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Ask Slashdot: Do Older IT Workers Doing End-User Support Find It Gets Harder With Age? 221

Posted by BeauHD from the I-need-a-drink dept.
Longtime Slashdot reader King_TJ writes: I've worked in I.T. for almost 30 years now in various capacities, from bench PC technician to web page designer, support specialist, network manager, and was self-employed for a while doing on-site service and consulting too. In all that time, I've always felt like I had a good handle on troubleshooting and problem-solving while providing good, friendly customer service at the same time. But recently, I've started feeling like there's just a little too much knowledge to keep straight in my brain. If I'm able to work on a project on my own terms, without interruptions or distractions? Sure, I can get almost anything figured out. But it's the stress of users needing immediate assistance with random problems, thrown out willy-nilly in the constant barrage of trouble tickets, that I'm starting to struggle with.

For example, just this morning, a user had a question about whether or not she should open an email about quarantined junk mail to actually look through it. I briefly noted a screenshot she attached that showed a typical MS Office quarantined email message and replied that she could absolutely view them at her discretion. (I also noted that I tend to ignore and delete those myself, unless I'm actually expecting a specific piece of email that I didn't receive -- in case it was actually in the junk mail filter.) Well, that was the wrong answer, because that message was a nicely done phishing attempt; not a legit message -- and she tried to sign in through it. Then, I had to do a mad scramble to change her password and help her get the new one working on her phone and computer. With more time to think about what happened, I'm realizing now that I should have known the email was fake because we recently made some changes to our Office 365 environment so junk mail is going directly into Junk folders in Outlook -- and those types of messages aren't really coming in to people anymore. On top of that? We're trying to migrate people to using two-factor authentication so I was instructed to get this user on it while I'm changing her account info. Makes sense, but I had to dig all over to find our document with instructions on how to do that too. I just couldn't remember where they told me they saved the thing, several weeks ago, when they talked about creating the new document in one of our weekly meetings. Am I just getting old and starting to lose it? Is everybody feeling this way about I.T. support these days? Are things just changing at too quick a pace for anyone to stay on top of it all?

I mean, in just the last few weeks, we've dealt with users failing to get their single sign-on passwords to work because something broke that only an upgrade to the latest build of Windows 10 corrected. We've had an office network go berserk and randomly drop people's Internet access, ability to print, etc. -- because one of the switches started intermittently failing under load. We've had online training to set up a new MDM solution, company-wide. And I had to single-handedly set up a new server running the latest version of vCenter for our ESXi servers. And all of that is while trying to get in some studying on the side to get my Security Plus cert., getting Macs with broken screens mailed out for service, a couple of new computers deployed, and accounts properly shut down for an employee who left, plus the usual grind of "mindless" tickets like requests to create new shared DropBox team folders for groups. It's a LOT to juggle, but I was pretty happy with my ability to keep all of it moving right along for years. Now -- I'm starting to have doubts.
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Ask Slashdot: Do Older IT Workers Doing End-User Support Find It Gets Harder With Age? More

Ask Slashdot: Do Older IT Workers Doing End-User Support Find It Gets Harder With Age?

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  • I don't know... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @09:18PM (#57597442)

    I don't know that it gets harder with age ... maybe one just gets more cynical. In your 20s, you feel good doing anything that pays well and gives you some money to party and have fun with.

    I learned that it wasn't something I wanted to do long-term after a decade or so in the business. There's too much good to be done in the world, research to work on, things to learn to waste the rest of one's life picking up after the errors of large software companies.

    • You don't know that it gets harder with age right now ... But you will realize that it does eventually. Really this should be obvious. Just go to a nursing home and ask if everyone if they are still as "quick on their feet", mentally, as they were in their youth

  • "Where's the ON button?" (Score:5, Funny)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @09:20PM (#57597458) Journal

    I'm not sure if providing end-user support gets harder with the age of the IT worker, but it definitely gets harder with the age of the end user.

    • LOL! Mod parent up.
    • Sure, there's a graduate ramp up, but it eventually drops off.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by raind ( 174356 )
      My go to stress release is muting the call and saying loudly so the whole office can hear - "how bout I come over and slap you in the head?" Works great.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Jhon ( 241832 )

      "I'm not sure if providing end-user support gets harder with the age of the IT worker, but it definitely gets harder with the age of the end user."

      Because of my physical location within our company I end up doing more than just managing a few servers and apps I've written -- anything from the occasional field job to crawling under desks. I like the mix.

      I just don't see what the issue is with older users that other people seem to have. About the only thing I've needed to do is to calm their anxiety about "

      • I just don't see what the issue is with older users that other people seem to have.

        I know, I was only joking. Personally, I'm a very old man, and I'm still a help desk worker's dream. Except for my telecom company. I'm their worst nightmare. I've threatened the life of more than one call center worker (only management though).

      • "Is the VPN light back on the blueish green box?".

        "Is that the one with VPN written on top of it?"

    • The newer Dell PCs no longer have a cup holder. Where else are they going to put their black coffee [slashdot.org]?

    • I'm not sure if providing end-user support gets harder with the age of the IT worker, but it definitely gets harder with the age of the end user.

      Eh, I encounter at least as many younguns who think they are "techie" because they use SnapFace.

      The whole "youngsters are better with tech" thing had some validity perhaps, in the 70s and 80s. A historical moment, if you will. Now it's just a tired meme, coasting along ...

      These days, the oldster that you think you are more techie than may well have built the tech that you merely use but don't understand.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      I'm not sure if providing end-user support gets harder with the age of the IT worker, but it definitely gets harder with the age of the end user.

      Certainly as I've aged, my tolerance for putting up with bollocks has diminished. That would make it harder for me to put up with the stupidity I encountered doing 1st level hell desk duties than it was in my 20's.

      Fortunately I've moved the hell desk entirely.

    • The hard bit is reading #EEEEFF text on a #F9F9F9 background.

  • I've been around a lot of corporations but I can't think of any that kept one guy on with limited IT skills but decent English grammar doing end user tech support for 30 years. I think this post is as fake as an article in GQ.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      I can, I've worked in IT with people like that, the general fact is that those are people that have been left behind by just about everyone else but somehow kept under the radar of continuously turning inept management, because their growing inertia it's hard to get rid of them so a lot of inept managers don't even bother in the 6-24m they're in charge.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I can. That person does not resolve problems - and is not Technical. The HERO on the team is busy closing un-actioned unfixed problems to keep the stats healthy. No one likes a 6 month open problem. So you wait till they are sick/on holiday/Christmas ,send an automated mail saying troubleticket will be closed if no reply, and then closed is a fake non-committal resolution. Sorry - you cant open that problem is is now closed and resolved. Older workers use the voice of authority to browbeat troublemakers, an

  • It all may intensify and become bizarre, but your limits are limited. Like anybody's. Occasionally I get a chance to have glimpse where my colleagues or competitors, doing similar, are - sometimes they are better, but more often I see them doing not so good, which is reassuring.
    The luxury, that I learned to have - dictate the pace at which to proceed, and pick most important bits first out of the pile, fix them - aiming for best longterm effect, this would return with. Be introducing calm professionalism, c

  • most of these problems are Microsoft's (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...and doesn't that tell you something? MS software has always been hopelessly and needlessly complicated to administrate, and the level of complication has always been increasing with time.

  • Phishing, two-factor, switch swap, vCenter install, training and service repairs. This is a typical week on an IT service desk, and not even specialized knowledge is required. These same type of randomer problems occurred all the time even 15 years ago. So long as you leverage the flow of communication to users, they are generally more than accepting of timelines that are longer than 'right now'.

  • The problem isn't age (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nehumanuscrede ( 624750 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @09:36PM (#57597506)

    " I just couldn't remember where they told me they saved the thing, several weeks ago, when they talked about creating the new document in one of our weekly meetings. "

    The problem is that every single meeting there are several of these " things " you're supposed to keep up with. The problem is every single meeting, those " things " you're supposed to remember from the last meeting gets changed to a " new " process or archived in favor of something else. Pretty soon, you have no idea which " things " are still active, which process is the current one or even what fucking day it is. . . . :|

    All the while you're still putting out fires on a daily basis, headcount comes and goes and somehow it magically became your job to train the new people because when you asked management for a training budget and / or even the time to train them, you got laughed off the call.

    One day, you just give up.

    Eventually, you come to realize you've become the old timer you used to hate when you first started working for the company. The only difference is now you understand how they came to be that way.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      Yeah ... I'm not sure I ever had hatred for the "old timer" when I first started working in corporate I.T. But I can definitely relate to the first part of your post, if nothing else!

      I think that's the maddening part.... It just feels like the rate of change keeps increasing, and the moving parts get ever more complex (and broken). I mean, instead of "just" dealing with Windows Active Directory and all the headaches it can cause in a domain that spans multiple sites, now you're dealing with Azure and a cl

    • Eventually, yes, you begin to understand [dilbert.com].

    • I hear ya on the meeting thing. Seems like there are a couple mandatory meetings a week talking about changes, most minor, occasionally major. If you don't keep up on the newest news, then someone will ask about something at a later date, you'll have outdated info, and your credibility suffers.

      And don't get me started on M&A. If you can't get one large company running smoothly, why buy others, then ask groups to 'merge them into our culture'.

      There seems to be a mentality that being all things to all peo

    • Quack quack. It's called being nibbled to death by baby ducks. One failed "update" after another, absentee vendor support for major bugs, and so on. Eventually those cute little guys nuzzle their way through your chest and slowly wear your heart away.

  • Tech support is actually the first level of hell (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05, 2018 @09:42PM (#57597522)

    If you feel you might be going that way, tech support can give you some practice. Seriously though, if you work tech support for any amount of time, it ruins how you think of your fellow humans. There is no way you can look at people and think "they know what they're doing" anymore. Sure, they don't all need to be tech experts, but some things are easy, and after explaining them four or five times, there's only one conclusion: These people are idiots. Don't do tech support, not even if you're good at it.

    • It really depends on a couple of things.

      First is how invested you are in the product you're supporting. I'm happy to answer questions (even the occasional dumb ones) about my own pet projects, the ones I wrote as a hobby or side business. My tolerance level is a lot lower for stuff related to my day job. Perhaps that's the difference between taking responsibility for your own dumb mistakes, or for the mistakes of others.

      Second is what level of support you are working at. I'm used to working with re

  • Can relate (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I can relate to OP story after joining a company which is constantly adding and integrating new third party products, the internal knowledge base is quickly deprecated and what has worked is being replaced with minimally viable products. It's very difficult to juggle 20+ years of practical experience given the rate of change. I am finding out I can't be bothered by all of it nor take responsibility for everything.

  • Before you don't open a virus laden email?
    Now I understand why some anti-virus programs refuse to properly disable when I want/need them too, it's because of of people like you who refuse to listen.

  • in my late 50s... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by spywhere ( 824072 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @09:56PM (#57597566)
    I've done everything from on-site support to large-scale Windows XP image design and deployment, but now -- due to age and disability -- I work from home, answering Help Desk calls for one of the worst companies to work for in America [247wallst.com].Our call queue times range from 30 minutes to over an hour, partly because the team gets virtually no training: some of them can take 45 minutes to track down drivers and install a printer. (I have provided some training for them in the past, but tamping down the calls in the queue always takes precedence over actually improving how we respond to the calls).

    As you can imagine, the users aren't the main source of frustration. Our IT department is easily the dumbest on God's gray Earth, and the stupid flows downhill from the very top. The business model seems to be "make a change that breaks tens of thousands of computers -- or hundreds of thousands of user profiles -- and let the Help Desk fix them one at a time as they call in." We basically work for Dilbert's PHB, and our company is circling the drain while we divest locations and cut costs by laying off staff and ditching M$ Office for GSuite... both of which are making the call queues even worse.

    I cope by reminding myself that I do a good job, and take care of the callers I get. I also realize that I'm sitting in my jammies in a recliner, half-watching movies on a 55" TV while I work, that I only have to do one thing at a time, that I have almost no responsibilities that extend beyond any phone call I take, and that most of the end users' jobs are much worse than mine (hence our placement on the aforementioned list).
    When I was younger, coming up, I would never have survived here. Now, I look at it as a means to a worthwhile end: my wife makes much better money, and we could survive quite comfortably on only her salary... but we enjoy new cars and cruises, and this Dilbertian hell is our conduit to such things. Besides, in our company of 50,000+ employees, I sometimes get to feel like a minor celebrity: several times per week, someone recognizes my voice and says "Thank God I got you!"

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by geek ( 5680 )

      Posts like this confuse me. You call others "at the top" stupid yet you're in your late 50's and never advanced beyond a minimum wage help desk zombie reading scripts. Ever stop to think it's not them, it's you?

      I see people like you every day. Pushing carts down the hallway at my work, setting up mice and keyboards. Often nice enough in person but after 30 years of drone like behavior, stomp off after every customer experience to complain how everyone else is stupid but you.

      I'm in my early 40's and advanced

      • You failed reading comprehension.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by geek ( 5680 )

          Our IT department is easily the dumbest on God's gray Earth, and the stupid flows downhill from the very top.

          No, but you certainly did.

          • Let me see...

            spywhere: I've done everything from ... but now ...
            geek: ... you're in your late 50's and never advanced beyond ...

            He clearly advanced, now he's gone back to it for (specified) reasons.

            Then there's this:

            spywhere: [big post]
            geek: [reply]
            spywhere: You failed reading comprehension.
            geek: No, but you certainly did.

            Did you not notice (or comprehend maybe) that you're responding to the same guy?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Be easy on him he might be stuck in a bad town for IT.

      • Re:in my late 50s... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @12:45AM (#57598072) Homepage
        Posts like this confuse me. You call others "at the top" stupid yet you're in your late 50's and never advanced beyond a minimum wage help desk zombie reading scripts. Ever stop to think it's not them, it's you?

        When I was in my early 50's, I was doing senior level phone support for a major ISP, dealing with issues the other techs didn't understand and earning almost twice as much as what I liked to call "the phone firewall." And every day, I went home knowing that there were people who had a better day because they'd talked to me, and that's the main way I coped with the stress.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by geek ( 5680 )

          Posts like this confuse me. You call others "at the top" stupid yet you're in your late 50's and never advanced beyond a minimum wage help desk zombie reading scripts. Ever stop to think it's not them, it's you?

          When I was in my early 50's, I was doing senior level phone support for a major ISP, dealing with issues the other techs didn't understand and earning almost twice as much as what I liked to call "the phone firewall." And every day, I went home knowing that there were people who had a better day because they'd talked to me, and that's the main way I coped with the stress.

          Fair enough. Everyone finds their place in life. The difference between you and the OP is you don't seem to be feeling sorry for yourself and blaming others for your position. OP is sitting in his pajamas watching TV while doing a help desk job and trying to pass it off like he's some hero to aspire too. It's terrible.

          • Re:in my late 50s... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Vitriol+Angst ( 458300 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @12:00PM (#57599870)

            When I was in my early 50's,

            I think people might be missing the fact that "once upon a time" being tech support was a job with prestige and advancement - now it's just a bit above working in retail.

            Almost every job besides investor is subject to being devalued one day.

      • Posts like this confuse me. You call others "at the top" stupid yet you're in your late 50's and never advanced beyond a minimum wage help desk zombie reading scripts. Ever stop to think it's not them, it's you?

        I see people like you every day. Pushing carts down the hallway at my work, setting up mice and keyboards. Often nice enough in person but after 30 years of drone like behavior, stomp off after every customer experience to complain how everyone else is stupid but you.

        I'm in my early 40's and advanced past that point 20 years ago. I was lucky enough to learn the lesson that just because someone doesn't know how to install software package X doesn't mean they are stupid, they just have other priorities.

        If you really are in your late 50's then maybe it's time you stopped blaming others?

        Wow, that's some great candid feedback but some of it was a little off the mark. These people your describe definitely exist but you really shouldn't lump someone into that category by the sole fact they complain but haven't climbed the corporate ladder. I know plenty of people who are very good at what they do, very good at complaining, but also lack of certain soft skills which keeps them where they are. Complaining even could be the very thing holding them back. It's a bit dark twisted of a thing to

      • Hey, maybe his life sucks enough being in tech support at age 50 that he doesn't need someone career shaming him. Work is work and people also complain about the lazy -- so why not give everyone wasting 40 hours a week on ANY task a big break?

        There are a lot of reasons people don't end up advancing, but the simple fact is that the space at the top of the tree is limited -- so not everyone is going to be there. You are probably in the top 30% or better, so just be glad he isn't higher performing or he would

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      As you can imagine, the users aren't the main source of frustration. Our IT department is easily the dumbest on God's gray Earth, and the stupid flows downhill from the very top. The business model seems to be "make a change that breaks tens of thousands of computers -- or hundreds of thousands of user profiles -- and let the Help Desk fix them one at a time as they call in." We basically work for Dilbert's PHB, and our company is circling the drain while we divest locations and cut costs by laying off staff and ditching M$ Office for GSuite... both of which are making the call queues even worse.

      I feel your pain, and this is my experience as well. The decision-makers at the top have risen to the level of their ignorance and incompentance, and are beyond the most rational and constructive criticism. Hold your tongue, and silently nod at any request, no matter how absurd.

      All IT doers/admins want what once was widely the way: initially, there is a lot of work wrangling networks and clients and endusers, but there is light at the end of the tunnel, the work gets done, and then eventually, the work is m

  • The right question is why are you still doing user support after 30 years? Most of us might start there, but that's the foot-in-the-door role, and depending on opportunities and drive, end up moving on in 3-5 years.

    From the brief history you provided, it sounds like you never had a higher goal - systems engineering, network design, infrastructure support - all the many IT career paths that move you away from end-user support. It sounds, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, like you wanted to b

    • Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Informative)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @10:39PM (#57597728) Journal

      I saw a couple of responses so far that seem to be saying the same thing....

      I guess I didn't explain my career history quite well enough, or perhaps I really did screw up somewhere along the line by not trying to something different in I.T.?

      I'm not sure? But the short version is, I've never really been able to find employment where user support wasn't rolled in as an expectation. I've always been hired by smaller companies -- not big corporations with thousands of employees and big departments that segment up the I.T. When I started out working in I.T., it was back in the late 1990's, working in the back room as a technician for small computer resellers or "mom and pop" type computer stores. From there, I progressed to a 7 year long stint for a mid-sized manufacturing firm that had a small department for software development (one in-house app they used as kind of an ERP system, customized for their industry), and the other small department I was employed in as "PC Support Specialist". We took care of everything that wasn't software development - including server backups, networking, maintaining the phone PBX, new deployments, customizing drive images for the workstations, etc.

      After that, I helped an entrepreneur try to get his idea off the ground to refurbish older/vintage Macs as first computers for small kids. We installed a bunch of them in daycare centers and sold others at trade shows and advertisements. I was pretty much THE guy who did all the technical work, and much of the work developing sales brochures and marketing materials for that one. After a year or two, it was clear it wasn't profitable for the owner and I ducked out when it turned into a "free for all" of him trying to get me to do all sorts of odd jobs related to anything he needed or could come up with. That gave me a really good handle on Macs though, as his office machines were modern OS X machines and I worked with those a lot too.

      I spent some time after that doing on-site service work for an old friend who had a business venture doing that and grew it enough to need a helping hand. Then, I spun that off into my own consulting business. But again, the corporate customers truly wanting consulting work on anything more technical wasn't enough to pay the bills. A big part of my income there was always the home user, wanting a virus or malware cleanup after little Johnny visited porn sites or hacker sites again on the family PC.

      I kept that as a side job while accepting a position as "Network Manager" for a steel fabricator (again, kind of a small family owned company). The only people I really managed, though, were the outside consultants they called in occasionally, for a few hours or a 1 day project, here or there. Everything else turned into expectations I'd do all the end-user support, day to day, along with reporting to the CEO and V.P. with annual budget proposals, plans for upgrading their infrastructure and network, etc. I honestly hoped that position was going to finally be my "launchpad" into some kind of management position and out of the daily grind of end-user support -- but it wasn't to be.

      At present, the company I work for has a focus on marketing, but more the internal aspects than marketing products or services to customers. The user-base is a mix of creative types, sales types, and of course your Finance staffers, managers, and H.R. They run a mixed environment that's about 50% Mac and 50% Windows 10. They have offices nation-wide and a highly mobile workforce, so we use a lot of cloud technologies -- but still have some infrastructure in house.

      I've seen far too many people try to "advance their career" out of this type of work, into project management, and then whither and die on the vine doing it. I don't look forward to sitting in meetings all day, dealing with people problems and losing my ability to do I.T. hands-on. But I think I really WOULD like to get to where I could specialize on projects themselves. Things like setting up new servers for such things as system backup

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by kugeln ( 680574 )

        I've seen several people come into my organization from a similar background - mom and pop shops that had one or two everything IT guys.

        The two newest additions had good timing, the right mindset, or both. One was as green as could be, but enthusiastic, and he plugged right into our entry level spot, immediately earned his A+, then came up with a plan for his next couple of years to get a 4-year degree. The other joined our network group, earned his CCNA, and has moved to our #2 position in our network gr

      • But every time I've tried to work for the bigger places

        Hmm, how many times did you? I found when I wanted to move to a different subfield within IT, it took me almost 50 e-mails (handcrafted, mind you) over the course of a year to get two interviews.

        • I'm not sure how many times I applied for openings at larger companies? But I went through at least 4 or 5 job interviews with them inside a one year period where I made a concerted effort to job hunt, and it didn't go well.

          For example, one place sat me down in a rather brutal "team interview" with 5 people taking turns grilling me with questions. It felt like every time I answered something to one person's satisfaction, one of the others would chime in, expressing dissatisfaction with the answer. They were

          • It sounds that in general you make a good impression, if there is a fit with the job itself. In this case, I'd consider 5 applications not much. Continue to rack up interviews until you're ~25-30 in.

      • I find a lot of IT professionals are too honest about their skills and abilities almost to their detriment.

        Really, the honest truth is you need to parlay your current job title into a "Director of IT" position and make it look like you were promoted into management.

        It may feel like you didn't but the truth is you were. You were making management level IT decisions for SMB that affected things company wide.

        I would go back and "edit" your title and responsibilities to reflect that. Make sure you edit those de

      • Haven't read all of the comments, but a little bit of critiquing. You sound like you have a lot of experience, but little things kind of sound like a rookie with less than four years of experience.

        For instance, the way you described switch failure:

        "We've had an office network go berserk and randomly drop people's Internet access, ability to print, etc. -- because one of the switches started intermittently failing under load."

        Or "We had the symptoms of switch failure, because one of the switches was failing". Or "I had to support users when one of our switches failed intermittently.".

        Focusing on the end user support in that statement, as in what happened in the office and to the

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by King_TJ ( 85913 )

          Understaffed might certainly be part of the problem, and we're in the process of hiring another person as "first level support" to take the initial help-desk tickets and resolve the "no brainer" ones, while trying to distribute the rest out to us as appropriate.

          As far as the switch failure I mentioned? Sure, that wasn't very difficult to resolve. BUT, I guess I should have also mentioned that we have 4 different offices in this geographic area. So in addition to doing some work from home, I have to travel a

          • I call it drift. At some point a company invests money in a unified and homogeneous infrastructure, and everything just works. Brand new equipment fails rarely, usually a decade later or more.

            Then time passes.

            Slowly but surely old tech in key locations begins to wear out. Since it was implemented when the company was smaller, and the staff less experienced, it requires downtime to replace. It also costs money, which nobody wants to spend on boring critical infrastructure unless they absolutely have to.
  • Most people have always been clueless. The term luser didn't come from nowhere. The difference today is that everyone thinks they are "good with technology", and they are generally using 2 or more platforms. For example they use iOS or Android and Windows, as well as Linux on devices they don't even know run Linux. Add to that your worst issue, that Windows 10 is a major clusterfuck, and things decline rapidly. As we get older it get a bit (or byte or word :-) more difficult because the brain does degrade n
  • You get this when you don't have good information management processes & known+published knowledge repositories - normally because you're too small to have enough people to work on these things.
  • Don't beat yourself up. It sounds like you're under a fair amount of stress both externally and internally generated. Stress/anxiety/depression all impair your ability to make decisions. When I'm having a bad day, I don't get done what I need to do which only makes me feel worse and the only way out is to stop, take a walk, meditate get some distance from the feelings and then give yourself permission to start over. Continuing to push will only dig a deeper hole.

    • No mod points to give but this is spot on.

      When I started work in software dev. I just couldn't let issues go. Everything I kept trying wouldn't work, but I kept hammering at the problem non-stop, usually putting in a bunch of unpaid OT, just because I'm too stubborn.

      Fast-forward to today. I look at the clock, is my day done? Yes? OK, we'll look at this tomorrow. And usually what happens in the mornings is the problem "fixes itself".

      Not enough can be said about walking away from a problem and coming back wit

  • I had to start telling everyone at work (and at home). "Unless I did did it yesterday I don't remember how to do it anymore. I'll help you, but I'm going to have to relearn how to do it."

  • Finding documentation is part of a clutter problem. Many people can find things in moderate levels of clutter up to a point and then it becomes nearly impossible to find most things. Modern documentation tends to follow the wiki model and that invites clutter unless you also have a librarian to organize that data like wikipedia does. A search engine isn't a substitute for proper organization.

    There is also something called "decision fatigue" which is related to "executive function" which limit how many goa

  • IT support was what saved me from an utterly worthless college degree. It was the poshest job on campus and landed me an even cushier job post college.

    The work was great and paid well, but that was the problem. It support is such a dead end job. They laid off my team, kept me on for 2 years while I did bullshit project management under my old title, and then laid me off when the project was done. At least I got 2 years of work in Europe as a trade off.

    I found after my layoff that I was truly stuck. Idiot re

  • Problem seems to be opposite. In my twenties it was "Hard" all the time. Now, in my 50's, it's only truly "Hard" once or twice a week.

    Wait, what were we talking about again?

  • So yeah. By the time you're 40 (50 if your genetics are good) you'll start having annoying but treatable health problems. If you're lucky your job is good enough to afford to get them treated, but either way they'll slow you down and tire you out. And the responsibilities you got saddled with over the last 20+ years (kids, keeping the house maintained, wife/husband) will weigh you down.

    Take care of your elders, you'll be that way too someday. And take care of the young folk. You were young one time.
    • The trick is to not have responsibilities -- delay marriage and kids as late as possible, own a small condo where the HOA takes care of most of the boring shit you have to deal with in a h**se.

      • You're nuts. A HOA is far more of a hassle than a yard.

        Do you love your micromanaging idiot boss? Then buy into a HOA, so it never ends. I'll be over 'here', where the lots are big and neighbors know how to mind their own business.

  • If you're still doing end-user support after 30y.. (Score:3)

    by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @12:23AM (#57598022)

    Perhaps the problem isn't the field but it's you. You should've promoted yourself to manager several times over or grow in another company. If after 30 years you're still doing first level help desk, you've cemented yourself in.

    I find that IT is getting simpler with my age, more and more packaged solutions to complex problems. You used to have to build and maintain a small network (Bind, dhcpd, sendmail, cyrus) with large data storage (eg. OpenSolaris, staged tape) with various layers of software (Samba, NFS, LDAP, Kerberos ...) down from the kernel (tuning sysctl) to the user interface, now you just buy a box or download some software that does it all for you and then some or simply go out and buy whatever you don't have the time for doing yourself.

    Sure back then you could buy a shrink-wrapped product too, but it was very expensive and then you were locked in (eg. NT or Novell), sometimes even tied to hardware (Sun, IBM) and trying to migrate out of it was weeks of headaches. Nowadays, you just point and click or buy a cheap service contract and you can migrate between Linux vendors, between hardware (or cloud) platforms and sometimes even between Windows and Linux vendors.

    • Take a look at OP job history;
      Bench tech, web designer, network manager, then consultant.

      Sounds like this guy was promoted along, then said fuck it I'm going to go get paid consultant money. Then said I'm done being a retail store and found some random ass help desk job just to do something.

      I see burn out, not the dumb.

  • ... at least most of the desktop owners realize that the optical drive tray isn't a coffee-cup holder any more....

  • But your rant is major old man complete with forgetfulness.

    yes windows 10 and the cloud is making things worse in many ways, but honestly if you can't keep up then you need to switch careers out of helpdesk and triage. Try and get them to give you the hard problems or projects that take days or weeks to solve which might prove less soul destroying to you.

    Or just get out of IT all together. Nothing is slowing down or getting less complex with time... Now its all hyperconverged everything apparently, back to

    • 47 and anything I can find on google I don't worry about. For everything else I keep notes in text files.

  • everything is harder when you get old, except where it counts.

  • Get help, at that stage, with your experience, become the 'wise mentor' and start 'nudging' the young 'uns around. Giving time to focus on one task at a time in more depth? Become a 2nd tier support where you can get more indepth with a problem when others are stuck?

    Is that something that'd be viable where you are?

    But... I hear ya. Pretty much in the same situation age wise, and have never had problems instantly recalling the sort of knowledge no-one else wanted to learn in the first place, 30 years la

  • Let me be clear I'm my responsr to you, I'm in exactly the same boat as you, exactly the same. Just got back in at level 1/2/3 (it's complicated) and I'm dealing with first level users at the age of 41.

    You fucked up.
    So did I.

    I've done second and third level only and is vastly superior. You need a new job, dealing with first level bullshit is for people under 35/40 (generally)

  • Dirty Harry said it a long time ago (Score:3)

    by drewsup ( 990717 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @06:47AM (#57598680)

    "A mans gotta know his limitations"..
    You've overstretched for your abilities is all, start using a tablet or notepad and pencil to write the important stuff down for easy reference. No ones brain works as good in their mid 50's as it did in their 20's, accept this and learn to work with it. On the plus side you have way more knowledge crammed into that gray matter, you just need a little help keeping it organized.

  • - you are overworked, have too much on your plate, perhaps your team needs to be extended, or you need to hand over tasks to somebody else in the team which can handle a bit of extra work.
    - you no longer enjoy your IT job, time to find something else. if it feels annoying most of the time, if you have to drag yourself to work most of the days, those are clear signs.

  • ... not your problem. What you describe is classic for "I just noticed that this never gets better" and "the novelty effect has worn off". The last time you had to adjust to changes in groupware/email policy was probably a few years ago and now you're older and probably

    fatter and your frustration tolerance is tried enough as it is.
    Cognitive ability declines noticeable from 45 onwards, I've been noticing this myself. This is why old guys are good managers. They're slower, but they have more experienc

  • I work for myself offering the local area end user IT support services., both business and domestic, I am in my late 30s. I attend a site and get sat down in front of the troublesome PC. The owner explains the issue they are having and walks me through the problems on screen. This process usually ends with the end user asking "Do you know how to fix that?". I usually tell them "No", they look worried. The first few moments of my discussion with the end user is usually to explain that I have never even

  • Poor design choices and different jobs (Score:3)

    by holophrastic ( 221104 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @09:34AM (#57599072)

    First, straight-up, you've listed at least three different job roles. Independent of the amount of your, or of your capacity, dealing with end-user service tickets is customer service, upgrading existing servers is maintenance work, and deploying new servers is design work. Sure there's overlap in reality, but that overlap is across three persons, not just three tasks.

    So yes, you've been tasked with too "many" things, where "many" is three, and "things" is completely different roles. Outside of an entrepreneur of a small company, what you've described really should be three independent "departments" of one or more persons.

    Second, and this is what happens when the above goes haywire, it would seem to me that you're being directed in an every-more-complicating spiral of complexity.

    These days, there is a big glorious solution, managed, well-designed, SaaS, IaaS, perfect solution to each and every problem you can have. And even better, they now fit together way better than they ever used to, so you can chain dozens of big glorious systems together. That means the solution to any problem is easily deployed.

    But you need to have someone keeping track of the now many big glorious solutions.

    It would seem to me that whomever is telling you what to do next is forgetting that the system-of-components is now so many components that the maintenance of those components and the procedures of those systems is adding serious weight.

    I think you need(ed) someone to notice that there are simply too many big glorious systems being used, and instead would choose which basic problems are actually easier to manage than to solve.

    Big glorious systems are big and glorious, but they ain't ever slick and elegant. That's the hard work these days.

    I think your efforts are the solution to someone else's problem, instead of you being the solution provider.

  • I think even younger IT workers are having trouble with things like this. Not only are things changing more rapidly than they used to, but the complexity of the systems interacting has gotten worse all while IT departments have been trying to figure out how to handle things with fewer and fewer people.

  • > Do Older IT Workers Doing End-User Support Find It Gets Harder With Age?

    No, 'It' actually gets softer with age.

  • I do exactly this as a retirement sideline (Score:3)

    by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @09:49AM (#57599134)

    After a long IT career, I'm doing residential and small business IT for my fellow chrono-Americans. I have come to believe that every IT executive should be required to spend some time doing this early in their careers. If they did, our personal computing experience would be greatly improved.

    The most urgent priority has to be better authentication interfaces. Please, at least get rid of the goddamned password field masks. You need a masked field that one time in ten thousand when Aunt Hattie is on vacation and logging in to her email from a busy library. The rest of the time, it just invites error. And when you mistype a password three or more times on so many of today's sites, you get locked out and have to go through a password reset. Having a 'reveal' option is creeping in, but should be an interface standard.

    Finding a way to eliminate passwords altogether would be even better. Let's issue little authentication dongles that people would keep in a USB port as an alternative, backed up by something like fingerprint ID on mobile devices. Or should we build password management into operating systems?

    Every old person's computer use area is a solid mass of sticky notes, mostly bearing IDs and passwords. Aha, that "error that keeps coming up on my iPhone" is a request for the Apple ID logon. I look through the Alien egg laying room nest of stickies for the Apple ID note. Here it is! But why doesn't that password work? Oops, he had to change it and forgot where he had put the old Apple ID note - and the one before that. This leads to more searches for updates to the logon, with a constant threat of exceeding a retry limit that was designed for hyper-alert young military personnel.

    Whoever fixes this one problem will win the Nobel Geriatrics Prize.

  • It really gets harder... (Score:3)

    by flex941 ( 521675 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @10:33AM (#57599380)
    .. but in my case not for the reasons author states.

    It gets harder and harder because I increasingly cannot stand the continuously mind blowing stupidity, ignorance, helplessness, mindlessness, naivety, long-lost ability or willingness to learn anything, etc the users constantly display. I just gets more and more irritating every day. It makes me really angry too often. It's hard on me.
  • My opinion on that is not that it gets "harder" per say, But rather that other factors in my life become more important and/or distracting. The net effect being that I tend forget details that less important to my daily 'struggle' so to speak. In other words, when I was younger I would go home and get on my computer all evening, even after being on the computer all day. I kept myself immersed in that world, as such I remembered details like that because I was constantly involving myself with them. These day
  • There is an inevitable "complexity collapse" coming in the future. We can see hints of it now in things like this. Things will decouple that are supposed to work together. People won't be able to keep up with the changes and additions that are constantly laid on us all, even the experts. Every entity acts as if the new thing or the correction of the correction of the correction of the old thing is just something it is doing and everyone should be able to deal with it easily. But the SUM of these modificatio

  • I've done customer support for over two decades now (mixed in with admin level stuff; small companies can't separate the two), and it's only gotten easier over time. But I have another decade before cognitive decline is likely to set in seriously, so I'm not old enough to give a good answer yet.

    Two-thirds of live support is remaining calm, supportive, and assertive. Even if I get worse at actually diagnosing complicated problems I doubt I'll get worse at reassuring the customer and keeping them entertained

  • I'm in my sixties. Although I may not have the energy I used to have, my time management and people skills have been honed by 30+ years in this job. In some ways it's actually gotten easier. In my youth I had a difficult time getting up in the morning, and getting back to sleep after a late night call. I had trouble dealing with department drama and tended to take things personally. I'm a lot more emotionally mature now, much less likely to let drama bother me, and generally have an easier time dealing

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