Hello all,
I have a few questions about what IT is like for everyone else. I’ve been with my current employer for a little over a year and it is my first real IT job outside of working with the general public at repair shops. I’ve been taken aback by the way our IT department is treated as well as some of the duties we have to perform and I’m curious if this is the norm in every IT job or if it is just the culture where I work.
First, I’ll start with a few general details: We support approximately 115 workstations, 19 servers, 25 printers, a phone system with 105 handsets (which is about to be fully replaced), 20-30 mobile devices and laptops, and around 30 other devices like switches, routers and firewalls. We support the above with 2 people, one of which is not allowed to go over 40 hours per week. We’re always 10-15 tickets behind the curve and we have a slew of large projects that need to be done. We spend the majority of our time keeping up with tickets so larger projects and general maintenance fall by the wayside. All of this is across 4 offices spread around 150 miles apart.
We have 20 workstations that were brand new 9 months ago. We have about 15 more workstations that are around 5 years old and the rest are from 2002-2003. So we’re piecing them together as they break, to keep a desktop on people’s desks. Our budget for new machines or parts is non-existent.
We have users that do not understand the basics of how computers work. Tickets are submitted so we can go to someone’s desk just to create a shortcut for them. We have users who have worked here for 5+ years with email being a large part of their jobs, who claim they are still learning how to use email. Or users who use a term such as “network folder” on their own, then turn around a few weeks later and tell you they have no clue what that is. We have users who blame us when they type their password wrong enough times to lockout their account. Or users who assume that we are sitting in our offices all day playing games or watching Youtube.
Managers do not show new employees how to contact the helpdesk or even tell them it exists and in many cases they don’t show them the basics of how to use the software that is required for their job. Many times we end up training them how to use the software when they come to us with “problems with their computer” and the problem is just that they haven’t been trained how to use the software for their job.
We have a very specific way to contact IT: Submit a ticket if it’s not an emergency, call our phones at our desks if it’s an emergency during normal business hours, call the pager if it’s an emergency any other time (we provide 24/7 support). People bypass this process completely and will call or text our cell phones directly. I’ve been paged several times while sitting at my desk, so I could go press “OK” on someone’s computer to activate Outlook.
We’ve tried correcting all of the problems above by educating users and teaching managers things. But within a week they either forget or decide to ignore everything we told them. We switched to using Spiceworks about a year ago and we still have people who attempt to submit tickets to the old helpdesk system, even though we’ve told them it no longer exists in company wide emails, private emails and in person countless times.
The above is a tiny portion of the things I’ve run into that surprised me. I used to work with the general public, repairing and training them on basics of using computers. I would say that I’ve easily seen people in this job who are far more clueless than any of the 1000’s of people I supported at a walk-in computer shop. Given the fact that there are very few jobs here that can be performed without a computer, I was very surprised by this.
So my questions are: Is this normal or do we have a particularly bad user-base? It really feels like we’re just babysitting a bunch of people can barely dress themselves in the morning and who seem to randomly forget something they knew days or even hours before.
Also, is a staff of two appropriate for this size of a network? The previous group had 5 people (which I agree is too many), who were all let go because they treated users poorly. To be honest, I’m starting to see why – It’s hard to be respectful to people who don’t return that respect and expect you to basically do their jobs for them. We’ve requested a third person and have been told no. But it really feels like there’s more than enough for another 40 hours per week.
