I now understand why other IT teams hate service desk
Posted by Terrible_Working_899@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 331 comments
I started on a service desk, moved my way to L2&3 support then now to where I am in cyber security and while on service desk never really understood the animosity other people had for SD, I now really do! Whether it is the rambling "documentation", no troubleshooting or just lack of screenshots forcing me to chase up with the end user rather than actually fix the problem.
The issue is that while there are some amazing people working on it the majority are terrible. Something I forget is that most decent support people move out of SD as fast as possible so that the remaining are just shite.
Don't say "we did some troubleshooting" then not document what you actually did, and for the love of christ I'd take a blurry screenshot or even you taking a pic of the screen with your phone over nothing at all.
- signed frustrated AF support person
NotMe-NoNotMe@reddit
Most likely you get to specialize in your field of expertise and are well paid. Service Desk get paid the least but have to deal with an enormous breadth of technology with the least amount of training, experience, and documentation. After a while, if it sounds like a duck, walks like a duck, and looks like a duck, escalate the ticket to the team that deals with ducks and move onto the next of the hundreds of tickets they have to deal with, while the duck team gets very few.
rayofliz@reddit
this is so real! as someone new-ish to service desk and really putting in some effort, some people just are not interested in learning anything, but others are and become overwhelmed and demotivated by the amount of things they are "supposed" to know how to handle without a proper training, on time pressure, and without a proper knowledge base.
and as others have said, competent people graduate out of SD fast.
Gettin_There_16@reddit
I think the issue is your service provider. Not all IT service desks are the same. some actually solve the issue without the hassle.
vCentered@reddit
It's all levels of IT these days. At least service desk I can forgive if they are lacking in skills or experience.
I've got a guy at work who brought me something infrastructure-ish he couldn't figure out and when I fixed it in ten seconds has now been arguing with me for fucking days that my solution and explanation for why it wasn't working can't possibly be right.
What he wanted to work is now working, exactly as he wanted it to work, and I have explained to him why the way he had it configured could not ever work and why it needs to be the way I configured it.
I have even googled it for him so he would see these are not merely my biased conclusions but also the general consensus of the industry...
He couldn't figure it out, he asked me for help, I got it working.
But somehow he is convinced that I don't understand how it works.
gamayogi@reddit
I had my boss and a senior network tech trying to fix a firewall issue for hours until I was like so have we tried turning it off and on again. My boss was like fuck it, try it. Problem fixed in 5 minutes. The senior network guy was bitchin for ages after that as to why that doesn't make sense and it shouldn't have been needed. Sometimes all the theoretical knowledge doesn't mean crap if you don't have the common sense to try some basic troubleshooting.
ThemesOfMurderBears@reddit
It is weird reading this threads. People citing anecdotes about someone fucking up, and using that as a reason to suggest why most of IT is crap these days (they also often come with the "I was able to fix it in seven seconds", so we know the commentor gets to let everyone know how amazing they are).
You've never had a problem in which you completely overlooked an obvious answer? I have been doing IT a long time, and I still have plenty of those. Based on my regular interactions with my colleagues, they still do as well. Depth of knowledge and expertise doesn't insulate someone from all levels of "oops, forgot about that". I would be more concerned with how a person comports themselves after a big mistake, rather than the fact that they made a mistake. If someone denies and points fingers, they're a coward and not a team player. If someone says something like "Crap, my fault -- let me fix that" -- that's the kind of positive response that makes for a good working environment.
Sometimes, I get so focused on a problem that logic starts getting fuzzy. I bring in a team member to assist, and he unravels it quickly, and I feel silly. But I know the inverse has happened, and I know neither of us are going to our supervisor talking shit about the other.
So yes, sometimes I forget to turn it off and turn it back on.
samasq@reddit
> So yes, sometimes I forget to turn it off and turn it back on.
This is why we have processes to follow. If you have forgotten to try turning it off and on again before spending hours troubleshooting, then you are trying to remember too much and need to follow procedure more.
ThemesOfMurderBears@reddit
Right, because the answer to the occasional "oopsie" is to bog everyone down with needlessly draconian troubleshooting steps that everyone must adhere to.
The point is that people make mistakes. Unless someone keeps repeatedly making the same mistake, you can just assume it's a human being a human.
What you don't need to assume is that this heralds the overwhelming idiocy of everyone but you.
pdp10@reddit
Entirely agreed, though the anecdote in question seems to be a dissatisfaction with why things became working or how they should work, not a black and white question of whether something was changed/fixed.
The answer may be to lab it out. Many years ago, our department got a block of consulting hours to use (I suspect it was a freebie). Since the consultant was supposed to be an expert in Checkpoint Firewall-1, I gave them my list of eleven outstanding issues since we'd migrated to FW-1.
They looked at it for a moment, and said: if you switch this from explicit proxying mode to Stateful Packet Filter mode, your problems will go away. We did switch it, and ten of the eleven problems went away. They said: this firewall has proxying on the feature list, but that's not the way they want you to use it. And I was enlightened.
I've made assumptions about how things should work, that I regretted even many decades later. It was bad hardware on one of a pair, didn't find out for over a decade. Yeah, it should've worked like I thought, if it didn't have a fried SCSI bus. Should have tried the other unit instead of being stubborn. I try not to have those regrets any more, by making as few untested assumptions as possible.
timbotheny26@reddit
Wow, imagine being the type of person that gets mad that a reboot fixed the issue.
Actually...maybe don't imagine it, that sounds like a miserable existence.
ThemesOfMurderBears@reddit
I don't know. If a critical system is down and the most important thing is restoring service, sure, sometimes a reboot is needed. But I can see a world where you're hunting down a problem, and getting closer to figuring it out -- only to have some helpdesk kid convince their boss to reboot the system. Then whatever happened is potentially not fixed, and all the work you put into it is shelved until the problem occurs again.
As a bonus, then the helpdesk kid comes on reddit and tells everyone how their amazing contribution of "reboot" means all of IT are idiots.
If the guy was really bitching and moaning about it, he's a jackass. It's not his call. A manager making the decision means you should end it there. Being annoyed is fine, but keep it to yourself.
pdp10@reddit
This. We had a department head that wanted to rollback scheduled changes at the first scent of a problem, it seemed like. If I felt that we wouldn't be able to replicate and debug in dev/test/staging environments, and we probably wouldn't because they were slipshod versions of the real thing, then I'd have to politely hold off this person's demands while trying to troubleshoot the cause(s).
It would have been nice to make dev/test/staging the equal of production, but certain choices had been made to ensure that replicating production would be so uneconomic as to be infeasible, or at least unpalatable. Second best was to have the department head in question, not be so monomaniacal about availability beyond the business needs. Later I found out that the department head's function was a major business bottleneck, so any unavailability hit them first and worst.
timbotheny26@reddit
I get that. In that case then I too would be pretty upset to see all of my work effectively be for naught.
MrsBadgeress@reddit
Most of the time it is because it clears the RAM. Shutting it down and then starting it back up doesn't.
timbotheny26@reddit
Even if Fast Startup is turned off or bypassed?
MrsBadgeress@reddit
Not sure I will have to check that but my gut says if you have restarted.
FuriousFurryFisting@reddit
It's literal called volatile memory because it loses all data on power loss.
Fast Startup or hibernation is saving the memory contents to disk and writes it back on boot.
With these features disables, reboot and shutdown are equivalent.
MrsBadgeress@reddit
Thanks
TheJesusGuy@reddit
It absolutely does unless you're talking Fast boot windows or an iPhone.
autogyrophilia@reddit
That's just Windows
vCentered@reddit
Yeah, this guy keeps wanting to "touch base" to "go over issues with X not working with Y". He is telling people he's "working with u/vCentered to resolve issues with X and Y".
X works with Y. It is currently working with Y. It is doing exactly what he wants it to do, exactly how he needs it to do it, with exactly the results that he needs to produce but he doesn't understand why the way he had it was wrong or why the way I have it is right.
For some reason he's completely rejected the explanations and evidence I've given him and insists on trying to make me find other explanations.
cptsmidge@reddit
Sometimes in those situations I would pull a “I made some additional adjustments on the backend and everything is working on my end. I’m marking the ticket as closed, please let me know if you need further assistance”. Not that I made any changes…
vCentered@reddit
I get it but I disagree strongly with the philosophy.
I'm not going to tell them I had to go back and do more and let them think they were right in thinking they knew better than me all along.
In other words I can't make them accept that I was right but I am not going to reinforce someone's belief that I was wrong when all the evidence is to the contrary.
All that's going to do is encourage them to repeat the cycle the next time they don't understand what's going on.
pdp10@reddit
Assuming for a moment that the changes you made are logged/recorded (perhaps by IaC), then your changes are on the record and the other person is presumably free to change things back and see if it breaks or not, also on the record.
Most teams have enough to argue about going forward, that arguing about things that already happened, are recorded/known, and aren't broken, isn't a responsible use of time.
BemusedBengal@reddit
I'd agree that doing it now would establish a bad precedent (since they would think they were right all along and with enough pestering they got you to admit it), but give them a bs explanation if they ever ask you for help again.
gamayogi@reddit
Some people are more obsessed with being right and knowing it all than silly things like teamwork or getting the job done efficiently.
pdp10@reddit
That can be the root cause, but it's not necessarily the root cause.
pdp10@reddit
Have them put their objections or issues into writing, not try to make a meeting to do the same thing verbally. You're implying that they're not being coherent with any objections that they may have.
pdp10@reddit
You fixed the problem, but you made no progress in the Root Cause Analysis.
It's important to have the right amount of respect for things that don't make sense: not too little, and not too much. I award both you and the senior network guy, half a point each.
Effective_File_9403@reddit
This is fair advice for most devices. I feel (depending on how critical) but for a FW I feel like rebooting should be one of your last options.
Most reboots are also just temporary fixes avoiding real problems.
But all in all, reboot your shit people (very conflicting i know)
1991cutlass@reddit
High availability, 2 firewalls. But could have just been disabling/enabling a rule or route etc.
appmapper@reddit
If a reboot fixes it… we haven’t really found a fix.
gramathy@reddit
Yeah, no root cause, even when a reboot fixes it, is not a “solution” for infrastructure.
Enough_Pattern8875@reddit
If something is “fixed” by power cycling the system then it’s just a temporary workaround while you continue working to identify the root cause.
It’s often just as important a troubleshooting step as any other.
Anybody that simply power cycles something and calls it good without fully understanding why is either lazy or incompetent.
alaub1491@reddit
Yeah or is an underpaid, overworked MSP technician who doesn't not have the option to be able to look into the problem deeper...
Enough_Pattern8875@reddit
That’s fair
SeatownNets@reddit
depends on if the issue comes back. if a solar flare causes something random to wig out, I don't think you are going to get your ROI on trying to track down the source of the problem
BioshockEnthusiast@reddit
Once is a one off.
Twice is a pattern to pay attention to.
Thrice means it's time to intervene.
Effective_File_9403@reddit
This is a good note! I don’t get to work in environments that care about redundancy all the time.
Thank you for the perspective:)
autogyrophilia@reddit
The problem is that firewalls are stateful, and sometimes filter reloads do not override old states so you have connections being processed wrong.
So maybe not a reboot, but clearing the states/sessions can be helpful. Some firewalls make this kind of hard to impossible, but as a last resort you can always up and down all interfaces.
PompeiiSketches@reddit
If still not exactly sure why restarting the sessions work but it does solve a bunch of issues.
autogyrophilia@reddit
Most of it is going to be about NAT and policy routing. With NAT you end up with gibberish traffic that is rejected, with policy routing the traffic is likely not going to where it should.
Tarquin_McBeard@reddit
I choose to appreciate the absence of a vocative comma in this sentence.
If you have shit people, they should definitely get the good ol' reboot treatment.
Ihaveasmallwang@reddit
Because sometimes doing things like that can cause a lot more problems. Rebooting an entire enterprise firewall is a much bigger impact than rebooting an end users isp supplied internet router at home. And in general, unlike the end users router, it really shouldn’t be needed and isn’t considered basic troubleshooting in the sense that it is far from the first thing that is attempted. It’s more of a last resort, especially if you don’t have proper failovers in place.
ThemesOfMurderBears@reddit
The thing to keep in mind is that this sub overrepresents people working in MSPs and for small businesses. I wouldn't blast anyone for doing that kind of work -- I did it myself for a while. But I also have the perspective to know that someone rebooting a router in a ten-person accounting office has no idea about the scope, coordination, and impact of an enterprise system being rebooted.
TheMadAsshatter@reddit
See, the practical side of me is always like "well, duh a reboot fixed it", but the theoretical side of me is like "there has to be something that can be done to not have to take the computer offline just to make it work properly". It's fucking frustrating, like, what broke with seemingly no cause where the only option is to reboot the whole computer? I always want to say "there must be a reason, and a way to fix it that isn't just a reboot, I want to know how to fix the ACTUAL problem".
RoosterBrewster@reddit
Yea depends on if you just wanted it fixed or an actual RCA investigation, especially for multiple occurrences.
BemusedBengal@reddit
There's a lot of things I'd do if I had infinite time and motivation, but I'd rather spend those limited resources on other things. Most problems that are fixed by a reboot never happen again, so it's not worth it to find the root cause. If it happens twice, then I look into more.
CleverMonkeyKnowHow@reddit
Like u/Effective_File_9403, this is not actually a solution. This just pushes the problem down the line to be dealt with later. Sometimes that okay and necessary, but it's critical to try to go back and reproduce the error so it can be documented and brought up with the vendor.
Purple_Woodpecker652@reddit
Fuck that guy.
NteworkAdnim@reddit
That's deliciously infuriating but also hilarious as hell.
pick_up_chair@reddit
It's possible he just doesn't want to admit he was mistaken about it. So the actual blame has to spread onto someone else, in this case you. Unfortunately this (not owning your not-knowing) seems to be a very common phenomenon these days.
McGuirk808@reddit
He's not wrong for wanting to understand how and why it works rather than just having it resolved, but that's something he needs to look into as it sounds like he's got some misunderstandings about the technology. He also sounds ass at communicating.
nightservice_@reddit
I literally don’t care if the service desk is bad, I just write detailed notes to resolve the issue then send it back to tier 1 so they can deal with the user. It takes me like 5 minutes. Nbd at all and overtime helpdesk gets better because they know A) I will send that shit right back instantly, B) they learn from my notes overtime and make less mistakes.
samasq@reddit
Force them to learn enough and you'll do yourself out of a job.
nightservice_@reddit
Worry about your mother
samasq@reddit
Dont waste your time she aint worth it.
joule_thief@reddit
If you see the same shit often enough, a text expander is a lifesaver.
Swarrlly@reddit
It’s a major issue that competent people get promoted out of service desk or leave for better jobs. I think I high quality service desk worker should make 6 figures. It’s a hard job and a good worker can save thousands of hours of tier 2 and tier 3 time.
samasq@reddit
Could not disagree more with this. If you have higher paid L1 staff, then whats the point of L2 and L3?
The whole point is that the better staff earn more and therefore cost more so their time is gated.
sistermarypolyesther@reddit
Much respect for saying this.
I would have been happy to remain as an overly-competent SD lead if I had been paid a higher wage and had the bandwidth to help techs develop better critical thinking skills, work on the user knowledge base, and invest in problem management.
I'm now an application analyst, and I am paid more to do less work. I feel guilty about that. It doesn't make sense.
tierunknownuser@reddit
quality before quantity
tier 1, the demands or minimal requirements required from a 1stline perspective, definition of a high quality ticket or "way of working" troubleshooting methodology
how what when & why, information gathering to get a proper whole picture of what is the actual issue customer is facing... but 1stline technician still can´t even apply these efforts of doing their job... ticket ping pong back & fourth.. impacting customer negative due to sloppyness or lazy people not even caring about their job or customer...
as IT technician in a servicedesk department tier 1 vs tier 2 vs tier 3, if backbone is not done from tier 1 part then of course tier 2 will not handle the ticket after it has been "escalated" but the fault is within the assignee, or people that will not change their behavior, you give them feedback to improve but still they "make" the same mistake, over & over & over........
I really don´t like lazy people in firstline positions... its not rocket sience.. I get it that 1stline is not a robot, we´re still humans interacting with other person on the other end of the phone, but some people just does not fit in within a "IT-technician/1stline position" due to their actions have no consiquence or they do not care about their job or the customer, eventhough you have a template for the ticket, the "minimum" field requirement are still beling left blanked, not filled in...
whats your definition of a proper "way of working" or "this is what we expect from tier 1 to tier 2 escalation" again, there is no permanent solution to individual.... issues
KPI vs SLA vs OLA vs CSAT vs Quality
its all a big whole picture right :D
servicedesk we´re working hard on the floor doing grinding, grinding.. the right people for the job will show proper results, we LOVE high CSAT scorecard & proper high quality tickets to reduce ping pong trends...
Keep the Stories going! its all so true reading everyones different experiances facing tier 1 escalations, laughing so hard right now becuase you´ve all hit the nail on the head ;)
iSunGod@reddit
Wait until you get the ticket "User received a phishing email" and it's a screencap of just the body of the message and the ticket is in the SD person's name.
I get three of those a week from my SD people. I hate our service desk with the fire of a 1000 suns.
man__i__love__frogs@reddit
What does your service desk actually do?
I ask this because in the past 3 jobs I've had the service desk were varying T2-3 techs, and a dispatcher is the one doing the initial touch to tickets and finding the appropriate tech who can resolve the issue, the vast majority of the time without escalation.
Substantial-Fruit447@reddit
With SSPR yes, but my org has so many old farts in it, they will only reset their password by calling the SD
man__i__love__frogs@reddit
We are passwordless so we don't have that issue. In a past org, the dispatcher(s) could handle something simple like that if a user refused - although I'd be inclined to remote on their computer and walk them thru using SSPR, and tell them it's now the only method to reset passwords, or setting some PAM role up so passwords are now their managers responsibility if you're spending that much helpdesk hours on it.
Substantial-Fruit447@reddit
I tried to push adoption of passwordless login this year and it promptly shut down.
I couldn't fathom how they considered 90 password rotations to be less intrusive.
man__i__love__frogs@reddit
Weird, our users find yubikey more convenient, there are no more MFA prompts for anything.
Plus the security benefits alone were enough to sell it. Just had to explain that remote phishes aren't possible anymore.
Rude_Strawberry@reddit
Passwordless? Trying working in a finance company, complying with banks 10+ year out of date security requirements.
man__i__love__frogs@reddit
I work for a credit union lol.
iSunGod@reddit
Mine is supposed to collect as much info as possible & try to solve if possible - escalate as needed. They take screenshots & send it on if it's more than a password reset. At this point we'd be better off using voice transcription or some shitty AI bot would be better.
They've also screwed up bad enough where they MGM'd us by resetting users password & MFA to let bad actors into random user accounts.
redoggle@reddit
Frankly sounds like there's not a clear process for them to follow. They get the call, have no playbook to follow and just make something up.
Have you tried asking them what their process is? Your service desk are probably aware something's not working but lack the knowledge, access, or authority to fix it. SD techs are typically lacking in all three, so systemic problems in service desk tend to persist until someone with actual influence and experience gets involved.
In other words, sounds like a management problem if it's that widespread.
iSunGod@reddit
I have. They don't follow it & there are no consequences for anything. They have a massive Confluence KB that has tons & tons of info... They don't use it.
We have a tool called SpecOps that they can validate user identities. They don't use it.
Bottom line, documented process or not, noting WHO CALLED shouldn't need to be in the documentation. I sit about 5' from one of the SD guys and hear "OMG WHY DID I DOCUMENT THIS IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO READ IT?!?!" while he's chatting with other SD techs from other regions.
And yes - their "manager" sucks & there are glaring issues but no one seems to care about actually addressing them. He's all about AI & over complicating simple processes by feeding everything into AI.
i8noodles@reddit
ah i think i might know the problem. its seems counter intuitive but the documentation itself might be the problem.
normally more documentation is good, however, it is not good if you are unable to find it. its fine if u arent on call and can wade through 20 mins to find 1 specific page, not so much if u got someone on the line who wants a fix now.
finding the information, and it being a clear and concise to solve the issue, would probably result in them actually solving the problem more faster.
or they just suck but I don't know whts going on with your systems
iSunGod@reddit
So you think not collecting, and noting in the ticket, WHO CALLED is a documentation issue?? C'mon man. I'm not talking about complex issues or a step-by-step diagram collecting system information for a complex issue. None of that matters if the person getting the ticket doesn't who called or what computer it happened on.
Odd_Dimension_8753@reddit
Document the time you are spending on these things. Go to your manager and show your data. Explain that if things aren't done per your documentation you believe it is costing the company money and taking away from other priority work. Ask your manager if they can work with the SD teams management to come up with a solution on how to get the SD to follow the documentation.
I recommend having decision tree level type documentation for each product the SD supports that they are escalating to you for.
If a user is putting in a ticket for a web app or tool the decision tree should start with questions for that user to determine the issue. For example "Can the user load the login screen?" if yes do this if not do that with further steps on each branch of the tree. The end of the tree should result with the SD having every detail you need and confirmation that escalation is what you would want them to do in that situation.
iSunGod@reddit
lol do you think this hasn't already been done?? They literally ignore all the documentation & just create a shitty ticket. These people don't care if it's annoying or if they could solve it themselves. I've spoken to their manager. My manager has spoken to their manager. Other managers, and directors, have spoken about this. They went as far as trying to create a chat bot to help... The humans create shitty tickets.
We have an R&D dev that was tampering with ZS, writing extremely unprofessional comments in the "disable reason" box, and trying to run things like mimikatz cuz he forgot his password.... You'd think this would get someone fired, right? NOPE! They highlighted his ass on LinkedIn touting "if you can't trust your dev to work in prod who can you trust".
Management doesn't care. The SD doesn't care. There is no "here is this quick trick to help" cuz they won't do it.
man__i__love__frogs@reddit
We're passwordless so we don't have to deal with that, and it should be the helpdesk/IT manager's responsibility to have a password verification process in place - then ticket system requires 'verification completed' when the category is set to password reset, better yet SSPR to avoid all of that.
Our helpdesk supervisor dispatches the tickets straight to the people who can do them, usually it's access based, but our helpdesk techs are all capable techs, they resolve like 90%+ of their tickets without escalation, and if it's something that falls under their purview, our engineers will just shadow/screenshare and walk them through it - cold escalations by assigning a ticket is not allowed lol.
I do remember the L1 days like 15 years ago when it was mostly password resets, or following some specific KBs but that kind of stuff has disappeared from the environments I've seen lately, and my last job was even at a MSP that did the same dispatch system.
i8noodles@reddit
depends. in a large enough org, u are bound to have people who are less technically savvy and need support that u really dont want a L2 person to do. who wants to guide a user on how to change the background of a computer as an example.
these are the people L1 filters out, and if u have set them up for success, they should be able to lessen the load of L2. but it is a 2 way street, u got to give them the tools and knowledge to do it. if u dont, well dont complain they are shitty
man__i__love__frogs@reddit
I honestly don't think it's possible to set someone up for success in a position like that.
It's generally a poor place to work to be doing such simple tasks, it's also frustrating for your users because they are wasting so many time before things get escalated, instead of the service desk doing a better job of finding the appropriate person in the first place.
That's why I haven't seen this kind of setup in many years.
Jaack18@reddit
We have a very simple answer. report as phishing in outlook. And then close ticket
iSunGod@reddit
We are a Google shop, have a "Report Phishing" on the side bar, and this still happens.
We also use privilege management so that if something would pop a UAC a box comes up indicating so it has a text field where the user, or analyst, can enter details, hit OK, and it sends all the pertinent info in a ticket to the appropriate team. Sounds pretty easy huh? NOPE! They take a screenshot of the fucking box & create a manual ticket for it instead of walking the user through filing in the box & clicking OK.
lmao guys.... I know you're trying to find a reason my org experiences this.. The reason is they suck. They get training. Documentation exists. Tools to make it simple exist. They just ignore it & create a shitty ticket every single time because they're lazy, awful, and there are no consequences for continuing to being awful.
vogelke@reddit
I'd bounce it right back to the SD and copy their manager with nothing but some bullet points:
iSunGod@reddit
You're much nicer than me. "Am I supposed to call 9000 users to ask which one had a problem or are you going to share any details with me?"
adelynn01@reddit
Do you close with the comment “not enough info”?
iSunGod@reddit
Nah I try to help if I can. The only time I've done something like that is when the HD sent me a ticket that a user forgot their Yahoo password. I noted it with "I don't work for Yahoo" and closed the ticket.
Substantial-Fruit447@reddit
I do that all the time.
Usually the ticket never gets generated again lol
adelynn01@reddit
lol yes I do it to the ridiculous ones for sure.
ItssRadical@reddit
As a hobbyist and person who loves to tinker with anything. I work security at the biggest retailer(you can guess😂) AND I HATE service desk. Aside from my main issue being that my active directory account only has basic privileges and it being stuff I could fix myself. And then the great run around begins!!! I get to Open a ticket. Speak with level one. Try to explain the issue that's very obvious and they have no understanding of the issue, escalates to level 1 now I spend an hour on the phone trying to explain the issue again. Escalate to level 2, another hour on the phone if I'm lucky they figure it out most of the time. I'm escalated to level 3 and have to wait a week for the ADE team 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ I can't stand it
FuzzySubject7090@reddit
I spent about 2 years working in the SD having worked before as a system administrator for a small company, now I'm back to 3rd line and I can tell you, it is easy to forget the pressure some service desk analysts have to deal with.
It is true a small group of them can be bad, I worked with some that would hang up on people or close a ticket without doing anything, but the majority are just trying to do their job as quick as they can, part of the job is about quantity, they can't afford to spend 60 minutes troubleshooting something or looking for the correct documentation, also think about all others things that get in the way, users no providing all the information or incorrect information, network connectivity during a remote session, just to mention a few.
One year at the service desk with a team of 5, we had to take over 100 calls per day while still dealing with 30-40 tickets each coming through the service desk portal, we weren't allowed to spend more than 10 minutes on a phone call, if you couldn't fix the problem in under 10 minutes, escalate it, that was the process.
Also, all teams have their stuff we don't like about them. As Service Desk we hated when they sit on a ticket for weeks and don't communicate with the customer, then the service desk ends up taking all the abuse from them.
We are all trying to do our job here.
changework@reddit
NOTES TAKEN:
I spent 4 days troubleshooting and 6 hours on the phone with the customer.
Customer reports computer is broken. Excel only displays gibberish.
Escalating to level 2 support.
L2 takes ticket: L2 asks two questions. Associates PDF with Edge browser
(Real issue: PDF files associated with Excel)
TheJesusGuy@reddit
How did you waste 6 hours on that..?
fuckasoviet@reddit
Well we had documentation on how to resolve this, but it was saved as a PDF. And every time I tried opening the PDF (which for some reason had a weird green X icon), Excel would just pop up with gibberish!
It took me about 6 hours to narrow it down, but the kernel was clearly corrupted so I escalated.
A_Sc00py_b0i@reddit
im not exactly a master in the help desk sector, but surely its as simple as selecting “Open with..” and selecting a browser or Microsoft Word?
Counterpoint-RD@reddit
That 'weird green X icon' is the symbol for Excel - if you associate a file type with a certain application (in Windows), it gets shown with the application's symbol by default, since about... forever? (The first I remember is Windows 3.1, in 1992, and probably even somewhere before that...? Before my time 🤷♂️...)
And the 'gibberish': if you open filetypes in Excel where it doesn't know what to do with 'em, it tends to try to shove them through the CSV import filter - and produces the 'gibberish' in the process: Does cell A1 contain, or start with "%PDF-1.4"? That's the start of the PDF header...
(Totally OT: Good Lord, why do people sound so darn absolutely clueless about computers these days? I've never even been in support in any capacity, only on the user side for 30+ years, with a bit more interest than average mixed in maybe, but reading stuff like "the kernel was clearly corrupted..."? No offense intended, but HECK NO - stuff like this ☝ shouldn't even be _that_ deep knowledge - you folks make me feel REALLY old sometimes 😑 *sigh*... the 'iPad generation' is ABSOLUTELY doomed 😔...)
fuckasoviet@reddit
Buddy, I’m talking about PDFs and kernels and Excel and you’re over here talking about CSVs and A1 steak sauce like wtf
Posts like this help with my imposter syndrome
TreborG2@reddit
Ah, but of course you didn't know it was a PDF, because f** Microsoft decided nobody needs to see what the extensions are, regardless of what that column says, because once you accessiate the PDF with Excel it says it's an Excel document not a PDF document... She if only we had some three letter acronym that could tell us what those files are quite possibly without having to right click and do properties for every single f**** one of them.
This is some of the design problem, and then the problem of people that get control, believing that they know they're s***.
Another example would be Mozilla Firefox. You go to an HTTPS page, say maybe an RFC 1918 IP address, you know it should be trusted, however Firefox doesn't, what is it to? It gives you the ability to view and add an exception, and what does it do by default? Sets the always trust option active.
No, you shouldn't always trust a badly certed web page, you should be required to manually select that you want to always trust that page versus just having a default to always trust.
Again just like Microsoft, you want security, but don't make the effort to require the users learn, making them dumber, and making them more likely to screw up.
tankerkiller125real@reddit
Explorer -> View -> File Extensions... It takes 30 seconds to turn it on and keep it on...
Better yet, in an enterprise environment, just force it on with GPO.
Speeddymon@reddit
Green X icon is Excel.
fuckasoviet@reddit
Excel starts with an E, silly
Darkchamber292@reddit
r/notopbutok
qlz19@reddit
r/wooosh
Darkchamber292@reddit
Uhh no?
qlz19@reddit
Uhh, yes!
Darkchamber292@reddit
Uhh, yes?
qlz19@reddit
Wait, do you still not understand the joke or are you just trolling now?
unique_MOFO@reddit
Was he talking about you?
qlz19@reddit
r/wooosh
changework@reddit
This
No-Blueberry-1823@reddit
Because getting an answer takes time. Most users are lazy about specifying there problem
TheJesusGuy@reddit
"What file are you trying to open, could you link me to it?"
And then you would have seen they're trying to open a pdf in Excel.
Defconx19@reddit
Gotta try reformatting the computer first.
Significant-Cancel70@reddit
and they wonder why AI will take their job.
HoosierLarry@reddit
True but even AI wouldn’t solve this if it took the end user’s call. It’s barely a level 1 tech.
Mr_ToDo@reddit
Ya, some end user reported symptoms are just so out of whack with their actual problem that you wonder how they dress themselves
The fact that I'm getting used to dealing with them makes me sad
caveboat@reddit
This is why at Apple support, I learned to start screen sharing ASAP. It removes so many unknown factors and minimizes the risk of troubleshooting something an issue that’s actually a miscommunication.
Grouchy-Experience15@reddit
any time i need to remote into a machine i screenshare even before restarting.
otherwise:
me: did you restart your PC?"
User: Yes
Me: checks uptime... 342 days...
sistermarypolyesther@reddit
Agreed. Spending the additional five minutes required to establish a remote connection and observe the issue firsthand can lead to first call resolution and save hours of unnecessary work.
-Cthaeh@reddit
With MSP life, its a godsend. Thankfully most of our clients expect it, since we all do it. They could tell me their chair is broke, and I'd still connect to their PC and verify with the camera. (/s)
jackmorganshots@reddit
"Attempted repair of office, wiped users templates, deleted the document they were working on, escalated to second level"
ralphw_therealone@reddit
That Document wipeout is from the “beatings will continue until morale improves” school of user management.
bobbybignono@reddit
why not reinstall the laptop, way quicker solution.
my rule is that if a solution takes longer than the image process i wont do it anymore.
MegaMechWorrier@reddit
How did they get PDFs to even load into Excel, did they import as CSV, or something?
Lukage@reddit
Jealous that your team provides that much documentation or troubleshooting effort.
realgone2@reddit
I mean everyone above service desk is an excellent worker. Not a bad one in the bunch......
i8noodles@reddit
the amount of L2 and above who do not read the whole ticket is beyond me. had a ticket bounce from L2 back to L1 asking for information that was already in the ticket.
or asking L1 to get information they dont have access to.
or sending back to L1 to see if the issue is resolved rather then just calling to confirm it themselves. because if it isn't resolved l, what the fuck are the L1 going to do?
bbqwatermelon@reddit
From the other side of the coin, we are pressured to meet deadlines and are constantly thrown shit from above as well as below and in the interest of saving time for the heavy lifting it can help to make the call. For me, most of the time the person with the problem is then in a meeting or goofing off at the watercooler so waiting for the opportune time to call can take more bandwidth than is available with the monumental amount of tasks we are facing. It is not always laziness.
i8noodles@reddit
which i can understand but it still doesnt change the fundamental issue. it is not L1s job to chase up L2 tickets to see if it is resolved. they can do nothing if it is not and L1 will get the brunt of the angry user.
however if it was the L2 who did the call, found out it wasnt resolved, they can further diagnose the issue.
call the user, no response? call another day and close it our after whatever the strike process for u is
realgone2@reddit
That last one always pissed me off to no end. Send the ticket back to me to ask the person if it was still not working!
You lazy SOB. Just email or call the user and ask them!!
Any-Virus7755@reddit
Lmao. I got out of the service desk then I realized about 50% of the guys in engineering were decent at their job and the other 50% just ended up there from sticking around long enough.
BlockBannington@reddit
I am that other 50 % but only after 2 years. I somehow landed this job but have no idea what the fuck I'm doing
Any-Virus7755@reddit
I feel ya man. I get thrown into shit I’ve never done before on a regular basis. Just read the manuals, use ChatGPT, make documentation, put in a ticket with the vendor if you’re really stuck.
LineCreative6699@reddit
50%?! Man I’d take those numbers! Feels more like 20% “decent” while 80% “sticking around long enough”
Any-Virus7755@reddit
A lot of lower level people made the engineers at my company seem smarter than they were and the engineers themselves acted like their job is much harder than it is.
When I started learning higher level shit I realized that they’ve done nothing by the book for the past decade. Shit they said couldn’t be done I figured out by reading manuals and using ChatGPT. Now I look like a rising star because they’ve inflated their jobs difficulty for so long and refused to stay up to date on the latest methods.
brokentr0jan@reddit
Yea this post is funny when you realize more than half of the “sysadmins” can’t tell you what DNS or DHCP is
Various_Efficiency89@reddit
At my company we are tier 2.5 we are help desk and above
two4six0won@reddit
Fair. As an L1, what used to piss me off the most was when the only person who had the necessary access to resolve the ticket, would send it back. Seemingly without reading it. I'm not going to add commentary when I have no access to the tool that the user needs help with. Probably not you, but I remember that happening and it pissed me off to no end.
Ihaveasmallwang@reddit
As someone who sends stuff back, just because you don’t have access to the tool doesn’t mean that you don’t have access to find out what the user is trying to say. Grab screenshots. Accurately describe the issue. If you can’t accurately describe why you sent me something, I’m sending it back.
Just because I am the admin of whatever system it is, doesn’t mean it’s actually my issue. Half the time it’s someone can’t even be bothered to save the correct bookmark, or some other user error equally as ridiculous.
I have a ton of huge projects going on with strict deadlines that affect the entire organization. I don’t have time to handhold some old lady in finance to type a url correctly.
fun_crush@reddit
I tell my tier 1 / Level 1 team tickets automatically get kicked back unless you attach the logs of the system or application...
Even when they call and ask a question. First thing i ask, "what do the logs say?"
i8noodles@reddit
are they taught to read the logs? or even get the logs? reading logs means nothing if they do not understand it.
also i disagree with having L1 read logs. it is far too time consuming for L1 who's job is to ultimately triage issues, not spend 30 mins parsing a log and then escalating, or fixing.
attching logs shouldn't be an issue but
altodor@reddit
It's also not really an L1's job to interpret logs. There's so many red herrings in the logs (especially Windows/macOS, which is most of what I expect L1 will encounter) that by the time they can interpret the logs the promotion they're eligible for is not L2 Service Desk but Jr. Admin.
mmzznnxx@reddit
I'm no longer L1 but there's a lot of times the logs aren't even helpful. Credit to SCCM who has a great logging system, and shame on Cisco who has a lot of events in event viewer where the entries are "error in $something.cpp failed" with no elaboration.
Am I supposed to de-compile and reverse engineer this Cisco client and the application?
Not all logs are created equal. And to your point, most L1s won't have enough time to peruse logs even if they want to. They should if they can, but even if they find a smoking gun, which is rare, it's usually beyond them or their permissions to fix.
So I think the parent OP of this subthread is a little too... I don't want to say anal, but rectum-focused, I guess.
Mr_ToDo@reddit
God. The CBS logs. The answer or directions to the answer may be there, but they don't make it easy
fun_crush@reddit
Yes, they are taught how to read the logs, get the logs parse the logs, tail the logs, put applications in debug and send those logs as well. There are automated scripts that grab this information as well as documentation on the whole process.
So to address the second part of your argument I somewhat agree especially with spending +/-30 minutes on a ticket but here's the problem.
Management looks at our metrics and sees over 75% of the tickets passed from L1 to L2. Even though they have never outlined what is considered L1, L2, L3 work... every budget meeting they ask, "Why are we spending thousands of dollars on a team that does nothing but reset passwords and pass tickets up? Can't we use some sort of AI automation?"
This is where we can say they do a lot more then just "pass" tickets up. They provide initial diagnosis of the problem, capture logs and use that information to route it to the correct team ultimately allowing us to resolve issues at a much faster rate, and to use an AI software that does their jobs it's going to require a complete redesign of how we process and complete tickets.
5panks@reddit
Yeah, there's no context needed.
If you escalate a ticket to me because a user definitely should have received and email but hasn't yet. You'd better at least have it documented that you checked several things including rules that could have sent it to his junk or blocked senders.
If you haven't, it's just getting sent back with "More troubleshooting needed"
Nomaddo@reddit
I dunno, I think the first thing you should do is check the email delivery logs to confirm the email was actually delivered to the users mailbox before checking if an email rule deleted the missing email, but I guess L1 might not have been given access or the training to do so.
5panks@reddit
It might be environment dependent, but when a user says, "I'm not getting a reset password email from xxx platform." It has been my experience that almost always that email is being sent out.
Nomaddo@reddit
yeah, probably. We have greylisting enabled in Mimecast so the sending MTA has to retry before the email is accepted. User can permit the sender's address/domain to bypass greylisting though.
5panks@reddit
Heh... Mimecast was literally the example in my head, "I cleared my cookies, but I'm not getting a new code in my email.", "Well you have postmaster@mimecast.com routing to a folder called 'junk.'"
two4six0won@reddit
Do you add relevant context, when you send it back? If you do, you may not be who I'm bitching about.
Ihaveasmallwang@reddit
The relevant context would be “please put some actual details in the case before escalating it”.
“Xxxx system is broke” is not details and is usually user error.
two4six0won@reddit
Oh, yeah, for sure. I guess I was over-estimating y'all's L1s. I always made sure there was at least enough info to understand that X was the problem, and changing Y setting in X would resolve the issue.
Ihaveasmallwang@reddit
Yes, you are definitely over estimating them. Or at least one person in particular I’m thinking of. If it isn’t clearly defined step by step for this one person, they cannot do it. And even if it is step by step, they’ll still somehow mess it up.
But yeah, if something has absolutely no details and just briefly mentions a system I might be in charge of, it really doesn’t need to be sent to me until at least some basic troubleshooting has been done. Maybe a log attached from the end users machine if you aren’t going to read the log to find the failure. At least need to know the steps taken to recreate the issue. Or a screenshot including the exact url they are trying to access. You’d be surprised how often that is missing and it turns out to not even be one of our apps. Or someone fat fingering their password.
What really grinds my gears is notes on a ticket that say “fixed issue” or “sending to server team” or something similar without saying what was actually done.
GinnyJr@reddit
Literally this
redoggle@reddit
When I was a t1 "troubleshooting" translated to "the max troubleshooting possible without access or documentation" which in turn meant "no troubleshooting".
If you make yourself the only one who can solve a problem, then you're going to have to solve it every time.
two4six0won@reddit
Pretty much. I was fine with solving weird problems. Like the lady whose laptop would 'turn off', any time she tried to type on it while working from home. Turned out that that particular model had an extra sensitive sensor, and the magnetic bracelet that the user wore at home was tripping that sensor and putting the laptop to sleep. I still take pride in figuring that one out, after L1s, L2s, and higher couldn't solve it. But if I have no access, I can't do the thing 🤷♀️
th3groveman@reddit
I had that same thing happen to me. User had a magnetic watch band and would 'close the lid' throughout the day. The other one I had was a user who reported his desktop would just shut off. Had Dell out to service the system twice, and it turned out the user had bought some cheap speakers on Amazon that would cause a short whenever they were plugged in. Binned the speakers and the problem vanished.
peaceoutrich@reddit
Access to what? What access? What kind of access are you looking for which would enable you to solve that?
two4six0won@reddit
You seem to have misunderstood the story that I wrote.
realgone2@reddit
When I was L1 I had pain in the ass L2 people. We'd have a website that shouldn't be blocked for example, but was. I obviously couldn't unblock it. I'd give the web address, the person's username and type "blocked showing the white screen that says reset". Which of course means the firewall isn't allowing access. They'd send it back asking for a screen shot of that white screen.
Gimme a fucking break.
Or they'd say I'd have to go to the user's PC and sit there while they remoted it. Now, mind you I could just give them the computer name and they can remote it and just notify the user they were working on their issue. I didn't need to do anything or be there. I'd have to sit there while they fumblefucked around trying to figure out what the problem is.
two4six0won@reddit
We may have worked for the same organization 🤦♀️🤣🤣
realgone2@reddit
We had one guy that always said "He didn't talk to users". So, that somehow justified me having to sit at the user's PC. I was like this guy's damn emissary.
Tarquin_McBeard@reddit
He says: "He doesn't talk to users"
His bosses say: "He doesn't talk to users... not since the incident."
BemusedBengal@reddit
And the users don't say anything because they were bludgeoned with a perfectly functioning mouse that just had a mismatched dongle.
nowildstuff_192@reddit
TBH, if I felt I had the leverage to refuse to talk to users, I'd do it too.
StellarSpore@reddit
I just focus on the people who are worth the time. The ones who show real interest, want to learn, and keep getting better. I make a point to point out their successes and skills to the team. A lot of us started in Help Desk and I have known some amazing Help Desk folks. Not everyone sucks. Everyone starts somewhere and everyone deserves a chance to move in the direction they want. I am always happy to put in the effort to help those people take the next step.
I also have to remind myself not to waste energy on the ones who stagnate. I try to put that frustration somewhere else instead of giving it to people who are not trying. And honestly, just push back, over and over and over again. If it is a bad escalation, push back. If there are no notes, push back. If the troubleshooting is garbage, send the ticket back. It is a good lesson for some people to learn. If nothing else, it annoys the shit out of them :)
Grouchy-Experience15@reddit
pretty much this.
We had two older guys on our team who were essentially looking for a cruisy stable job, not wanting to learn much or improve. and that was fine! i was able to give them the basic day to day tasks that were routine, and i knew they would get completed to prefection.
it allowed me to focus efforts and learning opportunities to the ones who wanted to move up, or specialise in a certain field.
Terrible_Mistake_862@reddit
Same. I mean, realistically speaking, I once needed to be taught how to use a spoon. If I can learn that, surely I can have the patience for other people to learn what they need to learn. We all started from zero.
I just came away from a client that had their own servicedesk. They said their own servicedesk was skilled enough. In truth, it's where people ended up who were close to retirement. I always left feedback like "where is the screenshot?" Or "you claim $problem. How did you verify/check/prove this?". 99 out of a 100 did not respond by learning/improving. But the 1 that did was amazing. Now I have a client where the servicedesk is our own. And they are amazing. They solve almost everything without my interference.
Deltrozero@reddit
This is the type of attitude I try to have as well. It's important to remember the barrier to entry for a service desk is much lower than for infrastructure level positions. That means you will naturally get a wide variety of work ethic levels, critical thinking skills, motivation, etc., from that group. Also most will just have less experience.
I certainly didn't approach problems the same in year 1 as I do after 10+ years. The advice and experience I got (and still get) along the way shaped how I'm able to solve problems. Like /u/StellarSpore said, focus on people worth your time, the people you can tell are trying and will listen to advice or constructive criticism.
It's not worth getting worked up over people who refuse to try to improve at their job. Do what you're required to do when dealing with them. Don't go out of your way to do their job for them, just professionally continue asking for the information they are expected to provide.
PlumtasticPlums@reddit
I honestly wasn't given advice. I started on a help desk for Pfizer sales reps and sales execs. They just kind of tossed us in and I swam rather than sank. I learned a lot from that job. I learned how to de-escalate, how to talk to users in general, how to glean important information from crumby docs, order of operations, and so much more. I was a very good crash course. I did that one year.
My first admin job was a level II job after the job above somewhere else. My approach was and still is - learn how everything works together. I was a third member of a team of three under our boss. My job was to be more of a middle person taking some things from each. But we were all same level.
I already had a decent grasp of MSSQL so I ended up taking a lot of the SQL stuff away from my boss. Which led to me learning how our web app worked - pages were views, data tables, processes SPs. If I needed to find data, I knew to look for the view based on the naming convention. From there, I could find the table.
From that I was able to build SPs that took 45-minute processes down to 5 minutes max.
This was when 365 was new too, and I did a lot of the leg work to move us into 365. Especially Exchange Online and archiving. And I had never done 365 before, granted no one had.
It boils down to approach and thinking big picture in my opinion. SD people don't often ask themselves big picture and use that to lay out the order of operations which leads them to a baseline.
tdhuck@reddit
Yeah, I think we are in a different time. When I first got into HD it wasn't just HD it was a full IT admin position, single admin (me) and a small company. While the company was small, they had a physical file server and a physical email server.
I knew nothing about backups, I knew nothing about security, I knew nothing about MS exchange and I knew very little about active directory. Guess what, you just figure it out. There were some notes left behind by the previous admin, which is better than nothing, but it was very basic. It was basically a dump of their work contacts and the notes field of the contacts had some info. Most was out of date and the out of date contacts were mainly services that were no longer used.
I quickly learned what happens when your exchange server runs out of storage.
I quickly learned what happens when you shutdown/reboot an exchange server and your mx records are pointed to your office WAN IP. Sure, this is fine if you have an on-prem appliance that can store your emails for you, but we didn't have that at that time.
I figured it out with google and reading forums and asking anyone I knew if they knew anything about the issues I was having.
That's why I sometimes get annoyed when a HD tech that's been at the same company for 7 years using the same systems for 7 years can't be bothered to do some basic troubleshooting before coming to me to ask me if the internet is disconnected at some remote office we have.
pdp10@reddit
Mail queues at the sender, and gets retried with an exponential backoff, if all of your MXes are offline.
Unless the sender is running Groupwise, or there's some similar bit of interesting business, but that's the sender's problem, not yours.
tdhuck@reddit
We had remote workers that had a connection to our exchange and would see errors because the server was offline.
Or if the owner was waiting on an email and saw there was a delay in receiving it, he knew something was up.
I agree with the retry stuff, but remember, I was new to all of this, I didn't know how things worked when the server was offline.
However, those experiences also taught me a lot of things.
Point being, when someone does all the work for you, you aren't going to learn, imo.
NEBook_Worm@reddit
Like you, i had to sink or swim with no real training on my first job.
I figured out real quick that 'big picture' matters. Learn how things work. Separately. Together. It will pay off.
When you're given projects early, its a test. Both of knowledge and time management. Get it done. It builds your rep. And never drop the ball / fail to finish something. That rep - good or bad - follows you
Dwokimmortalus@reddit
My first 'real' job was tier one phone support for Dell. We got no training, and most of us sat around and took calls with no computer, accounts, or access for more than 3 months. We took calls but literally couldn't do anything for the callers because most weren't troubleshooting calls, they were password resets and recovery.
No_Investigator3369@reddit
Oooh I did a stint at stream international that I forgot about supporting lattitudes and inspirons.
ChadTheLizardKing@reddit
It is also helpful to treat Service Desk as a valid career goal. Not many companies do that and I think it hurts the overall team in ways we notice and, in many more ways, that we do not.
As an example, an experienced and very competent SD team is helping to detect and triage problems the tooling misses. They may notice that users are providing different descriptions of a similar issue that they can package back to engineering as an actual engineering problem with logs, incidents, and evidence of "we think this may be a larger problem." An excellent SD tech will see a customer service issue that can be solved with a zero effort, no impact change that will reduce user friction; and they can de-escalate frustrated users so baskets of unrelated issues do not turn into the "CC of doom".
If there is no career future on the SD, anybody who can leave will get out as soon as possible. But, since we do not, most SD teams are made of "new to IT", "too incompetent to be trusted with anything important", or "getting out as fast as possible". They piss off users, they piss off IT staff, and, as the first line of contact for end users, they feed the image of an incompetent IT team. In principal, I have no issue with a highly experienced SD technician being paid as much, or more, than a similar systems engineer. It is just a different specialization and should be treated as such.
I have worked with good SD techs; though they are few and far between, they are worth multiples of their colleagues. But, because they are good, they inevitably start carrying the weight of everyone around them. The tragedy is that they actually love working on the SD and they are very, very good at it. But, structurally, there is no incentive for them to stay. So they do not. They burn out and leave the profession or they make sure they are promoted away from SD.
NEBook_Worm@reddit
In all my 25 years of IT work, I never considered this. I always thought of service desk as the "entry level", you shouldn't still be here in 5 years job.
But if a job is just a "starter" job, you're right; no one will ever truly good at it. And most will never care about...including the leadership team whose job it is to care.
Maybe we need to discard the idea of "starter jobs" completely. If you aren't willing to allow a job to be a career, how can you expect people to genuinely care about the job beyond the point where they've proven themselves capable of performing it to satisfaction?
This is an eye opener. Thanks.
Dwokimmortalus@reddit
I put in eight years in service desk and five as deskside. Loved every moment, but it certainly helped that we had an amazing client that put a large amount of trust and power in ours hands. If the pay wasn't unlivable, I'd go back to it. Being c-suite now is both insufferable and exhausting.
DeltaOmegaX@reddit
We were just told today not to push it back, because they're just kids. -smh- Some orgs genuinely see L1 IT as secretaries. It's the new secretary position. Congrats new grads, you can now has secretary job! /s
NEBook_Worm@reddit
These people may as well outsource help desk. Theirs will never become anything of quality anyway.
Or maybe they did outsource. Which would explain it.
NEBook_Worm@reddit
And more importantly, it annoys that person's teammates. And thus, eventually, their leadership team. Making it inevitably a self- correcting problem. Though that correction often takes far too long.
Thorogrim23@reddit
In my last job my director made it a point to rotate desks so more advanced people were always in the vicinity of the help desk. We could overhear calls that way. It gave us a chance to listen in and teach. It also gave us a chance to figure out who was right for the department and who was just there for a check.
In 13 years I saw a handful of really great people create an IT career for themselves. I feel a sense of pride I was able to help them when they were just coming up. Every one of them reached out when I got laid off last month.
I get where OP is coming from, but when we help people be better at their jobs/careers...it isn't just a professional thing, it is a human thing. People who call a help desk think it is manned by robots even when they talk to a person. This is expected, they don't understand that a help desk is a triage. It is the help desk that needs to know they will be treated that way.
No one goes in knowing this, it is up to the veterans of it to explain it. We have an obligation as "teachers " to make them aware of this. How they handle this is completely up to them. This is how you separate who is worth further help and who isn't right for the position they really want.
MrWally@reddit
That's such a good idea. In my office you can accurately guess a team's "seniority" based on how physically distant their desks are from the Helpdesk. The engineers and DBAs were on the absolute furthest corner away from the techs. That is....until they moved the Helpdesk into an entirely different building.
I feel sorry for the techs there now. They don't have Tier 3 and higher around to mentor and guide them. Back when I was a tech I really appreciated it when a Sysadmin would come over provide feedback or give context to how a system worked. Our new team has nothing like that.
More so, Tech Support is necessarily a "brain drain." Folks with talent and drive get promoted out of the service desk. So the "leadership" that they do have over in that building are the techs who haven't had the drive or motivation to leave or do anything else with their career. That sounds harsh, but it's just the facts. And they aren't mentoring the newbies. It's rough.
Appropriate_Art_3552@reddit
I think why most of the helpdesk don't learn as much as one could is that they don't have a grasp of the bigger picture of whats happening and they just start to troubleshoot blindly. I used to be one till I started moving up and expanding my technical perspective.
Techops837@reddit
I was lucky When I first started out in HD, our supervisor would do his best to help us understand the bigger picture so that we could better grasp the impact of changes being made and how it affected our day to day, that guy was a solid mentor. I was lucky to start in it under someone who was willing to teach me because I didn't knew much back then, now it's my turn to try and do the same with less experienced people!
tdhuck@reddit
Same. I tried helping a new guy in HD and after a year of holding his hand, I gave up. Now when he reaches out to me for an issue, I usually ignore it for a few hours or even a day (depending on my workload) and so far he either figured it out or he asks someone else for help and they help him.
Towards the end of the first year when I was training him, I would look at his ticket resolution notes and they would be something along the lines of:
I would politely bring this up when we had department meetings (and I do mean polite, I never used his examples or called him out). Everyone thanked me for my comments and nothing has changed since then.
I do agree there are good people in HD that want to do better and move on, but that's not for everyone.
Terrible_Working_899@reddit (OP)
Yeah I try to do this to as it was people like this that encouraged me to move from SD to where I am now. I posted this originally because I was in a ranty mood after an especially egregious incident that took most of my morning to resolve that could have been sorted quickly with the correct documentation.
waddlesticks@reddit
Yeah when I did a lot of the help desk I preferred the push back and additional troubleshooting steps. Sometimes you just miss or forget it when you're dealing with a lot of different types of issues during the day (essentially did l1/2 and sysadmins where l3, but we had over 100 tickets to myself a day and at the time there was nearly 100 different applications in use across the sites). Sometimes the information is new due to a change of operations that I wasn't made aware of and I can update a few things.
It's only really a problem if they just don't do the work. I get a lot of tickets because they decided instead of doing it on the phone they'd send somebody on site to look at the issue, which is just a few minute call to sort out that rubs me the wrong way now. Especially since I'm connected to the phone and mailbox so I know they aren't getting as much load as it was previously so they aren't exactly time crunched as it use to be
Grouchy-Experience15@reddit
i can see why the service desk i managed was overly qualified and well loved by the rest of the org:
- documented everything we did on every ticket
- developed Service desk SME's on different topics for escalations within our team
- worked closely with other teams to ask "what they did to fix issues" when we escalated, so we can fix next time
- focused on what people wanted to move to long term so i could assign them tickets that let them work with those teams.
because of the above, we had call wait times under a minute, closing out 3-400 tickets a day in our team, while also having time to work on new projects and it was awesome!
I miss my team...
No-Listen1206@reddit
It's almost the other way around, I'm on a service desk role doing L1/L2 and some L3 and all of my team documents quite well that we can pass between teach teams without issue.
redmage07734@reddit
Service desk is typically treated like crap and is a burnout role. Sho companies tend to pay them like shit and no one with any level of motivation or competence stays. It's literally designed that way
RabidTaquito@reddit
Now imagine that SD is going to get worse than ever, due to them all relying on Big Autocorrect to do their thinking for them. The future is grim, mate.
Legitimate_Put_1653@reddit
L1 support is measured by how many tickets they take on and how fast they close them. They have zero incentive to solve problems. In fact, most organizations effectively penalize them for taking time to solve a problem.
Budget-Consequence17@reddit
service desk can be a nightmare when documentation is sloppy and troubleshooting is minimal, and it’s no wonder good people try to move on fast
VirtualisedRage@reddit
It’s an unfortunate reality of many organisations t1 support. It’s seen as a low paying junior position and managing it is seen as a pedestrian role.
Even when I worked for a very well resourced IT department that was a big proponent of ITIL, the t1 group was still only really set up to triage within the SLA time and not encouraged to spend much time on an issue or do much remote support, to the point where a t1.5 desktop support team emerged.
There were a lot of contributing factors there, sure, but a big one was a certain unseriousness taken towards the role. Not treating it as a technical role with expectations of growth and professional development. That I see repeated everywhere.
TremendousCustard@reddit
I work on a team of 3 service desk staff in public admin that covers approximately 1200 people.
I do my best to troubleshoot and provide as much information as possible but am limited. Let me explain:
Colleague 1 is 21, mentally 13 and is sat on his phone most of the day. One of his tickets that he took via phone just says "JBL headphones". There is nothing else. No action, no activity. Most of his tickets are like this.
He hasn't even taken the asset name - we use TeamViewer and have to manually ask the user to read a 12 digit ID out on every single call as there isn't a way to integrate this that the org will pay for - so inevitably, I will have to call the user back and start it again.
(I also get scheduled to be in the office as someone needs to be present with him. Vague "he has ADHD", "boys will be boys" vibe. I am not a supervisor or manager and I am not a babysitter and I'm starting to resent it. My presence doesn't stop him using his phone. I have ADHD. I take medication for it and leave my phone in my bag.)
Colleague 2 has been on Service Desk for 5 years and is jaded and stuck on the processes of the manager who left 4 years ago. We do starters/transfers/leavers - each of these takes 45 minutes - again, no tools. However, he rushes starter accounts and marks things as done that haven’t been. I'm seeing a lot of tickets and phone calls where users don't have access to a system that is literally one of the activities/steps on the template.
The WORST part:
There is no push back on users to log a ticket. The phone is god - it's not moved on since 1999. We have a system - a god awful one, I might add - but there is the means of logging a ticket.
I am begging my line manager and the management above them to allow us to be empowered to say "log a ticket" and to stop having the phones as the first port of call.
Currently, I am trying to write up a previous ticket or ensure my screenshots are there and I've described everything for second/third line as best I can when the phone will go and we have to take it. Surprise, it's one of our daily callers who needs a password reset, or something changed or something that just shouldn't be a fucking phone call.
The constant context switching and distraction is absolute fucking insanity.
I do not have time to write KBs or sort the front side of our ticket system out to make it better for users to interact with. Starters/transfers/leavers fall behind and are delayed all the time - audit is showing this.
We just need to be empowered to ask users to log a ticket and then hide our number and only call us if you cannot get to the ticket portal (I.e an actual emergency). I am sick of being a scribe.
Learning from my colleagues or trying to show one of my colleagues how to do something is ALWAYS interrupted by a phone call because Margaret has an email she wants released or my presence on the phone has scared their device into working or someone needs a password reset on a system that takes 5 minutes for me to get signed in to the admin side on. Or a user WFH is having issues using a Citrix based system, even though we have told them their home Internet is far too shit for them to use it while WFH. AD has no self-serve function either as it's utterly broken, so you can imagine the amount of password calls ("oh, I only use my PIN - silly me, I don't do technology". Tough titties, these computer things have been in the office space for 30 years. Try saying you don't do cars when you're driving and get pulled over...).
Sometimes it's walk-ins - Service Desk is right by the door so people will just stare at us while we're on a call or working on something and then say "oh, I thought I'd come down, I get faster service this way'.
There's no boundaries. There is no "log a ticket".
We aren't made aware of changes that affect users and suddenly have an extra 200 phone calls/tickets that we don't know how to troubleshoot or people are angry because something has changed and they weren't told - yeah, us neither. (Our phone first priority means that even though there is a weekly whole of IT touch base, I'm in the Teams meeting for 2 minutes and have to drop out to take a phone call.) Either that or something gets introduced that we are not briefed on or trained on and... yeah.
I love learning how things work. I love learning from my colleagues on second and third line and trying to figure out ways so that things don't get escalated, to try and ask the right questions, or check certain things but I am not getting the time or headspace to remember to ask all the questions and sometimes can't get to providing all fo the info. I really do try.
Please bear with us. Some of us are doing the absolute best we can.
deadlyindedly@reddit
This might not be necessarily helpful, but one thing I've learned in this job over the years is just to accept things as they are and to let things fail. If they want phones to be first priority, then ok. So be it. If things fail because of it, well, ok. That was their choice. If they want to know why things are failing, ask them how they'd prefer you to prioritize your time. And if they're still shitty about it, then they're shitty, and why are you wasting your energy on a shitty job? Do what you need to do to not get fired and spend your energy outside your job (either on personal endeavors or learning skillsets to get you a better job where you're appreciated). But my god, learning to let things fail early on in my career would have saved me SO much burnout. Sometimes I only saw changes I in my jobs once things came apart because I was wasting my energy trying to prevent failure in a failing system.
kirashi3@reddit
Hands down this is the number 1 bane of my existence at literally every job I've ever attempted to hold... or held for X years until burnout eventually catches up with me. Almost all humans cannot actually multi-task; some of us are just really good at task juggling.
The rest of us end up in this constant washing machine of context switching caused by all kinds of distractions, some internal, some external, all of which make it impossible to get work done efficiently. And then on top of this, I'm told I should "manage my time better."
Excuse me? Kindly go away with that nonsense. Because nobody has easy access to see everything I work on / think about / touch / action in real time and/or they just don't ask if I'm busy before bursting into my day, I never feel like I've accomplished anything. It's exhausting.
I wish there was a good way to demonstrate how us Jack of All Trades folks (with or without mental health conditions) work effectively so that everyone can give us space when we need it. I'd imagine we would, in turn, have more "breathing time" to help others on the team, too.
Vakario@reddit
Exactly this.. ending each day feeling mentally worn from all the context switching, and then hardly anything of the significant things has been done. Pretty sure I've got an undiagnosed something, but this modern day notification spam, the general enshittification of everything including search engines, and the context switching doesn't help
DEADdrop_@reddit
I feel this deeply within my bones. I see you, fam.
777prawn@reddit
Fuck screen shots
Rude_Strawberry@reddit
When I was on support I was a senior persons wet dream. Barely escalated anything, researched everything, in my own time, fixed shit with no help during work hours. Had home labs, all sorts.
Now I'm 15+ years into my career, and an IT Director in charge of 25 staff, mixture of support, infra engineer, and a few managers. When I hear stories of how fucking lazy support are these days it pisses me off to the maximum. They have no drive, no common sense. Nothing.
Google... Google.... Google ... Or bloody AI these days. USE IT!
timbotheny26@reddit
I've found "AI" (namely Gemini) really useful for rubber ducking and bouncing ideas off of when I'm troubleshooting. I'll be doing traditional Google searches and scouring Reddit and other forums at the same time, but that process has helped trigger things in my brain that helped me figure out the issue.
captkrahs@reddit
I won’t stand for Service Desk slander
LasekxBruh@reddit
I'm in the service desk and I hate the service desk
SecurityHamster@reddit
See, my interactions with the service desk as a member of the security team has been great. I’ve coached them enough times that when they get an incident that’s going to come to my team, we have a lot of the necessary info already.
Point is don’t just expect the service desk to know. Theyre young and less experienced. Let them know what you need them to find out.
geegol@reddit
All our service desk does is create the ticket then send it to us. That’s it. No troubleshooting and the details are vague. Like “computer - issue” “staff member is facing issues with the computer” that’s it.
crankysysadmin@reddit
Our service desk drives me insane, and they're probably one of the better service desks I've ever worked with.
Given any decision they have to make, they will pick the wrong thing.
If something is best done by sysadmins at scale, they will go out in person and try to do it and muck it up.
If something is best done by them, they will escalate it to sysadmins.
They get butthurt if anyone points out they made a mistake and try to escalate it saying other teams are "mean."
We've had countless meetings with them and we just don't get anywhere. They write documentation and none of it makes sense.
Their most incompetent members are the ones who badger me the most about wanting to get promoted to sysadmins. I honestly told one of them that when a position opens it is highly unlikely anyone from the service desk would be considered and he really should look outside the company if he wants to be a sysadmin this bad.
gahhhh
Apprehensive-Pin518@reddit
the thing you have to remember about service desk is that anyone with real skill doesn't stick around very long. they will either be promoted or find a better job elsewhere. Sounds mean but it's the truth. we all started on Service desk though so be kind to them.
AndreiWarg@reddit
I am the solo infra dude for my area. I try to comment with enough detail to make it underdtandable both for the user, as well as for anyone from the team reading the ticket.
However, some tickets are just stupid or undescribeable. Like, guy sends in a ticket, saying his monitor is not working. I go there, look under the table, somebody unplugged the monitor from power and put their laptop charger there.
Now mind you, I have been in this company for years. I tried educating users, tried working with management, tried doing processes. They don't care. So I don't care. Like half the sites I manage don't even write tickets at all, they just grab working equipment from empty tables. Then they complain it is not working (duh, it is not interchangeable), then they steal more stuff. Over time the site is fucked, then our IT management and Ops management clash, then they bitch out local mgmt, they bitch out the users. I get a ticket to fix everything, spend 6 hours doing so and the cycle continues.
Appropriate_World265@reddit
Been in various IT support roles for 20 years, its not the level of knowledge, or your job title, its basic fucking communication skills! I have no idea how so many IT people haven't been sacked.
From helpdesk people who cannot string a sentence together, or figure out how to ask a simple question without waffling, to higher level people who have a massive chip on their shoulder who patronise and talk with such a condescending voice you just want to punch them in the face. Its baffling.
The few teams I've worked with that actually could communicate without infantilizing users, or knowledge hoarding about some obscure fix with their colleagues have been awesome. I really enjoyed those roles.
Currently on a contract with a big bank with about 20 others trying to migrate to Win 11 and sort all the app issues, network and policy changes that have been implemented without any communication to us.
Guess what we've just found out? That there's a massive wiki about all the unique apps they use that's been causing massive delays because no-one has any idea how they're set up. We've been there 5 goddamn months so far. No one can access the sharepoint site. Why? No idea. Why has not one person from the bank or the project team doing the migration brought this up before they brought everyone on site? No idea.
It's absolutely pathetic management and a totally insane "them and us" mind set, like this is overrunning by months and costing god know how much more than expected, why can't you just be normal human beings?
Bizarrely their service desk are the best people there, they will actually help you and fix stuff, it's the infrastructure and management teams who spend all day in pointless meetings I'm forced to attend whilst wanting to scream.
Defconx19@reddit
Try being a really strong generalist and having everyone in every department come to you to figure out the shit they can't. You quickly learn its not just help desk, its people suck as a whole :P
bdc999@reddit
Then train them / hire better people. They have to start somewhere
thepfy1@reddit
Our went through a phase of closing tickets with "advice given" and nothing else. The users then visited our office for help.
Enough_Pattern8875@reddit
You’re reinforcing negative stereotypes based on your own personal experience.
There are shitty service desk workers and shitty engineers and architects at every level of IT.
You come off as someone who was recently promoted to a junior admin role who now feels superior and better than their former team.
I haven’t worked a service desk in over 15 years now, but I don’t shit on them and I respect and appreciate the role they play in the organization.
Just wait until you have some experience working in the public sector. You’ll quickly realize your job title/seniority doesn’t correlate with how skilled or motivated someone is.
mondayp@reddit
Not to mention that, naturally, the most talented/competent people tend to (not always) get promoted out of help desk. This is a structural issue with the entire idea of an "entry level" position.
HotTakes4HotCakes@reddit
That's like 80% of this sub.
discogcu@reddit
100 agree with this.
Trust me. Of lot of sys admins think the same about cyber security .
vCentered@reddit
I'll just reinforce that there are lots of shitty engineers and as an engineer they make my life so much more difficult than shitty service desk.
TheRealLambardi@reddit
My favorite…big US help desk NOC has been “working a NAC port issue for 6 weeks”. I get pulled in and 5 minutes into a call ai ask….show me interface and log stats….because there is nothing in ticket history other than customer (me and my team) provided client side logs.
Logging was never turned on…switch confirms this (and hasn’t been rebooted or cleared and this is after they said “NAC logs are too hard to read”
i physically said out loud…”what is it that you said you do here?” .
PC509@reddit
Hopefully, this was communicated to them and brought to the managers attention. It's a very common thing I see, but when you bring it up they seem to either fix it and at least try and do better or they completely ignore you. We had a manager that eventually told people straight up what to put in a ticket and the "did some stuff" was not part of it. Detailed. And, when a solution was done with the details, he'd make it part of a KB so it was well documented.
I feel a lot of the annoyances I have with the SD are similar and no matter how much communication there is, they just don't want to improve or change things. So, they're still there. Year after year...
henk717@reddit
I avoid that frustration on my job in exchange for a different one. My job is at a small company so I am doing both sysadmin stuff and servicedesk stuff. So its not frustrating when I am the one troubleshooting, I enjoy that. It is frustrating however if I am tryjng to finish some sysadmin work in time and get interrupted by servicedesk work but usually if its critical time wise I can let them go and my colleagues let me. They know that on the days I don't have sysadmin tasks in my domain I take all calls so they can do their stuff.
Slooneytuness@reddit
we have a guy on our service desk who calls computers “CPUs” and a user’s network password their “NT password”, he doesn’t do any documentation or anything and his tickets are just plain bad. most of our SD—nay—ALL of them suck at their job and it’s basically L2 support’s job to fix their mistakes AND our users’ issues.
robmillerfl@reddit
Geez, how is this guy?
ClungeWhisperer@reddit
Amen brother
DarkRedMage@reddit
I started on an IMAC (Install Move Add Change) team, eventually moved into a L2 support role, and currently working as L3 specializing in Infrastructure (Network, Firewall, Virtualization, Storage). Each role at a different company.
In my current role I get random questions from our L1/L2 team like "User X is having issues connecting to Zoom, could the firmware update from last night cause this issue?"
I'll try to explain things at most twice to the same tech, after that I'll just give up and do the absolute minimum to help with resolving the issues they're running into.
lonrad87@reddit
I work in Desktop Support so a step up from ITSD, we have required details in some cases for a ticket to come our way. If it's not there we just send it back to ITSD, I sent one back yesterday as the agent failed to provide 2 key details required for my team to work on the ticket.
There are times where I've reached out to agents to give them a bit of advice and information. Which is mainly around when a manager is chasing a device for a new starter and the request is still within SLA.
Substantial-Fruit447@reddit
Yeah. Or escalating tickets to the Network team when it's not a network problem, it's a user device problem.
millamans2000@reddit
It’s always the networks fault…
Ihaveasmallwang@reddit
I thought it was DNS
No-NotLikeThat@reddit
It's both, but also neither
cwm13@reddit
No phrases more certain in IT.
vCentered@reddit
I've got engineers that do this claiming a network outage that somehow only affected a specific feature of their app that rides all the same interfaces as the rest of the infrastructure.
This is usually after their third party support consultant has told them their error report of "connection loss" meant there was a network outage. This is the beginning and the end of their investigation.
NEBook_Worm@reddit
Said it before, but - 5 years. If your service desk personnel aren't promoted or in a Senior / Lead role after 5 years, you need to let them go. For your sake and theirs.
By year 5 on service desk, one of two things will have happened. You will have proven yourself capable and motivated, and will have received a promotion. Or, you'll be a burnt out husk unwilling to do than the bare minimum necessary to stay in your seat, and a net drain on everyone you work with, as well as your organization.
Could exceptions exist to this general rule? Sure; i know one. I know 3 more around them that prove the rule, mind you. But I do know of obe exception. That said, very few people should ever start year 6 of their IT career aa tier 1 service desk. Doing so is often an indication of someone not in a good place, who will become a drain on everyone.
twatcrusher9000@reddit
Having been through it, maybe you should mentor them instead of shitting on them.
zoidao401@reddit
Service desk is your entry level, so it's your filter.
People get hired, the shutters stay, most of the decent ones move up.
CAPICINC@reddit
If their metric is closing tickets, and they can close 5-6 tickets more a day if they don't document, guess what the motivation is?
PompeiiSketches@reddit
In my experience most people on the service desk never move out of end user support. To them it’s just a job, not the start to a career. So they do the bare minimum and develop all sorts of services desk shenanigans to get out of work.
Soft_Temptressss@reddit
Man the “we did some troubleshooting” with zero detail is my personal villain origin story. Half the tickets I get are basically riddles because nobody writes down what they actually touched. At this point I’d take a napkin drawing over the blank nothing we usually get.
mineral_minion@reddit
"Broke. don't work" - escalation ticket from last week.
r_keel_esq@reddit
A lot of people in IT started their career on the Service Desk.
But, all the people who are really good at Service Desk eventually move on to other roles (2nd or 3rd Line Support, Change/Problem/MI management, actual management etc) so this means that 60-80% of your Service Desk crew are mediocre at their job (on a good day)
You don't notice this too much when you're in the SD because you're busy doing the job well - you'll think that Maureen two desks over is a bit useless, but it's nothing catastrophic. But it's when you move further up the ticket chain that you see how much crap the SD chuck over the fence.
Muted-Designer1307@reddit
Goes both ways. Im L2 and Ive had things passed with no troubleshooting which is annoying. On the other side i have done all the troubleshooting as L1 and passed it to L2. L2 proceeds to pass back saying I haven’t done a step I have clearly done. Essentially just fobbing off work.
knifebork@reddit
A long time ago, I worked on a project where the company had a sales force activity tracking system built for them and was rolling it out to people all across the country. This was eons ago, prior to much use of Windows 3.x or cell data networks, so we were working with MS-DOS laptops and nightly sync of data via dial-up. I don't know if that matters much.
We were trying to set up a help desk. This tended to attract applicants who aspired to become either system administrators or programmers and hoped this would be a good 1st step. However, they didn't like this and often didn't last more than a couple of months. I can't blame them. This job was neither system administration nor programming. It didn't feel like a stepping stone. While there were tech support aspects, it wasn't tech heavy. It was more customer support.
I had some contacts with people at a customer service / help line for a company that had products like home electronics, small appliances, major appliances, and even light bulbs. They could help people through a lot of tasks and questions like setting the clock on a VCR or is Corelle microwave safe. We started hiring some of their employees away. It wasn't hard to teach them the computer/tech part of our help desk job. They took to this job very well, they enjoyed it, and they were very successful at it.
I think the industry needs to consider what type of people to hire for Help / Service Desk.While they're an important part of an IT organization, not everyone in the IT organization should have engineer aptitudes (and stereotypical social skills).
plumbumplumbumbum@reddit
We hounded our Service Desk team about better ticketing including what troubleshooting steps they used and providing screenshots so now my new pet peeve is screenshots that are so narrowed down to just the error they cut out any context for what else is going on on screen. Most of the time I cant even tell what application is erroring out or even what OS its running on...
Genesis2001@reddit
I've heard that a lot of the time, the good ones get promoted out of service desk, leaving only the bad ones who can barely scrape by. No clue how true it is.
Proper_Front_1435@reddit
The problem with service desk is that anyone whose any good as service desk will be immediately moved off of service desk.
WolfMack@reddit
Crazy that an entry level position contains people with entry level skills.
Akamiso29@reddit
I have a small team - there are just two under me.
Both of them always send screenshots, tell me what the initial issue is, how many people are affected and what they have tried and why it didn’t work.
After reading this topic, I’ll tell them how much I appreciate their efforts once again. I gambled on personality match hires twice and it paid off massively both times.
paradox1920@reddit
And I would add that sometimes it can also be a two way street. I have seen service desk do exactly what OP says majority of them are lacking but higher tier IT level come back asking what did they do for troubleshooting or something like that as if they did not read any of the notes or just saw them but didn’t want to try to understand even if it was written intelligibly.
Pacers31Colts18@reddit
I was lucky and was able to move off desktop support into a sysadmin role. It saddens me that there doesnt seem to be much of a pipeline for promotions in IT. Having to move companies shouldn't always be the answer. I dont get it honestly.
LINAWR@reddit
Pay peanuts, get monkeys. No one is willing to invest in their SDs and wonder why they suck ass. Any of the skilled ones also typically move out to higher infra roles
Windows95GOAT@reddit
When you realise the majority of the workforce on our planet is just waiting out the clock. You realise your servicedesk is no different.
Also; Pay peanuts, get monkeh.
Malcolm_Flex@reddit
This is Exactly why I had to move companies in order to be promoted to Sys admin from HD, no raise no job title change no prospect of moving to the SA team just helpdesk tech. I could do it all and would’ve taken the load off the SA teams projects just for a damn TASTE of something else, but nope just treated like I was useless and stupid and couldn’t possibly grace the elite sys admins such as yourself. Instead of ranting and being mad make changes to help them help you in order for the new ones to understand better, allow a tech to sit with you for an hour or so a week to show them why you need the proper documentation, show them your work load, I know you have better things to do but the end users are why you’re getting paid my man and the SD are the guys who have to deal with them call after call after call, pushing back tickets constantly only gets people nowhere, you don’t have to take calls anymore so like what’s there to be mad at these guys are your frontline of defense so you can do those special projects.
SaladRetossed@reddit
The ones that just read the script suck. When I was a L2, I once had a ticket escalated to me where the L1 tech completely drove into the problem. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen escalated to me. No script, no bad notes, nothing like that. Just pure step by step break down. I asked my boss "hey why can't L1 do basic troubleshooting over the phone like this". "It's not their job".
A lot of them suck but oh my god the good ones deserve a giant hug and someone to fight for them to get into a higher position. Even the ones that suck are probably just doing what they need for a paycheck. I can't blame them.
The_Wkwied@reddit
I've noticed that the more 'we did some troubleshooting, pls fix' happens when technicians have less access than they should.
If, for example, a ticket comes in from t1 saying that a user's profile is stuck on a server and is preventing them from getting logged in to a new one, I've found that it's because t1 doesn't have the ability to resolve this on their own.
"Hey infra, user's profile is stuck on a server again. All the same things are happening from these 4 linked tickets, and we don't have the ability to boot the profile or id which vd the profile is stuck on. Or why. Pls fix, we can't. We literally can't"
Is the issue escalated to you something that they genuinely can not fix? Should they be able to?
Is there a record of like problems not being troubleshot, because they can't resolve it and they need to escalate to you?
What troubleshooting steps do you want t1 to do before they bug you? Have they done this? Do they know how to do these? Can they do these? Get with the helpdesk boss and sort out a method of troubleshooting.
I've literally seen cases where helpdesk people can literally only reset/unlock accounts and only have a standard user account everywhere. Everything had to be escalated through an infra team, because the leader of infra at the time was a too-seasoned-goon who was paranoid about allowing other groups to do their job. It didn't last, but it went on for at least a few months.
It could be a training issue, sure. Or it could be a 'our hands are tied and we don't know what else to do' issue, too.
jedipiper@reddit
If the ticket does not have enough information, I kick it back to HelpDesk. I don't do any follow-up with the user until I'm satisfied with what HelpDesk has done. I try to, very passive-aggressively, make them do their jobs. It works in my org's culture.
th3groveman@reddit
I actually really enjoy the customer service aspects of service desk and desktop support, as well as the troubleshooting and documentation to improve service over time, but you can't make six figures working it, so you have to move up.
223454@reddit
HD has always been used as the entry into IT, not a true team like security, network, etc, so most places don't want to pay much for those positions and some other IT people treat HD poorly. So a good HD person will do their best to get out of it. Plus, the more varied experience you get in IT, the easier it is to troubleshoot.
Automatic-Two-1583@reddit
this post is hilarious.... because it's so true. IT skill gap is upon us.
DEADdrop_@reddit
Man, some people get so fucking lucky to be lifted out of Service Desk. I’ve been stuck doing this shit for almost 15 fucking years.
Doesn’t help that my shitty town doesn’t need any engineers, apparently. Wife and kid won’t be willing to move. Having a wife and kid also means I don’t have the time to get on courses and shit, and even if I had time, I don’t have the money, because SD pay is shite.
Some of you guys need to realise how lucky you’ve been in your careers, man.
All the level 1 guys I’ve ever met having been trying so fucking hard for you guys. Be chill and explain the process. Us SD peeps are getting it in the neck from these users, but you guys get a level of disconnect from them.
altodor@reddit
A good service desk is absolutely invaluable. A bad service desk makes more work than there would be if they didn't exist. A suspect a lot of these folks harping on the service desk have the latter and not the former.
badwords@reddit
Where is the service desk manager in your promotion path? I do see how people getting promoted past manager if they are allowing the service desk to remain in such a chaotic state?
PositiveBubbles@reddit
Any team that is chaotic is one to move out from. If managers don't promote their staff/ allow them to grow or neglect taking a look at everything/ one they manage is a bad sign.
Even if managing is delegating and i don't mean delegate to SMEs or the same people either, necessarily. If you keep doing the same thing over and over and expect the same results then that's not a good sign.
insomniacultra@reddit
IMO most SDs are backward. You should have seasoned people taking the calls. Why you ask? If you've done L1 ts in the field and are real good at it you should be able to walk any end user thru simple things like clearing a browser cache, checking connectivity etc. Further you should have the knowledge and experience to know when to escalate and what info needs passed. Of course good remote access software
PositiveBubbles@reddit
Seasoned people get burned out and frustrated/ bored from not using their skills or being able to develop and grow If they're on a Servicedesk and the manager doesn't encourage them or allow them to be promoted.
This also happens at every level as well. People need to have a variety and change. I understand your reasoning from a knowledge and experience perspective, however good IT teams have good, clear documentation and processes.
Alot of issues mentioned by IT staff, especially on this sub come down to how operations are managed.
pinion13@reddit
Yeah I mean, they generally pay service desk people just enough to do their job and not go any extra mile, what do you expect.
Opening_Ad7004@reddit
I used to support multiple million sqft warehouses and the help desk would just leave the warehouse manager's name and a brief description of the problem.
I guess I'll just walk around for 3 hours. Like could you ask any follow up questions?
fadinizjr@reddit
SD forwarded the following to me (a LVL 3 Microsoft Senior Analyst): User is unable to print at printer xxx.
Attached is a screenshot of a message error stating that the printer spooler service is stopped.
So, you might guess why nobody likes SD...
loupgarou21@reddit
My biggest frustration was stuff being escalated to me that 100% should have been handled by tier 1 support.
"This user can't connect to wifi, I've checked everything else, so wifi (network) is broken" "wifi is broken? are other people having trouble connecting to wifi?" "no, just this user, but it's definitely a network problem" "did you try updating/reinstalling the wifi driver?" "Wifi driver is already all the way up to date, it's the network" "um... this computer is missing the wireless driver, I installed it and now it's working fine."
Ruachta@reddit
Tier 1 are generally operators. The ones that are good end up going up to l2 pretty quickly, and the rest sit in limbo at tier 1 and answer the phones/chat/email tickets and generally move them along.
But yea, most can't be bothered with asking the 5 W's and writing it down in the ticket.
Crazy-Finger-4185@reddit
The reason you didn’t understand, is the same reason you made it out of the pits.
zephalephadingong@reddit
My favorite is when they attach screenshots of things that shouldn't be screenshots. Like lists of users or devices. They have the right intention, but don't think that someone might like to copy and paste those lists as opposed to typing each entry one by one
hmtk1976@reddit
There´s internal SD and external SD. The former is often... troublesome while the latter tends to simply make me go nuclear. Typically external SD is 99% populated by people who even barely manage to follow their flow charts and struggle with basic English skills. The problem is not bad people but unskilled people and the pressure of above all working within (badly defined) SLA´s. At my current customer, SD and even external L2 and L3 manage to achieve 100% (100, not 99,99 but 100) on their SLA because they know perfectly how to game the system. Yet everyone knows their support sucks.
collinsl02@reddit
Is there any way you can get involved to change/set their KPIs in the future? Setting sane/reasonable KPIs which have had some thought put into them behind the scenes from people who have to support the support often means that the new KPIs will become useful and you'll get better support from the suppliers.
Or, they'll double/triple the price of the contract or refuse to bid, but at least if you can't get an external service then you may have to have an internal one which can use your KPIs.
hmtk1976@reddit
LOL no. I work for a financial institution, SD is with Capgemini.
poizone68@reddit
I've worked L1 to L3 support myself, and the problem as I see it is that Service Desk is always considered a junior support role. This means that the pay and motivation to stick with the role is very low, and you end up with staff who didn't find another job (yet). Everyone's satisfaction with the Service Desk suffers as a result.
The other problem is that there are perverse incentives for not doing a great job as an L1. If an L1 person is measured against how many customer contacts they had, they will be best served by only doing password resets and account unlocks, while time-consuming issues are just sent with cursory information to L2. This is also true on days where they are understaffed or fatigued due to a major outage.
If the organisation does customer satisfaction surveys (and I've done QA on this sort of thing), people are going to rate an L1 support great on issues where they got their password reset quickly. If the same L1 person was on the call with the client for 30 minutes to solve a printer or VPN issue, the customer is just less happy because it took 30 minutes.
This is also why L1 often don't read documentation. There is little incentive to do this unless it would help them get off the phone quicker with a customer. Similarly, asking them to check every day if L2 or L3 finally created documentation to solve issues that have been recurring over the past year is just not reasonable IMHO.
My approach to this as an L3 was to join the Service Desk weekly calls if I had the time or anything to share. This allowed me to see if there was some automation I could come up to solve some issues, and to educate on where new automation, procedures and documentation had been put in place. People respond much better if they're taken seriously as a co-worker.
SeaworthinessOk7756@reddit
Ticket escalated from SD yesterday:
"[Department] needs processor connected to server."
I'm sorry, what?
Curi0usJ0e@reddit
I can only speak about what I have seen personally, and it’s that they need to have a prescribed script for an issue already. Most of the time if it’s something they have never seen or don’t have documentation already, they basically give up on any troubleshooting and escalate.
I would also blame the KPIs that the management track to determine productivity for the support team. Are they looking at the quality of the work and how someone figured out an issue that no one could or just looking at the number of tickets closed? If it’s the latter, then why would the support team spend time on difficult tickets rather than working on the things that’s easy to solve?
sheikhyerbouti@reddit
My company expanded their Help Desk team, and brought in cheap contractors to support the Help Desk staff already in my building.
Simply put: if it's not a password reset, they escalate it without any troubleshooting - even issue that are within their area of service.
About 1 in 10 tickets I get from the Service Desk get kicked back down because of lack of troubleshooting, or worse.
Tb1969@reddit
/squints at blurry image "Is that a misconfiguration or evidence of bigfoot"
In front of the entire SD team, I would compliment people on specific acts of thorough troubleshooting and documentation of a problem.
I'd also encourage there be leads on the SD Team that are paid well instead of moving them out of SD too quickly.
I would point out behind closed doors incidents in which tickets are not thoroughly tested and documented. If it continues from the same SD engineers then make the entire Team how they aren't meeting the requirements. Who ever is managing the SD teams needs to improve the culture from within.
CommanderApaul@reddit
The worst offenders for us are some of the T2 staff. There's a complete lack of intellectual curiosity or desire to learn anything and the amount of "no troubleshoot, only fix" tickets where we provide actionable guidance that come back up 15 minutes later asking for an object name for a break/fix replacement vs actually fixing the problem is nuts.
Yesterday, we had a bitness-based Office suite install issue for a user that has the Access 2016 database engine installed. The error message explicitly tells you how to handle it. It was escalated three times. First with the error and no troubleshooting notes, we provided explicit instructions on how to fix it along with a couple URLs to reference. Second time with "Office is uninstalled but I still get the error", and we pulled the installed apps list from Defender to show that the DB engine is a separate installation from Office. Third time it came back up asking for a break/fix replacement.
For a goddamn Office installation issue.
requiemofthesoul@reddit
The minimum I demand are screenshots. Like what is even the point if they send in a ticket with just random text that doesn't even explain the issue and no screenshots of what's going on at all. Just skip the middleman and pay me the salary of the L1s. Also, I work in Japan but have an international L2 and up team, and the L1 agents are mostly Japanese. They try to hard to write things in English, and all meaning is lost. They know I can understand Japanese, but they still keep doing this over and over again.
i8noodles@reddit
u should never have hard demands from the L1 staff because they cant escalate it if they cant get it.
you ask for screenshots and it seems like a reasonable demand, but what if they are unable to get them? what if they are unable to remote into a system and the other side doesnt have teams to send it through? the hoops they would have to go through to get that screenshot is beyond what u should expect.
give them a check list. ask for them to get as much of it as possible. get them to give a reason why they cant get that information
Turbojelly@reddit
Chronicals from George
Ok_Conclusion5966@reddit
they all start off somewhere just like you did
now imagine everyone treated you like shit and they didn't promote you to l2/3 then didn't give you a chance in cyber, you'd be low paid, treated like shit with minimal choices to move upwards
rather take a mentorship role to those that show skills and output with the desire to learn
spin81@reddit
A buddy of mine is in his 30s and transitioning into IT, he's starting at a service desk because it makes sense as a starting point. I told him two things: firstly that if you're a good agent, you can really make a positive difference in people's day, and secondly that if you're able to open a ticket and literally just read what it says, you're already better than a surprising number of other agents, even experienced ones.
Ashamed-Button-5752@reddit
Service desk can be rough because the good ones move on fast and the gaps they leave behind show up in every ticket you touch
Muted-Part3399@reddit
I work T1. create escalation standards. they are not just allowoed to say "we did troubleshooting" they gotta detail the steps and preferably feature screenshots
they should also have to link to sites and documentation that they used for troubleshooting.
Bittenfleax@reddit
Helpdesk put the hairs on my chest. My colleague, someone getting on in life, did pull his weight, but was jaded/frustrated, would outburst in rage a few times a week. Rather unhappy chap.
But he would tell me and nudge me often; get your skills and move up/sideways. He was trapped and didn't want young me to fall into the same path. I think without that experience I may have fell into the trap and not tried.
After 1.5 years, I had opportunities to start going on site with seniors. Did that, got tedious after 2 years.
Found a niche of customers asking for bits outside our scope (this was in the mass cloud migration). Account managers saw pound signs, I saw an opportunity to learn.
4 years after that, I left and started the career path I enjoy.
I was lucky short form content wasn't a thing then and accessible on a phone. But I did have a gaming/YouTube addiction which I could not tend to at work fortunately.
If you've knackered your brain with dopamine saturation, I can imagine mustering the motivation to reach escape velocity is a lot harder.
Drywesi@reddit
Back when I was doing first line tech support, I used to get in trouble for writing too detailed of escalation notes. They wanted one line, 100 characters or less, preferably less than 50.
That doesn't work with recording steps.
donrosco@reddit
Honestly L1 and L2 have a harder job than me on 3rd line. They have to deal with people more, they’re more harshly judged on numbers, they have less access, they’re paid less…L3 has its difficulties but at least we get to work on more fun problems in general and have time to dive deep.
kammerfruen@reddit
I remember starting out in Service desk and during the first week we received Citrix training from a guy from the 2nd level Citrix team, teaching us the basics of virtualization in regards to Citrix Receiver.
He started off by thanking us, saying that he knows how busy servicedesk often is and how stressful the work environment can be, when you have to take phone calls all day non-stop.
He was always friendly and helpful whenever I reached out to him for Citrix related questions after that day, while other 2nd level people (mind you not everyone) sometimes didn't even bother replying, tried to deflect the issues/tickets I brought to their attention or were downright rude to me, making the job in service desk so difficult when I had to assign tickets to the correct 2nd level teams.
Fast forward 15 years and now that I am the 2nd level person, I always keep this in mind - and always go that extra mile for people in service desk whenever I can.
Saying you hate service desk is so toxic - remind yourself how busy they are at times and just bounce the ticket back to the person, asking them to put in the required information.
Personally, I find that it helps to improve their quality going forward, which ends up benefitting me as well.
Candid_Ad5642@reddit
I think most of us started with a tour or more in Helldesk. Almost like it is (or at least used to be) a rite of passage
And when it comes to shit like missing troubleshooting, documentation of the issue or similar, the fix is to return the ticket with some requirements for the HD agent to fix before escalation. A few rounds of that will make the SD agent understand (maybe understand what they need to do before passing the ticket, maybe understand that It is not for them, either way solves the issue)
If it's in the internal documentation, add a link to that
And if you get the ticket back with the required information, fix the issue and consider adding that to the documentation (One off, will never happen again, just make sure the fix is detailed in the closing notes of the ticket. Common issue, document properly, so you can refer the next SD agent to that)
Corona-@reddit
I like about service desk that i know what i am up to against, it's some 30-60yo mostly boomer person that doesn't really know how a computer works or how to convey the important information, but i can work around that because i know most people at the company and know their level of tech illiteracy. Sure it is frustrating sometimes if they are angry or refuse to share information i ask for, bit most are just very thankful when i solve their issues. It's not much but it's honest work meme
Geminii27@reddit
A lot of it is employers taking on anyone in the SD role rather than filtering for quality of work, or failing to provide any kind of training once hired.
Gadgetman_1@reddit
I work mostly L2 support, and netork/server work, but also did Helldesk work once upon a time...
In my Organisation we only have 4 - 4.5hour shifts on the phone. The other part of the day is for follow-ups, documentation and study.
We have a rather extensive Wiki that explains every system we have, what it depends on, common issues, and who is the owner and responsible users for them.
With over 400 systems in use at any time, and heaps of discontinued ones(nothing gets deleted before it's absolutely certain no one will ever need it again), yeah, it has taken more than a decade to compile.
Also, new Helldeskers spend 2 weeks just studying before they're let loose(supervised) on unsuspecting users.
Only half days on the phone leaves the operators 'still alive' at the end of the day, so burnout isn't an issue.
We tend to lose some operators at around the 2year mark, though. Those are the fresh out of school types that gets headhunted to large companies with better pay, to run their support system. Others get transferred to specialist groups, so there's always some fresh meat on the phones.
Sometimes I get those 'we did some thing but couldn't fix it' tickets, and yeah, I will contact the operator and ask what they did and to tell them to document it. I'm not going to contact the user before I know it, (it looks unprofessional to repeat whatever that helldesker did) though. not unless that operator has a history of crapping on tickets. Then I'll compile a list of his recent tickets and complain to his manager. Yeah, I can be a bit of an ass sometimes.
In cases where I believe the Helldesker should have been able to fix the issue, I will also contact him/her and explain what was wrong and how to diagnoe and fix it. Some of my messages have been 'refined' (fixed typos, more polite wording, screenshots and so on) and added to the wiki.
I don't hate the Helldeskers. some are good, some are just there because they needed a job. Yeah, some suck unleaded gasoline... You wouldn't believe some of the complete assholes working in L2/L3 some places.
Anyway, support is a team sport. without backing from L2/L3 or any of the other players how can L1 help win the day?
Human-Budget3804@reddit
SD guy here, totally agree that majority are careless and not even IT people who just do bare minimum or less to reach the 5 pm and go home. (been trying to free myself from this cage but job market aint helping lately)
_redcourier@reddit
Assign the tickets back to them and say it can't be escalated until proper evidence of troubleshooting has taken place.
Responsible-Slide-95@reddit
I feel your pain. Came up from SD myself and there are always two types.
The first, I cherish and encourage. They troubleshooting the issue, investigate problems and come up with solutions and document their findings if they find fixes to common problems and add to the KB. I tend to only get tickets from these people if they're genuinely stumped or the solution requires access privileges they don't have. The others I call 'log and floggers'. They take the bare minimum ( sometimes even less) and just pass the ticket to myself or another group. I've had tickets thst just say "Problem with computer" no description, no machine name, often no contact details. In those cases, I pass the ticket straight back with a note telling them to actually work the problem and provide usable information.
I got one tech written up for passing the same ticket back to me multiple times without putting in any of the information I asked for.
The user was a subsidiary company of ours and we do not have access to their laptops. They're not on our network either as they work off the public wifinof the building they're in. The user said they couldn't connect to the public WiFi. Tech just passed it straight to me because "I can't remote onto their laptop" I passed it back saying "Neither can I, please do basic wifi troubleshooting before passing back" Three times he put thst ticket back in my queue with no further notes till I went to his desk and said "if that ticket turns up in my queue again without the requested information, you and I will be having words." Then reported him to the SD manager.
Meanwhile the guy next to him pipes up with "while your here, I've hot a call about an error with this software." I ask him to try a couple of things and if that doesn't work to pass the ticket. Sure enough, suggestion #2 fixed the problem. User happy, tech now knows how to fix the problem if it reoccurs. (Note, the solution wasn't in the KB because it was new software we were testing out and still documenting)
faziten@reddit
The problem for me is in how service desk is thought out. Imho ITIL did some serious damage. You can't possibly take tickets as something that its whole purpose is to close with an sla or else. that's why support was dropped entirely from the name and became a shell service
Support is about helping people with something. That something may need a reboot or a production hotfix and several weeks of back and forth, understanding the customer needs, dialing in all the necessary links of the chain and even then it may need closure, damage control,etc.
But the overly contract based approach, creates different incentives for people inside the service desk.
At some point in the flow from L1 to L2, 3 etc the phrase "it's not my job" was thrown at something that was originally helping out someone do or fix something.
if you are in upper layers and you see someone not do or do something wrong, teach them how to do better.
If the though of "not my job" crosses your mind, you are slowly forgetting what this is all about. Don't blame you though. The chain of responsibility is somewhat deshumanizing after many years of the same drill going on and upper mgmt isn't helping either (probably)
Geek_Wandering@reddit
"we tried it, but we got an error." -- every goddamn escalation
bentley_88@reddit
Service desk is a proving ground that either makes you or breaks you. sounds like you learned the hard way why documentation actually matters.
Terrible_Working_899@reddit (OP)
Yeah, my first day on SD I got reemed out by a network engineer for not documenting what troubleshooting steps I had done. I ended up creating troubleshooting checklists/templates for all the common issues I found and then got the rest of my team to adopt them
ycnz@reddit
IT Manager here. A busy service desk is a much harder job than a lot of people assume. It's also meant to be a stepping stone to progressing. Imagine how your L3 people felt about you on your worst day when you were learning.
AWalkingITNightmare@reddit
You missed out the 'can' to be bothered to read the ticket, so will just assign the ticket to the infrastructure team' service desk person.
Because an unplugged MFD printer requires level 3 support 😑
JimmyTheGeek64@reddit
I’ve done SD for 20+ years and always try to document extensively.
I did support for Starbucks for a while. Their saying was “if it’s not in the ticket notes it didn’t happen.”
I like to document well so that if someone else on the team gets a ticket with the same problem they can see what I did.
The
Intelligent-Emu3932@reddit
Our Service Desk was Great once! We had one Big costumer and 5 People that did Support only for that company. Everyone of them with IT Background, so the Quota of Calls and Tickets that for solved on the Spot was >90% and After that no stupid Questions got asked.
Now it is a shitshow. We bundled them with other SD Teams for Cost Reduction, good Ones moved out of SD that Moment and now the Rest does Not know what nslookup or Ping does and that it is Hard to Trace a Client in a network without MAC, IP or at least a Hostname. The drop in quality is insane
nixie001@reddit
You are looking at it wrong. It goes both ways. Servicedesk might not be giving you revel at information or troubleshooting steps but higher level support or similar often don’t document solutions to recurring problems. I work in servicedesk for like 14 years and did some higher level and team lead roles during those years. Documentation is always the problem in both ways.
moistpimplee@reddit
lol this happens to every single level. ive met shit cybersecurity who do nothing but offshore their work to service desk. ive seen sysadmins not document or communicate with the team, shit screenshots, notes, etc. ive seen shit micromanagers, focusing on the KPI's too much, etc etc.
Hasuko@reddit
Your SD actually does troubleshooting? I just get tickets forwarded to me because they read that the end user said it was X issue which belongs to my department. 0 due diligence to see if it was actually that issue.
BippBoppp@reddit
At least y’all have levels… - lone support person of 500 user environment
LineCreative6699@reddit
The whole process of expecting a lower paid and experienced person to be able to tackle dealing with people who call computers “modems”, “the brain”, etc. To handle an end user who is already flustered, normally uninformed, who often likes to be loud and rude, and has unmanaged expectations may be the root cause of this madness.
Then make the SD do this over and over and over again through the day, without rage quitting. Then set SLA’s at such a high bar that it’s never acceptable enough.
S7relok@reddit
> no troubleshooting or just lack of screenshots forcing me to chase up with the end user rather than actually fix the problem.
So being there before, you don't realise that on the lot of low interest task given to L1, there's no time for further analysis, even if the L1 guy wanted to? When I tried when I was in SD, I recieved a not so cool warning to stay at my place. Looks like L3 "engineers" didn't liked that a L1 can speak technically equal with them
SameWeekend13@reddit
Exactly this OP needs to understand this.
S7relok@reddit
Becoming haughty is the classic trap some people fall into when they're promoted. Beginning my work carreer from rock bottom learned me some things
phoenix823@reddit
I feel your pain. We had this happen at my last job. The Service Desk complained that: nobody ever told them anything, they were unaware of changes happening in the environment, they didn't have access to all the tools needed to do troubleshooting, there was no documentation, etc. Taken individually, each point was partially valid, but it was really just a tidal wave of excuses of why they had to escalate something like 33% of their tickets.
So engineering granted them access to all the tools they needed to access. Basic documentation for those tools was published. Training sessions were held. Service Desk? Doesn't follow any of it. Formal ticket handling procedure put in place, ignored. More complaining that they don't know what to do. So we hire some offshore contractors literally right out of university, and give them access to Claude. They managed to be equally as ineffective as the regular Service Desk but at 20% of the cost. So, that made the next change obvious. I warned that team for months that if they just wanted to be a call center, that could be arranged. They didn't care.
rcp9ty@reddit
Don't follow up with the client follow up with the technician and the service desk manager. This is a behavior problem that needs to be documented and addressed. Otherwise the techs are worthless and basically tier 0.5
Any-Virus7755@reddit
I just document everything, post the documentation in public channels, refer them to the original message that they reacted to in teams when they ask me how to do it
floatingby493@reddit
It’s not just service desk, there are people like that are all levels of IT. Our network team is notorious for never adding any notes in their tickets and taking forever to resolve simple tickets when they get escalated to them.I respect what service desk does, that work is not easy at all. I’m not going to get too mad if I get a ticket with vague notes, I can pick up the phone or message the user it’s barely any extra work and if it’s a simple issue like you said that it won’t take long.
ItaJohnson@reddit
I dealt with crap service desk while working as an escalations tech in service desk. I know your pain. It got to the point where I would go straight to calling the user to troubleshoot because I didn’t trust the service desk technician to do his/her job.
Aloha_8914@reddit
That one guy you're talking about is helpdesk - technical guy doing technical things, don't blame service desk why they're so bad at this, blame the manager who want them to work that way, from my previous exp.
SlapcoFudd@reddit
Screenshots are great when they are relevant. They usually won't be though. They'll just be sort of "See? I covered all these irrelevant bases"
omasque@reddit
Do you need to ask the end user for screenshots when there are none, or handball it back to the rep to complete that task before you’ll take the escalation? How are you framing the issue from a business perspective?
Warronius@reddit
Nice now do the one where tier 2 and 3 ask you questions you answered on the ticket !
realgone2@reddit
Hahha. Yup.
Daphoid@reddit
I like our SD, a good chunk of them are L1.5/L2 territory but also they really like to follow processes properly and if they don't their manager gets on them. Also we have free reign to toss things back if they assign improperly / don't screenshot / etc. We don't go chasing users, that's their job :)
Vektor0@reddit
Many complaints about the Service Desk are largely due to poor management. The main part of a manager's job is to ensure his techs have training and create processes that reduce friction. If you're consistently having the same problems with the Service Desk, it's up to the Service Desk Manager to resolve those problems.
realgone2@reddit
Exactly, many times the management between the two is god awful. I did level 1 help desk 20 years ago for Urban Outfitters and our training and communication was horrible. So, there was a constant war between us and level 2. Level 2 was in Philly HQ and we were in SC. It was ridiculous.
F0LL0WFREEMAN@reddit
I always send the ticket back off its lacking.
FloppyDorito@reddit
Yeah it's crazy getting into positions that are being paid pretty well and hearing that the guy I replaced didn't do shit and I'm like "wtf dude, I was looking 3 years ago... You coulda hired me then and I would've loved to learn and actually do shit..."