[superlarry]

alright, here's my deal. first of all, i wonder if this kind of practice is prevalent in many business/school settings, and second, i'm open to your opinion on it. well, not really, i'm open to opinions supporting mine ;c)
so my old high school and school district were run like a business.
a very crappy business.
i could get into it further, but i'll leave it at computers:
once upon a time, all the teachers who chose to do so were saving oodles of time typing away on their se30's and printing on their imagewriters. class calendars, grading charts, worksheets, and notes. all of a sudden, the district decides to buy ALL new computers. so the lab computers (powermac 7200's at most, as well as gateway 2000 P5-90's) are thrown into the teachers' hands with minimal training. not optional - they are required to use e-mail and provided grading crap. alright, integrate, that's okay. but then we hire these pooheads for mucho money to CAUSE problems for us. they are contractually obligated to each of 5 buildings in the district twice a week.. if we're lucky. so we're left with no troubleshooting (me and my fellow ex-admins had been stripped of our passwords, which didn't last long, but that's another story). complaints up the wazoo!
the upcoming school year holds the same thing, only all the teachers must now use 333 iMacs.
long story shortened, we keep buying new computers, but we don't have people to maintain the problems caused by our "tech guys" (or even just general troubleshooting.. help is guaranteed in two weeks by this company, any problem big or small, and in many cases the problem is forgotten or I'VE gone and fixed it).

i'd like to know if this relates to anything out there. it'll help to know what kind of incompetency to expect as i venture into a computer-illiterate world. are there lots of cases of abuse of computer misknowledge on a large business level? and what do you think about it?

[Scott_H]

Originally posted by superlarry:
<STRONG>...

i'd like to know if this relates to anything out there. it'll help to know what kind of incompetency to expect as i venture into a computer-illiterate world. are there lots of cases of abuse of computer misknowledge on a large business level? and what do you think about it?</STRONG>

Here's what I have to say.

Never ever ever offer to fix anything or claim to know what's wrong. Once you do you'll be the "computer person", word will get around and everyone will ask you to fix it. When you get over run and can't do the real work you'll have to turn people down. Then you'll come off as the asshole that knows how to fix it but is too much of an arrogant pick to help out "this one time".

[Avenir]

Originally posted by Scott_H:
<STRONG>Never ever ever offer to fix anything or claim to know what's wrong. Once you do you'll be the "computer person", word will get around and everyone will ask you to fix it. When you get over run and can't do the real work you'll have to turn people down. Then you'll come off as the asshole that knows how to fix it but is too much of an arrogant pick to help out "this one time".</STRONG>

Can I get an AMEN!

[yoyo52]

First, it seems that the job of IT people is to make their work such a mystery that they'll never be out of a job. That's why they took away passwords. In my school, they make a big mystery of what your TCP/IP address is. As if you couldn't just look for it

I disagree about offering to help. Again, in my school, if it weren't for the fact that there are three people who know how to troubleshoot Macs, we'd be out of the Mac platform and into the Windozes world.

Again, it seems that because the job of IT people is to make their work a mystery, they hate Macs because it's so hard to make Macs mysterious. So not offering to help is to play their game, and the result is often not good.

[Korv]

Originally posted by Avenir:
<STRONG>

Can I get an AMEN!</STRONG>

AMEN!

Yoyo, yeah you're right, IT people shouldn't hold their help back. But as a computer savvy person who is not an IT person at work, its totally true. Back when I temped, I used to help peopleout because I would be outta there in a week or two. But at my job... I just play dumb. I have my own work to do.

[darcybaston]

My folks work for an energy distribution company (hydro and gas) and they have a network admin there who must be the most dishonest and poorly trained IT person out there. Check out some quotes I picked up from my folks and from meeting him personally during a few weeks of a data processing contract:

"The spell checker missed a word? That's IMPOSSIBLE! I'll have to debug the code"
-My take (If you add a misspelled word to the dictionary accidentally, bingo. And, debug WHAT code?)

"Darcy, did you put Appleshare on our server?" -My take (It's a Win2000 server, how the hell can I possibly put Appleshare on it?)

"I don't know what happened, the database changed its code on its own." -My take (In my tenure, MS Access 2000 doesn't rewrite its own VB code spontaneously).

"Nobody can use their computer today, I'm downloading updates for 8 hours and it will take a few more hours to install." -My take (This guy uses Windows Update features found in the start menu, and on a 56k modem to boot. A business that knew better would never lose a day of productivity over a damn service pack update.)

"" Just a note, the guy gives everyone a user account (login/password, standard Win2000 policy management fare), and doesn't set *any* read/write permissions for anybody so the point of having the user account permission model in place is lost. The whole server is open for all kinds of accidents. And he told me Macs were inherently insecure and can't be networked in a LAN? tsk tsk, the ignorance. He has never heard of OS X neither.

"We need this new dual Xenon RAID server, cause the other one was too slow" -my take (They have 5 computers on a LAN. 5! And all they do is use MS Office and a shared Access database. There's NO way you need 2 Xenon and RAID for this. As a side note, he brought a portable fan (the one you put on a desk when its hot in your home?) and leaves the server's tower case open for this fan to cool it, claiming that "the cpu fan doesn't spin right so we need this".)

"Wireless networking is too expensive" -my take (Airport? Making you broke? Compared to your silly Xenon RAID solution? Yes I know it wouldn't work with their Windows setup, but he was making a blanket statement.)

Anyway, there's more but I'm going crazy at the memory of experiencing this person's banter. Why is he still an employee? Well, the owner and him are pot smoking buddies and they enjoy each other's company I suppose. Nothing against anyone and the use of cannabis, but that's where the job performance tolerance lies in this example.

Hehe, if you're going into IT, don't be a Brad.

Darcy

[superlarry]

ease of use vs. familiarity
--&gt;
the company at my school ditched AppleShare (the 'professional' one) in favor of Novell Netware. not too friendly on macs.. hopefully they did it wrong, because it was total crap. from what i've seen, managing simple server stuff (one user, one folder, plus access to different class' folders) is MUCH easier with appleshare. i could fix/make an account in seconds.
here's the other thing: the powermac 610 or whatever that was running the server seamlessly from in between the two computer labs was ditched in favor of FOUR HP towers running Novell. these were locked in a new 'server room' and not allowed access by anyone except the hired tech guys (who were never around).
the "reason"? a computer teacher (1 of three in one year, haha they wouldn't stick around) walked in, and seeing the apple's screensaver was password protected, SHUT IT DOWN with the power button on the front. first of all.. idiot. second of all, no problems were caused! i booted it right back up (i saw him do it from across the room). so the tech guys grasped every reason to be able to move to something they knew. or, at least new a little better.
btw, they never said it was a teacher shutting it down - they said it was a student hacking in. BS.

[Kozmik]

I've always found it ironic when students are more intelligent than the teachers and other employees of schools. Don't even get me started on my school's system administrator... I don't know if there could be anyone more incompetent.

[darcybaston]

Kozmik, I find it perfectly normal and expected for knowledge to trascend the original sources. I mean, isn`t that the whole point of improvement, change and evolution?

It also makes sense to me that learning and knowledge is an exchange where there's always room for improvement. I mean, an adult to assume that no more growth or learning is to be done, often becomes the incompetent you mention.

Darcy

[itomato]

I dunno.. If it were me, I'd be thankful that first of all, my school had the *budget* to buy or otherwise provide teachers with computers, and second that they were Macs. Those problems sound like growing pains to me. The school signed a deal with a lame consulting firm? Sounds about right. The administration just needs to see that there is a need for in-house IT staff, and go with it.

Large businesses are all about computer misknowledge. That's why so many of us have jobs.

[Kozmik]

There are 2 things I'm not sure if my school's system admin guy has ever done:

1. Used a Mac.
2. Set up a LAN that has an uptime of more than 4 days without crashing.