Quality of engineers is really going down

Posted by ChataEye@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 420 comments

More and more people even with 4-5 YOE as just blind clickops zombies. They dont know anything about anything and when it comes to troobuleshoot any bigger issues its just goes beyond their head. I was not master with 4-5 years in the field but i knew how to search for stuff on the internet and sooner or later i would figure it out. Isnt the most important ability the ability to google stuff or even easier today to use a AI tool.But even for that you need to know what to search for.

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420 Comments

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WeirdKindofStrange@reddit

\*picks up ticket\* \*looks at ticket\* \*passes on ticket to someone else\*

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kingcobra5352@reddit

I’ve noticed this a lot over the past few years with help desk. I’m convinced that a lot of help desk employees don’t even read past the subject of the ticket before escalating.

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InexperiencedAngler@reddit

Im sick of our help desk guys, if they can't fix the issue by restarting or running updates, they just escalate.

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music2myear@reddit

We're a Windows shop, and so their one tool is "gpupdate /force", regardless the symptoms.

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mnmetal-218@reddit

To be perfectly fair…. Gpupdate /force and ipconfig /flushdns quite often does resolve tons of issues - these are tools in your kit, use them

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music2myear@reddit

These do resolve \*some\* issues. When it is ALL you've done before you reassign the ticket to a higher level, well, that's no good.

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Ninjabeaver212@reddit

We had this problem with our helpdesk until we hired a new supervisor. Almost all needless escalations stopped once he started tracking tickets.

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KrakusKrak@reddit

I just toss it back and detail what other steps have they taken

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nealfive@reddit

I tried nothing and nothing worked lol We are not allowed to give it back to Service Desk it's utter BS.

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caffeine-junkie@reddit

Yup exactly. They need to document what has been tried and the results of those attempts.

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SillyPuttyGizmo@reddit

Kick it back to the tech that pushed it, annotated ticket, " Ticket can not be reassigned, options are solve and close".

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3BlindMice1@reddit

Do they have a time limit? I had a similar complaint made of me at one time, but if I couldn't solve a problem in less than 5 minutes, I was supposed to escalate it. That rule led to me escalating a lot of relatively easy to solve problems that were tedious nonetheless, which made me (and the rest of the team) look bad, all for the sake of metrics.

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spilledice@reddit

Helpdesk isn’t staffed/have enough access to fix a lot of things. That’s what engineers are for. Helpdesk has to keep the phones moving, not talk a user through swapping ports on a switch.

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frzen@reddit

mine (one guy) ignores tickets for as long as possible if he could do it, and immediately jumps on them and escalates it to me if it's something he can't do. If he escalates it to me he won't have done any fact finding to make my life easier. Even if we went to talk to the person at their desk a "PC not working" ticket doesn't get the IP address/machine name added as a courtesy. He will immediately reply to users sometimes saying I'll be right there and he will start to look for them in the building. Even if the user ticket is something like: "I am getting logged out of M365 constantly because I'm travelling in Russia right now"

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MathmoKiwi@reddit

It's like with every paragraph you say it gets worse and worse.

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AwesomeXav@reddit

Damn? What a Kevin

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Visible_Canary_7325@reddit

Correct. Today, being a day off for most of in my dept (I'm net eng but same idea) a ticket got escalated to on call but was isolated to one pc in one hospital. "Printing down" was actually "one computer can't print" They. mobilized several people to an outage bridge on black Friday because people don't have basic thinking skills.

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Character_Chemist546@reddit

I have observed the same. Only internal notes are "Hello team, please do the needfull" with zero effort to actually use brains for a moment. Quite often those are returned back because of wrong assignment group or the resolution is one click away..

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linoleumknife@reddit

We have one guy that's so bad. The ticket can say something like: "I'm connected to the corporate VPN, and when I go to Application in my browser, and enter my credentials for Application, I am told my login is incorrect." This guy just reads: "Corporate VPN" And then assigns it to the VPN team. I have never met the guy, he works in a different country, but if I ever meet him face to face I'm going to have a hard time resisting the urge to slap him.

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WeirdKindofStrange@reddit

Just know where the CCTV blinds spot are bro

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QuantumRiff@reddit

Whoops, my teammate had the CCTV DVR system down for a 15 min maintenance window when the alleged incident took place.....

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WeirdKindofStrange@reddit

Allegedly ;)

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Easy-Philosopher5131@reddit

I'm still patiently waiting for "slap over IP" to be a real thing.

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kingcobra5352@reddit

Sames! I’m the Teams/phones/365 engineer for my company. Help desk will just see the word ‘Teams’ in the subject and just send it on to me. My favorite is when help desk sits on a ticket for weeks, sends it to me at the 11th hour, and I’m getting pinged by my boss’s boss about having a month old ticket in my queue. 🤦🏻‍♂️

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QuantumRiff@reddit

Had a guy that every Monday would message me that he forgot how to reload on of our test databases. Every single Monday. The partner on my team would just do it, because it takes like 3-4 minutes.. (funny enough, the process was automated on most systems, but guess who didn't "trust" automation?) I wrote up a step by step guide, with pictures, etc. Spoke to teamate, so we were on the same page.... It took 5-6 months of us repeating every week "Which step on the documentation (with a link to it) failed, and what is the error mesage" for him to get the hint, and actually start using the documentation and doing it himself...

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daniel280187@reddit

In my good old days as a Service Desk Engineer I would have fight with other teams leads for them to allow me to solve easy and repetitive tickets myself. In several occasions I would have escalated the ticket with possible solutions and tshooting commands I would have ran on the servers if they would give me access (Read access, at least) Totally crazy to think someone would pay me to mindlessly escalate ticket after ticket. There really are curious people out there who just need an opportunity to demonstrate and take on more responsibilities.

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HeKis4@reddit

"There's SQL somewhere in the server name, must be a DBA ticket" My brother in christ it's a "no ping" alert, what database am I supposed to administer if the entire machine is down ?

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OkLibrary4339@reddit

We also have a colleague, who just works like a dictionary. “Oh it’s DB” -> move it to colleague A “Oh it’s Azure -> move it to colleague B And so on. It’s really frustrating. Even though I’m also in the helpdesk, I assume I’m from the “older” gen (even if it’s just a few years) who really tries to solve something and tries to get as far as possible.

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SexBobomb@reddit

reminds me of trying to explain to my old sysadmin that a db server's backup server being down was actually an issue

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twoscoopsofpig@reddit

> My brother in Torvalds Stolen

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jesusrockshard@reddit

I think thats it. I've worked helpdesk myself for a while and some people were literally unable to fix an error even if the error message says how to, if they didn't encounter this particular one before. Not to mention the amount of laziness to read some text or hold on and think for a minute before passing a ticket to someone else. Which made me understand why I sometimes had to fight our admins so hard. If 90% of the stuff you get passed on by helpdesk is pure and utter BS, you learn to simply assume whenever some helpdesk dude comes up with something, he is full of shit.

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yepperoniP@reddit

I'm a glorified help desk tech that's done [some admin work](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1klamxb/comment/ms10vce/), and I totally see this every day. Coworker with a higher title than me looks at a ticket, could probably fix it if they would stop and think for a second and put two and two together, but just escalates it up and writes zero ticket notes to help the other person or for future reference. Or they put two and two together but their base knowladge is poor so they very frequently put the wrong two things together. Like somebody is having difficulty launching a local offline app that does not require internet. They see a "VPN reconnecting" popup in the systray for a moment. Immediately escalate, "VPN is blocking OfflineApp, please unblock. Will tell all users to turn off VPN whenever using OfflineApp". When if you did even a couple seconds of actual troubleshooting you'd see the VPN had no effect on the app at all. Others just put one line of vague "notes" in tickets that are difficult to go off of, so the troubleshooting process basically has to start from scratch anyway. Meanwhile I put in super detailed ticket describing another issue, as many steps as I could on how to semi-reliably reproduce it, point to a clearly very outdated GPO using deprecated settings that is 100% not supported anymore and appears to be the cause after reviewing a gpresult report and confirming the issue seems to go away when it's disabled, and... I get a super vague reply from a sysadmin on that team basically copypasting a solution that I should try clearing my browser cache, try gpupdate or sfc scannow, etc. Just super infuriating when you actually put in the effort and get basically stonewalled like this.

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jesusrockshard@reddit

It totally is. But after all, I think the mistake that got made in the first place was measuring success by the number of tickets resolved. or 'resolved'. I mean, at least for me, I experienced much more thoughtful co-workers at places where this wasn't the case. Which makes sense, I like to think much more if my boss doesn't yell at me for thinking, so I assume others feel this way too. And why should that stop at helpdesk, if you 'punish' your admin for looking into such stuff as you've described, he probably will. In such an environment, its smarter to wait if its possible to ignore the problem long enough until it gets recognized as something bad and attention-worthy from higher up, so when the admin does look into it, he is no longer seen as slacking off but saving the day instead. Sometimes I wonder what that whole business was like in the early days, like 70's. Whenever I read the BOFH-Stories I assume it was way more fun, but probably giving you reasons to shoot yourself too on a weekly basis.

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taterthotsalad@reddit

That’s fun part. First two times, I pass it back and ask a few questions. Gauge things. If they are being lazy or useless…Now they get it sent back and CC their immediate. Anything else that’s reasonable, I’ll work with them.

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Obi-Juan-K-Nobi@reddit

The good news for me is that they all report up to me, from help desk to server admins. Don’t pass tickets you don’t know how to solve until you contact next level and they say “yeah, that’s us.” Then next level proceeds to teach tech how to resolve issue. If they need addition rights, I’m here to help. My customers getting quicker resolutions over time is our goal.

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kingcobra5352@reddit

When I get a ticket from the help desk that has real effort behind it, clear notes, detailed steps they’ve already taken, and an honest “I’ve tried everything I can, can you help?”, I go out of my way to jump in. It shows they care about doing their job well, and it gives them a genuine chance to learn something new. Plus, it helps me build solid relationships with the people who actually put in the work.

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Obi-Juan-K-Nobi@reddit

Thank you for being that guy!

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kingcobra5352@reddit

I wouldn’t be where I was today if it weren’t for people taking me under their wing when I was new to IT. I try to pay that forward.

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Juls_Santana@reddit

Ha! Just today I spent over an hour helping a tech (with a CS degree) learn how to get the gist of step 1: pick. up. ticket! Him: 1 ticket per 3-4 hours with others having to ask him to pick up a ticket/session The rest of us: juggling 6-9 tickets simultaneously How do you get a CS degree and then struggle with things like getting context menu to come up vs. clicking in the name field, copy/pasting vs typing out long text, and resizing windows to manage screen real estate?? I....I just don't understand it "How, Sway?!?" ![gif](giphy|26gsq8fim9nnlRUgU)

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WeirdKindofStrange@reddit

I think most of us will be that someone else here…

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Funlovinghater@reddit

Nothing worse than seeing an error that says "Contact your system administrator" and then you have to think ... ahh crap, that's me.

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WeirdKindofStrange@reddit

I don’t wanna talk to that guy, he’s an asshat

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knightofargh@reddit

It’s Past-Me who didn’t comment the code or document the process who is the real asshole.

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MissionSpecialist@reddit

Even worse is when Past Me **did** comment the code, and it says, "This is ugly and fragile, but there was no other way to meet this stupid requirement. Sorry, Future Me."

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knightofargh@reddit

#don’t touch the next five lines. I don’t know what they do but the script won’t run without them. This is where the magic starts. Actual comment I found once.

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SkyFire7787@reddit

Even better if you wrote it and promptly forgot said magic ways.

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Frothyleet@reddit

I've been writing code and not understanding why it worked since way before chatGPT!

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Raskuja46@reddit

It's how I write most of my code honestly. It's also why I'm such a stickler about commenting my code.

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TheRealLambardi@reddit

That is the worst…even better when you named variables after your various pets names.

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BrainWaveCC@reddit

And it stays that way until one day when the magic stops working, and you have to spend a whole day reverse engineering it, only to find out that the problem was in another module entirely, and only the manifested itself in the current module through some weird cascade effect under certain conditions. I had to rewrite a big section of a script to fix something, but it was well worth it, as it got rid of at least 2 magical gremlin areas.

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knightofargh@reddit

I just spent 3 months retooling my teams code-base. There were style issues all over the place and at least once instance where something never got promoted to production but was just left alone since it didn’t break anything until I tried to use it. Also Python using string concat instead of f-strings. The guy who wrote it started programming after f-strings were introduced. No excuse for that.

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MoonpieSonata@reddit

Pretty sure this comment exists in the Doom source code

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Ssakaa@reddit

I've come back after 4am me was writing code to find "# why the fuck does this work?" ... and could not come up with an answer, but it did in fact work, so I also didn't touch it. Little present for later me if I ever touch that code again...

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Existential_Racoon@reddit

I straight up do the xkcd thing with one script, where I document the amount of times I've failed to rewrite a section.

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Bladelink@reddit

load-bearing comments

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iama_bad_person@reddit

"This code is shit, who wrote this!?" *looks at commits* "Ah fuck it was me."

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shackledtodesk@reddit

You get my upvote for the appropriate use of “asshat”

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Man-e-questions@reddit

I know! He has absolutely zero people skills

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orion3311@reddit

There is a worse thing: "Your admin has blocked your ability to do xyz (due to compliance, security, or cost), please contact your evil administrator blocking you from getting your work done and let them know how you feel."

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Saueso@reddit

Your organization deleted your device contact your admin

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Unable-Entrance3110@reddit

Especially when you, the admin, are getting that message when trying to admin...

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CaptainZhon@reddit

Please contact your suckerty overlords who don’t know how IT works.

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agitated--crow@reddit

I don't mind that because I would tell my boss about not having access needed. If I get the access, then great. If I don't, then the job doesn't get done or it gets passed to someone else.

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aes_gcm@reddit

"You are not in the sudoers group, this incident will be reported." Spiderman pointing meme.

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DaChieftainOfThirsk@reddit

Yes, feel the hatred flow. Feel the power of the dark side of the force.

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Zjoee@reddit

I love when an error pops up that says to contact your system administrator but it gives ZERO information about the error that occurred.

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pretty-late-machine@reddit

Or it gives some bizarre, long error code that isn't documented anywhere or known to anyone external to the software company, yet it asks the user to contact their administrator.

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Few_Round_7769@reddit

The worst is "your admin has restricted this" when it's just the default setting.

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BlazeVenturaV2@reddit

with no error code...

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Cynical_Thinker@reddit

>"Contact your system administrator" "You BASTARD! I have admin rights, give it to me!" - Me, mildly inconvenienced

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Parking-Asparagus625@reddit

I had ChatGPT brush me off the other day, telling me to ask the IT guy. I AM the IT guy, you damn toaster.

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AwesomeXav@reddit

I've had my GPT save to memory that I am the IT System admin. It helps a lot

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natebc@reddit

or when all the links in the search results are already purple ... or you find a github issue or bug report that matches the condition exactly .... and you (or your predecessor) are the one that posted it!!!

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tehho1337@reddit

Yes there is. Finding a GitHub issue of the thing you are looking for, only to realize it's your issue from 6 months ago

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wildfyre010@reddit

![gif](giphy|1201hONkUdpK36)

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tuxedo_jack@reddit

I can understand an escalation to me - I tend to handle odd, obscure, or persistent issues that have blown up - but for _FUCK'S_ sake, at least have the goddamn fucking decency to both do the troubleshooting and _put your fucking notes in the ticket._ I can't be fucked to waste time redoing all the shit that some helpdesk person does all over again, and if something like that gets escalated to me, I will push back against it like a sheep at the edge of a cliff.

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rdldr1@reddit

Or be the one the ticket gets passed to, when you get to a certain level.

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Windows95GOAT@reddit

Picks up ticket Asks "chat" Fucks up something passes on ticket to someone else The future is now.

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Top-Perspective-4069@reddit

Thankfully, passing tickets to others is part of my job. Though I'm also currently on the phone with TAC to troubleshoot a failed HA firewall upgrade so I get all the big garbage piles anyway.

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badaccount99@reddit

"Do the needful." But also, as a director in charge of a devops team who used to be a sysadmin, this is my life. I could probably handle every single ticket. Learning to pass it on and trust my peeps has been super difficult for me.

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overworkedpnw@reddit

You forgot to add the comment “do the needful” before passing the ticket to someone else.

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EverythingsFugged@reddit

Yea but the other side of the medal are people that will respond to a ticket, put it on "Customer action required" and then never look at it again lmao

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Initial_Ad279@reddit

That’s legit my offshore team and they are meant to be the team I escalate to.

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0o0o0o0o0o0z@reddit

> *picks up ticket* > *looks at ticket* > *passes on ticket to someone else* No one wants to work in IT... anymore.

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Maleficent-Story-861@reddit

This hurts my soul to read.

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cbelt3@reddit

*offshore gets ticket * *ignores ticket until 30 seconds before SLA is breached * *Asks obvious question, waiting for user*

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cluberti@reddit

My favorite is meeting SLA but they "called customer". Look in the address book, the customer's phone number (that they "called") is incorrect and "call cannot be completed as dialed". The number was probably right a decade ago but no one has updated it, so how did they "call" the customer to meet SLA? Madness. I keep a list of who does this, and pass the info on, but the list is more of a "if I ever see something from this engineer again, I'm going to assume it's all crap and we will need to start over from the beginning" type of thing.

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DramaticErraticism@reddit

I tried to get my boss to institute a policy where we each take tickets for a full week, once a month. Me and the guy who do all the tickets were for it, the other two lazy assholes were against it and my boss said no. Its like you can't even force some people to do work, yet they still keep their job and get paid like everyone else.

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DadLoCo@reddit

Ticket contains a single screenshot if I’m lucky. - No identification of which machine they were working on - No record of things they tried - No logs sourced - Nothing from Event logs If they could just provide the first one, I could source the other stuff remotely instead of having to call the user to ask them all the questions that should’ve been asked when *they* had them on the phone.

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burnte@reddit

Ahh, you've found the script for my company's EMR vendor support!

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pakman82@reddit

Everyone thinks diagnosis is the important part. But 90% of time they can't diagnose shit and they punt it to the wrong department I actually got something last week that was routed right. I guessed the cause correctly and resolved the issue. Felt sooo good. Still was "user some how did something stupid" but someone routed it to probably the only person with the years of experience needed

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EsOvaAra@reddit

They dont even pass it on correctly.

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No_Adhesiveness_3550@reddit

Reminds me of my “favorite” guy who has most of access he needs for all the tickets he passes to me…

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Ilikehotdogs1@reddit

I hate this but unfortunately I also hate when a user doesn’t read the support pathway documentation for their service or application they’re experiencing trouble with and just blindly fire an incident ticket to the incorrect queue.

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AltruisticLoad2024@reddit

This always drives me nuts! Like did you even try.

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Queasy-Career-9364@reddit

That’s because you engineering folk don’t know the art of corporate politics. When these tickets come through, flick them back followed by an email to said engineer with their line manager in CC asking for an explanation. If the behaviour is repeated, repeat the same action each time CCing escalating levels of leadership until eventually you find someone in the management chain who gets triggered by negative feedback and whips their team into line. Source: Project Manager of 15 years who has mastered the art of escalation warfare

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itiscodeman@reddit

Your the grumpy man who wants kids to stay off his lawn? They need mentors and influencers

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eggrattle@reddit

I have a guy who is ten years experienced, an absolutely waste of space. He can talk the talk, but when it comes to execution "implementation" it's garbage. I don't understand why he has such a gap.

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I-Love-IT-MSP@reddit

So here is what is happening, people that have already learned troubleshooting skills are now fucking terminators with LLM's. People that have never really learned those skills already couldn't follow instructions well and they don't have the prior knowledge needed to use the LLM's effectively. We are in a spot with the smart have become smarter and the dumb more dumb.

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Adept-Pangolin1302@reddit

The smart will die off eventually and the dumb are multiplying.

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Adept-Pangolin1302@reddit

It's been going down dramatically for a long time. When I left the game a few years back most of the people coming into the industry couldn't troubleshoot their way out of a toilet cubicle. When I started we didn't have Google and the main network protocol I started with was x.25 so I taught myself from vendor manuals and other books. I remember when this guru I was talking to on the phone started talking to me about ip addresses, MAC addresses, and netmasks so I taught my self that as well. That was the start of a 30+ year career in IT/networking. Many people today have never been in the situation where they can't just Google the answer for most problems and get an answer to they have never developed skills required to work stuff out for ourselves. AI is making it worse because they don't even go through the process of finding reliable sources and thinking critically about the information returned. We will get to the situation soon where these people are replaced by AI because it is simply cutting out low value add human impedance in the process. After that we will be completely at the mercy of these systems because nobody left understands how they work. I reckon the end of the human race as we know it will occur when the system that replaces our life skills tells people that we should lemming off the nearest elevated object

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Grouchy-Trade-7250@reddit

Today the vendor support rep told me I can't update the software on my device without their fleet management software. I already copied the new software to the device with ssh and upgraded the device it right before he said that on the same day that so I knew he was wrong I was just baffled

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Visible_Canary_7325@reddit

I agree. I, net eng, was troubleshooting Wednesday with our systems team and nobody on that team of 20+ could answer the following questions: 1) What is the real backend ip of the servers behind the netscaler? 2) How is your snat configured, if it is at all.?

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Visible_Canary_7325@reddit

I agree...now I'm in network engineering but I see the same thing.

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Significant_Pen2804@reddit

People become more and more stupid. With AI they will become even more stupid.

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whiteycnbr@reddit

Used to get level 2 and level 3 guys from the help desk. Helpdesk has disappeared, entry level guys wanting to work on Level 3 tasks without building the core troubleshooting skills you learn from dealing with the basics first.

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Intelligent-Emu3932@reddit

100% ! Last week one Guy without IT Education (moved in for the pay) asked if he could also do Network 2nd and 3rd Level Stuff. You know how a VLAN works? You know how Routing works or what OSPF is? No? Jeah i do, because i had to do CCNA and two other CERTs to be even considered for this position despite my years of Working with Cisco/Fortinet. But he demands it and „will figure it out on the fly“

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IT_Guy_2005@reddit

Exactly this.

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jimgarrigan@reddit

A lot has changed since http "went live". IT people quite literally got their hands dirty. IT was known as MIS. Netscape Navigator ..., AOL, CompuServe, 8080/8086/Z80/68000 on a "bread board" ..., 4K of RAM ... Novell Netware, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, MS-DOS There were less Microsoft products, and the products were not "jam packed" with features thus a smart person could learn 99% of the product. I remember getting an IT job from a conversation at a local gym. I was able to borrow two books about dBase III and the floppy diskettes. I learned enough within a few days to support the product. Now, folks are drinking cloud-flavored Kool Aid, and most folks do not know the origin of the expression, "drinking the Kool Aid". FYI: The folks drank their poison with Flavor Aid. I read the location might become a tourist attraction. If you had the aptitude and the determination, it was possible to "land" an IT job. Of course, during that time, you actually spoke to people onsite for job interviews. Fast forward to the present: Jobs: Many jobs offer compensation that is lower than a food server could earn at Applebee's in Watertown, NY. I use that food server job posting in my reply to some of the email. Many jobs have a very long list of technical/functional requirements. Would a person with a sound mind trust a healthcare professional that claims to be a subject matter expert for a dozen or more healthcare specialties? I doubt it. "AI" - I prefer real intelligence. If a person does not know the subject matter, that person will not know if the AI solution is valid. If you cannot do simple arithmetic and you punch the incorrect keys on the calculator, then the ignorant fool might believe 1 + 1 = 3 because the person sees "3" on the display. "AI" is an imperfect tool. Last comment, today from a recruiter. So true, I battle this all day every day with them ... Sadly the vast majority do not take the time really for much of anything, anymore. in any line of work, not just HR. It is why quality, customer service, and overall pride in your work are so lacking these days.

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andersab@reddit

You just gave me a brief flashback on my old ass career lol.

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jimgarrigan@reddit

Ideally it was not the "Timothy Leary" type of flashback, 🙂

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creeek26@reddit

Claude-stack overflow combo

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Pure-Swordfish-4279@reddit

ClickOps zombies 😂

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rootcurios@reddit

Meanwhile a ton of good engineers can't find employment because we're either "overqualified" or slip through the hiring process because of ridiculous/unnecessary requirements (like basic certs that are superseded by experience) which get filtered out by AI. 🙄

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Crimzx@reddit

On the other side of that also hiring is hard, I got flooded with 600 applicants and at least 80% didn't even come close to what we were looking for skills match wise. The rest were fake. We got 1 good applicant out of the batch, and that was after conceding some skills that are honestly a requirement for this specific position. The posting was very specific about what we are looking for and as a technical hiring manager I went through each resume personally, keeping in mind all of the annoyances I've personally faced job searching.

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BatemansChainsaw@reddit

I'm convinced this field is best navigated by reputation based rigorous networking (the social/work related kind) and outright nepotism. It seems as if it's nearly always always been a crapshoot otherwise.

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Maro1947@reddit

It's always been like that really

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uptimefordays@reddit

That's just "the majority of white collar work." The majority of jobs are not advertised and go to preferred candidates (sometimes nepotism but often "I liked Alice and Bob and will bring them with me to my next role."

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Lazy_Sweet_824@reddit

What do you expect with every company doing full speed offshoring. Even the competent US engineers have to deal with an ocean of half trained Indians who have to be spoonfed everything.

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Disastrous-Cow7354@reddit

IT folk was taught to deliver the numbers rather than fixing the issues. What else would you expect if everyone must wear thousand hats and close the tickets in timely manner.

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EagerSleeper@reddit

It's so weird, especially nowadays when we literally have Artificial Intelligence at our fingertips. I would have been over the moon if I had these tools early on when I was struggling.

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Armchairplum@reddit

Searching is a part of it, aka google-fu and being able to break problems down. What if anon doesnt post their fix on their "xyz broke nvm fixed it" anon how? That or lovely Microsoft libraries breaking when they change domains.. out of date info etc. The second part, is people skills. Being able to talk to someone and sift through the conversation to find the key bits of what their issue actually is. How do you manage someone who's come in frustrated etc. Eg "are you able to show me what you're trying to do? <+optional insert comment about silly techology>"

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Lagfoundry@reddit

So I remember back in college it was about half and half of people who cared and didn’t care. I would say you’re just running into a lot of people that don’t care about it all that much and only did it for the degree… I would say I’m a good example of someone who cares. Even 8 years later I’m obsessed with making logic circuits. I can go from nothing but NANDs to a cpu in an hour. But there a lot of people who never touched the stuff again after they graduated. So yeah I can understand

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chickenturrrd@reddit

That’s a PC..straight up total muppets, should not have normalised being..sorry.. feeling like an imposter

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_litz@reddit

Nobody is taught, or learns, critical thinking and problem solving. If it's not in the flow chart, they're lost.

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tarvijron@reddit

The quality of every vendor tech support org I rely on has gone from "slow but scientific, log gathering based issue resolution" to "just a regular old not that talented person on a different continent guessing with the same pile of random stackoverflow answers you already found". This is absolutely by design, the vendors could retain talent that understands their product but they would rather venueshop their opex into some sunbelt nation so they can get 800 hours of functionally-worthless-but-technically-contract-fulfilling labor for the cost of 200 hours of actual expertise.

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bagelgoose14@reddit

Man this is so fucking true. In my experience, hell even 10 years ago you'd always get the level 1 first answer dipshit but there always used to be a greybeard wizard 20+ year lifer hiding in the back that just **knew his shit.** Now it feels like even escalating tickets gets you to just some slightly more learned dipshit that is also googling the same shit you just got done googling before submitting a ticket. Now that we've killed lvl 1 support for AI Chatbots its just *pain* now*.*

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SpaceGuy1968@reddit

They don't pay enough for these T1 type /job category anymore anyway (and they are going away all together)

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twoscoopsofpig@reddit

As a greying-beard lifer whose whole goal is to be That Guy Who Knows His Shit, man do I miss the days of finding a decent teacher/mentor. They've all just about retired. People already think I'm a wizard by comparison to the rest of the team, but I know my limits - they're just way further out than the limits for the dipshits on helldesk.

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bagelgoose14@reddit

I come from generalist help desk support and not primarily with a single vendor. I consider myself a swiss army knife guy that just happened to have seen my fair of stupid shit over the years. ive been fortunate enough to have learned from enough guys in the field that were kind enough to explain to me the "why" behind something instead of just throwing me a KB. My only take away is that even great documentation doesnt really explain how all of the pieces add together, so a lower level helpdesk person can for sure replicate a documented fix but you can be sure as fuck they wont understand the why. I find it extremely difficult to train staff who are just coming up the ranks on things I learned by hellen kellering my way through 20 years of IT and I think that might be why good support is difficult to find. That gap between wise yet jaded greybeard wizard and a fresh up and coming IT support guy is just years of late nights, long weekends and alcoholism that dont necessarily translate well into a clean concise knowledge base.

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twoscoopsofpig@reddit

Yeah, the why is the hardest part to explain to folks who don't have the attention span for all the history and context, but damned if I won't keep trying. Anytime I run across a new tech who will give me the slightest inkling of being curious about their jobs, I will pour WAY more effort into them than I otherwise would have. You have to get good before you get fast, and the best way to get good is by failing slowly because that will teach you the most about how to avoid fucking it up again. The second best way is to listen to the guy saying "don't touch that, it'll break things and hurt the entire time".

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jbldotexe@reddit

Please be my friend, I am 2 years into my Engineering career.

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twoscoopsofpig@reddit

Hello friend!

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vogelke@reddit

> hellen kellering my way through 20 years of IT Stealing that.

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SkiingAway@reddit

> I find it extremely difficult to train staff who are just coming up the ranks on things I learned by hellen kellering my way through 20 years of IT and I think that might be why good support is difficult to find. IMO it's that tech now largely doesn't make you learn much as a user and so (most) new hires lack a ton of formative "tinkering" knowledge that anyone over ~30 or so in the field often gained largely just.....by being a nerd messing with computers and frequently having stuff break on them growing up. Overall this is a positive thing in some respects - I don't exactly miss having to frequently dig through event logs to figure out why my game won't run or why it has no sound. But I do think it's resulted in new hires for things like Helpdesk often coming in with less "experience" than their equivalents would have had 15 years ago.

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JosephRW@reddit

100% correct. I'm seeing a distinct lack of being willing to fail to learn. I've got a rookie we hired and she's great but holy shit is she afraid to look dumb on a fundamental topic. She also thinks shes very clever at times with her work politicking which is slowly burning her to me as I suddenly have far fewer answers to her questions all of a sudden.

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felix1429@reddit

Congrats, your transformation into That Guy Who Knows His Shit is complete.

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twoscoopsofpig@reddit

Perhaps the true Guy Who Knows His Shit is actually The Guy Who Knows His Shit Has Limits. Damn does Dunning-Krueger have a nasty interaction with impostor syndrome.

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haggard_hominid@reddit

I'm presently "The Guy Who Knows His Shit Has Limits And Would Rather Be Gardening". Being the resident tender of the dumpster fires gets tiring.

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DespondentEyes@reddit

Oof, felt that in my bones

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twoscoopsofpig@reddit

Same, but for 3D printing (too hot to garden in Houston). Dumpster fires are a pain, especially when you're not allowed to extinguish them because of reasons like "what if I need it later?" and so forth. My response is always "listen boss man, if you sign my chitty to say it's on your head if something goes bang and that you'll pour whatever funds in that are needed, I'll keep that dumpster fire burning however you want it." Funds here will include a little something for the good guys, of course - that's usually what gets them to say I can extinguish things.

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cluberti@reddit

As an ex-grey-bearder who's on his way out of the workforce for good (finally!) soon, the reality was they/we knew what we knew, and knew what we didn't - we just learned what we didn't from those that did. The difference that the generation after you is going to struggle with is that we did it without online forums (bbs nonwithstanding) and had to know how things worked from firmware upwards. The cloud is something I know, but I don't *know* (and likely never will) the way I know how hardware, firmware, and the very low-levels of a few different OSes and applications work (and how to develop and debug for those when they don't work properly). If you already know what you know and can explain it to a new peer, and also know what you don't know (and know where to go to find the answers and learn when it comes across your desk), your path to the grey beard is complete. Also, at that point, you're likely seeing the grey in your beard and hair as well ;).

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UnexpectedAnomaly@reddit

I feel like I'm in the same position. I grew up tinkering with stuff and learning how it works because I was genuinely interested in how things work. And then I got into computers later on and took that same mentality where I like to tinker with it see how it works read books about the underlying technology and build an nice robust foundation so even if I don't know what's going on I have an idea of what it's trying to do and how to make it happen. People nowadays deal with much simpler tech that just works and they don't tinker with it because they never realize that's an option and don't care. I feel like they just took this profession just to make money. They don't have an actual interest or drive in how things work or tech in general. I've worked with coworkers who don't even have computers at home because they don't like them. In my last job we ended up hiring some managers who did not like people tinkering with things. I would run across a problem where oh I can fix this by just doing a little registry edit and they're like now just reload it. Don't try to figure out why it's broken. To me that sort of mentality is boring. Yeah I could just reload windows and fix whatever's wrong with it but then I don't learn or grow or anything. I wonder if this is how grey beards feel.

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twoscoopsofpig@reddit

Can confirm, there are a handful of white whiskers peeking through... I think your broader point about getting in on the ground floor of physical tech is right - I definitely had some Very Senior Individuals' brains to pick that opened my eyes to the true complexity of it all. The magic isn't that it works, the magic is that it works so well with so little apparent effort on the surface, like the proverbial duck. I also think my generation is about to have to do all that work again, but in the cloud - we don't get the benefit of having a friendly neighborhood greybeard for this because we *are* the greybeards in this venue. Someday we all have to grow up and we find ourselves having to be the actual adults, and that day is here for Millennials. Gen X and the Boomers paved the way for us and gave us enough rope to hang ourselves, and now we get to do the same for the generations behind us. That said, I think too many of us jumped to work on the cloud too soon, without leaving enough knowledge in the day-to-day for on-prem, which *absolutely* still needs just as much support as it ever has, if not more. As ever, the next shiny thing is way more exciting than the old thing that got us here. Hail corporate.

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cluberti@reddit

All hail the shiny new thing. ;)

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agitated--crow@reddit

Sounds like you are that guy that knows his shit. I bet the old guys thought the same about themselves as you do about yourself.

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twoscoopsofpig@reddit

I bet they did, but I couldn't tell. They just looked like they were flicking through their mental list of Shit I Know instead of gauging how little they knew about the current question at hand lol

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Coffee_Ops@reddit

Never in my career have I encountered the Greybeard while calling Microsoft. Its just that all of the Ciscos and VMWares and everyone else took notice that MS got away with it.

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Challymo@reddit

We have a software supplier where I work, I have dealt with them for over 15 years at this point over 2 jobs. Back when I first started the developers used to work the support on a rota, this meant when you logged a ticket you didn't always get the fastest response but it was usually a proper resolution or a decent workaround until they could patch it. After the first buyout they swore nothing would change, after the second buyout they introduced a first tier help desk with developer escalation when needed, after the 3rd buyout they got rid of the entire development team and product managers and offshored it. The last time I logged a ticket I was trying to find out some detail on a line in their product update notes that just said "Security upgrades", waited several days for any response to be told "I'll get back to you with an answer", waited several more days to be told they had introduced a longer password requirement and the ability for MFA. When I asked for documentation so I could set this up I then waited a few more days before they sent me the full documentation for the system... It was dated July 2015! I've now resolved to just installing it in a test environment and turning settings off and on again to figure out how it works. The only saving grace is some of the developers and product managers started up their own company and built a competitor to one of the most widely used packages the old company sell, then took half their customers due to it being a much better product.

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DespondentEyes@reddit

I just recently lost my devops/support job of 10 years to someone in India. I was never a star employee but I pity the people who'll need to rely on them for being able to deploy new versions etc. Not blaming the person who took my job btw, this is 100% on my employer.

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WorldlyNotice@reddit

Just had a vendor bulk move a bunch of roles to an external company. They've been awesome for years, but now I'm nervous.

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Seditional@reddit

Enshitification. The solid vendors eventually get sold on to private equity companies who just mine them for profit then sell the shell.

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Legal-Razzmatazz1055@reddit

Zscaler entered the chat

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brontide@reddit

I am one of those vendors support people. 30 years experience doesn't help when it's an orchestrated mess of container, libraries, and drivers that nobody seems to know how they really work and they update them every week with a whole new host of unintended side-effects with zero comprehensive documentation. We're doing what we can but the complexity is off the charts.

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tclark2006@reddit

I've seen vendor support screenshot ChatGPT answers when I ask a question. If I wanted AI slop I can do that myself.

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slashinhobo1@reddit

We have been teaching our vendors stuff. These are the people we pay tp help us.

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moobycow@reddit

It defense of engineers, the number of things I am expected to now know and keep track of vs when I started 20+ years ago is insane.

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ukkie2000@reddit

Not to mention a culture in many places where you're held directly responsible if you break something. Better just not touch it and confirm your theories with experienced folk. They may get pissy, but the alternative is worse. Even if failing is fantastic for learning, that won't be the takeaway when you hear how much you cost the company I hate this mindset. I wasnt always like this, but now I've got this overly cautious reflex unless I was involved in the creation of something new

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SpaceGuy1968@reddit

OJT isn't a good thing in production

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danceonmyown@reddit

I stopped touching things because my name gets attached to systems I do not directly own. Even if you touch a small piece of it, you are now the DRI for that system or application. So much tech debt and no one spends any time to document or fix because management fails to see value until there are incidents. Even then, there are only patches and not fix the root issue. I am at a point where I do not make any improvements to any systems I do not own, even when I see an issue and it can be fixed.

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I-heart-java@reddit

I’d argue that hiring juniors, putting them on experienced teams and training by doing has been dropped by the biggest companies out there leaving a huge gap. Almost no junior positions exist and people wonder why the young don’t have experience. The big companies had the resources to be the training grounds but they dropped it hoping some other company will pick up the slack. I got lucky I was just in as a junior as those roles started to disappear and I got into a niche that has been ok for me.

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widowhanzo@reddit

I learned so much when I was just given a stack of servers, switches, routers and storage and told to figure it out. It was great because everything was new and I couldn't break anything in prod. It was stressful, but I figured it out. Configured network bonds and MTUs in Linux terminal and figured out VLANs and trunking and NFS and what not. It makes it much easier to understand cloud when you know a little bit about low level basics.

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bacmod@reddit

But it feels good, right? Figuring it all out. And this system you're working on just starts ticking all by it self.

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widowhanzo@reddit

"Oh you took a look at this server 6 years ago and now it's broken, please fix"

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BronnOP@reddit

This is exactly it. If I use my initiative to fix something and break it due to an unexpected outcome, I’m trashed for it. So they’ve actively disincentivised using initiative so I just won’t. I’ll go as far as I can then check with someone senior because it’ll be them chewing me out if it breaks.

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cloudboykami@reddit

This, the threshold for if things break or mistakes is much higher. Plus if you work for an msp time is money so you’re not going to spend more than 30 mins troubleshooting when you could escalate. Don’t mean people shouldn’t try but does cause issues later on.

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DespondentEyes@reddit

Before I lost it, my job required me to have 30+ accounts spread over various environments and services. Keeping track of that alone took up an inordinate amount of time and effort.

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Jaxberry@reddit

I was going to definitely comment a similar thing. The amount of Job postings for IT Support specialist, a title that I took as my entry level first real IT job, that want knowledge of things that I didn't get until several years down the line.

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thewormbird@reddit

This is the case in a lot of tech roles. I am lucky in that I got to experience 3 very distinct tech roles in my career and then watch them grow significant in the amount of knowledge work required. An SRE for example (my current role) has to be tangentially (and sometimes deeply) familiar with systems design/performance/scaling, network design/performance/scaling, multiple programming languages, a handful of platform-specific configuration languages, AWS (any of it), GCP, Azure, On-prem and its various flavors and architectures, database performance/architecture, observability platforms. And all the common failure modes across all of that. Oh and the command line? Add about 10 to 15 random CLI tools for day-to-day work. Thankfully you’re never really expected to leverage all of these things at the same time. But damnit if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes.

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Coffee_Ops@reddit

20 years ago finding how-tos and documentation was ridiculously hard.

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brontide@reddit

I've been doing linux for more than 30 years. We are heavily invested in k8s and cuda. 95% of diagnostics and repairs are cargo cult actions because nobody know or has documented how this actually works. It's incredible that this hasn't blown up in a more spectacular manner sooner.

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Klutzy-Residen@reddit

I feel like a part of this is that there is a mix of constantly introducing new technology/solutions and never 100% abandoning the old ones. So you end up having to learn and maintain 30 years of various solutions and quirks that have become incredibly complicated over the years.

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humandib@reddit

This. I used to a sysadmin for a gov agency and was expected to keep up with the emerging technologies because someone caught wind of it and they wanted to have it NOW! Also, entry level positions are being exploited. You get companies that want senior technicians for entry level pay. I'm currently in a position of help desk technician and most of my peers lack the skills that OP is pointing out. I've found myself saying quite a lot "I dunno, I just read the manual" or "I went to the support site".

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dotnetmonke@reddit

I’ve definitely pulled the card of “I know the answer, but you’re not getting it without doing your due diligence.” Our L1 techs used to come to me with an issue they hadn’t even tried to work, and I’d just tell them “F I O” - figure it out. It pissed them off at first, but after a few attempts they stopped trying to escalate things that don’t need escalation.

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Academic-Detail-4348@reddit

In defense of me - SaaS is killing my team. Huge amount of effort spent on management.

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ChataEye@reddit (OP)

20 years ago IT was all with electricity based on many directors and CEOs hahahah

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Leucippus1@reddit

I don't know, we have a few juniors and motivated HD guys who buck this trend, so I am not sure it wasn't exactly the same as when I started out. I will say we unintentionally screw new people by telling them to 'learn cloud' before they know the basics of how things work. That DOES leave big holes in understanding that need to be addressed.

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SpaceGuy1968@reddit

There is a lot of this going on...I see it in New cyber security degree holders .... Let's secure a system that we know very little baseline understanding...

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trick63@reddit

This x100. Clouds are generally interchangable patterns as long as you understand the underlying tech stack. Learn Linux, do some projects using docker and kubernetes, configure a scalable mysql/nosql database, configure an nginx/haproxy setup, have a good enough knowledge of a programming language to be able to do basic API interactions. That will get you further than any big 3 cloud certifications.

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Bittenfleax@reddit

Good point. Learning vmware esxi and hyper-v (and all the skills leading up to these) a few years before the cloud got mass adoption put me in a good position for when the great on-prem cleansing was thrust upon us. Being on bare metal let me fail, fix, see results, at a low/high level over the years. Troubleshooting on a lot of cloud platforms is very different. Transferable skills for sure but you are limited in what you can see under the hood. Which takes the fun out of it imo.

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BlazeVenturaV2@reddit

>Which takes the fun out of it imo. Yes... Imagine being a mechanic where the car manufacture locked the hood and now your job is to configure the radio.

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

I'm stealing that one...that's a good analogy. No user serviceable parts inside, indeed. One thing I wonder is what basement Microsoft and Amazon keep the only people left who know how Azure/AWS truly works locked up in. Or has it even gotten so abstract that we're not dealing with compute/NICs/storage anymore even at the low level?

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ProbablyJustArguing@reddit

The radio isn't configured under the hood though.

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username687@reddit

Yes that's the point. We can't get under the hood anymore so now the radio is all we can adjust for people.

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Living-Method-294@reddit

That is where I began, a SuperMicro chassis with Mobo and we built the rest. In terms of OS/Software Server 2000, Novel, Nortel stuff, and a lot of SONET in the Army (think of like Comcast) so Multiplexers and OC (Fiber) cards in the early 2000s. And from all that the one thing that always helped was Critical Thinking skills which isn't what these techs have these days. Tech these suck at critical thinking. They depend too much on AI stuff like CoPilot and ChatGPT, which honestly has been wrong for me a good bit of times. How did I catch it, by actually reading and learning the OS material or what I am working with PowerShell, VMWare and so on, yeah it sucked but I know my job. Also the cloud stuff is really shitty if you dont spend the money. Then your stuck with the basic monitoring. You want the good reports, spin up BLOBs and start doing analytics and reports but you got pay for that BLOB

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orten_rotte@reddit

I dont get to tcpdump like I used to :(

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

> I will say we unintentionally screw new people by telling them to 'learn cloud' before they know the basics of how things work. This is 100% the case. If you only know how to fling YAML at an endpoint and don't know what's actually going on, or only have a portal with 10,000 buttons to push, you're going to have big gaps in knowledge. I actually think this was the cloud and SaaS vendors' plan all along...train an entire generation of "tech" people in such a way that they can't operate outside of your cloud. Once that happens, companies will start throwing up their hands and saying they can't hire anyone who knows Hyper-V or VMWare and how real physical devices operate. And once that happens, those cloud salesmen circling around the CIO will finally get them to hand over the keys and lock them in.

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AlexHuntKenny@reddit

I genuinely think that what's being taught in schools just isn't practical anymore, and folks are coming in with next to no hands on and not equipped for environments that are hanging on by a thread (so, almost all working ones) I'm doing my best to try and teach and train 🙃

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Living-Method-294@reddit

The first part you are lucky, there are few knowledgeable techs out there. You hiring peeps needs a bonus. These days a lot of T1 positions are being hand fed the answers through wikis (Internal docs IT Glue) and such. Are they bad, not really but they really take away the troubleshooting aspect which builds Critical Thinking skills. T1 is mainly there to get the easy out of the way so T2/3 dont get swarmed with dumb tickets. But why do I need documentation on How to install Adobe Reader. Tickets get escalated for no documentation on that software, like really! They requested Reader not Pro, just download the software and run it. So that where I stand with that, new techs expect to be spoon fed and lack Critical Thinking. Thank your "Become an IT Pro in six months!" schools. The second part about Cloud, I highly agree and it hurts our T2/3 foundation. At my company before I went to the Projects side, I urged so many techs get your MS Hybrid Admin cert. Avoid any cloud until you get that cert. Your Az800 and Az801 hit on so many good things and preps for the cloud stuff. Literally the Az801 study stuff has cloud in there. So my thoughts for MSP techs for T1 techs get the following to start: MS Hybrid Admin (Az800 and Az801) Az Fundamentals AZ Admin Then whatever else

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BlazeVenturaV2@reddit

Actually.. good point... Us old heads had a more ladder based learning curve. Our servers were on prem, the network was physical, and a lot more problems was actual hardware breaking, then cloud. we got exposed to it while it was still being developed.. New guys now have to learn that, plus the various cloud platforms.

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PBI325@reddit

> I don't know, we have a few juniors and motivated HD guys who buck this trend, so I am not sure it wasn't exactly the same as when I started out. Wow, you mean OPs opinion isn't the rule and he's just complaining about the younger generation like all generations before him did?! lol Posts like this always crack me up man.

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jaydizzleforshizzle@reddit

The biggest being networking and connectivity. Like 90 percent of the difficulty in local infrastructure is communication, cloud abstracts that and makes it so simple, no one learns proper subnetting or the osi model.

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chillzatl@reddit

It's always been this way. Most people only want to give the minimum effort needed to not be seen as a slacker while also not giving too much and being seen as a go getter and get more work thrown at them. you're both lucky and doing something right if you manage to get 2 of 10 people with that mindset and work ethic. Those are keepers!

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ThatBarnacle7439@reddit

Yep when I first started there were the people that got things done and the bums who posted on Reddit all day complaining about things. Now that I'm older I'm the latter just like OP.

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Specialist-Desk-9422@reddit

I’ve been noticing this too. I’ve been in IT 20 years. 4+ years ago, I would hire a consultant to help me on a specific project and they knew what they were talking about. I now manage 12 in house IT staff and I can say I have 2 1/2 good ones that knows their shit. The 1/2 person depends on his motivation for the day. More and more I see people wanting to be sys admins or cybersecurity analysts but they don’t even know the basics of the foundation of IT. It’s frustrating . People now have no sense of urgency or how to implement tangible and achievable solutions and they have no idea to combine IT with business mindset.

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Confident-Middle1632@reddit

pay peanuts get monkeys.

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oppositetoup@reddit

So many companies don't help juniors or train them anymore. My company doesn't expect the 1st line to be technical at all. And has them follow guides, no critical thinking is encouraged. Even 2nd line is just full of 1st liners that have failed upwards and mostly follow existing documentation. I've tried pushing for training, but always falls on deaf ears.

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Le_fribourgeois_92@reddit

For me the big problem is that most of the new guys/gilrs come to IT because it pays well. They dont have a passion nor care about tech or computers like we used to do, most dont even have labs or side projects.. There works shows exactly that and their ability to solve problems is absolute shit. Also the cloud and Saas is dumbifying everyone who works exclusively with cloud environnements, they have no idea what kind magic is working behind the scenes, they just click some buttons on a web interfaces and thats it. Im lucky to work excusively with on-premise environnements and our datacenters are owned and maintained by our company. Its way better that those cloud providers to learn and get hands down with lots of hardware and technologies of all types.

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Ok-Difference-1093@reddit

The main thing is to understand that if you can reduce the units of measurement to a kilogram on the left in your equation, then there should be a kilogram on the right) - the rest can always be reduced to the law of conservation of energy. In high school, they teach you to think first of all, and how you find the information you need - from textbooks, experimentally, or using AI - does not matter - the main thing is that the information you find does not contradict the basic scientific laws.

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francosnip@reddit

All professions that coexist with woke things are losing quality and value. These are consequences of this all over the world, this is putting an end to professions and products

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No_Blueberry4622@reddit

Maybe as the good people no longer see a good future becoming a sysadmin, so instead they build a career in other tech roles.

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Thundahead@reddit

I wouldn't class myself as a great techie or anything like that, but I can generally read a doc and understand the fundamentals on what is going on and then try it, far too many younger techies just have a not my problem or straight out dunno so passing it on attitude which is weird.

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OmenVi@reddit

I see this especially in the recent/current crop of graduates. Nearly zero drive to improve on themselves, or expand their skill set. They perceive themselves as "good enough", and move on with getting their dopamine hits.

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Jazzlike-Vacation230@reddit

I've noticed it on the Helpdesk side as well. Imo it's the concept of the SErvice Desk which has turned into nothing but a priority handler, which allows non technical folks to move up in it thinking it's IT IT when it's really just glorified customer service. I kind of want the old helpdesk style back. Everything is so weird now: Writing a KB means you are then the entire departments SME on it Having general technical discussions in chats leads to managers telling you to keep quiet Handling tickets in your own style is not allowed anymore. It's all so draconion. And more often then not the leaders of the new Service Desk style barely have any technical background.

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OmenVi@reddit

That's because they're hired to do one thing: Meet SLA. No more or less. It's very reductive, and is generally fueled by chasing perceived savings, and ends up forcing a "quick resolution" mentality over a "proper resolution" mentality. This is the kind of shit that drives band-aid fixes that blow up down the line, and take production down entirely, which is hardly cost effective.

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Ok_Conclusion5966@reddit

People wonder why tickets are passed, you do it once and now they are all assigned to you.

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Seditional@reddit

I definitely feel this. Service Desk people used to need to know some actual IT so they could do more than just fill in a text box and move tickets. We used to have college grads now we have school leaver apprentices to avoid paying minimum wage.

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Sasataf12@reddit

Considering the IT field is extremely competitive at the moment, if you're only seeing poor quality engineers, well, I don't know what to tell ya.

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who_am_i_to_say_so@reddit

I believe it’s the AI action happening in between the job hunter and employers filtering out the good players. **Ahem** Also, I cannot count how many LinkedIn superstars my old employer hired - and they fooled me, too- that were complete shit coworkers. Completely incompetent.

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sysadminsavage@reddit

There is a major gap on both sides. I thought the same thing until we listed a junior sysadmin position last year. Candidates were lackluster at best despite getting hundreds of applications. Salary was not bad either ($80-90k for a MCOL market).

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

How is this possible? Amazon and Microsoft just jettisoned tens of thousands of employees, and other tech firms dumped even more. Given the insane hoops you have to jump through to get hired at a Big Tech (multi-day interviews, live coding exams, etc.) I'm sure these people are more than qualified to operate at normal businesses. I agree there's a massive disconnect in the hiring market on both sides, and AI made it worse by allowing both spam applying and overly harsh filtering. But it's weird how companies are insisting there's nobody out there...I assure you there are plenty of candidates. Either you're not paying enough, not able to connect with them, or your workplace is a known dumpster fire (I have several local employers that I would avoid even if I were broke.)

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Sasataf12@reddit

If you're only getting lackluster applicants at best, then something about your company or hiring process isn't good enough to attract higher quality applicants. This could be due to factors outside your control as well, like industry or location. Quality candidates look for more than just the money on the table.

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Smelltastic@reddit

You could always try hiring someone not yet knowledgeable but capable at half that, and letting them train up over time. Then they'll also be more valuable because they'll have learned in your environment. A big part of the problem is the ridiculous churn that keeps people bouncing around, and the lack of internal advancement everywhere. You have to care about developing and retaining talent, not just finding it.

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MathmoKiwi@reddit

Got to give people a bigger than 3% annual raise if you wish to retain them long term.

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MathmoKiwi@reddit

There were probably a dozen gems there? Just impossible to find all of them when you have hundreds and hundreds of applicants

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ITaggie@reddit

I blame modern recruitment platforms

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pinkycatcher@reddit

100% The skill is out there, don't let your HR team filter out quality candidates.

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TaiGlobal@reddit

The job market being competitive doesn’t increase the supply of quality talent. In fact it makes it worse in the hiring ppl to have to sift through all the trash to find someone good. I’ve don’t interviews and have spoke to other colleagues who have done interviews there’s a void in talent and I think it’s only going to get worse as the seniors retire. All the juniors and mid that should be replacing those talents are chasing “cloud” or devops and cyber positions.

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Sasataf12@reddit

>The job market being competitive doesn’t increase the supply of quality talent. You could see it that way, but I would call that a naive outlook that gives a poor "excuse" for the inability to attract talent.

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centizen24@reddit

100% going to be an issue in their hiring and selection process. There are so many good quality engineers looking for jobs right now, if you are missing them it's because HR is being lazy and using some highly automated screening software that is filtering out all of the good candidates and just getting the ones who lie on their resumes to check all to boxes.

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occasional_cynic@reddit

Just because the job market is not great, does not mean there is a ton of good people out there who will jump at any job. Hiring can still be challenging for certain roles.

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Z3t4@reddit

I bet the pay is of the same quality.

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ThatBarnacle7439@reddit

they're getting the talent they pay for is the easy answer I bet

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trail-g62Bim@reddit

I think part of the reason is so few companies want to pay to retain people. Even if you are super knowledgeable, it can take a while to get up to speed. We bring in a new guy and by the time he has the lay of the land, we get a year or two out of him and then he moves on. It would be better to pay to keep him.

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Vardy@reddit

It's not just about Googling the answer, it's about knowing which answer is the correct one for your scenario. I've seen some results from AI tools that are outright wrong, but people blindly believe them. I think the real skill in our jobs is to know how to fault-find. The ability to take a step back from a situation, look at the whole and work out what is wrong without even knowing the system we're looking at.

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ChataEye@reddit (OP)

I mean yeah , not just googling and answer and apply something , i mean google what the issue is , then finding also a relevant answer

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OmenVi@reddit

And this only gets you so far. I've had coworkers who don't understand the system they're working on implement fixes they found online, and as soon as the proposed solution went off script, and broke something, they had no idea what broke or how to fix it.

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who_am_i_to_say_so@reddit

It’s shocking how inaccurate yet convincing AI tools are. Seems 2/3 of my responses are “nu uh, that is not true at all” to which I get “you are absolutely right!”.

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MRTWISTYT@reddit

Agree with this 100%

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z_agent@reddit

Its about know what question to ask google. As someone in another reply said, DBAs cant do shit for a no ping report......dont send it to the database team.

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AstralVenture@reddit

I work at Help Desk, and from my experience, it’s usually the other teams that have no idea or don’t respond on the tickets that we can’t assist on.

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DickNose-TurdWaffle@reddit

Hire better people, it's not that hard.

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notHooptieJ@reddit

"just google it" is dead. the AI slop means the 'google fu' we all had 5 years ago is fuackall worthless. there is no more "search the internet" now thats a recipe for 3 hours down the tubes trying to figure out if the AI gave you correct info and you're an idiot, or if it gave you instructions that were 6 years out of date, or just made shit up that kinda fit your question. Even experienced techs are floundering under the artificial load AI has created in our work flows. AI has killed internet research, and rather than saving time, it dramatically increases it in a troubleshooting role.

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AgreeableIron811@reddit

I di not agree. Googling has proven to be worthless at many times. Ai is very good with combination of google searches and exeperience. Ai is much better at getting syntax right snd commands u partially forgotten. It helps you to doublecheck and troubleshoot error messages. But you need some experience for it to give value. Btw all seniors use AI today. The trick id knowing when and when not to use it.

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jLighthalzen@reddit

Honestly its the landscape of the industry. There's a huge drive for "efficiency" which has detrimental effects to buildning new technical staff. Unfortunately with my current helpdesk, If there's no KB article with a solution they escalate to Tier 2 & 3 which pulls our SysAdmin's and SysEngineers away from projects. Employers no longer want the juniors to spend time troubleshooting/figuring it out. It's let the SME's handle it. Which for the industry is shooting themselves in the foot. Learn on your own time, but not with company hardware/software/property but also devote all your time working for said company. The younger generation is getting screwed over because they are being deprived of the opportunity to build/develop their foundational skills/instincts/habits because its not a immediate profitable use of time. For employer's its a boon because its cheaper to hire staff with less skills, but have your senior/skilled staff "document" everything so that junior staff can be mindless drones. The huge push for documentation KB articles is to prevent tribal knowledge, and knowledge loss. But it is also reduced developing critical thinking and troubleshooting skills and understandings of why things are done certain ways. The moment 1 step / 1 configuration / 1 menu changes, juniors are at a loss and documentation is now out of date.

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MikeTheGrass@reddit

Glad to see this has become a helpdesk hate circle jerk somehow. Have yall seen how help desk pay is dogshit nowadays? Like Walmart or other easy low knowledge jobs pay similar to entry helpdesk at a ton of places. Asking for all that technical knowledge and troubleshooting skills for Jiffylube pay is insane since that amount of money is barely livable. Bullshit when it's asking for a degree and certs too. As someone who recently got out of helldesk I'm more sympathetic. Pay your helpdesk and come up with automations and processes to make their lives easier instead of bitching on Reddit.

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New-Seesaw1719@reddit

There's TONS of guys aged 50-60 that don't know what a subnet or TCP/IP port is. They can terminate ethernet though so I guess they can own a home and retire.

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frustratedsignup@reddit

I know. I'm going through a disagreement with a co-worker because I want him to stop passing the buck to me whenever an AD search needs to happen. He needs an inventory of active email addresses and I've already told him to query and parse the proxyAddresses attribute on each mail enabled object. Instead he insists that I have to search months of logs to figure this out. It would only take five minutes with AI to do this. I already did it once, not using AI, and it took about 3 minutes.

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kerosene31@reddit

I wonder how different the environment is now vs back when greybeards like me came in? It is so structured now and internal security is big. Everything is specialized. I started out last century, barely old enough to be considered an adult. I was sysadmin/programmer/dba/help desk. I had WAY WAY too much access for a kid who could barely shave without cutting my face. I feel like I learned because I had the opportunity to. I'd build dev servers out of spare parts and break things. And break things I did. Today, you spin up a dev server, and you need to fill out a change request and answer a bunch of security questions. I was given a ton of access and told "don't break anything in prod". Today we hire a "kid" and give them almost no access. They've got no sandbox to play in.

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East_Attempt4453@reddit

It comes from good foundational knowledge

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TechSupportJT@reddit

To be fair, our company will have this problem simply by virtue of offering what is basically an internal DaaS. Our teams require x number of devices at all times. We keep spares. If someone brings us a problem that can't immediately be fixed, they just get handed one of the spares and we autopilot reset the original, and it becomes a spare. We don't troubleshoot because it's time costly.

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redthrull@reddit

You'll be surprised that for some people "cybersecurity" now means just working with a CSV

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danrhodes1987@reddit

Hiring is a nightmare too just can't seem to find a decent 2nd line 😩

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Sad_Sell6756@reddit

Yes. Knowing what to search and understanding what google gives in that search. Finding what's important to you. It's like searching for that paper in a pile of discarded paper.

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Agentwise@reddit

15 years ago a good engineer knew one field well, and dabbled in others. Now-a-days you need to be an expert in multiple domains that are often well outside of your operation.

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Sudden_Office8710@reddit

It’s because people have been born using a GUI. It used to be you had to boot into MS DOS prior to running the GUI then Windows 95 changed all that. Then everyone is on a smartphone or tablet so everyone is so far removed from seeing how things actually operate.

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daerogami@reddit

The terminal is still an abstraction from the code. To your point, yes, every abstraction layer obscures more of the system as it simplifies the interface by hiding some information and highlighting other information. But to pick a point in time is arbitrary. My arbitrary point would be mobile devices that all but completely hide the filesystem and offer little to no real system tools.

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hadrabap@reddit

Yes. The most scary thing ever is a terminal. Sometimes, I need to do stuff in my BMC or UPS over SSH. No bash, no autocompletion. Just an imagination of a contemporary junior sitting in front of it makes me nervous. 🙂

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imnotonreddit2025@reddit

Try this one simple trick that senior IT staff don't want you to know. Read the logs. Not every problem can be solved this way. But its a great start for most issues to look and listen before you restart or change something.

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daerogami@reddit

And if it's open source, crack open the codebase.

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lungbong@reddit

Splunk is my favourite tool for this very reason, not only can you easily search the logs but visualise them. Got a user getting a certain error, find it in Splunk and then see when it started or when the volume changed.

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Arudinne@reddit

User: > Something happened The logs: > Something Happened Not always the case, but sometimes is.

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imnotonreddit2025@reddit

Oh definitely. When the logs fail you must collect data (this can be in the form of a test and recorded result). Example, can't get online. You try to ping your router with "ping 192.168.1.1" and you get result "general failure". That is literally the equivalent of "something happened" but it still tells you something. And like jazz, it's about the errors you don't get sometimes. It didn't say "timeout" it said "general failure" which could mean lack of physical link or lack of IP addressing. Encouraging you to look further. This is opposed to "I rebooted it and it still doesn't work I'm out of ideas".

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ChataEye@reddit (OP)

yes of course , lets imagine that not all logs give a straight answer

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Affectionate_Row609@reddit

That's where critical thought comes in.

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KrakusKrak@reddit

It’s not a catch all but it’s something to look at for sure

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ZOMBOY@reddit

90% of the time they don’t. I fucking hate Event Viewer for many reasons (vague-ass errors being one of them) but at least I know that it will usually turn me in the right direction for an issue

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yaminub@reddit

Event viewer tells all*

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AlexHuntKenny@reddit

I learned by trying not to escalate any tickets unless entirely necessary, and even then I asked to be walked through to solution to document and learn it for myself Now, that I'm in a much higher role, seems nobody is even trying basic triage anymore.

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EngineersOfAscension@reddit

I changed industries because no one wanted to pay enough or provide insurance. I'd come back for the right offer. 😜

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smooyth@reddit

Who wrote this lol

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Nydus87@reddit

I think we lost a lot when things got moved more and more to the cloud. I used to run a home lab on old desktops and VMs to practice my AD scripting stuff, but I’m not springing for a cloud lab and azure license.

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AbyssRR@reddit

Curious, what field specifically is this in? I think that honestly we’re at a level of such well-thought out building blocks, that web engineering, for instance, these days is a hell of a lot easier than the days we all had a sacrificial corner for internet explorer 6.

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HowDoYouDoFool@reddit

I'll take a job if you are offering

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sublimeprince32@reddit

Ditto. Can't get past these fucking HR people. Had one tell me last week that I don't qualify for a job because being a consultant for O365 migrations isnt the same as someone who knows where a specific button is within the user interface of Azure.

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D0nM3ga@reddit

That's honestly the biggest reason I would never consider any sort of Microsoft certification. You're telling me to spend months memorizing the names and locations of systems within your ecosphere, so that you can screw around with the names and locations every 6 months for the next 5 years before you shut it down and move it somewhere else? No thanks.

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Seditional@reddit

It shows a willingness to invest in yourself and your career. People,do care about certs but not always for the reason you think.

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D0nM3ga@reddit

I hold several vendor neutral and vendor specific certs. Sometimes you have to learn the jargon to make moves, but Microsoft certs can kiss my ass honestly.

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Smith6612@reddit

As well as replace all the things with Copilot prompts.

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sublimeprince32@reddit

EXACTLY. uuuuuuuuggggghhhhhh.

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Bluetooth_Sandwich@reddit

That's what copilot is for lol

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sublimeprince32@reddit

How are you leveraging copilot?

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Lost-Ear9642@reddit

Thinking longer for a better answer…

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sublimeprince32@reddit

Everybody uses copilot for different things, smartass.

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DylJR@reddit

He was quoting Copilot 😂

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djr201@reddit

He was quoting Copilot 😂

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reciprocity__@reddit

Fuck that, give me an interface for standard tree structured navigation instead. I want hierarchical menus back. They're both a) predictable and b) discoverable. Deterministic navigation will always be superior to the Copilot workflow.

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Lost-Ear9642@reddit

Is your answer reimage the device to any issue faced? Hired.

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Zuxicovp@reddit

Either that or fire the user. That always makes the problem go away

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ElectroHiker@reddit

Lmao seriously. I worked my way up from desktop admin to Linux System Engineer/Devops and I distinctly remember having the conversation with my manager as the Service Desk Lead about the wasted time spent troubleshooting when we could just re-image it. God forbid we figure out an issue and deploy/document a fix to not only learn from it but prevent wasted man hours down the road on the client and admin side. Not long after I was offered a choice between Service Desk Manager and Linux Systems Admin and I definitely chose the technical role. No regerts

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Rouxls__Kaard@reddit

I thrive in the tech role. I dislike being a manager.

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gritsngravyPCP@reddit

Are you the sys configuration manager at my company lol

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Lost-Ear9642@reddit

Yes. Reimage 🤣 Nah I do wear that hat, but never force a reimage unless I know it’s truly needed. As someone who did HD for years, it’s annoying

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jimmyjohn2018@reddit

We went from a generation of people that were mostly self trained and tinkering with this stuff since childhood to people that simply went to college and listened to the counselor that told them IT is where the money is at. I have a handful of engineers under me, and a few are the old guard. A few are the young ones. There is a vast difference in both knowledge (expected with experience) but also critical thinking and thinking outside of the box.

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Bleubear3@reddit

You sound like a hiring manager/lead LOL My friend was telling me the same thing "these guys are idiots; don't be a cert hunter, cause it often shows how little you know. I often ask these guys a certain question on how to troubleshoot something and they freeze. If it isn't on the GUI they also don't bother learning it." In any case, if you're hiring.... 👀

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IDKMyBFFGPT@reddit

Low-key feel this. Half the “clickops zombie” problem disappears when teams actually have clear requirements and traceability. We switched to Jama Connect with Jira and suddenly people understood why they were doing stuff instead of just vibing through tickets.

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blink0927@reddit

I’ve been seeing this too, and a lot of it in my teams came down to how the work is structured. When everything lives in scattered docs or tribal knowledge, newer engineers end up just following whatever button sequence the last person did. What helped us was shifting toward a more digital engineering setup and using actual requirements management instead of random notes. We paired Jama Connect with Jira, and having that traceability from “why we’re doing this” → “how it’s implemented” → “what needs to be tested” pushed people to understand the full picture instead of just clicking through tasks. Tools don’t magically make someone a better engineer, but having the reasoning and context visible definitely raised the floor for the whole team.

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Atto_@reddit

Yeah...loads of people on my team +and adjacent teams) who just don't give a shit any more, contractors and perm both. 90% of the work done by 10% of the team, management seems ok to let people just coast or let the good people leave without even attempting to match salary/terms. (I'm not saying if I'm in the 10% or 90% lol)

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RingingInTheRain@reddit

So many good people have left my job while all the unskilled people stay. I'm so shocked at how nothing is done to prevent it. The people who stay are getting paid more than the people who leave too.

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BatemansChainsaw@reddit

Executives don't really care about the teams or their morale in terms of that 90/10. They see a team and as long as the churn of employees in/out doesn't go above a certain threshold that ends up costing them over what they're getting out of them, it's manageable. So if that team becomes even ninety-*five* percent click-ops and five percent actual hard workers, they're still evening out.

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zakabog@reddit

Sounds like your company is bad at hiring, or not paying enough for better employees.

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mthunter222@reddit

Almost every company these days is completely incompetent at hiring, let alone paying enough for good engineers.

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zakabog@reddit

Maybe you work at one such company yourself and have that bias, but companies that hire competent employees and pay them well do exist. The problem OP is facing is likely one of the two (or both), not the quality of available employees trending downwards.

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mthunter222@reddit

> The problem OP is facing is likely one of the two (or both), I'm almost sure of it. > not the quality of available employees trending downwards. I agree. > but companies that hire competent employees and pay them well do exist. You have a better chance at winning the lottery than being selected for an interview on the basis of your competency at pretty much every company I know/know of, and that's without even considering a decent salary.

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zakabog@reddit

> You have a better chance at winning the lottery than being selected for an interview on the basis of your competency at pretty much every company I know This has not been my experience whatsoever. I live in a major city and work fully on site positions, so maybe that plays a major part, but I've had no issues whatsoever landing interviews at jobs I'm qualified for that also paid well. From the hiring side, our biggest hurdle at multiple companies was finding qualified people, you get so many cert chasers that know nothing about the tech they're certified for and never make it through the technical interview, or you get people that were so pigeonholed into a role they don't know anything about the underlying tech they've been using professionally for the last 20 years. It wastes a lot of time dealing with these "great on paper" candidates, but if a resume looks like a good fit that candidate will always make it to at least the first technical interview.

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Zolty@reddit

Have you considered the good ones are not visible since they aren't coming to you for help? You also may be working at a place that simply isn't attracting adaptable (expensive) engineers.

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sonicc_boom@reddit

This is nothing new OP. Every experienced engineer complains about new guys

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No_Supermarket9617@reddit

Yeah, we started giving candidates a busted VM to fix during teh interview. It's the only way we've found to seperate the people who can actually diagnose a problem from those who just follow a script.

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PeeNutt_ButtHair@reddit

Well yeah, jobs are so silo'd and no one trains anymore. What did you expect?

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stromm@reddit

That’s true of ALL IT roles.

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MasterOfGrey@reddit

It doesn’t help that search engines have gotten worse. Back when I did engineering if you went searching for something you would actually find it, or you could see how to refine your search from the results you got the first time. These days I am refining my searches 5-6 times and going far deeper into the rabbit hole to find information, and I can do it because I’ve done it a lot - but I’d really hate to have had to learn this in recent years, because I don’t know that you could learn search refinement naturally when n the first 2-3 refinements are likely to be ineffectual. There’s little to no positive feedback loop on attempting to find the answers to problems these days until you’ve gone a few layers deep, and that raises a barrier to skill acquisition that’s quite meaningful.

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badaccount99@reddit

I've been saying this for awhile. Hiring people with just a few years experience has been kind of horrible for us. There is a HUGE gap between them and the peeps that learned stuff 30+ years ago. Tandy, IBM,some of us did Unix back then too. figuring out the internet before it was just putting in a WIFI password and nothing else. I, a director, have stopped hiring young people. I hate it, but that greybeard is gonna do 50x more work than someone out of college and doesn't cost us 50x more. It's going to stop being possible before too long, but I'll have retired by then, and our tech positions will be in a horrible place because we didn't hire young people and train them. But the kids job jump. I've had more than one of them peace out in their first week or two because some other company offered them better pay but way worse health insurance and they get laid off and move back in with their parents. Sysadmins/DevOps people take like 2+ years to be trained just on the basic stuff outside of everything they learned in college, and kids leaving after putting in so much time and money just isn't worth it so we don't hire them.

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overworkedpnw@reddit

Used to support MS Azure and from what I’ve seen over the last ten years, the whole thing is by design. The business degree crowd has been absolutely salivating over the idea of dumbing down technical fields as an excuse to devalue them. I worked as a v- making half the wage of an FTE (with worse benefits too), when Satya and Amy started ripping the copper out of the walls. It was wild, they started eliminating huge swaths of the employee base, without so much as fixing any of the documentation to indicate what we were supposed to do. Entire processes ground to a halt because entire teams no longer existed and there was nobody to replace them. Then, suddenly we get told we have to use this “AI” tool. *Did the tool work?* **No.** *Was the tool being developed by MS employees?* **No, of course they were all contractors with a tenuous skill set.** *Did the tool even occasionally provide a benefit?* **Absolutely not.** *Did they just ram the tool into place, lay a whole bunch of people off in the US and move everything else to India and Costa Rica?* **You betcha!**

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rire0001@reddit

Obviously, your results may vary, but I openly mocked some of the Burroughs and UNISYS engineers sent to us from '81-86. They'd waltz into the computer room, like they were God's gift to us GI's, and we'd already patched and rebooted. I learned early on the actions speak louder than pedigrees.

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Hier0phant@reddit

This is why you dont skip helpdesk. Tsk tsk

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arisaurusrex@reddit

What do you guys do fight against this trend? Do you educate your fellow junior engineers? Everything starts at your own "house", if your company is not training the next generations, you should not be angry of quality issues. Companies like this are part of this problem.

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Nik_Tesla@reddit

I agree at the help desk level for sure, but at the higher levels where we're *capable* of it, I feel like so much is out of our hands to actually fix these days. How am I supposed to do anything about Cloudflare being down, or Microsoft removing an option that we rely on, or a major vendor is hacked. We have given up all control of our environments to others, so much of our jobs has become escalating tickets to others.

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VA_Network_Nerd@reddit

Look at the pipeline that is building the foundation for these candidates: All-online education has made cheating rampant to the point that it's practically normalized. Entry-level employers no longer reward effort that goers above and beyond expectations. So early-career technology workers see no clear benefit to investing in personal development. As has always been the case: there will continue to be exceptions. Early-Career technology workers who are chomping at the bit to learn more and are studying their asses off at home and building the homelabs and tinkering with all the things are still out there. But are your recruiters looking in the right places to find them? Are your recruiters prioritizing the kinds of questions & responses to help discover these applicants? Or are they obsessing over the name of the university and the number of years of alleged experience? High-Quality applicants are becoming an uncommon, in-demand commodity. They are going to receive good job offers. Are your recruiters prepared to pay these applicants what they are worth? Or are your recruiters going to stick to the budget and recommend you hire another button-masher? If your recruiters refuse to budge on salary-cap, can you push new-hires through more training ?

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Frothyleet@reddit

Just FYI it's "champing" at the bit

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Dal90@reddit

Chomp is quite correct. We are neither following the AP Style guide here, and having seen his posts over the years I have no reason to believe the OP is not American. >chomp(v.) > >1640s, dialectal and American English variant of champ (v.). Related: Chomped; chomping. But feel free to also correct people when they write color about how they missed the u.

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Frothyleet@reddit

Chomp is not merely an americism of champ, it's specific to horses and the idiom. While I'm not a prescriptivist - or maybe I am, but I know I'm wrong - I believe idiomatic phrases deserve special protection.

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VA_Network_Nerd@reddit

> Just FYI it's "champing" at the bit I hear what you are saying. But, I think if you listen to this historical record of this phrase's origin, you will better see my perspective on this matter: https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

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BatemansChainsaw@reddit

I'm almost ashamed for knowing what this was before clicking and still following through with it anyways.

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MathmoKiwi@reddit

I'm ashamed for *not* realizing what that was before clicking it

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Rustyshackilford@reddit

It was... you'll be hard pressed to find anyone that actually saws champing. Even as writing this, autocorrect doesnt even k ow the word champing. Typical response for IT pros.

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ThinInvestigator4953@reddit

Is the problem the click ops or the lack of googling?

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Smoking-Posing@reddit

Yeah we need a term for this There's already "the GenZ stare", and there's also my most hated, "the GenZ mumble"... So I say we call it "the GenZ click-a-thon"

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bingle-cowabungle@reddit

What happens is these companies got really liberal with the term "engineer" and started giving them to tier 2/3 help desk techs, and so now you don't really know much about the person you're interviewing because everyone is using AI to brush up their resumes with nonsense, and recruiters are all unskilled and outsourced, and have no idea what they're putting in front of hiring managers. I don't think the quality of engineers is going down. In fact, high quality engineers are saturating the market because barely anyone wants to pay them enough to do anything more than click ops these days, but the real problem is that executives, recruiters, HR, etc don't know what a "sysadmin" is and think they can load as many hats onto them as possible.

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Stranjer@reddit

Part of it is lack of basics, but part of it is also AI slop and SEO manifesting in search results being ever worse. Googling shit is a learned skill and when they deliberately worsened the algorithms and system to feed you more ads they kinda killed people's ability to naturally learn that skill. AI is largely positioning itself as a replacement for thinking, instead of a place to learn.

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EmoJarsh@reddit

I love it, keeps me stress-free in my role. Bring on the generation that can only ask ChatGPT, I don't mind doing the work and I can demand an ever-expanding salary. I work with a product that doesn't exist online, there's zero resources. You can't ask AI about it, period. You can learn it yourself and/or you can ask other employees. I get asked to sit in on interviews sometimes and I always bring that up, it sends people out the door. It can be frustrating when I'm dealing with another Org but I've gotten extremely good at A. Proving the issue is not with us and B. Getting customer buy-in to that effect. Not my problem if another company can't do the work but I will shine a bright light on your inadequacy.

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armankordi@reddit

As the sole admin for a small company, I understand.

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thatirishguyyyyy@reddit

And yet these people still get hired over most of the IT guys I know looking for work. They don't want people who are qualified, they want people who are under qualified so they can underpay them.

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SayNoToStim@reddit

One thing I have noticed is that today's shift towards job-hopping-to-get-a-raise, it's less likely that you'll encounter someone who's been working on that system for a significant amount of time. My last job I was required to work with Microsoft Dynamics GP, by the time I actually knew my way around, I quit and moved on, learning some new systems.

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LBik@reddit

I can be adocate diaboli. But tried to Google stuff recent days? It's garbage. I was complaining about my interns but right now how to achieve knowledge? YT videos? C'mon.

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InternationalTop7648@reddit

I've definitely seen this too. Last year I was asked to train someone up on our storage and backup systems since I was the only person on the team that could manage them and the systems, especially the backups, were prone to issues. They gave me this girl to train up, new to the company but she had a few years experience with another company. Over the year I was working with her, I'm not sure she learned anything. She'd always asked the same basic questions again and again, and any time I asked her what she thought the path forward was, she couldn't think about anything beyond the last sentence she'd heard. After a year her contract was up and the company chose not to renew. I was back to having no one that can cover for me, but honestly that was better than having to walk her through even the most basic issues we'd seen time and time again.

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Over-Ease3578@reddit

Hey it’s good job security

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HexTalon@reddit

Not the way it used to be, especially at larger companies.

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Challymo@reddit

I had a conversation with one of the junior developers last week where he was trying to implement something, what he had done worked but when I asked him to explain he couldn't as ai had pointed him in the direction. Gave me a really good opportunity to go through how to get the tools to give context on what it is telling you and then use references to check it isn't hallucinating. AI can be a really good tool to learn and find solutions, the bit alot seem to fall foul of is just taking the result and not trying to check or understand it at all.

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KoneCEXChange@reddit

Project-management refugees and career-swappers. They’re taking the two-year warning and retraining, but they’re doing it in the laziest way possible. They treat “retraining” as swapping job titles, not rebuilding foundations. They flood into engineering without ever touching the underlying mechanics, then wonder why everything past a guided tutorial leaves them stranded. The real drop comes from people who think clicking around cloud consoles is a substitute for engineering. Four or five years in and they still can’t reason about a system, can’t form a hypothesis, can’t debug without a step-by-step script. Tools aren’t making them sharper. Tools are masking the fact they never built the fundamentals in the first place. #

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skiddily_biddily@reddit

Part of it is a natural result of “My nephew can do computers”. Hiring the wrong people to pay them less just makes things worse. A warm body isn’t helping at all in many cases.

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Timbo_R4zE@reddit

If ChatGPT doesn't know it, they don't know it.

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notHooptieJ@reddit

...and every other resource is blocked and hidden behind web searches that dont fucking search anymore and just feed you back ChatGPT replies. I hate what google has done to the internet; since they introduced AI to the crawling, their search is fuckall worthless. Bing is almost better, and thats fuckall sad.

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shitlord_god@reddit

it is almost as though they figured out how to make it cheaper and did, without regard for robustness of systems.

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SirLoremIpsum@reddit

> More and more people even with 4-5 YOE as just blind clickops zombies. They dont know anything about anything and when it comes to troobuleshoot any bigger issues its just goes beyond their head. I don't wanna made sweeping generalisations, but greybeards have been saying this about newbies for decades. And I am 100% confident people said that about you when they started. Every generation says about about the next one "they don't want to learn, they don't have the skills". "Kids don't want to learn mainframe, just token ring network" "kids don't want to learn networking they just ask google. Where's textbook and learning?' "kids don't want to learn anything, they just chatgpt and click buttons".

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llahlahkje@reddit

It was the same sort of thing when I was new in IT. The big fear at the time was outsourcing, and the "remedy" was getting all the certifications, which led to A+ being created (and eventually all the various + certs) and all of these Microsoft Certification "boot camps" opening up. You could generally tell the folks who earned their way through in the school of hard knocks because they had their shit together. The boot campers were worse than a coin flip; For every one you had on a team, you had two other rubber stamped "Certified Professionals" who couldn't find their ass with both hands, a flashlight, and a map. AI has no doubt made that far, far worse because at least the boot camps taught the fundamentals (albeit extremely quickly).

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Far_King_Howl@reddit

I'm currently dealing with a service desk where anything that isn't a password reset requires reinstalling teams and then forwarding the call to us when that inevitably doesn't solve the problem

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nstern2@reddit

I find that if the team is local, I can actually have a conversation with them and let them know expectations, whereas with our offshore level 1 teams that will never happen since the turnover rate is so high and you have so many different people doing what is essentially a receptionists job at this point that I don't even think management expects them to do anything but the simplest of repetitive tasks.

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z_agent@reddit

And it is terrfying how much thee seat warmers are getting paid. Especially if you are in a company that has shit pay raises but hires at market rates.

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shimoheihei2@reddit

We learned to use Google and search StackOverflow. The kids these days are learning to ask ChatGPT.

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Smelltastic@reddit

One of my pet peeves in any job is when I'm put in a position to assume all the risk for something going wrong without any of the benefits of having that responsibility. It's rampant across all fields but especially in IT for management to make demands for people to operate beyond their station, but take none of the responsibility when something goes south. If you've never messed something up by following "easily googled" instructions without understanding the circumstances of the specific environment or any special exceptions in place, I don't believe your years of experience have done you any good. You're not supplying any context here so I can only make assumptions on the situation, but it sounds like you're taking lower-level staff to take the responsibility (and blame) for fixing things beyond their station. If you're also extremely forgiving when they inevitably end up taking shit down, then maybe this is appropriate. But I'm guessing that's not the case, and people are passing on work they might be able to handle because they don't want to be held accountable if it goes south. It is unfair to set people up to take the fall for breaking shit because they were operating beyond their station, but also demand that they do so without appropriate inclusion in their explicit list of duties.

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FNblankpage@reddit

Its not just low level help desk anymore. I work as smart hands in DCO and transport. Poor management 3000000 mergers, cost cutting leading to layoffs and offshore ingredients have left the rest of who's left in a state of fuck it. Everyone waiting for if and when the market improves to move on.

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LachlantehGreat@reddit

here me out man: *AI* that's it. brought to you by the life and death of the em dash. The future seems incredibly bleak, people blindly trusting LLMs when in reality they don't have the ability to troubleshoot enough to enter the correct prompt to get a reasonable solution.

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meles2@reddit

Some people here are pointing towards helpdesk positions, but I'm really grateful for my orgs helpdesk. They do a good job, and if I were to answer to half of their support emails, I'd probably have to have a chat with HR.

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ZY6K9fw4tJ5fNvKx@reddit

You can complain or teach. Which do you prefer?

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lordorgasmic@reddit

We can do both! :-p

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coffee_poops_@reddit

The whole methodology around Agile of "ship anything that unit tests", "don't document shit" and "only revenue features matter" doesn't get enough hate. They don't make products for engineering mindsets that aren't IDEs any more. And most products are intentionally designed to shield inner workings or be naturally discoverable beyond specific features. Or God forbid engineer product life cycles that include switching to competitive products or sunset gracefully without an abrupt eol. Mastering new technology without having existing mastery is much more difficult now and not easy when they keep ignoring existing conventions and leave gaping holes in expected feature sets.

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This_Bitch_Overhere@reddit

I work with a "sysadmin," "developer," that couldnt even know what to do if you used him as a door stop. He has been with us for 13 years and besides adding printers, and forwarding emails to others, he is useless. We lost good people yet his sorry ass is still collecting a paycheck. Fuck that guy!

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magaisallpedos@reddit

the field is flooded with low skill/no troubleshooting ability tech school "adults"

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WhereDidThatGo@reddit

"Engineers"

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taintedcake@reddit

There's someone twice my age on our deskside support team who took a week to do a keyboard dropoff ticket. It only got done because someone else took it and did it in the 5 minutes it shouldve taken. This same person also regularly "can't find where an installer is" (or the push for packaged apps), despite our installers all living in a single location with a very common sense naming convention. Even if it werent common sense, a simple search for the app name wouldve returned what he needed. Every time I get a ticket he worked I already know it's going to be some dumb shit that didnt need escalated and could've been resolved within an hour.

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coolbeaNs92@reddit

With all due respect, I am working with someone with 20+ years Infra experience who can't sort build number properly so.. If you're okay, you're rewarded with endless work and constant chat messages of people wanting things from you.

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billyjonhh@reddit

They are all Indians now

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ItsMeMulbear@reddit

Cloud and SaaS is rapidly deskilling the workforce IMHO. Only the lucky few in Big Tech get to put these skills into practice anymore. The rest of us either become clickops zombies, or incredibly bitter about the state of the industry.

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grawmpy@reddit

Troubleshooting seems to be a lost art.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

I have been employed in IT almost continuously since 1997. I will never pretend to know everything (yet.) I have always been interested in technology. I have moved through the whole stack of tech that's been building for the last 25 years, applying curiosity and cumulative knowledge to every job and position I've had all that time. To me its not just a career, its a way of life. In the early 2000's friends I had known for years suddenly wanted to get into IT. It was turning into a big thing. No fault of theirs, but they looked at IT fields as a path/career (money), not something they even knew it they would enjoy yet. They did it because they had to pick a major and they knew they liked playing Metal Gear so 'computers cool' To your point, I think the quality of engineers will vary but what we see now are far more people that get into support and Information Tech because its a reliable, needed field and its something we're all bathed in every day so obviously some will try it out because its familiar. How many of them actually have a passion for the work and an active drive to really plow ahead instead of simply doing the bare minimum to get a paycheck?

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XanII@reddit

I checked on some YT video recently about AI changing work and there the argument was the 'AI breaks the novice and expert learning chain' as companies downsize everything from mid-manager to lower levels so entry jobs are gone but so are paths forward from low level to seniority. AI makes it so that the ongoing learning the novice does from the expert until someone comes asking the ex-novice for advice is breaking fast. I do kinda see this. Nobody follows in footsteps and if someone does it is someone who has been assigned to 'read the docs' and these people dont usually stick around. Trying to assimilate as novice what some high flying dude has come up with may induce a bit too fast the 'i hate this and my life' -thing. Oh well, good luck to whoever troubleshoots my AI Automation code and scripts some day when it's legacy.

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FixItBadly@reddit

Question is, do they actually have 4-5 years of accumulated experience, or have they had 4-5 years of the same repeated year of experience? In the latter case, they really have just the 1 because they've never progressed beyond that basic level. When hiring we see the latter far more than the former. Somehow having a butt in a seat for X years magically improves troubleshooting skills, because, who really wants to actually do the work nowadays.

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Grrl_geek@reddit

Yes, 4 years of French I <> 4 years of French. 🤣🤣

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motorik@reddit

There's an entire department devoted to a configuration management tool we kinda-sorta use as a release management tool at the Fortune 500 I work at that fundamentally do not understand how a declarative configuration management tool works. It crashes when it runs on 1/3 of our systems. It's part of the culture that everybody looks the other way. The WITCH model is "pay us X and we'll set up a system that de-skilled click-ops people can maintain moving forward" and it can't solve for the fact that the vendor model is to force updates the people in those roles can't work-around. There is a big OS update we're going to be forced to deal with by the security people that the DevOps people don't have the ability to accommodate that I cannot make enough popcorn in anticipation of. I'm an old grey-beard, and I may be motivated to delay the early retirement I'm in a position to take just to watch the hyjinx ensue. It took me 2 years in my current job to come to terms with just how little some of my cow-orkers grasp what's going on behind the dashboards and single-panes-of-glass.

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HeresyReminder@reddit

I work for a massive company that's at the top of their field and they've outsourced the product engineering teams to contractor companies in India. Yes. It's fucked.

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Geno0wl@reddit

"Who cares that our core products are suffering and it will cause end users to look for different solutions which will ultimately tank the company, we boosted our books by 12% this year!"

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SevaraB@reddit

Bingo. Managers and recruiters haven’t prioritized research skills (either acquiring or developing talent), and even with fuzzy matching, graph searching, and RAGs, “garbage in, garbage out” still applies. This sub skews to a certain demographic because those tools weren’t *available* for us to over-rely on- we’ve got our own bad habits, but they’re *different* bad habits: being a little arrogant and insular, being too cozy with vendor reps, hand-waving stuff away as “best practices,” things like that. Read up on the BOFH if you want to see what *our* bad habits look like, but from our group, we weeded out a lot of the “fake it til you make it” types a while ago- AI/ML has just introduced a new way to fake it til you make it, and you’re seeing a new crop come in. As the tech matures and things get more settled, there’ll be less uncertainty for them to hide in, and this batch will get weeded out, too.

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BronnOP@reddit

The problem I’ve seen climbing the ladder in the past 10 years is poor *seniors*. What do I mean by that? It’s ultimately *their* environment. If I use my imitative, spend an hour googling, researching, sanity checking a solution and then implementing it… and it breaks something… I’m in the shit and they’re angry because ultimately they’re the one that has to fix it. No talking me through the fix, no walking me through why what happened happened, just a scolding and making me look bad in front of everyone. All of that is to say most of those who are seniors today got where they are by being **allowed** and **encouraged** to use their initiative, something they aren’t good at allowing their juniors to do. If you disincentivise googling and trying things out… Guess what? People don’t want to do it! My current boss was *astounded* at what I could do when he gave me the slightest bit of freedom and sat with me to coach me how to fix something instead of angrily going off and doing it himself. Just a little note that some of you guys might be seniors due to experience but you aren’t seniors when it comes to being good mentors, you’re amateurs. Let your juniors learn and perhaps you won’t have to complain on reddit!

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GerryChampoux@reddit

I managed all of my company's engineering software for 25 years, until I retired. I definitely saw a shift in engineers' abilities and attitudes over that time. During the latest years, new engineers were mostly looking for the next company to lure them away. And yet, we were one of the highest paying companies (aerospace). In many cases, brand new hires never showed up (ghosted us) on their first day. New hires also were very computer illiterate. This was a burden upon myself and the whole IT department. They also took too long to understand (and work with) the company culture. Fortunately, not all engineers were like that. We had many that were shining stars, and set good examples for others.

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BeadOfLerasium@reddit

I am pretty much done with IT at this point. Just looking for an offramp now. The new people coming up in help desk roles are absolutely fucking clueless (there are some diamonds here and there obviously) and I am tired of being treated like *I'm* google. The same goddamn questions they've asked me time after time without ever even making at *attempt* at troubleshooting the problem. There was time when the help desk technicians came in with some base level of technical knowledge because they grew up using computers regularly. Nowadays the only technology most of them seem to have any experience with is their phones. So now I'm stuck holding their hands for every piddly-shit basic little tier 1 problem AND expected to do my job as a solo network engineer. And from people I've spoken with, this seems pretty par for the course when it comes to small-to-midsize enterprises. /rant

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FrivolousMe@reddit

The training is shit, hiring is shit, performance metrics are shit. So it's not the fault of young people but their companies and supervisors for putting everyone in this situation. Invest in people, don't just treat them like slaves.

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atw527@reddit

I call them "leaf moments". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTQJdGp4F34 Ants in the line are engineers that lack basic troubleshooting skills.

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VoltageOnTheLow@reddit

I actually think this is in large part a consequence of abstraction. When I started, I had to learn every bit of the server room / datacentre, everything had a direct physical correlation. Server down? Yes, the fans are at 100% and lights are blinking. Need storage space? Put HDDs into SAN/NAS etc. You get the idea. But now, now its all cloud, and unfortunately the computers have started to speak...

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PoolMotosBowling@reddit

I love to teach and train. But some people don't want to learn, those people get: Them, help! Me, what did the manufacturer website/Google say?? Them... Uuuh Me, do some investigation and open a ticket if you can't figure it out, I super busy right now.

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sour-sop@reddit

Just wait a couple more years when all the new grads only know how to resolve a ticket with ChatGPT.

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EstablishmentTop2610@reddit

I’ve pretty much stopped doing tickets because it felt like the others on my team would look at new tickets and if they didn’t immediately know how to solve them they wouldn’t try. Best thing programming ever taught me was not just how to solve problems, but how to find solutions to problems that were implemented differently but fundamentally the same. For the longest time some users were given both business standard and E3 licenses :/

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SystemIntuitive@reddit

AI is just exposing what was already there. The education system trains for memorisation. People lack critical thinking & can’t even troubleshoot. Companies wouldn’t be so afraid to hire juniors if a lot of them knew what they were doing. It’s going to get worse. The next generation of developers will be vibe coders.

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Oblachko_O@reddit

Well, on the other hand, companies want people with cloud experience and if you don't have a nice track of companies with such opportunities, yeah, good luck to go through the HR wall. Companies don't know if people have or don't have troubleshooting experience, because people are filtered out before that. HR doesn't look at troubleshooting at all.

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Jswazy@reddit

It's because we've now fully shifted into the supply of people that got into computer based things strictly because of pay not because of Interest. We are looking in a pool of people where a lot of people did their first "tech" activity basically in university and just did what they had to do to graduate. It's no longer a pool of people where the majority were running Linux for fun in 8th grade and have home labs and tons of projects going on all the time just for fun. Those people are still out there but they're no longer the majority so it seems like the overall quality has decreased.

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Mobile-Marzipan6861@reddit

OSI model vs ChatGPT.

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tech2but1@reddit

Basic literacy is also important.

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Acceptable_Mood_7590@reddit

Tell me about it! The lack of ownership is another problem too

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ProgressBartender@reddit

I think part of the problem is Google has suffered as a research tool. Search results are clogged with irrelevant results and AI is only making that worse. And you may know the tricks for clearing out some of the crap Google is pushing, but that doesn’t help the increasingly useless websites the support community puts up. And don’t get me started on how counterproductive the vendor sites often are.

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MairusuPawa@reddit

This sub is full of that.

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RParkerMU@reddit

I just watched something on Youtube on how AI is contributing to this. Due to AI less entry / juniors are being hired, and the ones that are trained up can typically jump ship as there are more opportunities. Engineers have to be trained up

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KrakusKrak@reddit

I’ve been in the field 20+ years now and I feel that trying to research your solution has always been what separates the good techs from the bad. A lot of our field is nuance too and workplace politics even at the helpdesk level. It takes awhile to pick that up. I’ve always been good at the research part but, the softer skills have taken time to learn I try to mentor my techs, showing them xyz, trying not to give the solution right away but giving a gentle nudge towards it, but even with that you have to know when to do that and when you have to intervene.

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Vegetable-Put2432@reddit

AI makes people brain rot

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sdrawkcabineter@reddit

What concerns me, is some % of it is "I can't do this." and that self-affirmation plants the seeds of doubt that keep someone from pursuing education. If they fear failure to such an extreme that they won't try, then they'll never learn.

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50ShadesOfBackups@reddit

Been saying this for a while. 31, when i was coming up at 17/18 i had it DRILLED into me for thinking outside the box, and critical thinking, and always checking the basics and then USING GOOGLE when i had no idea what to do. I feel like that skill has completely vanished.

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JPNer@reddit

Smartphone zoomies with cybersecurity degrees. lol.

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lino_ox@reddit

making software nowadays is just mixing ready to use tools, there’s a library, a db, a framework for every project you’re working on. back in day you had to build a lot of tools from scratch

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Hynch@reddit

It used to be easier to find stuff on Google. I switched from a pure sysadmin role to devops four years ago. I got my start as a sysadmin 15 years ago. As a sysadmin I could lean hard on Google. There was a plethora of knowledge at my fingertips. Now as a devops engineer I’m finding Google useless. And it’s not just for work. Google is just useless in general. I fortunately am resourceful and old school, so I’m able to fall back on my RTFM skills, but the younger crowd has got be struggling with this.

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ScroogeMcDuckFace2@reddit

gonna get worse with the entry level pipeline in disarray and AI brain rot starting

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PotentiallyAProblem_@reddit

The problem with "just google stuff" is google is heavily compromised by search engine optimization and an AI summary that is out to lunch. For AI tools reliance on them is how we keep getting major outages. I've asked chatgpt for commands I use once in a blue moon and it responds with a command that doesn't exist. Imagine if I were feeding that thing the actual problem and going along with whatever script it spits out. We do see a decline in engineer quality but I think it's a combo of lower standards in school and reliance on crutches that make you lazy.

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Loupreme@reddit

Google may be compromised with SEO stuff but if you’re googling technical things it doesnt matter too much, if you google the documentation for an application common sense would tell you to look for the applications website. SEOs only a small problem if you’re looking for recommendations for something, not something that has a clear cut answer. AI though is a bigger problem because it takes away the friction of reading and learning by searching AND it also gives straight up made answers frequently

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AdultContemporaneous@reddit

ClickOps. I love it.

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rapidsalad@reddit

At least at my company, so is the salary, so that makes sense

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StuckinSuFu@reddit

I remember in college reading the old slashdot forums and this post sounds exactly the same as posts I remember reading there 25 years ago. When you started out - the old folks said the same generalized statement about you and everyone your age entering the job market.

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HeligKo@reddit

I think it's a couple of things. Mainly our ego makes us forget how stupid we were. Another big player is we cling to old ways of doing things. 90% or more of the time troubleshooting is a waste of time when a quick rebuild/redeploy takes care of the problem. By the time you have figured out the issue, there is a new release and if the problem doesn't persist in the new release you would have wasted your time. I am a slave to perfectionism, so this is a tough pill to swallow, but it is often true.

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abuhd@reddit

I think your seeing people work for what they get paid. Effort requires more money.

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PainfulRaindance@reddit

Yeah, the trick to being a good sysadmin\engineer, is not knowing answers, it’s knowing the right questions. The more you are exposed to, via experience or learning materials, will help build your pool of knowledge. But memorizing everything is just a waste of time.

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RestartRebootRetire@reddit

Upon what merits are these people hired?

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therealtaddymason@reddit

Wholeheartedly agree. We have "engineers" by title on staff who are basically just sysadmins by knowledge. No ability to implement anything. Break fix and keep the lights on tasks no problem. Implement something new or see a project from A to B? Crash out and can't accomplish anything and ask questions like they just started a few months ago.

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_Meke_@reddit

AI has been a huge blessing for me, because I'm pretty good at identifying problems, but might not know how to fix them. Unless the AI doesn't know either, then it just keeps repeating the same solutions over and over.

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Noun_Noun_Numb3r@reddit

![gif](giphy|y6Inkaz7omxAk) you got me

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rim-diversion@reddit

Is your company's pay appropriate for attracting good new hires? Is your onboarding process adequate? Does your workload prioritoze quality over speed of completion? Is the hiring manager using accurate and relevant qualification and experience requirements when searching for candidates? Are poor performers trained or motivated in any way to try to improve their performance? If any of those questions are a 'no' then I don't think the problem is that all engineers are bad.

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ITaggie@reddit

You get the quality you pay for, it has always been this way. The IT market has definitely been flooded over the past 15 years or so which makes it harder than ever to filter through these, but this also means that there are more talented sysadmins than ever out there. If your org is hiring mostly unimpressive engineers then that's a recruiting issue (usually tied directly to low pay).

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nazerall@reddit

It doesn't help that a lot of senior sys admins are so overwhelmed with work, that they become huge assholes, and don't really mentor young techs anymore. And a lot of companies are automating low level tasks so no one gets that experience either. But yeah, shitty techs who put in no effort suck as well.

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The_Big_Man1@reddit

Ah the old 'log and flog'.

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waxwayne@reddit

They just run to vendor anytime anything comes up.

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DebugDiag@reddit

Ambition has a lot to do with it. When I was starting out, I was really driven to learn as much as I could about Active Directory, Windows Server, and just solving problems in general, doesn’t matter whether it’s AD, Exchange, O365, Debugging, Linux, etc. I think that drive is something a lot of people seem to miss. It’s not that they’re not smart, it’s just that the ambition to get better isn’t really there. So they end up clicking around in GUIs without learning how to automate things or understand what’s going on under the hood.

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uptimefordays@reddit

The field has seen a seismic change over the last 10-15 years. The rise of cloud computing and shift back towards the CLI combined with the increased popularity of computer science education following the second dotcom bubble caused by the advent of smartphones has collapsed infrastructure silos into single roles. It’s also worth pointing out today’s entry level certificates cover a lot more than USB speeds and cable types. But ultimately you have a group of people who know how computers and distributed systems work and people who don’t. A lot of people who came up through Windows support and never learned general computing concepts now have no idea how anything works and thus cannot troubleshoot or search for useful information. For these folks everything beyond their immediate knowledge (the Windows GUI) is a black box.

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Bubby_Mang@reddit

Everyone is so nice these days though. That sentiment was always around except back in the day you'd escalate a ticket and the t2 teams would just be like, "Did you try restarting it? Did you try trying? \*spits in your face\* \*reassigns ticket to t1\*"

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Expensive_Finger_973@reddit

>I was not master with 4-5 years in the field but i knew how to search for stuff on the internet and sooner or later i would figure it out. I hope you don't consider yourself a master now, no matter how much experience you have or how much you know. The worst thing you can do in my opinion is get to a point where you start entertaining the notion that you are the top of the heap with something, it tends to make you complacent and arrogant. Which always bites you in the ass eventually. Back on topic, in my experience there have always been crappy candidates and peers. Time is better spent looking at the why. Your place isn't attracting largely *clickops zombies* because everyone looking for a job just sucks. Much more likely it is something about the place itself that pushes the good people out or stops them from applying in the first place. Or even worse your HR and/or recruiter outreach is some how filtering out or scaring off the good ones.

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OneSeaworthiness7768@reddit

I’m not a master of anything. But I’m really good at troubleshooting, researching, piecing things together. That’s all you really need to succeed honestly.

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g2g079@reddit

What's the pay?

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Goodspike@reddit

I think you're just describing people in general, in all professions, and it's not something new. Try not to think about that the next time you go to the doctor.

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cjcox4@reddit

We (old techies) built the brainless wave. And with us moving from being Internet/Google dependent, we will now be "AI" (all flavors) dependent in the future. Some say "this is good". I disagree.

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MiserableTear8705@reddit

It’s not like gitops/devops automatically makes you less of a zombie. Makes you even more so, tbh. Because most folks just blindly copy stack overflow or now AI bots without questioning what’s happening under the hood.

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umlcat@reddit

..., and they are hired on purpouse because they are cheap !!!

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Yokoblue@reddit

I just got hired with 8 years of experience and I haven't touched a single tool they're using beside Microsoft stuff. I don't think it's because of the technicians. I think it's because of the technologies and different tools that every company uses. I have never used the same software across companies and I've worked at over 8 locations.

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scytob@reddit

lol, it was no beter in the late 90s early 2000s either the average company, is, by defintion, staffed with average people

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digitaltransmutation@reddit

Only going to get worse as entry-level continues being ground into dust.

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No-Description2794@reddit

I can feel your rant. I see the same thing around here. Most of what i know what self taught, knowing how to ask the right questions, searching on the right places. And then a bit o logic to help. And that's missing on the large majority of humans. They lack logic and the interest on knowing/fixing things. With new generations, it seems we are getting more and more rare, or just more spread out between more fields. Thats why everything must be written down to the dot, and they still fail to follow or continue if anything goes out of the playbook. And this kind of intelligence level is going to be replaced by AI, that also can't think, analyze and figure things out.

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aenae@reddit

You know you’re getting older when you start to feel the younger generation doesn’t know enough. That said, lots of things that we had to troubleshoot aren’t ours to troubleshoot anymore, so why would they need to know how to do that.

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