Hey everyone! This is a new community focused on NonPolitical Comics (NPCs), which essentially means no gloom and doom of the day stuff.
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The most important skill you need to work in IT is communication.
Communication skills and text interpretation. But that excludes so many people, including a good half of IT support personnel.
Honestly you can get by even without that so long as you can read. Everyone knows at least one IT guy that doesn’t talk to anyone, just emerges from his server closet/dungeon to solve your problem and disappear silently back into the darkness like some breed of Batman.
It’s me. I’m the guy. Been working remotely since COVID, haven’t been to the office in at least 2 years and skip all office parties/gatherings.
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[SPEECH][FAIL]You've been let go.Civility, please
And people wonder why people who do IT work are dicks. MF, just read the error message. Internalize the message. The message tells you what to do or what the problem is.
There’s just something most people don’t think when they say “just read the error” and that’s the knowledge you’ve gathered over the years.
A doctor can read through your test results in 5 minutes and know instantly what’s the problem, while you’re still stuck googling the first abbreviation
Or doctor looking at console output about killing children, it’s not obvious without knowing the context
You are giving end users too much credit.
I get like a half dozen emails a day about “an error message”, which I always have to go back and ask what the message actually says
The replies to these are always screenshots, because if it wasn’t they may have accidentally read it by mistake
About half the time, the error message is “credit card on file is expired” or “12a-482-223 is not a valid phone number”, or some other thing that makes it impossible for me to send an email reply that isn’t condescending, but when I just say “it means your credit card is expired”, I get thanked for how prompt I was at solving their problem
Yeah, I don’t think they realize what a bad analogy this is. Hell I’d argue it’s straight up faulty analogy fallacy. Computers are designed to be useable by humans and programmers want users to know the fix to the problem. We’ve had to reverse engineer how the human body works but the computer and software is man made. The problem isn’t your hemocrit is 7.3 it’s your credit card expired, this program is in an unusable state please close it and reopen it, your computer needs to update please restart it, the program can’t get new messages because the computer isn’t connected to the internet.
Use OCR to change it into text and then send the whole error back. See if they notice.
These messages are rarely more than 6 words, so OCR is kind of overkill
If the error requires a developer (me) to look into it, I capture it in the backend - the only messages I pass on to the client are those a 6th grader could understand
I can’t tell you how many times I personally have been called to help someone with a computer problem where the error message tells the the easy solution. Close and reopen the program, restart your computer, time to change your password using this easy UI, connect to the internet.
Half the time the error message tells users the exact easy solution to do. Call me when it’s the other half.
Not so easy on windows with generic error messages (or worse, codes) and shoddy logging. Also even if you know what’s wrong finding a solution despite the army of seo slop isn’t so easy.
That was my favorite thing about Arch Linux. Things will break, perhaps even more than windows or ubuntu but at least troubleshooting is easier
Oh I agree, issues on windows can be convoluted but restarts usually fix most of them. But yeah random fucking hex error codes that mean 1 of like 6 things and all the solutions are 4 years old and are no longer possible annoy the shit out of me.
Working as a developer, I sometimes get questions regarding issues where the error message contains jack shit. And way too often, I was the one who wrote the error message.
You also need to have patience.
If ITers were to give up after 2 attempts, like a regular user, the world would have exploded during the Y2K bug.
Does that work like that? After 2 attempts you just end up curious about what is going on, unable to think of anything else, no?
Although sometimes that remain when things fix themselves. “I didn’t even really change anything. Just minor things back and forth, and suddenly after 20 reboots it just… started working under the exact same conditions.”
“sorry, i have to spend the next few days fixing this thing, because if i get run over before it’s fixed my spirit will be unable to find peace and will roam the world seeking vengeance”
If I can’t fix it almost immediately and it isn’t 100% preventing me from doing my shit, that error is now just part of life.
Maybe. But only if I don’t know how to approach it. For example, I just found copying partitions using Gparted and opening detailed informations has a high chance of crashing entire KDE Plasma desktop.
But it restarts and doesn’t kill Gparted, so…I have no idea what’s going on though, and no idea what to look for.
When I started in IT as a greenhorn, they gave me 2 trainings: a basic explanation about enterprise networking and a training on how to troubleshoot effectively.
That network training was forgotten quickly because it would be many years before it became relevant to my job, but that troubleshooting training was absolute gold.
I have given similar trainings many times since, because it’s one of, if not the most important aspects of problem solving.
And it applies to anything really, not just IT. I look at medical doctors and I see them basically troubleshooting their way through the issues their patients have. Lawyers troubleshoot their way out of legal quandaries, politicians out of embarrassing situations, etc…
It’s a skill and a highly valuable one.
I really wanted to work in IT but I’m too thin-skinned to deal with the elitism you have to deal with. The other guys just seem to be constantly watching you until they notice something you don’t know.
That’s not really elitism. No one in the actual elite cares if you know obscure command line options. You’re dealing with insecure, traumatized mental children.
What happens when they notice that?
Arrogant sneering. Some people really need to rub in that they know something you don’t. Sometimes they teach you. Sometimes they just use the opportunity to roll their eyes that you haven’t read the fucking manual. Never mind if that manual is itself written in illegible arcana unknown and impenetrable to mere mortals, that just serves to reinforce the notion that they’re superior.
The same happens when you do something in a way they don’t approve of and think you’re ignorant of how to do it “right”.
Mind, not everyone is like that, and I’d say most people aren’t. There’s often someone helpful too. But every now and then, you come across these characters, and due to the nature of the internet, it’s somewhat more frequent than, say, a painter mocking your paintjob.
As it stands nlw, if you can’t deal with them, IT may be a frustrating field to get into. We’re working to make it better, but they’re taking their sweet time with turning into fertiliser.
I feel your pain. Those guys waste so much of everyone’s time, in unpleasant ways, rather than just teaching what they know so everyone can get things done quicker. I hate those guys.
This one time I put a guy on mute and he must have thought that I couldn’t hear him. So he starts joking with his buddy. “I bet he’s just Googling it”…
I was indeed. I think the real point is that not only do I know what to Google but I know what to do with what I’ve googled.
Which Is part of why I don’t do IT services for my friends anymore. Most of what I know is applicable to deprecated operating systems, and google is shit now.
Also, sometimes you want to be 100% sure and not 99%.
I put “googling” down as a skill on my resume.
Obligatory https://xkcd.com/627/
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This is really true for many professions. The information is out there somewhere, that’s why it’s called research and not presearch. There’s a lot of info we just take for granted that took time to learn.
And then relearn when the knowledge inevitably atrophies away
That’s why it’s re-search. I know the answer I just can’t remember it so I need to search it up again.
I watched the IT person we hired look u YouTube videos right in front of me when I asked him to try and set something up.
I didn’t care cause I had already watched like 15 youtube videos and still failed because I don’t have the background knowledge to be able to comprehend a lot of the information and the risks that doing something might have on other systems and programs. Let him do what he did and it was done in a few hours when it would have taken me multiple days.
Being able to quickly find and parse the information you need is a valuable skill in and of itself.
Ha yes but most people cant understand what theyre reading!
Yet, they can google what they don’t understand.
I googled what I didn’t understand and all I got was these lousy targeted ads.
Usually they have already looked it up and didn’t find anything and don’t think I’m going to find anything. Yet somehow I do.
I think technical people underestimate how much of a skill internet searches are. We wish people would do their own searches but really there is a lot of experience that goes into finding and applying the answer.
That’s what’s I tell my wife and my mother. I don’t know the solution, I will Google the issue and try find the solution. They can do the same and usually it will be a very simple fix
I recently showed my mother how to use chatgpt and she was actually able to install the scanner, I was impressed
LLMs might be the ultimate noob friendly tech support tool. You can throw it 99% of basic tech issues and it’ll probably work.
100%, I hate LLMs but once I hooked up my father in law with duck.ai, the times I get called for IT support has halved. It’s easier to describe your problem to a LLM than to find exactly the right keywords to search.
A fuzzy search tool is literally the best use of AI since that’s literally what it’s trained to do!
About the only thing an llm is good for. If only it wasnt trained by destroying earth/the economy.
Might be shocking to some but every professional is looking stuff up all the time. In contrast I would be suspicious of someone not doing it. I mean even if you have the best memory there are always new developments and stuff.
Except if you are new at the position and you have people screaming over “are you crazy?” Lol
This summarizes my experience at work and at home.
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