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I cannot stand the way they treat me with contempt because I am ignorant of their area.
Finally we have one is none of the above after 5 years of searching.
Type one is cheap, that's who cheap web hosters hire. I've had nightmares with those, when for example they do a redhat upgrade and all the configuration files are broken, including the trouble ticket reporting component.
Then there's how much real bandwidth costs. And how much providing real ip addresses costs. And providing real non outsourced tech support. Soon you realize that cheap hosting isn't the way to go, since it's not physically possible for them to provide all these services at a quality level, they MUST sacrifice somewhere to stay in business, and they do.
Why are admins difficult?
I think this is a good analogy of what admins go through on a daily basis,
Movie DVD's that you buy at a store are pressed. They contain either single or dual layers. Blank DVD's currently, with $ exception, come only in single layer.
Average Joe buys new computer with DVD Burner, almost standard these days. Average Joe figures that DVD Burner means he can copy and burn DVD's just like you do with CD to blank CD's. Average Joe doesn't understand that DVD Movies come with copyright protection.
Inevetably Average Joe tries to copy a movie. Then gets angry when he figures out he can't get it to work. Assumes he has viruses or his machine is broken. He calls his computers tech support company and gets some guy speaking broken english telling him that his DVD burner isn't for copying movies.
Now Average Joe is already upset and quite frustrated with the whole mess. Now Joe, after installing and uninstalling software and messing with his computer settings for hours or days, gets ahold of his computer buddy or company admin.
Now Joe is mad and frustrated and wants Admin to not only tell him in 1 simple step how to copy movies but also undo all the damage he has done to his computer even though he didn't bother to take the time to write down the steps he took to make his computer all screwed up. So after the admin spends hours getting Joe's computer working again Joe is ready for Admin to tell him how to record DVD's in 1 simple step.
Admin begins to explain to Joe the difference between single and dual layer DVD's and then Admin sets him up with the correct software to copy the movies. Admin then, to the best of his ability, tries to explain compression and why it might be easier and quicker to remove the french soundtrack from the movie or the extras. Of course after spending a precious 20 minutes of his time explaining to Joe how and what compression is Joe gives a blank stare and says, "So I just push this button?"
Admin realizing that their is no easy way to explain compression gives up and says, "Yes Joe, just push that button." Of course this will lead to more of the Admins time wasted when Joe inevatebly comes back and says A)His movies don't look that good or B)I can't get some movies to work.
Admin, finally tired of holding Joe's hand time after time trying to teach Joe something that would in reality take weeks of reading and study for Joe to even have the slightest comprehension of what is really going on, just gives up on Joe and tries to avoid him at all cost.
A month later Joe runs into his other buddy looking for some computer help. Joe tells him to stay away from Admin, he is a real $#%&*@#% and couldn't even show me how to copy DVD's. Nevermind the fact that Admin initially fixed his computer and wasted probably what ended up as hours of his time trying to help Joe.
Of course the above situation can be applied to office software are whatever you like.
Out of self defense, when people ask me for this type of help, I'll take a quick look at their computer, and if it's in reasonable shape I may agree to help them out, but if it's filled with garbage, system tray overflowing etc, I'll mumble some excuse about being too busy at the moment, then avoid them in the future.
It all comes from trying to sell and market very complex systems and computing machines as 'user friendly', users get trained to learn nothing to use the machine, not realizing that you need to learn stuff to use it. Then some learn a little, and of course go on to wreaking total havock.
There's a reason a big commercial site I do now has about 2-3% Linux traffic, that's all from corporate networks, that number has risen about 10 times over the last 6 months, and it's going to keep rising. Good network admins want to work with good tools. All of the german national railroad just switched to linux, that's about 55,000 machines. At least 50% of all corporate desktops could be running Linux today is my guess, the ones that don't require constant changes. Soon there will be more happy network admins.
IT staff generally follow an inverse law:
Level of IT competence is inversely proportional to social skills
Or to put it mathematically:
skills = a + b/manners
Where a and b are unknown constants. In most cases a=0, though thankfully there are exceptions.
By the look on his face I guess its a long time since that happened.
It all comes from trying to sell and market very complex systems and computing machines as 'user friendly', users get trained to learn nothing to use the machine, not realizing that you need to learn stuff to use it. Then some learn a little, and of course go on to wreaking total havock.
You couldn't be more right. Were and when did "Average Joe" get the idea that computers are easy? Marketing is amazing. I have been working with computers since '97 and been on the net since '98. I am just starting to feel comfortable with the whole computer/internet thing.
I had a computer science teacher in college who was in his late 60's and had been working with computers for over 30 years. Someone asked him once if he knew everything about computers. He told him that the more he learns the more he realizes how little he knows. He couldn't have been more humble of a person, the complete opposite of arrogant. I think that the more a person knows about computers the more humble they became. Maybe companies/owners should pony up some more cash and find a nice humble admin, probably get better results, as long as you don't annoy him/her with questions that you could easily find the answers to yourself with a little work and time.
because if you have Nero and Roxio on the same computer it will fry it
Actually, that's not far from the truth. The two programs didn't sit well together and caused all manner of faults. "Fry" may have been the simplest explanation the techie could give the customer at the time. He may not have meant it literally.
But I agree that any idiot can claim to be a computer engineer. And many idiots do.
Woman: My system keeps crashing and I get a blue colour
Techie: What's on your screen now, maam?
Woman: The teddy bear my boyfriend bought me for my birthday.
And that's one of the more intelligent users. Arrrgghh! Someone tell people to stop using computers. Operating them is above the level of competence of most folk. :)
Twist, that's actually the core of the topic of this thread, arrogant admins. The ones people have problems with are not as good as they think they are as a rule, although sometimes I think simply being sick of hearing the same problem asked by the same person 10 or 100 times just makes the admin stop trying to be nice, I've had that problem. First time they ask, explain it all, solve the issue, whatever. Second time, same thing, with slightly less patience. Third time, put it in writing so they can refer to the document themselves. 10th time, document, what document? Send new copy of document, help talk through problem again. This isn't an exageration by the way.
By the 10th time admin really has to be a saint to answer the same person asking the same question with the same level of patience.
The problem is, a very good network admin, the kind that is humble etc, will only work in that kind of environment for so long, unless you pay him a lot. Otherwise they'll move to somewhere where their skills are given the respect they deserve. Which means one less nice humble competent network admin in the general pool of available network admins.
And also keep this in mind: the better at this stuff you get, the harder it is to explain stuff to normal users, what may appear to be a simple explanation to the admin will be way over the head of most users. Which can create the impression of arrogance. Also, explaining the same problem over and over again just isn't very interesting. Fixing somebody's computer who decided to install an old pre xp roxio on xp isn't very fun, it takes sometimes more than 10 hours, all because of user error. This stuff gets old.
Re the user friendliness thing, definitely all marketing. Push what's happening behind the scenes, hide as much as possible. Both Apple and MS are responsible for this, Apple is a bit more guilty than MS, though MS's version is buggier. Then throw in adding feature after feature, again designed to sell more machines, need the latest and greatest so you can do whatever you want that you didn't need to do 2 years ago, and it all starts getting sort of silly. Users are so overwhelmed, it's absurd adding feature after feature when most users are way way way out of their league with something as simple as ftp. Or understanding that you can't open or view attachments without knowing that it's a real one, sent by a real person.
Actually, that's not far from the truth. The two programs didn't sit well together and caused all manner of faults. "Fry" may have been the simplest explanation the techie could give the customer at the time. He may not have meant it literally.
[note]Im not going to go research the issue, so if my facts are way off I apologize in advance.[/note]
If I recall, back before Roxio bought Easy CD Creator and CD burners were just started to come down to a somewhat reasonable price (my first 4x burner cost $400!) there was a problem with the way Windows 95/98 handled the ASPI driver because they weren't originally designed for CD Burners. I think the ASPI driver was built into windows and when you installed either Nero or Easy CD Creator they both relied on the windows ASPI driver to work. If you tried installing both programs it would corrupt the ASPI driver and the only way to fix it was to either copy it from the windows disk or do a reinstall. I think this problem was fixed in later versions of both Nero and Easy CD Creator, even before Easy CD Creator was bought by Roxio.
So there is some truth in the rumor, that at one point while using both Nero and Easy CD Creator you could foul up your system. Of course Windows XP handles everything differently than 95/98 did and now both Nero and Roxio both use their own ASPI drivers that are seperate from Windows.
But trying to explain everything I said to a non-techie would be boring for them to listen to and most likely they would still not install both as fear rules most non-techie users.
We have a number of buildings. User from another building phones. "I can't access my email, or the main computer system. Is there a network problem."
IT supervisor tries to check the status of the network switch in their building and can't access it. Go back to tell her there does indeed seem to be a network problem, and that we'll send the technician ASAP.
"Oh, I wonder if it's anything to do with the fire we had downstairs. We had several fire engines."
Turns out the dishwasher caught fire, and probably the power to the network switch was turned off. But the fire was not the first thought in anyones mind when the network wouldn't work! And yes, the kitchen was below the network cupboard.
For a while, all this information was actually on the adaptec/roxio website, but I think they took it down when roxio and adaptec split apart, for obvious reasons.
I think I averaged about a 50-75% failure rate on w2k with roxio. When I switched to nero my failure rate dropped to less than 1%, much less.
Knowing this background, I was very bummed when a good friend of mine, unable to figure out the native xp burning utility, decided to install his old roxio software on his xp machine, which of course killed everything in terms of burning cds. That's one of the ones where I had to say: sorry, I'm too busy, can't help, since I knew that fixing it involved serious registry tweaks, prayers, and offerings to the right gods, and even then there was no guarantee, except the guarantee that it would take me at least 10 hours to fix.
I turned into a BOFH when I was working a government contract. By the end of that 8 years in hell when a luser would call about forgetting their password I would just change it to "imanidiot". Took a little heat for that but they wouldn't forget their password again.
Got really burned out and decided to take an easy job as an engineer for a while but then got bored after a few years of being a monkey with a wrench. So here I am now, Webmaster of my own domain and making tons more than I used to.
People who don't understand the subject matter often use surrogate indicators to judge the entire worth of a technician's ability, no matter what the field. This results in them choosing a "nice" person over a competent one, which seems to make them happier even when the "nice" person never delivers results.
New clients often tell these long-winded stories of the shop they went to before mine. "They charged $800+ each time, but they were so nice! I had to take it back 5 times, but they were so nice! They never did cure the original problem, nor offer any credit or discount for the unnecessary repairs (and never mind that the work is so bad it will have to be re-done at a higher cost) but they were SO NICE! People like this seldom become regular clients after doing a masterful job curing the problem, because I am too busy fixing widgets to stand around schmoozing and "being nice."
I'm sure there is a happy medium of being very competent, and building "schmoozing time" into the already-high price structure. The bottom line in my case is, I've tried everything over 20 years in my industry, and I am happier AND do more and better work by being a little gruff as a means of selecting out the clients who judge me for what really matters-THE COMPETENCE OF MY WORK.
I'm sure I have left many wondering Why are techs difficult?
By the end of that 8 years in hell when a luser would call about forgetting their password I would just change it to "imanidiot".
LMAO!
I'm sure there is a happy medium of being very competent, and building "schmoozing time" into the already-high price structure.
This might seem a little off key but I thought I would mention this anyway,
I was forced to take this bs communications class in college. 99% of the class was a complete waste of time but they had a guest speaker one day and she actually gave me some information that was usefull. She had some tests and charts which lumped people into one of four categories, golden retriever, otter, lion, and some other animal whose name escapes me. Anybody who already has heard about this already knows what I am talking about.
Point is, if you have a lion personality, like most programmers, techies, mechanics, engineers and so on you will have certain personality traits. Such as hating small talk, wasting time, inefficiency and stuff like that.
If you were a golden retriever you always cheered the underdog and feel sorry for people, think of nurse, grade school teacher and things as such.
If you are a otter you are really chatty and love to bs with people about anything. You are always late to everything and usually the life of the party. You never do a good job at work but keep your job because you are fun to hang around. Think of executive, salesman and so on.
The other animal personality type is a very accurate person who ends up doing accounting and other tediously boring work.
The point the guest speaker was trying to get across was if your a lion, be a lion, don't try to be a otter or you'll just end up being unhappy. Same principle goes for the rest as well. I went off the chart on the tests as a lion personality before she even told us what that meant. If I was an admin I would do a great job and all the computers would run like clock work but everyone would most likely hate me because I despise useless drivel small talk about the weather. Thats why I chose the web developing route. Suits my personality much more, I have my website setup where I almost never have to communicate with people that visit unless I choose to. Also the reason I will never be able to have a forum on my website. I choose to participate in this forum, for example. If I had my own forum I would inevatably go off on someone or at some point just shut the whole thing down because I would grow tired of all the people wasting my time with stupid or pointless posts.
If I ever become more succesful here would be my plan,
Find a otter to be my salesman, give him a company car so he will always be far away from me wheeling and dealing with clients. Otters and lions dont get along well it says, which I have found to be true.
Find a golden retriever to be my secretary and answer the phone. Always nice and pleasent and is actually concerned about you when you have a bad day. Lions and golden retrievers mix well, which I also found to be true.
Hire the other personality type to do data entry into my databases and other monotonous tasks that they would actually find enjoyable.
one of four categories, golden retriever, otter, lion, and some other animal whose name escapes me.
The other animal is a beaver.
From the "The four personality types"
[new-life.net...]
Philosophically speaking, systems administration is about your problem-solving mindset. This can be broken down into your ability to ask the right questions, and your ability to effectively process the responses.Asking the right questions is a matter of understanding what information is available to you on a given system, and what tools are available with which to retrieve it. But it's more than that. It's also about when to ask questions, when to take action, and when to do nothing.
You'll notice people skills don't really come into play here, except when extracting useful data from the questioned entity [which is usually error codes etc, but sometimes is a person], although they do give those a cursory note at the end of the article.
