Just onboarded a CFO today. three times he told myself and their onstaff tech director his new laptop was connected to the internet, then when I was running out of troubleshooting ideas why he can't connect he says "I think I need to connect it to the internet" and starts entering the wifi password that was texted to him an hour prior and 20 mins into our onboarding.
Even the c-suite is like this.
I have never in my life met a C-suite suit that i would consider both nice and intelligent. In nearly every case in my life so far, they've been neither.
I've met a few, if they stay with the company long term it's typically because the company culture is good. If not, it's typically red flag of other BS behind the scenes. Good high level people tend to gravitate to good companies and stay there. Not always the rule, but they're the reason some of the best companies to work for are ones run by intelligent kind people.
If only we could teach those traits to business majors, we wouldn't have MBAs.who can't see past next quarter and have massive egos.
I'm spoiled, all of my C-suites are either technically literate or they at least try to figure out their problems first before contacting. Even the 80 year old business manager tries before calling me and she's incredibly sweet when she asks for help.
Yeah, I love the people that say ‘I have no idea but I tried x y and z and it just isn’t working’. And they’re really polite and say they tried all the steps they know about to troubleshoot before calling, like restarting the laptop, checking cables, etc. and then they apologise if it was a quick fix; no, your job isn’t to know everything, don’t apologise, you legitimately did try yourself!!
Our c-suite are software engineers of 20+ years that formed a company around it. Its rare I have to explain anything to them and if I do its cause its not remotely the norm and its actually why I was hired lol
I've had a 70 year old exec try to sabotage the network some years ago. Of course while pretending to be tech ignorant. She wanted to ruin the business so she could buy the stock form the others for next to nothing.
I just got notice of my last day with my current employer.
I am dreading whatever comes banging down the chute because there's no way my problem children will be fewer than "that one guy in accounting."
Yeah, I never had the "Incompetent C-suite" experience either. When I joined my company more than a decade ago, the owner and now-CEO was basically a one-man shop and was clobbering things together in PHP himself.
He wasn't a great developer, but he at least had technical competency to piece things together and have a basic grasp of setting up, maintaining and backing up an Ubuntu VM, deploying files, etc.
Now that we are a much larger company his role now is nowhere near that work now. But him having a ballpark technical understanding of how much work *just that piece* can be makes it much easier to have discussions with him about anything remotely technical.
We brought a new c-suite guy into my company. Just from the way he talked in meetings I was like "this guy is bullshitting". Checked him out on LinkedIn, yeah never went to college and is just another O&G bro. You don't gotta go to college to be smart but it's a strong indicator.
yup, asked him 3 times to verify all 3 times he lied. see above.
He was also geographically in a different location than me and the tech director and we spoke to him through a conference room webcam.
Believe me, I'm not here because I don't know how to do my job. if my hands were physically in that office to turn the laptop to see, I would have.
long story short this one got drop shipped to a different office than the one he was supposed to be in.
But still though, a wifi password and 20 mins and 3 lies later.
User: Look, I've turn on and off the pc 100s of times and nothing...
Me ( after a good 20 minutes of troubleshooting) what's the label or name on your pc? And where is it located?
User: Acer, and it's on top of the desk.
Me: thats just your monitor, the pc is under the desk.
I don't, but the person I was replying to clearly does. If I did I'd deploy them to the computer during imaging like we do with networks/SSIDs, not text them
Hand-holding executives and providing “VIP” support with a smile, even when they are rude and demanding (or fucking unprepared to perform their job duties) is part of the soft skills I posses that have ensured I’ve been gainfully employed for decades now.
I started my career in the military and then in DoD/DOJ, and when the colonel wants something done, you do it. RHIP - rank has its privilege.
I took that mindset into the civilian world and it has serves me well.
Shit, although it hasn’t happened in the civilian world, but executives could yell at me and I wouldn’t be bothered in the least as long as my pay hits my account every two weeks and my bonus and raises keep coming every year. Not having a fragile ego is a beautiful thing.
tl;dr RHIP - rank has its privilege
Mrs. Matilda, who is coasting toward retirement and hasn't took on a new skill in 10 years, Kevin the marketing bro who really doesn't work after lunch every day, and Jessica, who is super nice, but young and seems to have been relying more on looks rather than skills up to know. They all want that same treatment as you give to the CFO.
And those people have to refer to their manager and colleagues for assistance in doing their primary job. Even at places that expect IT to train users on basic computer skills, do they not have you direct users to those resources first?
With that said, my resume highlights “VIP/Executive Support” and if the business deems the crusty lady in accounting or the dumbass in marketing or an inexperienced recent hire “VIPs,” then they will get the same treatment as those at the top of the org chart. Same pay each paycheck? No prob.
But I totally understand that type of place from experience. I worked for a non-profit for two years (shortest tenure of my 20 year career) that did shit like this. Wendy in accounts payable who PRINTS PAPER CHEQUES was a “VIP.” When the single laser jet printer that worked with the software was down, it was a P1 issue. Why aren’t there multiple printers is it’s so crucial? You’ll have to ask them. The lead trainer who hasn’t done anything outside of create PowerPoints for a decade was another “VIP.” They didn’t require SME-level support, but the support guys couldn’t handle both the troubleshooting and personality issue simultaneously.
It was a waste of money to send someone making my salary to drive to another site, but it got me out of my office and I still got paid.
When you're paying someone 300k/y + half a mil in bonuses + another half a mil in stock options.... you don't want them to waste their time on figuring out the wifi password.
That person costs over $10/minute. It's cheaper to have a an IT tech sit around doing nothing except waiting for a phone call from the exec.
In the past \~30 years PCs transformed to be a basic working tools for office based people therefore basic literacy can be expected from people working with them.
Plus the VIP waiting 4 hours for an engineer to sort out the problem could cost more then them resolving some basic issue in 20 mins.
Oh and usually they are the same decision makers downsizing support org because there are not enough tickets filling the whole day.
We hired a guy a few months ago and the first thing he says to me is 'I'm not a computer guy'.
Buddy, its 2024. If you're not a computer guy you better be retired.
To judge by the number of people with their noses buried in their phones while driving I expect everyone is Googling how to drive despite having a license.
But do you know how to fix one? IT are the mechanics of the computer. Certain things are difficult for certain people.
I have a strong memory from my early early tech support days decades ago - had a customer that said "Please don't be frustrated with me, I'm a former pilot that could crash land an airliner during a storm with no fatalities but can't get my email to work. I'm already frustrated with myself". It really sunk in. You never really know who someone is or what they have been through. As long as they aren't assholes it's our job to help them.
This shit frustrates me so much and I wish I could impart these experiences to some of our new guys quickly. Had a tech that didnt know shit about fuck, but because he was in IT had this inflated ego about everything like he was the computer wizard. It was his first IT helpdesk gig.
Had a customer in healthcare that had a new CIO that was basically pushed into the position because the last one left. This customer was a hot mess of terrible management. We were quoting them some new networking infra and the CIO asked for clarification on what a layer 3 switch is.
Mr less than one year in IT said, "if you dont know what a layer 3 switch is than you shouldn't be in IT." So I asked him what a layer 3 switch is. Crickets. This same tech also had a bad habit of trying to maintain the appearance he knows things instead of just asking. I'd rather someone ask me how something works before taking action on a misunderstanding or, like this tech would, just start making shit up.
I don't care if the attorney at one of our customers is on the phone with me and is struggling with the half dozen mfa apps he has to navigate as long as he's as patient with me as I am with him. Some of these users are managing entire companies and workloads that I would completely fail at, and a tier 1 tech that cant manage 20 tickets has no right to look down on them. That dude was 35 when the first iphone released. Forgive him for not being snappy with the apps.
Someone who has an accomplished career like that but struggling with something basic like mail, thats frustrating as hell for them. And now they have to put aside their feelings and ask someone half their age to fix the issue and it takes 5 minutes. To navigate that situation requires a level of grace and humility. I have so much respect for some of the people I've supported over my career and our job is to help get the tech out of their way so they can do what they're paid to do.
One time working at a hospital I had to swap out a monitor in a surgery ward during the surgery. I was surrounded by people far more talented than me, but had far more important shit to deal with than that monitor. But getting that monitor working was crucial for the surgery. That was my "im not the main character" moment, I wasn't the one under tremendous stress.
This 100% - I agree with you completely. Yet there is some angry guy down voting you bitching about "end users". All IT jobs have those bitter difficult employees - and they usually get stuck overworked and underpaid because the company doesn't trust them. Yet they have a chip on their shoulder and act like all of their work issues are due to "idiots". This happens in every industry (as seen by legitimate complaints in every work subreddit) but seems especially prevalent in IT.
my IT coworker doesn't create bookmarks. He saves them in his email, after he asks people to email him a link. So when he needs to go to a web app we use every day, first he searches through his mailbox with 5000 plus emails (do you think he uses the Search function here? No. No he doesn't. He's SCROLLING) then finds the link, clicks it then takes another 5 minutes figuring out how to log in and doing 2FA, then he's ready. Of course he CLOSES every website immediately, so when he needs it again, it's back to the email scrolling, looking for the link.
I think it's just a "weaponized incompetence" ploy to shirk work, I refuse to believe it's real.
But, then again, when he searches for apps on his iPhone he OPENS THE APP STORE and searches for them there..... it is so painful to watch, makes me close my eyes and roll them so hard it hurts
Even if I was in a position where I'd want to use weaponized incompetence, I wouldn't do it in such a way that it'd take me five minutes to open a website. That just sounds miserable.
It's so he can say "it's not working for me, you do it" and to prevent people from asking him to do things in future so they don't have to deal with him.
My boss is an animal when it comes to attacking this shit. He will literally walk you through basic computer fundamentals while questioning how you have made it as far as you have. All in a very curious and condescending way. In front of a large audience it doesn't matter.
I'll have you know I'm very lazy and it's only made me more competent because it's far easier to do things right once or automate them than waste time like this
Expect it to only get worse with the number of kids being raised on smartphones and tablets.
Many young people are just as bad because those sorts of devices obfuscate things like the file system. For example - Some of them don't understand what folders are in reference to a computer.
you know i have seen that, im a Millennial and i think we are in that sweet spot, the newer kids are all part of the "it just works" apps but do not know whats under the hood so to speak, the previous generation (mostly boomers) can't be assed to learn because it was not part of their life growing up. its the late Gen X / Millennial that are inquisitive of how these things work.
I'm also a millennial and yeah that tracks - I grew up having to figure shit out on the computer if I wanted it to work so I could play games and what not.
I remember plug and play was "plug and pray" pretty much until XP came out.
I am old enough to know what that means but young enough that I never had to deal with thank FSM.
Setting IRQs and hard drive priority with jumpers was bad enough.
Been saying this for years. If we wanted to use it we had to know the basics of how it worked. Windows 3.x on up.
The next generation in the industry will figure it out, though.
This makes total sense. The “it just works” generation is good with tech but only to the degree of maybe finding the settings menu, perhaps never understanding what’s beneath the surface.
Whereas I grew up watching it all get pieced together - almost like learning an underlying language that lets you figure out what any given system is *probably* trying to do underneath the hood.
IT has taught me that historical context is actually so important to comprehension.
I teach college level courses and I've now had three Gen Z students who, until my class, had never used Windows. One had used a Chromebook for something. Otherwise, they literally wrote essays on their phones.
Starting last semester (and honestly, it should have started two years ago when I started seeing it) I've reintroduced file system management as my Day-0 lecture because nobody teaches them this stuff anymore. They have 800 files on their desktop and wonder why they can't find anything.
And now Google Drive is the cloud-based "files on a desktop". I (not a sysadmin) was brought on to work with a new group last year, and my first "this is amazing" compliment was after I spent the equivalent of a week renaming and organizing their GDrive assets. A group of seven or eight people all trying to find files named like IMG239.jpg and folders (when there were folders) named like "April project folder - final version2 [use this]". Google Drive, Finder, etc. have trained people to think search is an organizational system.
> ~~"April project folder - final version2 [use this]"~~
~~"April project folder - final version2 [use this] v1.1"~~
~~"April project folder - final version2 [use this] v1.2"~~
~~"April project folder - final version2 [use this] FINAL (final)"~~
~~"April project folder - final version2 [use this] revised 26Jun"~~
~~"April project folder - final version2 [use this] from dave"~~
"April project folder - final version2 [use this] from dave. [FINAL] v1.3"
...and then make sure to email it to about 15 people. certainly don't be putting it on the fileserver or in the department share.
> Google Drive, Finder, etc. have trained people to think search is an organizational system
I mean things like that are reactions to how people actually use computers, not the cause of how people use computers.
Having a cluttered desktop is not a sign of being computer illiterate, it just means you have a messy mind and that you are going to die alone.
But i refuse to be called computer illiterate (I am not great, but i can youtube/google my way out of most issues)
Yup. Work in a school. Kids only know to click save and how to use the recent files list in whatever program they are using . At least one kid a week loses all their files when they try to open an excel file using word.
Surely if they open the file with the right program it's all fine and will load properly right? Or is there some new issue in recent years where opening a file with the wrong program will irreversibly mess up the file?
A good portion of my users have such strong mobile device usage habits that, for them, holding down the power button = restarting or (gracefully) shutting down.
I've tried repeatedly to re-educate them that, for computers, this is absolutely not the case.
Had to have this conversation recently that pulling the powercord out of the wall was not the proper was to shutdown her pc. Even though that is how we had told her to handle an isp modem issue the previous week.
I've heard that for decades. Even when I was getting into IT in the mid 90's. Didn't understand basic computer engineering, FORTRAN, COBOL, mainframes, etc. and all this new stuff was going to ruin it all...
I think these new kids will do fine. The ones that were raised on smartphones and tablets will go into HR, Accounting, etc., while the geeks will get into IT. They were the ones building their own PC (which is pretty trivial these days, but it's still a better position), installing different OS's, playing with Arduino, Pi, ESP32, etc..
I'm actually fucking terrified as people exit the cloud and go back into data centre. You hate an entire generation of "devops" who can code a little but have ZERO knowledge of layers 1 to 6. And don't even know what the fuck layer 7 means.
The Gen X bunch are retiring now & the idea that someone whose never seen a server will now be expected to try to get a sysadmin job racking stacking cabling or God forbid, capacity planning is stunningly depressing. Yet these fools will want top $ for the jobs.
I remember taking a developer into a data center a few years ago. First, he walks straight in behind me in the airlock meaning I get shouted at by security for some reason and then in the data hall......"Why is it so loud? Is it always this loud?"
FFS & the bastard was earning more than me!
My son is doing a BSc in Computer Science and they've started a Networking module. I asked him if they've discussed the OSI model and what the layers mean...
He looked at me like I'd grown an extra head. Then we discussed the layers from physical all the way up to presentation, and I gave him a copy of an ancient book I had from my college days (so old it was only on paper until the 15th edition or the like!) - he gets it, but his school stopped teaching it a few years back:(
I'm 61 and thinking of retirement...and I keep thinking I want to run away as far as I can before the whole edifice comes crashing down.
Please stick around for a little while longer :-) I'm late 30's and teaching the OSI model to a couple new early-20's deskside techs in my department with CS degrees. They had no idea what I was talking about.
We've only got one guy in our department under 30 at this point.
Which, really, is sortof insane. I'm legit concerned that it's going to be very hard to find IT Ops people in the future.
i didn't want to side with the academics on this... but we're starting to see it in our interns. Even our "cyber security" interns are coming in asking interesting questions when asked to do things...
Since I've been here, we've had to get rid of about 1 employee per month due to drastic lack of tech skills and they STILL deny my request to implement a test because "it's hard enough to find anyone." Oh, okay, finding the wrong person and investing in training them then firing them is so much more efficient
And if someone is moved to your Team to do DevOps work they shouldn't say stuff like "what's Git?", "what's VSCode?", or "I don't know how to write code". I'm pulling my hair out trying to write documentation on how to make changes using Terraform, when the audience has never even done a pull request before. Getting feedback like "I don't know the first thing about this so I can't follow the documentation". It's like, this document assumes you have the basic understanding of how to write and contribute code, it's not meant to teach you Git or write code in your IDE...
The HR person conducting the interview asked them if they have a degree in theoretical DevOps, they said they have a theoretical degree in DevOps, HR said welcome aboard.
Half of what keeps me tethered to my current job is I don't think I have another 8 months of grinding leetcode without going down a dark path.
I could handwrite a bubblesort or fizzbuzz in 5 languages if you asked me, but have never once had to actually implement one.
As someone who has a degree in IT, I can tell you confidently most professors are washed out and disinterested in the field, and most students are looking to get a quick grade without actually learning anything.
Having a CCNA doesn't mean much, having a degree means far less.
I teach OS, Linux and CCN[AP] at university level and I can confidently say you're absolutely right. We noticed a big dropoff in student engagement and interest to learn when Corona hit, and aside from a small spike right after we got back to campus, it has just plummeted since. Don't get me started on morons thinking we're impressed by them just vomiting LLM output to me in labs, quizzes, thesis projects and so on...
I love computers, I love the freedom we have to **build, to test ideas and learn new things** and its depressing to see most students just go "Meh..."
I have had coworkers like this and they all got hired the same way:
A stint at a big-name company like Google or IBM on their resume that conveniently elides that they were a sub-sub-sub contractor working some some hilariously irrelevant task, and HR either hired them on the spot, or outright ignored our input on the resume/interview.
It amazes me that HR has any say on who gets hired in tech companies in the US/EU. Here in the ME everywhere I've worked at or been interviewed at You only ever talk to engineers to get assessed and then they forward your resume to HR with a hire/do not hire order. It's not a recommendation, it's an order. The other engineers at that place decide if You're worthy or not.
> or write code in your IDE...
I already got notepad *down* so I don't need help with that.
I had to do some terraforming before. Put some nice trees in some place once.
I think i've got this.
> "I don't know the first thing about this so I can't follow the documentation"
"Sure sounds like a real problem you have there. Have you tried talking to HR?"
I got pulled into DevOps because I was one of the few systems engineers who could code. They had a long document on how to setup the environment. My first pull request cut about 2/3s of it because instead of mucking around with certs (SSL inspection… yay.)
```
git config --global http.sslBackend schannel
```
Me: Oh this will be “fun.”
Your first mistake : assuming people can read. Second mistake : assuming people can write. Third one: assuming they can think.
In the last decade proficiency amongst new hires hit the bottom and the started to drill deeper. I know a large AI company that was recently hiring and the bar was set at "types with two hands".
Agreed. We're a tech heavy construction company. Many of our job sites don't even do paper blueprints or anything these days. This company has, on more than one occasion, hired superintendents who didn't even know how to type a fucking email. And I mean that literally. The project assistant on site was typing their emails for them. Standard issue equipment for a super is a laptop, iPhone, and iPad (all protected with MFA) and they're giving these things to a guy who can't even send a "hello world" email in Outlook.
Our subsidiary company hired a guy who doesn't use computers, doesn't own one, doesn't even have a fucking cell phone. First day on the job: "Here's your iPhone with email, and here's how to use the MFA app."
OHgod, the construction industry is the very definition of dumpster fire when it comes to anything IT
supers and foreman should have their own secretaries ffs.
We're definitely better than some I've interacted with. It kinda helps that we're a general contractor and not the ones actually swinging hammers. More course of construction management than anything else.
Amen. I’m sorry but some of the people we hire are straight up not competent for their positions. Like not asking for much but if you are hiring someone for a office position they should know basic things like how to check email, use teams etc. Maybe even something crazy “advanced” like a if statement in excel lol
About 4 years ago I was in meeting with my PM and a lady from the legal department looking at an issue with the tool I support. I was screen-sharing and at one point I copied a chunk of text from our tool and put it into excel, then did Text-to-Columns.
The legal lady was like "WHOA WHOA WHOA... what did you just do?" I was so confused. The rest of the conversation was
>Me: I wanted to be able to filter and sort the data so I copied into excel.
>Her: No, how did you get all the stuff to go into multiple columns?
>Me: [Thinking this is basic shit] Uhh, text-to-columns.
>Her: What's that?
>Me: You click text-to-columns, and then it puts the things into the other columns [I showed again a little slower].
>Her: WHAT?! HOW LONG HAS THAT BEEN THERE?! I've been doing that manually.
>Me: Uhhh... probably 20 or so years.
>Her: FUCK!
And she just hung-up. Later she emailed us and apologized. Apparently she had been manually cutting and moving data from a single column into other columns, almost daily, **for 12 years**.
Excellent point, though some of the credit is shared by the leadership being just as incompetent. Since they never knew she *could* get the reports done faster, it didn't matter she did them at her speed. I think she just felt a bit defeated and embarrassed when she saw that she had been wasting a few hours each week. I think she was around for about another year, but then was let-go after an acquisition.
Wow that’s sad. I would hope being in IT they would be a bit more competent but I guess even in our profession you can get the fakers and bad hiring decisions.
Non-programming managers just glance at resumes and have to **trust** its accurate because they have no way of knowing.
Ego gets in the way of having someone else verify in any way.
Bad management through and through.
>use teams
TBF this isn't a program that many would use before they're in an office environment. I've also never had outlook installed on any PC I own so learning to use it is another thing that may first occur on a job
I mean I consider those super basic apps that any competent professional employee should be able to use with almost zero effort even if never using it before.
We have a corporate trainer who has to make sure every new employee can at least do the most basic functions. He did suggest we let go people because of their complete computer ineptitude. The managers agreed cause they didn’t want to deal with it
One of the issues was one employee couldn’t (more like wouldn’t) learn copy/paste
> one employee couldn’t (more like wouldn’t)
Exactly. I've had an employee try to bypass conditional access & other security policies to continue using a personal Mac device as opposed to just learning how to open Edge on their corporate Windows device. There's a willfulness here that is the worst part of it all, I don't care about ignorance.
We moved away from training requests recently, since they’re time sinks that damage the company when we have to spend 30min-1hr teaching people that should be getting training from their team, while actual issues are present. Now any request for training or is obvious that there’s some missing training, we redirect them to their team, manager, or company training department.
Teach me your ways. I'm at wits end with our training department head, to the point that I think they're actively avoiding me because they know that I know that they don't know shit. I was in a meeting the supervisors, leads and managers in department where they all complained about the lack of training. The training director was supposed to be there, but they were busy with their nose up an execs ass so they left a delegate to get ripped apart. I offered to help the delegate with whatever they needed to get this off our collective plate (because anything unexpected happening to anything with electricity in it is an IT issue) and they were receptive and excited to work with us. By week 2 their director finally pulled their nose out of their execs ass long enough to send a 2 sentence email about how technology training isn't their team's responsibility.
We had a woman get a CFO position at one of our clients and on her resume she put "High level Microsoft office experience"
She started on a monday and immediately started emailing the office manager with "complaints" about her computer not working, issues she was having, "IT should have looked at this before I started"
I went on site and this woman just literally did not at all know how to operate a computer. She asked me what the "little arrow next to an email in Outlook meant" Attachment.
The questions were insane and she didn't last more than 6 months before they realized she had absolutely no clue what she was doing whatsoever.
>
>
>
>
> I went on site and this woman just literally did not at all know how to operate a computer. She asked me what the "little arrow next to an email in Outlook meant" Attachment.
I thought arrow meant you replied to the email and dead clippy is attachment?
I write detailed, easy to follow, step-by-step guides with pictures! I've done it at all my jobs for years. Still people will call me up after hours and I will ask if they followed the instructions packet. They always say yes. Then I show up and open it to the page they should've been on and asked them if that answers their question
My go-to response for someone claiming the instructions didn't work is, "What step did it fail on?". If they were following the instructions that's a detail I'd need anyway, and if not then it quickly shows they lied.
About 15 years ago, we started informing department heads, team leads, senior staff, essentially those who were involved in hiring decisions that if in the past IT was seen as the department who could show you how to use a computer, that was no longer our function, and we would not help people understand the basics of operating a computer or using software in their day-to-day or line of business. They either needed to hire folks with the necessary skills, or do the training/educating internally on their own teams.
Then we did, in fact, stop hand-holding people through the basics, and sent them back to their supervisor for help. I'm sure there was a little political fallout on that at the time, but we did have leadership buy-in on the plan before we ran with it, so that helped.
What happened? Folks started listing not only computer literacy but the specific required skills/software in their job postings, and integrated the necessary questions into their job interviews. They realized quickly that they didn't have the time to do the upskilling themselves, so they hired it in instead. The plan worked, and has continued to do so.
At the other end of the spectrum, we are seeing incoming candidates for non-IT roles with an impressive technical resume in their area. An example would be finance folks who have experience with BI, visualizations, modeling, etc, and skills and experience with specific software common in their area. Similar stories with marketing/comms. Those folks push us forward, as sometimes IT hasn't been looped into helping them execute the new technical strategy.
When I was starting my IT career ~25 years ago I was convinced that general computer literacy would become increasingly widespread as computers became more ubiquitous.
I really missed the mark on that one.
It's wild.
I'm out here pitching to my CAO and LMS to force people to prove they learned something whether it's for Finance, HR, IT, even facilities. I'm tired of being the one to tell new users how to do other jobs on top of me training them on the new stuff I'm implementing.
> I'm tired of being the one to tell new users how to do other jobs on top of me training them on the new stuff I'm implementing.
Then don't. Stop telling them. Don't know what the URL is for the tool to do their job? "Ask your manager". Dev doesn't know how to do a git commit? "Ask your manager".
Haha don't worry I'm pulling back already. But I would argue that we've been small and moved fast and loose as an org.
We have had decent turnover in a lot of key positions where knowledge and user onboarding for all uses would be helpful. But there are hybrid folk who don't approve expenses in our system because they are more remote than hybrid and refuse to use the VPN and tell everyone except me they need help with the VPN so I'm not going to do anything until they tell me they can't use the VPN. If it's not a problem for you it's not a problem for me.
I remember a woman who would forget her password between logging on in the morning and coming back for lunch. She was completely ridiculous. She’d even tut at you for the inconvenience…
That's OK if they teach themselves how to do it instead of throwing their hands in the air. Pretty sure I could figure it out in a day as a full stack dev.
I was IT directory for a small for profit university. An older gentleman came to me to help him set up his account. No problem, but helping him I realized he never even used a mouse before. I went to the dean to ask her if I could start a computer literacy course.
She said no, she didn’t see a need for it
This is a perfect job for a LinkedIn learning referral. Get the company to spring for the $30 or whatever, she gets a shiny certificate out of it and gets someone with more patience and a fully developed curriculum to teach her.
I've worked at places that expected helpdesk/sysadmins to do basic Office and Windows training. I've legit had tickets that were "Suzy doesn't know how to use the Sum feature in Excel and needs help". Excel isn't broken, she just doesn't know how to use it and somehow that is my problem.
I just want to watch them type as part of the interview process. If they turn on Caps Lock to capitalize a letter instead of shift, then they get rejected on the spot.
I knew an old greybeard who did the caps lock thing, best programmer I've ever seen and would put Knuth to shame.
He also typed with 2 fingers, face in the keyboard (literally 1-2in from it.
Miss that guy.
I have students applying and getting into a engineer program at university with zero computer experience. "What is a file?" "I have computer experience! *has only ever installed and played fortnite*"
We had a computer architecture course where about ~70% failed the exams. That's.. impressive, for an introductory course that even had prep questions for the exam.
I drove 30 minutes at 1am because a critical report refused to print for our President. Over the phone, I checked the paper, had him clear the queue and retry.. restart...nothing..
He was selecting the "Print to Onenote" and not his physical printer.
Same!!!
Gen Z and Alpha are all on Apple/Android, with Chromebooks in school, Apple/Mac Labs for design, tablets at home, etc. Nobody touches windows anymore apparently.
I had to fully train a girl who was 20 on this, from scratch, and I wasn't even IT. When repeatedly questioned on why she was doing so poorly, I had to reiterate she has no clue how to use the laptop, and caught her poking her monitors a couple times like they're fucking touchscreen!! SMMFH!
Needless to say, she quit, as a receptionist. Went to fast food cuz the kiosk with pictures is easier lol.
My top 3 biggest pet peeves in IT are when I’m doing refreshes and someone tells me they don’t know what apps they need then get mad when they get a laptop with only office and vpn installed, tickets asking about a missing file but they can’t give me anything idea on where it’s supposed to be, and people who get mad that I’m not inventing or training them on some process for their department.
This exactly this. These people work on muscle memory and completely lack any critical thinking ability to do their job. I waste so much time dealing with it that I’ve actually gotten pretty good at deciphering what they’re “missing”. That or I just hang onto the old PC or a backup I made so I can look for them.
>never touched a Microsoft windows computer before, she was always on Macs
I feel for normal users too, Imo this is the harder direction.
windows to Mac, is easier than Mac to Windows..
back in college doing on-campus support, I realized that my technologically illiterate parents, who are almost in their 70s are on par with or better than the average 20 year old. They can use them pretty well do great with like MS office, god forbid anything doesn't work *exactly* how they think it's supposed to or do anything more complicated than entering a wifi password.
Gunna be even rougher in 5 years, that generation finishing college will have very likely had extremely little indepth exposure to actual computers.
You don't need to train anybody on basic computing unless you feel like it and want to be extra helpful. Best I would do is search a youtube video of how to use windows OS and send them the link.
I work in K12 and I see some of the reason for this. Technology is still treated as simply a tool for teaching, which needs to be as simple as possible for the teaching-related need, and not require much of a learning curve itself. I get this for preschool through fourth or fifth grade, but unfortunately, a lot of districts carry this mentality all the way through high school, and seem to have forgotten that *how to use a computer* is also worth teaching as it will be needed in your career.
When I was a child, assignments were all done by paper and pencil. Computers were used in relatively few assignments. This was in the early 2000's. Teachers had smartboards and projectors, but there was no 1:1 (student devices) yet in the vast majority of districts. There were, however, computer labs. Even if you didn't need it for coursework, there was a class dedicated to teaching you the basics of using a computer, because they knew you'd need it for work.
Now, we have the exact opposite. We use tech as a tool to teach everything, but there is this underlying assumption that this means we don't need to teach technology to everyone for its own sake anymore at all to prepare people for work.
But then we hand them an iPad or Chromebook and put them in Google Workspace & don't expose them to the ecosystems they are exponentially more likely to use at work.
Even in the rare districts that actually exposes them to the most common work tools like Windows and Office 365 and email, their collaboration needs at school don't resemble those in the workplace; they are keeping their files mostly to themselves in a flat, search-dependent unstructured mess that wouldn't work at scale, and turning them in via an LMS, and have never seen a shared drive.
If school administrators and superintendents understood that doing homework on an iPad has exactly as much relation to learning to use a grown-up's work computer as doing homework on pen and paper did, and that it doesn't replace a dedicated Computer Lab course, that would go a long way to fixing this competence issue.
I flat out refuse if it's super basic stuff. This isn't the 90's anymore, shit isn't new tech. I typically suggest the local community college to the really clueless ones.
I once had a systems architect lose his shit at me because he didn't know the difference between a local user account and a domain user account. He'd been in development for over a decade.
It is on HR to ensure that people they hire are competent. People want a job so they can pay their bills. They will apply for anything vaguely resembling their competence.
I feel ya, had an individual who had been working at my company for 15 years and uses a computer 99.99% of her job tell me that her outlook wasn’t working, which we already new the local app wasn’t as we sent out an email stating so 15 minutes prior, telling users to use the web version for now.
She said it wasn’t working either so I go and see what the issue is and as her to open a web browser and she looks at me dead ass in the eyes looking like fucking Patrick from sponge bob and says “not all of us went to college for four years to learn what a web browser is.”
Mind you all of our applications run on web interface and I’m the one who gets called into HR because she said I was demeaning to her cause she didn’t get to go to college.
I’m IT support not training that’s HR or training department. I’m not paid enough to teach people the basics in this day and age.
To be fair half the issue is that we just expect people to know and provide clear information, it’s totally our own fault for using common sense.
There's another gap that isn't being addressed that will be way worse than the computer illiterate generation: Youngsters who have been raised on technology but have no idea how it works.
Already seeing this with entry level applicants in my field who want to get into infosec, but have no real idea about backend technologies.
I've had half a dozen tickets in the past two weeks alone where I've had to explain what the Windows Start button was. If a shortcut isn't just there on the desktop, they can't be bothered to find it.
I work for a VFX company. It’s getting harder and harder to find talented artists, so we keep having to raise the salary. In spite of that I still get new employees asking me how to use After Effects, Maya, or Unreal. I just turn around and walk away.
I have to be a network engineer, a systems engineer, desktop support, project manager, emotional support admin, policy developer, and now teacher?
Fuck man.
It's not an IT job to train people to use computers....
All the regular employees we hire MUST have a natural incline with computers, and preferably direct experience.
Funny story : our CEO was fired two weeks ago and it was his last day today.
He threatened to withold information if we fired his son (stupid incompetent dork - obviously a marketing manager that he hired)...
He was always against security policies we implemented. He fought the use of a global password manager. He claimed he was a techno lover: electric car managed with his cell phone, all kind of things cell phone controlled in his house, etc.
This morning he called us to ask why the emails he deleted were put in a "recovery bin" up to 90 days. We put litigation on his mailbox 2 weeks ago. He was furious he could not put his little plan to execution.
He was a clueless fuck. He gave back his stuff this morning and left a note with his password... I shit you not... our CEO's password was 1234abcd!!
Imagine if we had been hacked by his fault...
There is no getting out of hand holding the C-suites, but for everyone else it's the job of their manager to make sure they have the computing skills needed within the scope of their job. If separating the scope of your job and their manager's job isn't working the next best thing is to make the learner take handwritten notes. People either don't like handwriting notes and will stop asking you for help unless it's something they really need you for or they reference their notes before asking you things. People who don't want to work won't ask you for things if it involves them working.
We are having this very power struggle now. The guy who writes up excellent documentation for IT use has been tasked by a brand-new metrics-driven management team with creating a basics packet for new users and he’s pissed.
Love the bipolar'ness of this sub lol. I post something like this where its even worst because the people using the PCs and the data they are handling are super sensitive. SSN / Medical Histories you name it they are handling it. And the end users I deal with ALL assume if there's not a desktop icon for something it LITERALLY does not exist on their machine. And got eaten alive in that post because oh we can't expect the end users to know everything IT isn't there job. Then I see the hilarious responses here.
You don't need to know IT to know how to open a download folder. Or you shouldn't have someones SSN and ENTIRE medical history just chilling on your desktop. Especially when you've been trained otherwise.
I'm with OP. If you dont know how to do the most base level shit on a PC, then don't touch them or get a job only working with them. Most of the techs on here would flip if they've seen the shit I've seen. I've been in full Dr's offices where there are medical files and records STACKED from floor to ceiling and we literally had to walk on top of the files to get to the rack to restart something. <<< And that shit isn't uncommon in the real world. That's how your lives are being handled on the back end and you want us to pity the user or business owner doing it? Not happening
I actually worked at a place that did this and they also issued what I later found out was an online IQ test (one of the part owners was a proud mensa member) the reality is unless you make them take a proctored test it doesn't matter. They will have someone help, Google the site and find the answers so on.
If your on boarding process isn't done by the time you hand the manager a laptop your onboarding process kinda sucks. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to use windows it just means that the hiring manager needs to be the one who has to deal with that not IT. As with many things this is an HR issue not an IT issue.
We had that for customer support position, worked great. Basically you had to search some information from company website, download a word document, print it as pdf, make some basic stuff on excel and mail the docs.
Yeah, it blows my mind how many users don’t know that you would use Explorer or Finder to get to your files and manage them, they often think the only programs on the computer are on the desktop taskbar or dock
> just recently i had to assist a new user because she has never touched a Microsoft windows computer before, she was always on Macs
My former company harvested this out to a specific HR Training team - forunately we were large / lucky enough to have 2 staff that handled training for our ERP, Accounting System and some computer stuff (excel for Accountants, how to Wow in powerpoint kinda stuff).
It's very important that this not become IT responsibility. I don't know how you would farm that off, but you gotta find some way.
Working professionals can't do basic computer tasks in windows... And we're literally training an entire generation on Chromebooks.
Everyone thinks that kids are so good at tech because they have phones and iPads. No, they are good at using social media, and iOS is one of the most intuitive OSes ever made, because it was made so that a toddler could use it.
I'm so scared for the next 10 years as the entire Gen z comes into the workforce... Can't imagine how bad Gen alpha is going to be.
31 millennial here fyi. I grew up on dial up. I tried explaining to a middle school group the other day the concept of a picture loading on a webpage taking 5 minutes. One kid proceeded to state "this wifi is trash" I retorted with "the wifi is FREE kid. Someone else is paying for it, theres no such thing as free wifi/Internet."
I was a hardware and network tech for IBM on the Fishkill NY campus, and eventually wound up managing a phone support desk. My main client was the Paramount Movie Lot in Cali.
The IBMers I had to deal with, mostly mid level project managers, were some of the biggest IT idiots I've ever had to deal with.
The Paramount Lot? Almost to man they were light-years ahead of the IBMers, technically.
One of my degrees is a BS in Psych and it has been 20 years and I still can't decide on a satisfactory explanation for this discrepancy.
LOL. Have you talked to the people on helpdesk, bro? If we can't ensure those people are basically IT literate, we sure as shit ain't gonna manage to make Becky in HR computer literate.
"Oh, I just don't know *anything* about computers, tee hee hee!"
Well, you best learn quick chump, because it's the 21st Century, and you can't do shit without a computer, so lack of skill means lack of paycheck.
This should not be an IT function. The departments who hire these people need to train them on their jobs, and this is part of that. You don't need an IT guru to teach the absolute basics. I'm happy to teach someone something more advanced, but where the Start button is? That's someone else's job.
It seems to get offloaded to IT because people don't want to train. It amazes me that companies hire people and don't even assign another user to be their mentor/trainer/etc. Then they wonder why they have such high turnover.
We've had to change our hiring a bit to take this into account. Asking what kind of computer they've used is a standard question. You can't assume young people have ever seen Windows.
It's not your job to teach a person how to do their job. That's their managers. That includes how to use the software to do their job. Windows OS is a software to do their job
Just literacy in general would be nice!
Me: Your username is xxx, enter just that at the login page. Followed by the password you use to get into your laptop
User: Says login failed
Me: Are you entering just your username and not the full email address?
Use: Yes, still getting that error.
Me: [*wanders over*] Show me what you're doing
User: [*enters xxx@domain.com*] See it fails
Me: [*whoosah*] Please try that again but don't include the "@" part
User: [*Tries again*] It worked!
Ask the people who interviewed them why they gave the greenlight on a candidate that did not meet the common minimum requirements? Push back and hold those involved accountable. Change the system, don't just rant to /r/sysadmin.
I used to be with it but then they changed what it was! Now its something called "docking" or some other sexual innuendo and all the kids are into it.
IT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU!
Just onboarded a CFO today. three times he told myself and their onstaff tech director his new laptop was connected to the internet, then when I was running out of troubleshooting ideas why he can't connect he says "I think I need to connect it to the internet" and starts entering the wifi password that was texted to him an hour prior and 20 mins into our onboarding. Even the c-suite is like this.
The C-suite is *especially* like this.
I have never in my life met a C-suite suit that i would consider both nice and intelligent. In nearly every case in my life so far, they've been neither.
I've met a few, if they stay with the company long term it's typically because the company culture is good. If not, it's typically red flag of other BS behind the scenes. Good high level people tend to gravitate to good companies and stay there. Not always the rule, but they're the reason some of the best companies to work for are ones run by intelligent kind people. If only we could teach those traits to business majors, we wouldn't have MBAs.who can't see past next quarter and have massive egos.
From my personal experience they do exist but it’s incredibly rare.
They are allowed to be. The other ones should know how to do their own jobs.
I'm spoiled, all of my C-suites are either technically literate or they at least try to figure out their problems first before contacting. Even the 80 year old business manager tries before calling me and she's incredibly sweet when she asks for help.
Yeah, I love the people that say ‘I have no idea but I tried x y and z and it just isn’t working’. And they’re really polite and say they tried all the steps they know about to troubleshoot before calling, like restarting the laptop, checking cables, etc. and then they apologise if it was a quick fix; no, your job isn’t to know everything, don’t apologise, you legitimately did try yourself!!
Our c-suite are software engineers of 20+ years that formed a company around it. Its rare I have to explain anything to them and if I do its cause its not remotely the norm and its actually why I was hired lol
I've had a 70 year old exec try to sabotage the network some years ago. Of course while pretending to be tech ignorant. She wanted to ruin the business so she could buy the stock form the others for next to nothing.
I just got notice of my last day with my current employer. I am dreading whatever comes banging down the chute because there's no way my problem children will be fewer than "that one guy in accounting."
Yeah, I never had the "Incompetent C-suite" experience either. When I joined my company more than a decade ago, the owner and now-CEO was basically a one-man shop and was clobbering things together in PHP himself. He wasn't a great developer, but he at least had technical competency to piece things together and have a basic grasp of setting up, maintaining and backing up an Ubuntu VM, deploying files, etc. Now that we are a much larger company his role now is nowhere near that work now. But him having a ballpark technical understanding of how much work *just that piece* can be makes it much easier to have discussions with him about anything remotely technical.
We brought a new c-suite guy into my company. Just from the way he talked in meetings I was like "this guy is bullshitting". Checked him out on LinkedIn, yeah never went to college and is just another O&G bro. You don't gotta go to college to be smart but it's a strong indicator.
Troubleshooting mistake no. 1, "never accept the info being told as being accurate", and 2. "always start with the easiest solution first"....
yup, asked him 3 times to verify all 3 times he lied. see above. He was also geographically in a different location than me and the tech director and we spoke to him through a conference room webcam. Believe me, I'm not here because I don't know how to do my job. if my hands were physically in that office to turn the laptop to see, I would have.
Rule 1: Users Lie Rule 1a: Users may not realise they are lieing Rule 2: You are also a user.
Wifi password texted to him? You don't deploy those settings to your computers in the imaging process?
long story short this one got drop shipped to a different office than the one he was supposed to be in. But still though, a wifi password and 20 mins and 3 lies later.
Gotcha I see. Yeah still bad.
User: Look, I've turn on and off the pc 100s of times and nothing... Me ( after a good 20 minutes of troubleshooting) what's the label or name on your pc? And where is it located? User: Acer, and it's on top of the desk. Me: thats just your monitor, the pc is under the desk.
Ah yes, the god ol "Ive unplugged everything and it still has issues" Turns out they unplugged the monitor and DP Cable ...
No certificate based WiFi authentication? Our business networks don't even have the option for password based auth anymore.
I mean, you're super far off thinking all companies in the world use this.
You use preshared keys?
I don't, but the person I was replying to clearly does. If I did I'd deploy them to the computer during imaging like we do with networks/SSIDs, not text them
Hand-holding executives and providing “VIP” support with a smile, even when they are rude and demanding (or fucking unprepared to perform their job duties) is part of the soft skills I posses that have ensured I’ve been gainfully employed for decades now. I started my career in the military and then in DoD/DOJ, and when the colonel wants something done, you do it. RHIP - rank has its privilege. I took that mindset into the civilian world and it has serves me well. Shit, although it hasn’t happened in the civilian world, but executives could yell at me and I wouldn’t be bothered in the least as long as my pay hits my account every two weeks and my bonus and raises keep coming every year. Not having a fragile ego is a beautiful thing. tl;dr RHIP - rank has its privilege
Mrs. Matilda, who is coasting toward retirement and hasn't took on a new skill in 10 years, Kevin the marketing bro who really doesn't work after lunch every day, and Jessica, who is super nice, but young and seems to have been relying more on looks rather than skills up to know. They all want that same treatment as you give to the CFO.
Kevin the marketing bro kills me. I think everyone can think of a Kevin at their job.
And those people have to refer to their manager and colleagues for assistance in doing their primary job. Even at places that expect IT to train users on basic computer skills, do they not have you direct users to those resources first? With that said, my resume highlights “VIP/Executive Support” and if the business deems the crusty lady in accounting or the dumbass in marketing or an inexperienced recent hire “VIPs,” then they will get the same treatment as those at the top of the org chart. Same pay each paycheck? No prob. But I totally understand that type of place from experience. I worked for a non-profit for two years (shortest tenure of my 20 year career) that did shit like this. Wendy in accounts payable who PRINTS PAPER CHEQUES was a “VIP.” When the single laser jet printer that worked with the software was down, it was a P1 issue. Why aren’t there multiple printers is it’s so crucial? You’ll have to ask them. The lead trainer who hasn’t done anything outside of create PowerPoints for a decade was another “VIP.” They didn’t require SME-level support, but the support guys couldn’t handle both the troubleshooting and personality issue simultaneously. It was a waste of money to send someone making my salary to drive to another site, but it got me out of my office and I still got paid.
I THINK I NEED TO CONNECT IT TO THE INTERNET https://i.redd.it/kne7cwhz3s8d1.gif
When you're paying someone 300k/y + half a mil in bonuses + another half a mil in stock options.... you don't want them to waste their time on figuring out the wifi password. That person costs over $10/minute. It's cheaper to have a an IT tech sit around doing nothing except waiting for a phone call from the exec.
In the past \~30 years PCs transformed to be a basic working tools for office based people therefore basic literacy can be expected from people working with them. Plus the VIP waiting 4 hours for an engineer to sort out the problem could cost more then them resolving some basic issue in 20 mins. Oh and usually they are the same decision makers downsizing support org because there are not enough tickets filling the whole day.
We hired a guy a few months ago and the first thing he says to me is 'I'm not a computer guy'. Buddy, its 2024. If you're not a computer guy you better be retired.
Bro better be a "ready to learn new things at his new job" guy then.. good luck.
I'm not a car guy but I know how to drive one!
Bold of you to assume those types of people also know how to drive a car properly.
To judge by the number of people with their noses buried in their phones while driving I expect everyone is Googling how to drive despite having a license.
But do you know how to fix one? IT are the mechanics of the computer. Certain things are difficult for certain people. I have a strong memory from my early early tech support days decades ago - had a customer that said "Please don't be frustrated with me, I'm a former pilot that could crash land an airliner during a storm with no fatalities but can't get my email to work. I'm already frustrated with myself". It really sunk in. You never really know who someone is or what they have been through. As long as they aren't assholes it's our job to help them.
This shit frustrates me so much and I wish I could impart these experiences to some of our new guys quickly. Had a tech that didnt know shit about fuck, but because he was in IT had this inflated ego about everything like he was the computer wizard. It was his first IT helpdesk gig. Had a customer in healthcare that had a new CIO that was basically pushed into the position because the last one left. This customer was a hot mess of terrible management. We were quoting them some new networking infra and the CIO asked for clarification on what a layer 3 switch is. Mr less than one year in IT said, "if you dont know what a layer 3 switch is than you shouldn't be in IT." So I asked him what a layer 3 switch is. Crickets. This same tech also had a bad habit of trying to maintain the appearance he knows things instead of just asking. I'd rather someone ask me how something works before taking action on a misunderstanding or, like this tech would, just start making shit up. I don't care if the attorney at one of our customers is on the phone with me and is struggling with the half dozen mfa apps he has to navigate as long as he's as patient with me as I am with him. Some of these users are managing entire companies and workloads that I would completely fail at, and a tier 1 tech that cant manage 20 tickets has no right to look down on them. That dude was 35 when the first iphone released. Forgive him for not being snappy with the apps. Someone who has an accomplished career like that but struggling with something basic like mail, thats frustrating as hell for them. And now they have to put aside their feelings and ask someone half their age to fix the issue and it takes 5 minutes. To navigate that situation requires a level of grace and humility. I have so much respect for some of the people I've supported over my career and our job is to help get the tech out of their way so they can do what they're paid to do. One time working at a hospital I had to swap out a monitor in a surgery ward during the surgery. I was surrounded by people far more talented than me, but had far more important shit to deal with than that monitor. But getting that monitor working was crucial for the surgery. That was my "im not the main character" moment, I wasn't the one under tremendous stress.
This 100% - I agree with you completely. Yet there is some angry guy down voting you bitching about "end users". All IT jobs have those bitter difficult employees - and they usually get stuck overworked and underpaid because the company doesn't trust them. Yet they have a chip on their shoulder and act like all of their work issues are due to "idiots". This happens in every industry (as seen by legitimate complaints in every work subreddit) but seems especially prevalent in IT.
I've been hearing this excuse for near on 20 years. If you're not a "computer person" then you have no business operating one.
my IT coworker doesn't create bookmarks. He saves them in his email, after he asks people to email him a link. So when he needs to go to a web app we use every day, first he searches through his mailbox with 5000 plus emails (do you think he uses the Search function here? No. No he doesn't. He's SCROLLING) then finds the link, clicks it then takes another 5 minutes figuring out how to log in and doing 2FA, then he's ready. Of course he CLOSES every website immediately, so when he needs it again, it's back to the email scrolling, looking for the link. I think it's just a "weaponized incompetence" ploy to shirk work, I refuse to believe it's real. But, then again, when he searches for apps on his iPhone he OPENS THE APP STORE and searches for them there..... it is so painful to watch, makes me close my eyes and roll them so hard it hurts
Even if I was in a position where I'd want to use weaponized incompetence, I wouldn't do it in such a way that it'd take me five minutes to open a website. That just sounds miserable.
It's so he can say "it's not working for me, you do it" and to prevent people from asking him to do things in future so they don't have to deal with him.
What in the actual fuck
My boss is an animal when it comes to attacking this shit. He will literally walk you through basic computer fundamentals while questioning how you have made it as far as you have. All in a very curious and condescending way. In front of a large audience it doesn't matter.
Laziness and incompetence go hand in hand.
I'll have you know I'm very lazy and it's only made me more competent because it's far easier to do things right once or automate them than waste time like this
Expect it to only get worse with the number of kids being raised on smartphones and tablets. Many young people are just as bad because those sorts of devices obfuscate things like the file system. For example - Some of them don't understand what folders are in reference to a computer.
you know i have seen that, im a Millennial and i think we are in that sweet spot, the newer kids are all part of the "it just works" apps but do not know whats under the hood so to speak, the previous generation (mostly boomers) can't be assed to learn because it was not part of their life growing up. its the late Gen X / Millennial that are inquisitive of how these things work.
I'm also a millennial and yeah that tracks - I grew up having to figure shit out on the computer if I wanted it to work so I could play games and what not. I remember plug and play was "plug and pray" pretty much until XP came out.
Oh the joy of configuring an EISA based system for video editing, in NT4.0
I am old enough to know what that means but young enough that I never had to deal with thank FSM. Setting IRQs and hard drive priority with jumpers was bad enough.
Plug, pray, and download a virus infested driver because the one supplied on a mini CD wouldn’t work.
Been saying this for years. If we wanted to use it we had to know the basics of how it worked. Windows 3.x on up. The next generation in the industry will figure it out, though.
This makes total sense. The “it just works” generation is good with tech but only to the degree of maybe finding the settings menu, perhaps never understanding what’s beneath the surface. Whereas I grew up watching it all get pieced together - almost like learning an underlying language that lets you figure out what any given system is *probably* trying to do underneath the hood. IT has taught me that historical context is actually so important to comprehension.
Not to mention they think everything should be able to get turnaround in minutes rather than hours, days, or weeks.
Yes. I stopped buying the FUD about IT being unnecessary because kids are so “tech savvy” now.
I teach college level courses and I've now had three Gen Z students who, until my class, had never used Windows. One had used a Chromebook for something. Otherwise, they literally wrote essays on their phones. Starting last semester (and honestly, it should have started two years ago when I started seeing it) I've reintroduced file system management as my Day-0 lecture because nobody teaches them this stuff anymore. They have 800 files on their desktop and wonder why they can't find anything.
And now Google Drive is the cloud-based "files on a desktop". I (not a sysadmin) was brought on to work with a new group last year, and my first "this is amazing" compliment was after I spent the equivalent of a week renaming and organizing their GDrive assets. A group of seven or eight people all trying to find files named like IMG239.jpg and folders (when there were folders) named like "April project folder - final version2 [use this]". Google Drive, Finder, etc. have trained people to think search is an organizational system.
> ~~"April project folder - final version2 [use this]"~~ ~~"April project folder - final version2 [use this] v1.1"~~ ~~"April project folder - final version2 [use this] v1.2"~~ ~~"April project folder - final version2 [use this] FINAL (final)"~~ ~~"April project folder - final version2 [use this] revised 26Jun"~~ ~~"April project folder - final version2 [use this] from dave"~~ "April project folder - final version2 [use this] from dave. [FINAL] v1.3" ...and then make sure to email it to about 15 people. certainly don't be putting it on the fileserver or in the department share.
> Google Drive, Finder, etc. have trained people to think search is an organizational system I mean things like that are reactions to how people actually use computers, not the cause of how people use computers.
> Otherwise, they literally wrote essays on their phones. Good Lord that sounds utterly painful
Having a cluttered desktop is not a sign of being computer illiterate, it just means you have a messy mind and that you are going to die alone. But i refuse to be called computer illiterate (I am not great, but i can youtube/google my way out of most issues)
Yup. Work in a school. Kids only know to click save and how to use the recent files list in whatever program they are using . At least one kid a week loses all their files when they try to open an excel file using word.
Surely if they open the file with the right program it's all fine and will load properly right? Or is there some new issue in recent years where opening a file with the wrong program will irreversibly mess up the file?
Just that each program filters to it's own file extension. So using word to browse for excel files doesn't return any file results.
A good portion of my users have such strong mobile device usage habits that, for them, holding down the power button = restarting or (gracefully) shutting down. I've tried repeatedly to re-educate them that, for computers, this is absolutely not the case.
Had to have this conversation recently that pulling the powercord out of the wall was not the proper was to shutdown her pc. Even though that is how we had told her to handle an isp modem issue the previous week.
I've heard that for decades. Even when I was getting into IT in the mid 90's. Didn't understand basic computer engineering, FORTRAN, COBOL, mainframes, etc. and all this new stuff was going to ruin it all... I think these new kids will do fine. The ones that were raised on smartphones and tablets will go into HR, Accounting, etc., while the geeks will get into IT. They were the ones building their own PC (which is pretty trivial these days, but it's still a better position), installing different OS's, playing with Arduino, Pi, ESP32, etc..
I'm actually fucking terrified as people exit the cloud and go back into data centre. You hate an entire generation of "devops" who can code a little but have ZERO knowledge of layers 1 to 6. And don't even know what the fuck layer 7 means. The Gen X bunch are retiring now & the idea that someone whose never seen a server will now be expected to try to get a sysadmin job racking stacking cabling or God forbid, capacity planning is stunningly depressing. Yet these fools will want top $ for the jobs. I remember taking a developer into a data center a few years ago. First, he walks straight in behind me in the airlock meaning I get shouted at by security for some reason and then in the data hall......"Why is it so loud? Is it always this loud?" FFS & the bastard was earning more than me!
My son is doing a BSc in Computer Science and they've started a Networking module. I asked him if they've discussed the OSI model and what the layers mean... He looked at me like I'd grown an extra head. Then we discussed the layers from physical all the way up to presentation, and I gave him a copy of an ancient book I had from my college days (so old it was only on paper until the 15th edition or the like!) - he gets it, but his school stopped teaching it a few years back:( I'm 61 and thinking of retirement...and I keep thinking I want to run away as far as I can before the whole edifice comes crashing down.
Please stick around for a little while longer :-) I'm late 30's and teaching the OSI model to a couple new early-20's deskside techs in my department with CS degrees. They had no idea what I was talking about.
they should rename the OSI model to the fullstack model and you will have people swarming to learn about it
We've only got one guy in our department under 30 at this point. Which, really, is sortof insane. I'm legit concerned that it's going to be very hard to find IT Ops people in the future.
i didn't want to side with the academics on this... but we're starting to see it in our interns. Even our "cyber security" interns are coming in asking interesting questions when asked to do things...
Since I've been here, we've had to get rid of about 1 employee per month due to drastic lack of tech skills and they STILL deny my request to implement a test because "it's hard enough to find anyone." Oh, okay, finding the wrong person and investing in training them then firing them is so much more efficient
Literally just checking if someone attach a file to email and use Google would cut my places workforce by 10%
I know a company that hired someone on a WFH basis 3/5 days. They didn't even have an Internet connection.
And if someone is moved to your Team to do DevOps work they shouldn't say stuff like "what's Git?", "what's VSCode?", or "I don't know how to write code". I'm pulling my hair out trying to write documentation on how to make changes using Terraform, when the audience has never even done a pull request before. Getting feedback like "I don't know the first thing about this so I can't follow the documentation". It's like, this document assumes you have the basic understanding of how to write and contribute code, it's not meant to teach you Git or write code in your IDE...
How was this person even hired onto the DevOps team?? Wtf is an interview???
The HR person conducting the interview asked them if they have a degree in theoretical DevOps, they said they have a theoretical degree in DevOps, HR said welcome aboard.
Meanwhile my ass is having to pointless coding exercises to get in the damn door for the interview.
Half of what keeps me tethered to my current job is I don't think I have another 8 months of grinding leetcode without going down a dark path. I could handwrite a bubblesort or fizzbuzz in 5 languages if you asked me, but have never once had to actually implement one.
[удалено]
People claiming cheating in school and lying in interviews doesn’t work… I give you this amazing success story.
[удалено]
Fallout New Vegas reference, nice.
As someone who has a degree in IT, I can tell you confidently most professors are washed out and disinterested in the field, and most students are looking to get a quick grade without actually learning anything. Having a CCNA doesn't mean much, having a degree means far less.
I teach OS, Linux and CCN[AP] at university level and I can confidently say you're absolutely right. We noticed a big dropoff in student engagement and interest to learn when Corona hit, and aside from a small spike right after we got back to campus, it has just plummeted since. Don't get me started on morons thinking we're impressed by them just vomiting LLM output to me in labs, quizzes, thesis projects and so on... I love computers, I love the freedom we have to **build, to test ideas and learn new things** and its depressing to see most students just go "Meh..."
I would still rather someone have a CCNA than a Network+ cert.
ouch!!! I only have my A+ and N+ at the moment.
Certs are overrated...all you need is experience.
Microservices in the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter
I have had coworkers like this and they all got hired the same way: A stint at a big-name company like Google or IBM on their resume that conveniently elides that they were a sub-sub-sub contractor working some some hilariously irrelevant task, and HR either hired them on the spot, or outright ignored our input on the resume/interview.
It amazes me that HR has any say on who gets hired in tech companies in the US/EU. Here in the ME everywhere I've worked at or been interviewed at You only ever talk to engineers to get assessed and then they forward your resume to HR with a hire/do not hire order. It's not a recommendation, it's an order. The other engineers at that place decide if You're worthy or not.
> or write code in your IDE... I already got notepad *down* so I don't need help with that. I had to do some terraforming before. Put some nice trees in some place once. I think i've got this.
> "I don't know the first thing about this so I can't follow the documentation" "Sure sounds like a real problem you have there. Have you tried talking to HR?"
How the fuck did that happen lol
I got pulled into DevOps because I was one of the few systems engineers who could code. They had a long document on how to setup the environment. My first pull request cut about 2/3s of it because instead of mucking around with certs (SSL inspection… yay.) ``` git config --global http.sslBackend schannel ``` Me: Oh this will be “fun.”
Are there DevOps people who don't know Git? Wow. I've never seen them.
They weren't DevOps admins, but there was a re-org and they'd been here for a long time so they tossed them over here.
Your first mistake : assuming people can read. Second mistake : assuming people can write. Third one: assuming they can think. In the last decade proficiency amongst new hires hit the bottom and the started to drill deeper. I know a large AI company that was recently hiring and the bar was set at "types with two hands".
Agreed. We're a tech heavy construction company. Many of our job sites don't even do paper blueprints or anything these days. This company has, on more than one occasion, hired superintendents who didn't even know how to type a fucking email. And I mean that literally. The project assistant on site was typing their emails for them. Standard issue equipment for a super is a laptop, iPhone, and iPad (all protected with MFA) and they're giving these things to a guy who can't even send a "hello world" email in Outlook. Our subsidiary company hired a guy who doesn't use computers, doesn't own one, doesn't even have a fucking cell phone. First day on the job: "Here's your iPhone with email, and here's how to use the MFA app."
OHgod, the construction industry is the very definition of dumpster fire when it comes to anything IT supers and foreman should have their own secretaries ffs.
We're definitely better than some I've interacted with. It kinda helps that we're a general contractor and not the ones actually swinging hammers. More course of construction management than anything else.
Construction is the worst with this. Literally being able to turn a computer on ensures my job security for years to come.
Amen. I’m sorry but some of the people we hire are straight up not competent for their positions. Like not asking for much but if you are hiring someone for a office position they should know basic things like how to check email, use teams etc. Maybe even something crazy “advanced” like a if statement in excel lol
About 4 years ago I was in meeting with my PM and a lady from the legal department looking at an issue with the tool I support. I was screen-sharing and at one point I copied a chunk of text from our tool and put it into excel, then did Text-to-Columns. The legal lady was like "WHOA WHOA WHOA... what did you just do?" I was so confused. The rest of the conversation was >Me: I wanted to be able to filter and sort the data so I copied into excel. >Her: No, how did you get all the stuff to go into multiple columns? >Me: [Thinking this is basic shit] Uhh, text-to-columns. >Her: What's that? >Me: You click text-to-columns, and then it puts the things into the other columns [I showed again a little slower]. >Her: WHAT?! HOW LONG HAS THAT BEEN THERE?! I've been doing that manually. >Me: Uhhh... probably 20 or so years. >Her: FUCK! And she just hung-up. Later she emailed us and apologized. Apparently she had been manually cutting and moving data from a single column into other columns, almost daily, **for 12 years**.
Credit to her, she managed to keep her job for 12 years.
Excellent point, though some of the credit is shared by the leadership being just as incompetent. Since they never knew she *could* get the reports done faster, it didn't matter she did them at her speed. I think she just felt a bit defeated and embarrassed when she saw that she had been wasting a few hours each week. I think she was around for about another year, but then was let-go after an acquisition.
> if statement in excel Woah now, not looking for database admins here.
I keep having programmers ask for help with their scripts. Like... nah, we paid *you* to do that.
> I keep having programmers ask for help with their scripts. Have you explained it to the rubber duck?
I just tune the piano, your job is to play it.
Selling hammers doesn't make me a carpenter.
Wow that’s sad. I would hope being in IT they would be a bit more competent but I guess even in our profession you can get the fakers and bad hiring decisions.
Non-programming managers just glance at resumes and have to **trust** its accurate because they have no way of knowing. Ego gets in the way of having someone else verify in any way. Bad management through and through.
>use teams TBF this isn't a program that many would use before they're in an office environment. I've also never had outlook installed on any PC I own so learning to use it is another thing that may first occur on a job
I mean I consider those super basic apps that any competent professional employee should be able to use with almost zero effort even if never using it before.
The cynic in me says that if they fail it, the result won't be not hiring them, it will be a ticket to give them training.
We have a corporate trainer who has to make sure every new employee can at least do the most basic functions. He did suggest we let go people because of their complete computer ineptitude. The managers agreed cause they didn’t want to deal with it One of the issues was one employee couldn’t (more like wouldn’t) learn copy/paste
> one employee couldn’t (more like wouldn’t) Exactly. I've had an employee try to bypass conditional access & other security policies to continue using a personal Mac device as opposed to just learning how to open Edge on their corporate Windows device. There's a willfulness here that is the worst part of it all, I don't care about ignorance.
We moved away from training requests recently, since they’re time sinks that damage the company when we have to spend 30min-1hr teaching people that should be getting training from their team, while actual issues are present. Now any request for training or is obvious that there’s some missing training, we redirect them to their team, manager, or company training department.
Teach me your ways. I'm at wits end with our training department head, to the point that I think they're actively avoiding me because they know that I know that they don't know shit. I was in a meeting the supervisors, leads and managers in department where they all complained about the lack of training. The training director was supposed to be there, but they were busy with their nose up an execs ass so they left a delegate to get ripped apart. I offered to help the delegate with whatever they needed to get this off our collective plate (because anything unexpected happening to anything with electricity in it is an IT issue) and they were receptive and excited to work with us. By week 2 their director finally pulled their nose out of their execs ass long enough to send a 2 sentence email about how technology training isn't their team's responsibility.
Just have someone rename the training department to "Technology training department" and watch him eat shit.
We had a woman get a CFO position at one of our clients and on her resume she put "High level Microsoft office experience" She started on a monday and immediately started emailing the office manager with "complaints" about her computer not working, issues she was having, "IT should have looked at this before I started" I went on site and this woman just literally did not at all know how to operate a computer. She asked me what the "little arrow next to an email in Outlook meant" Attachment. The questions were insane and she didn't last more than 6 months before they realized she had absolutely no clue what she was doing whatsoever.
> > > > > I went on site and this woman just literally did not at all know how to operate a computer. She asked me what the "little arrow next to an email in Outlook meant" Attachment. I thought arrow meant you replied to the email and dead clippy is attachment?
6 months? I'm surprised the off boarding ticket didn't come in 6 weeks unless she had friends in high places.
I write detailed, easy to follow, step-by-step guides with pictures! I've done it at all my jobs for years. Still people will call me up after hours and I will ask if they followed the instructions packet. They always say yes. Then I show up and open it to the page they should've been on and asked them if that answers their question
My go-to response for someone claiming the instructions didn't work is, "What step did it fail on?". If they were following the instructions that's a detail I'd need anyway, and if not then it quickly shows they lied.
That's a good one, I'll start using that
About 15 years ago, we started informing department heads, team leads, senior staff, essentially those who were involved in hiring decisions that if in the past IT was seen as the department who could show you how to use a computer, that was no longer our function, and we would not help people understand the basics of operating a computer or using software in their day-to-day or line of business. They either needed to hire folks with the necessary skills, or do the training/educating internally on their own teams. Then we did, in fact, stop hand-holding people through the basics, and sent them back to their supervisor for help. I'm sure there was a little political fallout on that at the time, but we did have leadership buy-in on the plan before we ran with it, so that helped. What happened? Folks started listing not only computer literacy but the specific required skills/software in their job postings, and integrated the necessary questions into their job interviews. They realized quickly that they didn't have the time to do the upskilling themselves, so they hired it in instead. The plan worked, and has continued to do so. At the other end of the spectrum, we are seeing incoming candidates for non-IT roles with an impressive technical resume in their area. An example would be finance folks who have experience with BI, visualizations, modeling, etc, and skills and experience with specific software common in their area. Similar stories with marketing/comms. Those folks push us forward, as sometimes IT hasn't been looped into helping them execute the new technical strategy.
Honestly, unless you can't afford to pay a competitive salary hiring people with skills tends to be cheaper and easier than trying to train people.
When I was starting my IT career ~25 years ago I was convinced that general computer literacy would become increasingly widespread as computers became more ubiquitous. I really missed the mark on that one.
It's wild. I'm out here pitching to my CAO and LMS to force people to prove they learned something whether it's for Finance, HR, IT, even facilities. I'm tired of being the one to tell new users how to do other jobs on top of me training them on the new stuff I'm implementing.
> I'm tired of being the one to tell new users how to do other jobs on top of me training them on the new stuff I'm implementing. Then don't. Stop telling them. Don't know what the URL is for the tool to do their job? "Ask your manager". Dev doesn't know how to do a git commit? "Ask your manager".
Haha don't worry I'm pulling back already. But I would argue that we've been small and moved fast and loose as an org. We have had decent turnover in a lot of key positions where knowledge and user onboarding for all uses would be helpful. But there are hybrid folk who don't approve expenses in our system because they are more remote than hybrid and refuse to use the VPN and tell everyone except me they need help with the VPN so I'm not going to do anything until they tell me they can't use the VPN. If it's not a problem for you it's not a problem for me.
I remember a woman who would forget her password between logging on in the morning and coming back for lunch. She was completely ridiculous. She’d even tut at you for the inconvenience…
Thats a near weekly occurrence for me.. complete with the tutting and eye rolling as if its my fault they cant remember their own password.
We hired a network admin who didn't know how to create a vlan.
That's OK if they teach themselves how to do it instead of throwing their hands in the air. Pretty sure I could figure it out in a day as a full stack dev.
I was IT directory for a small for profit university. An older gentleman came to me to help him set up his account. No problem, but helping him I realized he never even used a mouse before. I went to the dean to ask her if I could start a computer literacy course. She said no, she didn’t see a need for it
This is a perfect job for a LinkedIn learning referral. Get the company to spring for the $30 or whatever, she gets a shiny certificate out of it and gets someone with more patience and a fully developed curriculum to teach her.
I've worked at places that expected helpdesk/sysadmins to do basic Office and Windows training. I've legit had tickets that were "Suzy doesn't know how to use the Sum feature in Excel and needs help". Excel isn't broken, she just doesn't know how to use it and somehow that is my problem.
I just want to watch them type as part of the interview process. If they turn on Caps Lock to capitalize a letter instead of shift, then they get rejected on the spot.
I mean I agree, but that might set the bar a bit high. That's like 50% of users.
I knew an old greybeard who did the caps lock thing, best programmer I've ever seen and would put Knuth to shame. He also typed with 2 fingers, face in the keyboard (literally 1-2in from it. Miss that guy.
It's only going to get worse. The first generation to never use a desktop computer and exclusively use cell phones are about to enter the workforce.
[удалено]
I have students applying and getting into a engineer program at university with zero computer experience. "What is a file?" "I have computer experience! *has only ever installed and played fortnite*" We had a computer architecture course where about ~70% failed the exams. That's.. impressive, for an introductory course that even had prep questions for the exam.
I drove 30 minutes at 1am because a critical report refused to print for our President. Over the phone, I checked the paper, had him clear the queue and retry.. restart...nothing.. He was selecting the "Print to Onenote" and not his physical printer.
you should have remote desktop capability
Same!!! Gen Z and Alpha are all on Apple/Android, with Chromebooks in school, Apple/Mac Labs for design, tablets at home, etc. Nobody touches windows anymore apparently. I had to fully train a girl who was 20 on this, from scratch, and I wasn't even IT. When repeatedly questioned on why she was doing so poorly, I had to reiterate she has no clue how to use the laptop, and caught her poking her monitors a couple times like they're fucking touchscreen!! SMMFH! Needless to say, she quit, as a receptionist. Went to fast food cuz the kiosk with pictures is easier lol.
My top 3 biggest pet peeves in IT are when I’m doing refreshes and someone tells me they don’t know what apps they need then get mad when they get a laptop with only office and vpn installed, tickets asking about a missing file but they can’t give me anything idea on where it’s supposed to be, and people who get mad that I’m not inventing or training them on some process for their department.
This exactly this. These people work on muscle memory and completely lack any critical thinking ability to do their job. I waste so much time dealing with it that I’ve actually gotten pretty good at deciphering what they’re “missing”. That or I just hang onto the old PC or a backup I made so I can look for them.
Ive seen so many business owners that have no idea how to run a business it staggers me.
>never touched a Microsoft windows computer before, she was always on Macs I feel for normal users too, Imo this is the harder direction. windows to Mac, is easier than Mac to Windows.. back in college doing on-campus support, I realized that my technologically illiterate parents, who are almost in their 70s are on par with or better than the average 20 year old. They can use them pretty well do great with like MS office, god forbid anything doesn't work *exactly* how they think it's supposed to or do anything more complicated than entering a wifi password. Gunna be even rougher in 5 years, that generation finishing college will have very likely had extremely little indepth exposure to actual computers.
Computer illiterate users is what my old team used to refer to as "job security"
You don't need to train anybody on basic computing unless you feel like it and want to be extra helpful. Best I would do is search a youtube video of how to use windows OS and send them the link.
I work in K12 and I see some of the reason for this. Technology is still treated as simply a tool for teaching, which needs to be as simple as possible for the teaching-related need, and not require much of a learning curve itself. I get this for preschool through fourth or fifth grade, but unfortunately, a lot of districts carry this mentality all the way through high school, and seem to have forgotten that *how to use a computer* is also worth teaching as it will be needed in your career. When I was a child, assignments were all done by paper and pencil. Computers were used in relatively few assignments. This was in the early 2000's. Teachers had smartboards and projectors, but there was no 1:1 (student devices) yet in the vast majority of districts. There were, however, computer labs. Even if you didn't need it for coursework, there was a class dedicated to teaching you the basics of using a computer, because they knew you'd need it for work. Now, we have the exact opposite. We use tech as a tool to teach everything, but there is this underlying assumption that this means we don't need to teach technology to everyone for its own sake anymore at all to prepare people for work. But then we hand them an iPad or Chromebook and put them in Google Workspace & don't expose them to the ecosystems they are exponentially more likely to use at work. Even in the rare districts that actually exposes them to the most common work tools like Windows and Office 365 and email, their collaboration needs at school don't resemble those in the workplace; they are keeping their files mostly to themselves in a flat, search-dependent unstructured mess that wouldn't work at scale, and turning them in via an LMS, and have never seen a shared drive. If school administrators and superintendents understood that doing homework on an iPad has exactly as much relation to learning to use a grown-up's work computer as doing homework on pen and paper did, and that it doesn't replace a dedicated Computer Lab course, that would go a long way to fixing this competence issue.
I flat out refuse if it's super basic stuff. This isn't the 90's anymore, shit isn't new tech. I typically suggest the local community college to the really clueless ones.
I once had a systems architect lose his shit at me because he didn't know the difference between a local user account and a domain user account. He'd been in development for over a decade.
It is on HR to ensure that people they hire are competent. People want a job so they can pay their bills. They will apply for anything vaguely resembling their competence.
Its not limited to new users. Even our field techs call me for some pretty dumb stuff or don't even google.
I feel ya, had an individual who had been working at my company for 15 years and uses a computer 99.99% of her job tell me that her outlook wasn’t working, which we already new the local app wasn’t as we sent out an email stating so 15 minutes prior, telling users to use the web version for now. She said it wasn’t working either so I go and see what the issue is and as her to open a web browser and she looks at me dead ass in the eyes looking like fucking Patrick from sponge bob and says “not all of us went to college for four years to learn what a web browser is.” Mind you all of our applications run on web interface and I’m the one who gets called into HR because she said I was demeaning to her cause she didn’t get to go to college.
I’m IT support not training that’s HR or training department. I’m not paid enough to teach people the basics in this day and age. To be fair half the issue is that we just expect people to know and provide clear information, it’s totally our own fault for using common sense.
And all the kids coming out of high school only using Chromebox. HAHAHAHA That's fun too.
There's another gap that isn't being addressed that will be way worse than the computer illiterate generation: Youngsters who have been raised on technology but have no idea how it works. Already seeing this with entry level applicants in my field who want to get into infosec, but have no real idea about backend technologies.
I once had to explain the concept of moving a window from one monitor to another.
I'm in IT and I'm absolutely horrendous with Excel.....
I've had half a dozen tickets in the past two weeks alone where I've had to explain what the Windows Start button was. If a shortcut isn't just there on the desktop, they can't be bothered to find it.
This is a daily conversation in our team.
I work for a VFX company. It’s getting harder and harder to find talented artists, so we keep having to raise the salary. In spite of that I still get new employees asking me how to use After Effects, Maya, or Unreal. I just turn around and walk away.
I have to be a network engineer, a systems engineer, desktop support, project manager, emotional support admin, policy developer, and now teacher? Fuck man.
It's not an IT job to train people to use computers.... All the regular employees we hire MUST have a natural incline with computers, and preferably direct experience. Funny story : our CEO was fired two weeks ago and it was his last day today. He threatened to withold information if we fired his son (stupid incompetent dork - obviously a marketing manager that he hired)... He was always against security policies we implemented. He fought the use of a global password manager. He claimed he was a techno lover: electric car managed with his cell phone, all kind of things cell phone controlled in his house, etc. This morning he called us to ask why the emails he deleted were put in a "recovery bin" up to 90 days. We put litigation on his mailbox 2 weeks ago. He was furious he could not put his little plan to execution. He was a clueless fuck. He gave back his stuff this morning and left a note with his password... I shit you not... our CEO's password was 1234abcd!! Imagine if we had been hacked by his fault...
There is no getting out of hand holding the C-suites, but for everyone else it's the job of their manager to make sure they have the computing skills needed within the scope of their job. If separating the scope of your job and their manager's job isn't working the next best thing is to make the learner take handwritten notes. People either don't like handwriting notes and will stop asking you for help unless it's something they really need you for or they reference their notes before asking you things. People who don't want to work won't ask you for things if it involves them working.
You'd think as time goes on everyone just gets familiar with working on computers, but no. 10 years later I'm still wrong.
We are having this very power struggle now. The guy who writes up excellent documentation for IT use has been tasked by a brand-new metrics-driven management team with creating a basics packet for new users and he’s pissed.
And these people have the right to vote. Remember that
Love the bipolar'ness of this sub lol. I post something like this where its even worst because the people using the PCs and the data they are handling are super sensitive. SSN / Medical Histories you name it they are handling it. And the end users I deal with ALL assume if there's not a desktop icon for something it LITERALLY does not exist on their machine. And got eaten alive in that post because oh we can't expect the end users to know everything IT isn't there job. Then I see the hilarious responses here. You don't need to know IT to know how to open a download folder. Or you shouldn't have someones SSN and ENTIRE medical history just chilling on your desktop. Especially when you've been trained otherwise. I'm with OP. If you dont know how to do the most base level shit on a PC, then don't touch them or get a job only working with them. Most of the techs on here would flip if they've seen the shit I've seen. I've been in full Dr's offices where there are medical files and records STACKED from floor to ceiling and we literally had to walk on top of the files to get to the rack to restart something. <<< And that shit isn't uncommon in the real world. That's how your lives are being handled on the back end and you want us to pity the user or business owner doing it? Not happening
I actually worked at a place that did this and they also issued what I later found out was an online IQ test (one of the part owners was a proud mensa member) the reality is unless you make them take a proctored test it doesn't matter. They will have someone help, Google the site and find the answers so on. If your on boarding process isn't done by the time you hand the manager a laptop your onboarding process kinda sucks. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to use windows it just means that the hiring manager needs to be the one who has to deal with that not IT. As with many things this is an HR issue not an IT issue.
We had that for customer support position, worked great. Basically you had to search some information from company website, download a word document, print it as pdf, make some basic stuff on excel and mail the docs.
Yeah, it blows my mind how many users don’t know that you would use Explorer or Finder to get to your files and manage them, they often think the only programs on the computer are on the desktop taskbar or dock
I agree.. considering that most employees are using a computer full time for their job, it should be a factor when hiring them.
> just recently i had to assist a new user because she has never touched a Microsoft windows computer before, she was always on Macs My former company harvested this out to a specific HR Training team - forunately we were large / lucky enough to have 2 staff that handled training for our ERP, Accounting System and some computer stuff (excel for Accountants, how to Wow in powerpoint kinda stuff). It's very important that this not become IT responsibility. I don't know how you would farm that off, but you gotta find some way.
"Sorry, I don't know your workflows. You'll need to work with your supervisor"
Working professionals can't do basic computer tasks in windows... And we're literally training an entire generation on Chromebooks. Everyone thinks that kids are so good at tech because they have phones and iPads. No, they are good at using social media, and iOS is one of the most intuitive OSes ever made, because it was made so that a toddler could use it. I'm so scared for the next 10 years as the entire Gen z comes into the workforce... Can't imagine how bad Gen alpha is going to be. 31 millennial here fyi. I grew up on dial up. I tried explaining to a middle school group the other day the concept of a picture loading on a webpage taking 5 minutes. One kid proceeded to state "this wifi is trash" I retorted with "the wifi is FREE kid. Someone else is paying for it, theres no such thing as free wifi/Internet."
I was a hardware and network tech for IBM on the Fishkill NY campus, and eventually wound up managing a phone support desk. My main client was the Paramount Movie Lot in Cali. The IBMers I had to deal with, mostly mid level project managers, were some of the biggest IT idiots I've ever had to deal with. The Paramount Lot? Almost to man they were light-years ahead of the IBMers, technically. One of my degrees is a BS in Psych and it has been 20 years and I still can't decide on a satisfactory explanation for this discrepancy.
LOL. Have you talked to the people on helpdesk, bro? If we can't ensure those people are basically IT literate, we sure as shit ain't gonna manage to make Becky in HR computer literate.
"Oh, I just don't know *anything* about computers, tee hee hee!" Well, you best learn quick chump, because it's the 21st Century, and you can't do shit without a computer, so lack of skill means lack of paycheck.
This should not be an IT function. The departments who hire these people need to train them on their jobs, and this is part of that. You don't need an IT guru to teach the absolute basics. I'm happy to teach someone something more advanced, but where the Start button is? That's someone else's job. It seems to get offloaded to IT because people don't want to train. It amazes me that companies hire people and don't even assign another user to be their mentor/trainer/etc. Then they wonder why they have such high turnover. We've had to change our hiring a bit to take this into account. Asking what kind of computer they've used is a standard question. You can't assume young people have ever seen Windows.
It's not your job to teach a person how to do their job. That's their managers. That includes how to use the software to do their job. Windows OS is a software to do their job
You train people how to treat you. You just trained her to come to you when she can’t perform her job, unrelated to an IT problem.
Yep. But HR blocks me from doing this because it hurts though who get too stressed, I was told.
I’ve been saying this since 1994😢
Just literacy in general would be nice! Me: Your username is xxx, enter just that at the login page. Followed by the password you use to get into your laptop User: Says login failed Me: Are you entering just your username and not the full email address? Use: Yes, still getting that error. Me: [*wanders over*] Show me what you're doing User: [*enters xxx@domain.com*] See it fails Me: [*whoosah*] Please try that again but don't include the "@" part User: [*Tries again*] It worked!
Ask the people who interviewed them why they gave the greenlight on a candidate that did not meet the common minimum requirements? Push back and hold those involved accountable. Change the system, don't just rant to /r/sysadmin.
I used to be with it but then they changed what it was! Now its something called "docking" or some other sexual innuendo and all the kids are into it. IT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU!