Wudang
BOFH
This image has popped up in several work sametime/slack calls over the years.
Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10
- Thread starter TragicMonkey
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Blue Mountain
Resident Skeptical Hobbit
In a lifetime career in I/T, I've been on both sides of that. While your particular job has well-defined boundaries and timelines, I/T projects have a notorious reputation for scope creep and the resulting missed deadlines. Systems analysts and programmers tend to be optimistic about how long it will take to get something done. Very often there's pressure from management to trim the schedule to meet an arbitrary deadline they've set without consulting with the experts about how long it should reasonably take.
An old adage I've seen about setting delivery dates is to estimate how long you think it would take you to do a task, double it, and move to the next unit of time. Thus you should allocate two days for a one hour task.
"Just shut up and fix it", says the person who makes 5 times more than an IT guy, works 70 hour weeks on salary and puts up with a hell of a lot more problems every single day.
"And maybe clean the crumbs out of your beard and keyboard"
Ya, we could do a thread on what we all think of IT people. I did IT for awhile but didn't like being a glorified mechanic.
Fix-er-up Bob so I can do some important work!
"And maybe clean the crumbs out of your beard and keyboard"
Ya, we could do a thread on what we all think of IT people. I did IT for awhile but didn't like being a glorified mechanic.
Fix-er-up Bob so I can do some important work!
Norman Alexander
Penultimate Amazing
"Surely there's some button on a website you can click that will do what I want instantly??"
In a way that brings us right the way back to JoeMorgue's original post, "computers" are for many people simply magic, they know how to perform a spell and then hey-presto it happens. Because of this they usually have no idea what they are asking for means. They simply expect the priests to make the magic work as they want.
That's a common thread that goes through so many of the stories and incidents recounted here.
I do wonder if that will change because of the change in education for kids. Over the last few years because I've worked with and alongside sixteen to early 20-year-olds I've helped many with their studies, and I've noticed that the maths they learn for their final exams up to A level has changed a lot since I was at school. It has much more "logic" and even basic" programming" knowledge baked into the courses.
Be interesting to see if that helps them understand the magic any better than the older generations when they enter the work force.
Blue Mountain
Resident Skeptical Hobbit
Sadly, the answer seems to be "no." The current generation has been raised on smartphones and tablet computers, which do an even better job of hiding basics than even Windows does, let alone DOS. Many users these days don't understand the split between a "file" (data that you've created and stored) and an "application" that's used to manipulate that file.
They're not aware they can pluck content out of a continuous scroll and save it to a permanent location, which means if they see a cool picture on Facebook or Whatsapp, the only way they can find it again is by connecting to the same place, then scrolling down and down and down in the hopes it hasn't disappeared from the feed.
They're not aware when they save a document using Word that it's stored as a file on their computer, or in the cloud, and (if it's in the could) they can access it using a different device and even a different program.
A while ago I took two pictures on my phone of something interesting. I took the second because I moved the phone on the first one, so it was blurry. Why I kept that picture I'm not sure, but later on I accidentally deleted the good one. My solution was not to mourn the permanent loss of the good picture, but rather:
- Remove the SD card from the phone (I configured the photo app to store all pictures to it)
- Plug the card into my laptop
- Run a recovery program to search for content in the unused blocks on the card's file system
- Scan the recovered files for the picture.
I was successful in recovering the picture. That's the difference between simply being a computer user and understanding the technology in use.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
I agree with Blue Mountain. Their area of professional expertise is elsewhere. They wouldn't be able to do my job, but I wouldn't be able to do theirs either.
The problem is there is no excuse for it NOW. It's 2021. Computers aren't this magical new thing we dropped on users a week ago Thursday. They have been ubiquitous in office environments for 30 years.
But the users are and a lot of the IT people have fully brought into the mythology that it makes perfect sense for "computers" to remain this magic totem that end users can't understand.
Again that's why I bristle so strongly at that "Oh those people keep you in work" excuse. Not they don't. It's not my job to show Karen in accounting how to resize an Excel column.
I am not in the wrong for expecting computer users to know how to do their job.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
More than once I've shown coworkers something in Excel and watched their faces move from astonishment at the magical power of the program, to delight thinking how simple their tasks will be from now on, to realization that if their management finds out this secret they'll be replaced by a temp doing their job for one fifth the pay in one tenth the time. To resentment for me for "barging in" to "mess things up" in their department.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
I'd estimate about fifty percent of my "programming" work over the years has been messing about in Excel. This is not a bad thing, when I compare the income made in that time to the amount of actual effort I had to exert. Of course I'm not foolish enough to let anyone know how simple Excel work is when it's mine: at one job I had two days a month blocked off for me to do the "data reconciliation". It was a VLOOKUP. Took me five minutes to do, another fifteen to format all pretty. But for two days people would tiptoe past my cubicle, fearful of disturbing the mighty workings of my powerful computing mind as I labored to enact the arcane subtleties of the spheres. I'd emerge at the end, pale and shaken, and have to be revived with someone bringing me a soda and possibly a bagel if I timed it right. It was a stupid job among stupid people but sometimes I miss it.
Blue Mountain
Resident Skeptical Hobbit
More to the point, it's users knowing the tools they use to do their job. If you hired a secretary in 1975 who didn't know how change the type ball in an IBM Selectric typewriter, you'd probably not be very impressed.
However, a computer is much more complicated than an IBM Selectric. The Selectric had only three design iterations in its 23 year life span (1961-1984.) Add to that the fact that anyone who trained on the original could still use the model III, although they might not be able to access all the features. Contrast that with computers where things often change every year, whenever a new version of the operating system and other software is released.
Having said that, Reddit's Tales from Tech Support sub is full of examples of people who suffer from "learned helplessness:" they actively refuse to learn anything new and are permanently stuck in whatever year it was when they first joined the company. Do you fire them just because they don't want to adapt to whatever newfangled doohickeys management forces on them, sending years of accumulated organizational knowledge out the door with them?
Let's revisit Karen in accounting not knowing who to resize an Excel column. At what point in her education and career should she have picked up this knowledge? Let's assume she's in her mid-forties, having entered the work force once her kids reached their teens. Did she even learn about spreadsheets and word processors in school 25 years before? Is her computer so locked down she can't even start a web browser and type in "How do I resize an Excel column"?
I've not used Microsoft Office in years, but LibreOffice relies heavily on the web for its documentation. I just tried with LibreOffce to find out—using its internal help system—how to resize a column, and a quick search turned up nothing. (I deliberately disconnected from the Internet to force LibreOffice to use the documentation available on the system.)
Another issue is, how willing are these people to learn? It's one thing to show them once how to resize a column, and point them to places where they can get help. That I can handle. It's when they call the help desk every freaking week with the same question that I get annoyed.
The Man
Unbanned zombie poster
Heck, way back when (early to mid 90s) we were moving the lab from paper based to computer based, I had self destructing macros set up. They would take the data from the raw data file (generated by the now automated data acquisition systems) organize and format it in the spread sheet (including any graphs), some times assembling it in the spreadsheet line by line. Apply whatever calculations or summaries, organize the report based on canned statements and conditions or limits (that had been predetermined by a committee) and then the majority of the macro would delete itself to prevent accidental reactivation at some future time (when the raw data file was gone). The last couple of lines that always remained simply saved the output report files. The company that bought our company lost it all in their move to their facilities.
While I've done some other Excel stuff since then for other companies I've never gone back to that type of full spreadsheet automation.
ETA: Now in our cloud based modern times I've had to almost start from scratch. Learning office 365 power apps and power automate to do the data intake, crunching and viewing I had done with Access and Excel before.
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Let me be 100% clear here.
I don't care. At no point did it become my job to teach her.
And the answer is "A ten second Google Search at literally any point."
BowlOfRed
Master Poster
I got shipped out on a last-second contract for something I didn't feel qualified to do. Nosed around at things for a couple of days to see if I could find anything interesting.
Found out the team had purchased a storage system without understanding how much they needed.
I spent two days whipping up storage allocation calculator in Excel that properly accounted for the systems that displayed usage in decimal (TB) and the systems in binary (TiB), pull downs for them to select the redundancy (mirroring, etc) and popped out how much storage that was going to take as they did it.
Let them see that they could fit about 45% of the data they thought was going to move over to the system in its current configuration. They thought that spreadsheet was better than anything the vendor that sold them the stuff had given them for planning.
Found out the team had purchased a storage system without understanding how much they needed.
I spent two days whipping up storage allocation calculator in Excel that properly accounted for the systems that displayed usage in decimal (TB) and the systems in binary (TiB), pull downs for them to select the redundancy (mirroring, etc) and popped out how much storage that was going to take as they did it.
Let them see that they could fit about 45% of the data they thought was going to move over to the system in its current configuration. They thought that spreadsheet was better than anything the vendor that sold them the stuff had given them for planning.
Blue Mountain
Resident Skeptical Hobbit
JoeMorgue said:
Please try again, this time reading what I wrote. (I recommend you read my next post first.)
(Deleted part of this post after reviewing JoeMorgue's contributions to this thread.)
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Blue Mountain
Resident Skeptical Hobbit
Looking back through this thread, I saw this post from JoeMorgue:
If it's these users who are also asking how to resize an Excel column, I can easily see why he'd be annoyed at being asked how to do it.
For the most part in my career, I've been very lucky to have worked with smart people: those who work with computers for a living and have taken the time to learn how to use them. Having to support a bunch of dimwits who either can't or won't learn probably goes from depressing to soul crushing very quickly.
JoeMorgue said:
If it's these users who are also asking how to resize an Excel column, I can easily see why he'd be annoyed at being asked how to do it.
For the most part in my career, I've been very lucky to have worked with smart people: those who work with computers for a living and have taken the time to learn how to use them. Having to support a bunch of dimwits who either can't or won't learn probably goes from depressing to soul crushing very quickly.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
You wouldn't expect a carpenter to not know how to use a circular saw, but you also wouldn't expect them to understand the internal electrical circuitry that makes it work.
Gord_in_Toronto
Penultimate Amazing
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Surely the general principle is that a tool is something that I can competently use but can't necessarily make.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Sure, that's a reasonable definition. I would also say that it's possible to be able to competently use a tool without understanding how or why it works the way it does.
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