IT is one of few fields where having a shitty attitude is acceptable and it's dumb
Let’s clarify two things up front:
1: I’m obviously not saying everyone who works in the field has a shitty attitude. I’m saying that those attitudes are acceptable and even lauded, particularly on Reddit (which is probably disproportionately IT folks).
2: I’m not against people having to reboot their PC’s before contacting IT. That is a completely reasonable request because it fixes a really large percentage of issues and has minimal effort. My complaints are the attitudes of people in the field AFTER that has been done and there is still a problem.
I am more computer literate than the average office employee, mostly because I’m younger than the average office employee, but even I occasionally need technological assistance. Every interaction I’ve had with internal IT groups in my career has been shitty.
No other field has such enormous circlejerks on Reddit about how tough they have it and how stupid the people they have to deal with are.
“He didn’t even know that he had to do X, Y, and Z.”
“I swear to God they don’t even bother googling their problem or doing any research AT ALL.”
Are recurring comments on Reddit about working in IT. And I’ve had IT professionals ask me if I tried googling/researching my problem before contacting them with an issue.
No. I fucking didn’t. Do you know why? Because that is YOUR JOB. You are not a charity. You aren’t here helping the homeless with their computers. You are PAID to be here to do YOUR JOB which, yes, fucking includes fixing my tech problems and, YES, fucking includes having the knowledge/conducting the research to do so.
If someone asked me something about what I do and I said “Well, did you try researching your question before coming to me? Did you try jumping through hoops to fix it or figure it out yourself?” my ass would be grass. How come it is an acceptable response for them? Asking you to do what you're paid to do should not be controversial.
And while we are on the subject: No, you are not the only people who have to deal with folks that know fuckall about what you do. Motherfuckers, that is like 90% of the jobs! Everyone has to put up with similar bullshit of one stripe or another, you don’t have it worse than anyone else, you’re not part of some esoteric brotherhood, get over it.
Posted Sep 21, 2020, 3:36 PM UTC
Not trying to generalize here and maybe in some office spaces that's different but often IT isn't actually there to babysit employees with their personal technology problems. Very often their job is actually to primarily to set up networks and keep the digital environment running but not play tech support.
This get's kinda amplified by most IT services being service contracts with a fixed rate. So when you're payed to only keep the infrastructure running there is very little incentive to play tech support on quasi your own time.
If I'm payed hourly then gladly give me all your one google search issues. Because that's pretty much free money.
Even more annoying because IT is maybe one of the most thankless jobs in existence as people pretty much only realize when stuff isn't working.
In those cases I've worked with third party tech support services. Not internal IT.
Third party tech support has been universally respectful and have universally solved my issues timely and effectively. That is part of why I specified internal IT in my post.
I didn't want to get too granular is all.
Yeah was just trying to explain it from a more insider perspective. That being said I never worked in internal IT, but the people I usually correspond often face the same issues of being primarily there for maintaining infrastructure but instead having to do Tech support all day. And then get scolded for other projects that aren't finished.
But yeah not everyone obviously has a reason. There's also a lot assholes, and it being a more stressful job can amplify that.
I get that and what I'm saying is those stresses and factors are not unique to IT. I have had scenarios exactly like what you described.
"Why didn't you do this special project?"
"I've been focusing on keeping my metrics stellar."
"Forget your metrics, this project is drop dead important."
Teo months later
"Why aren't your metrics stellar?"