advice: is helpdesk supposed to be like this?

R

rehab

Gawd
Joined
Aug 23, 2005
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sorry for starters, i dont have any personal friends that are in a related field, so i am asking you all. this is the meat of it...
first job out of college, hospital system, 50k salary

I work as the senior helpdesk guy. i have been there 1 year. I am getting very disenchanted with it all for a couple of reasons. One, our network admin / bulk company IT decisions for projects is outsourced. A company that has been with them from the ground up handles the large projects and most of the non-day to day functions. I am OK with this as i dont claim to be qualified with alot of what they handle. I get along with them very well, and they include me on alot of it as i always ask them to call me so I can learn something new. They provide all hardware to us...which is overpriced. I have written proposals about ordering from other vendors and the money would be saved, and that has been basically shot down, due to the the outsourced company not agreeing with it. I am starting to get the itch to look for another job. So much of what i do involves fire fighting, not fire prevention. Printers occupy much of my time, as well as mundane user errors. Im just curious as to what the helpdesk functions are at other locations. Are you involved in all aspects? How long were you in that position? Did you ask for further education? What were the salary ranges? I dont see myself moving "up" so to speak, as there is nowhere to go. Should i stick around for some upcoming large projects and just soak up what i can?
Thanks for your time whoever reads this, i appreciate any comments / wisdom from you seasoned pros.
 
I'd say you are being too sensitive to company policy.
It takes a long time to find decent suppliers and often lack of supply or bad quality hurts more than buying a little cheaper.

Its also possible that the decision is mandated from above the managers heads to use certain suppliers and the decision to change that is above their heads.

This is a very small problem and has nothing to do with how you are treated.
Seriously, remember this is just a job. Do what they pay you for, its not a democracy.
 
rehab said:
So much of what i do involves fire fighting, not fire prevention. Printers occupy much of my time, as well as mundane user errors. Im just curious as to what the helpdesk functions are at other locations. Are you involved in all aspects?
Click to expand...

Helpdesk is fire fighting. People don't send tickets or call to prevent a problem, they call when they need a problem fixed. That's a given.

It sounds like you want to get away from helpdesk and more into the infrastructure stuff. Either way, it sounds like you are going to have to put up a fight since your company sides with the outside "vendors". If you leave you might be facing some of the same challenges elsewhere. IMO, you are in your current company, so I would continue to show them you are just looking out for the company. You'll have to prove your ability and credibility, so it's going to be a long battle to beat out the vendors they have been a longer relationship with.
 
That's a pretty good buck for helpdesk work.

You've only been there a year, give it time.

It's not common for any Corporate IT dept. to turn over all the decisions to a kid (sorry) out of college who's been there a year.

Keep making yourself a valuable asset to the team.
If you are the one consistently coming up with good ideas, you will get noticed.
 
The other thing you must remember youn padawan, is that you must not create your own doom. It is every IT person's dream to run a flawless network, however if you acheive that goal you are possibly undermining the very reason for which you were hired.

In other words, IT people are very much in charge of their own job security.
 
as a fellow recent college graduate in IT (im a programmer though, not helpdesk), here is what i think about the hole situation:

- the pay sounds GOOD, assuming your 50k is in USD, you are making way more then a regular helpdesk kid in his early 20s would make over here, though im not sure what kind of responsabilities you shoulder, if you are the lead tech support there, it only sounds fair that you get paid a good deal more then a regular junior tech

- Getting overturned on decissions is normal. As said, im a programmer, and the junior programmer at my current assignment. It took a few weeks to sink in, but despite the college degree, the company car, the official SUN certs, im still at the bottom of the food chain, so in order for one of my suggestions to make it through, it has to be really good, since i carry very little authority. And as said, you get paid to do this job, you dont HAVE to like every bit of it.

and i tend to agree with the assumption that helpdesk is more fire fighting then prevention. Sure you can try and do as much to prevent fires, but at the end of the day your job is to solve a problem as quickly as possible when a user accidently sets the place on fire. Fire prevention in general sounds more like the head of the IT departments job.

My advice, just do your job for a while, and decide if this is what you want on the long term. If you find that you dont like going to work most days, or just downright hate it, start looking for a way out. Try a different helpdesk/tech support assignment, and if that isnt for you either, perhaps consider a career change.

Good luck!
 
Don't worry. Them's the breaks.

It could always work out in a more negative way.

When I worked for a BellSouth contractor, I submitted a couple proposals of my own. Gave them to my supervisor who then turned them over to his contact at BellSouth. At the time, I was writing and managing an in-house knowledgebase for BS FastAccess DSL.

Not only did the contact at BellSouth take my proposal and put his name on it, he later took my entire knowledgebase, gave it to a coder of his own and submitted it as his own work.

Few months later, BellSouth rolls out a new knowledgebase that looks eerily familiar.

In other words, keep some of those good ideas to yourself.
 
Heh that is a sweet salary friend..

Currently working for a billion dollar/year company @ $17.50/Hour. Works to about $37k/Year.

I would go with the flow. Managers above you have the say, you just do. Yeah it sucks having the outsourced company that you see is 'raping' your network/IT Dept, but meh what can you do? You tried, you showed you care about it, but you can't do anything else. Just concentrate on your tasks at hand.

Im lucky, as part of my job is Fire Fighting and the other is Prevention. We have a decent IT team though so that helps. FOr example, this week I've been working on our Blackberries/BES, so the other guy is doing break/fix. So there are jobs where it is not 24/7 break/fix but they are rare, and most of the time you will need to invest serious time in order to get some rank. Best of luck.
 
I finally got some time to reply to this...

First off, you have a pretty good gig there it sounds like. I'm a TSS Level 4, and trust me. It can be a whole LOT worse !

As far as feeling like you don't receive appropriate attention to your idea's, you have to remember that a contracted support system can be complex. There are contract line items (requirements), SLA's (Service Level Agreements), and a shit load of politics involved. Just because you didn't get a nod, it doesn't always mean your idea was totally ignored.

You'll know when you have a really good idea because someone above you will steal it and use it and take the credit themselves :) When that happens, sometimes you just have to chin up and feel good knowing that YOU are the one that solved the problem. Good managers know when this happens, and while you may not get the direct credit, it is remembered by the right people.

I've been doing this a very long time (in excess of 18 years), and there are a lot of things going on with Help Desks these days that really concern me. The sheer number of complaints I hear, industry wide, about companies support systems validates my concerns. Some things are just plain being done wrong, or designed by the wrong people. Those wrong people are usually the bean counters seeking false economy.

1. Shipment of support to an oversea's company. We all know that issue and the problems it creates. I won't harp on it here.

2. Too many managers, IMHO, see Help Desks as "Transitory" positions. It's no suprise that help desks cannot keep bright, trained, energetic people when you are seen as a "Transitory Asset" the second you walk in the door, and are treated and paid in accordance with that vision.

3. This one bugs the ever-livin'-crap out of me. Scripting... I don't understand how managers don't get the fact that you simply cannot provide good support simply by giving a person a book of scripts to refer to. You just can't expect a good level of customer service like that. PROCEDURES are important, epecially in a corporate setting. But procedures are what you refer to when you KNOW what is wrong, and you need the procedure to FIX it. You just can't isolate most complex issues by reading a damned script. People need to be TRAINED. Why doesn't training happen? See #2 above. Too many consider it a waste of time saying "they will just move on after we do all that work". They way they treat HD people these days, they are right. They have created a self-fullfilling prophecy for themselves. Until the industry breaks out of this stupid notion of help desks being "Transitory Positions", it will never get any better. I refuse to use scripts. I DO use procedures at times, particularly for complex network based issues (ActiveDirectory, etc...) and custom corporate applications. I will only refer to scripts if I'm completely stumped. Hell, I use Google before I use scripts!

4. Help Desk people need to be treated like valued asset's. That can't happen if you don't TURN them into valued assets! That means training. Every week. Every day if possible. Choose an "issue of the week", and beat it into everyone. Hold small, personalized training sessions on the more complex area's of Windows. Make these folks feel like they are accomplishing something instead of just reading from a script book every day. No human could stand that for long. Even a trained monkey will throw feces at you eventually :)

5. Have a growth path. When that person walks in the very first day, sit them down and have a training and growth plan for them. Show them what they need to do to transit from level 1 to Level 2 and (usually only in corporate settings), Levels 3 and 4. Set expectations and goals. Make the goals part of the evaluation process. Did they meet their goals or not? If not, why. Were they unreasonable for the situation, or did the person not work hard enough. Fix it, reset, and move towards the next cycle

Then again, what the hell do I know :) I've only been in the game for 18 years :)
 
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