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Years ago I was working on a major relocation as a government contractor - like shutting down a base and moving all the civilians to another state kind of major. We were in charge of getting people in the new building set up. Stuff likr making physical connections to the networks (6 different networks in some cases) when the drop is on the other side of the room, setting up specialty stuff like rooftop GPS or cell service antennas to get timing for some of the equipment, and adding or extending drops when some manager decided that the room that has been designated a conference room since before the building was complete should now be his department’s lab, and the lab should be his office.
Anyway, I get a call from the facilities manager that “Jane Doe” does not have network access, and instead of coming to him or us, she called the Director of the entire fucking command (Senior Executive Service, above a GS-15, so equivalent to an Army General), and the Director is pissed that we screwed this up. Jane is well-known for being a difficult person, to put it mildly. Her whole department was a bunch of entitled prima donnas, and she was the worst of the bunch. So we meet the facilities guy outside the department office, which has about 30 people working in cubicles. I walk in, then turn around and walk back out, and ask him politely how exacty can she be surfing CNN.com on her computer if she has no network access? Turns out she was upset that she didn’t have a pretty blue ethernet cable like a bunch of other folks, and thought they had something that she didn’t. No, she had a fiber connection. The whole ginormous building had SM fiber to all the drops, but this conference room-turned-office only had about 10 or 12 drops, so some people got fiber but most got CAT6 coming from a switch that we installed as a temporary measure to make sure that everyone would be able to have network access until they figured out who was going to pay to install more drops.
Been doing IT for 20 years.
The one ray of hope is that the number of entirely tech illiterate people I deal with has decreased. They’re retiring/dying. It’s not nearly as common now to deal with people that don’t understand how to literally turn something on. I also got out of the private sector, so I’m not dealing with the general public, which always made me want to drive my car into oncoming traffic on my way home every day.
But yeah, I always make a point of embarrassing someone when I have to drive somewhere to do something a toddler could have done if they put them on the phone with me.
There’s a whole new generation of tech illiterates being born with a smartphone up their asses. I feel that 80’s kids peaked at tech literacy, then steadily declined from the mid 90s maybe.
I’d say 2000s was when it peaked.
Knowledge peaked in the 2000s, but those are the 80’s and 90’s kids. The ones born in the 2000s had an iPhone with 14 and know nothing…
Yup. People under the age of 25 don’t even understand files or directories.
iPhones and Chromebooks have abstracted everything away.
Thankfully Chromebooks have very low popularity outside US
Why are we dicks?
Imagine being hired as a subject matter expert but every piece of advice you give is ignored. Until something goes catastrophically wrong, now you are pulled into 3 different incident response meeting being blamed for it happening despite you raising the alarm for the past 6-12 months(but you can’t say that because it is non constructive and finger pointing), asking what is happening, when will it be fixed, and how to prevent it from happening again.
But here is the kicker, the incident started an hour ago and you have been in the meeting for the past 30 min with everyone pointing fingers at you and expecting answers from you but you haven’t even started proper troubleshooting because you were pulled into the meeting.Then you ask for a budget to make the systems perform better. You spend 3 months gathering quotes, haggling prices, demoing products but when you lay out your proposal you get ‘That is too expensive or everything is running fine we don’t need that.’ Then next week the sales team say we will start using X software with a cost of 3x what you found and lacks features you must have to maintain your cybersecurity insurance and it gets approved.
This is not just one bad employer, that is across the world. Subject matter experts thought as cost centres and scapegoats.
This should come with a trigger warning and a glass of whisky.
Best I can do is a printer and a baseball bat.
I am not sure if it is worldwide, or if its just American culture (fuck i hope its just us), but I don’t believe the problem is a form of prejudice against intelligence, but rather that people with intelligence rely only on data and facts to make points. It is a sad truth that while this is the only correct way to make decisions, id guess around 70-80% of the population are simple, and when given solid evidence and reasoning you bore them. Meanwhile the sales team, while having no real evidence or reasoning for their solution was entertaining, and used simple buzzwords management understood delivered with a confident charisma.
So what do we do about this? We do the only thing we can do, we work on our charisma. It might make you hate yourself a smidge to give a report that focuses more on the emotions of decision making than the reasoning, but the alternative is that bad decisions keep being made that make your life harder. You as the one that knows what the fuck they are talking about will generally have one of the most well reasoned plans in a situation, learn how to be a better guardian of that plan.
None of this is to say any of this is our fault, its more an acceptance of the world we live in and recognizing how best to play in it.
So what do we do about this? We do the only thing we can do, we work on our charisma
You can’t beat the sales team on that front. Charisma is a key part of their job. They are literally being payed for their ability to convince people to buy things, and this works inside the organization as well as it work on customers.
I never said beat them at charisma, I said you need to work on your charisma. In this scenario your idea is still better than theirs, we are just working on presenting it better.
“my computer won’t turn on!!”
“is it plugged in?”
“hold on let me check…it’s hard to tell, the power’s out”
“…”
I spent over an hour on a support call trying to walk an asshole lady through fixing her Adobe Illustrator, for her to stop mid-instructions to say she couldn’t tell me what the status was because her power was out due to a fucking hurricane in her area! 🤦♂️
Side note: that was one of the two times my bosses didn’t get upset at me for telling off a customer.
I’m the family tech support person so I know your pain
It’s a pain in the ass when you have a parent who won’t even try to learn to do something after trying to teach them and they call you everytime they need to do something
I had a site that was going down multiple days a week for a hour or two. Turns out a employee was unplugging the small rack surge strip to plug in their coffee maker. They also happened to be the person complaining the loudest about how incompetent IT was. For some reason what she did was understandable and not worthy of a write up. But me telling her not to touch anything connected to server rack was going over the line. She was gone within the year having finally made someone with more suction mad.
Hot take; if IT had important gear running on a single power outlet with no UPS where it’s easily accessible and any schmuck could pull the power, she made a pretty compelling point about incompetence.
Yes, but it’s incompetence of the management who won’t approve of putting important IT hardware in a protected space
You don’t often get to choose a racks location in a small office and the UPS only ran the router and switch for a hour. You sound like you have never worked in the field.
I’m over 30 years in the field, thanks
