I wanted to ask if anyone knew if computer technicians often do illegal planned or built-in obsolescence. If they purposely set up your pc to fail after an amount of time to incur repeat business. You know like maybe a hidden virus set to trigger after a time, or if they mess up your hardware a little so that itll fail after 8 months or so....
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Do computer technicians use tricks to generate repeat business?
- Thread starter garry26
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Cmustang87
Supreme [H]ardness
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Well this isn't GenMay and will most likely be a locked thread very shortly.
There are certainly business of all different kinds that will do shady things. I couldn't imagine someone spending the time to do this on a customers machine, when in reality it would just cause a headache for the customer, and even being reluctant to pay that person. It would be very easy to just take it elsewhere.
I've never seen it, but I wouldn't doubt if there are super shady computer shops/computer "technicians" that do this.
There are certainly business of all different kinds that will do shady things. I couldn't imagine someone spending the time to do this on a customers machine, when in reality it would just cause a headache for the customer, and even being reluctant to pay that person. It would be very easy to just take it elsewhere.
I've never seen it, but I wouldn't doubt if there are super shady computer shops/computer "technicians" that do this.
I've personally never seen it as well. I've been doing PC repair side work for years. Most of the time my repeat work is due to the fact that my customer continues to go back to the same sites that cause the maleware infection the first time (usually their kids). In rare instances you might have a hardware issue that you as a technician didn't catch the first time around as well (failing PSU / HD). Who's to say it's not possible though.
It's really up to the consumer that if you have a bit of doubt to get a 2nd opinion. I don't know much about cars or medical problems. So if I have doubt in a diagnosis I just go somewhere else and get that second opinion. Worst case I'm out the money for that initial checkup (1 hour labor, 1 deductible) but I'm paying that for piece of mind. Hell taking it to another shop might find something that the 1st shop didn't just due to inexperience. Nothing malicious if the first technician just wasn't as good.
It's really up to the consumer that if you have a bit of doubt to get a 2nd opinion. I don't know much about cars or medical problems. So if I have doubt in a diagnosis I just go somewhere else and get that second opinion. Worst case I'm out the money for that initial checkup (1 hour labor, 1 deductible) but I'm paying that for piece of mind. Hell taking it to another shop might find something that the 1st shop didn't just due to inexperience. Nothing malicious if the first technician just wasn't as good.
I worked as a hardware tech for three years at two different companies, one of them a national retailer with let's say a less than stellar reputation on the whole (much of it deserved from what I saw). I will not name any names to protect the guilty.
However, I can say that it is really pretty difficult to engineer a failure after X amount of time has passed. I will say there were times when I knew something was likely to fail in the near future, but because it hadn't failed yet, I wasn't allowed to fix it. I think some of that is your basic beancounting, but some of it is that if you fix anything the customer didn't ask you to, that just opens the door for them to complain about it later, so a lot of companies have kind of learned the hard way not to fix anything except EXACTLY what the customer reported as an issue unless there's a failure cascade. Maybe the customer brings it in because the fan on a laptop is going out, and they waited so long that the CPU is fried.
I know at least in my case I was averaging around 20-25 repairs/week (doesn't sound like much, but think of it like college credits, where each credit/repair is an undertaking of a couple hours) which totaled up to somewhere between 1000-1100 repairs for 2011. There were times where I was so rushed to try and clear the backlog of units I had, that something might have gotten forgotten. I always tried to treat customer units the same, or better, than I would my own, but then I might be something of an oddity in the field.
At least in my personal opinion, based on observations I've made, there seems to be a trend towards adopting Apple's method of hiring people. That is hire based on personality, arguing that you can train someone to do repairs far more easily than train someone to give good customer service if the tech isn't a people person. So what you end up getting are a bunch of really nice people, who have absolutely no business holding a screwdriver or working on people's computers. Also, at least based on my experience with the nameless retailer, you find that they pay so lousy, that anyone with any real skill will likely find another job very quickly, unless they have some other kind of emotional damage that means they're stuck at a Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples, Fry's or Apple Store.
Anyway, despite the fact that the retailer I worked for was willing to stoop pretty low in a lot of cases, I never once saw anything where they were deliberately looking to ensure that the customer would come back. Most of the anecdotal evidence I've ever heard is that the smaller shops will do things like load a pirated copy of Windows on your system and charge you for the install.
I think a lot of people just kind of invent these conspiracy theories of intentional malice to explain events that are really just coincidental or an honest mistake/oversight. Yours might have been the only unit out of 100 that it happened to, but you have no knowledge of the other 99 units, just yours. Especially if you take your example of a virus that is set to go off after some period of time. The amount of time and effort it would take to make something like that, which could also hide from all AV programs, is quite probably beyond the means of the smaller shops that might consider doing it.
So in short, while this may go on here and there, I suspect it's little more than a few "rogue" techs. The rest is just people ascribing some kind of conspiracy theory to what is more appropriately just plain and simple honest mistakes.
However, I can say that it is really pretty difficult to engineer a failure after X amount of time has passed. I will say there were times when I knew something was likely to fail in the near future, but because it hadn't failed yet, I wasn't allowed to fix it. I think some of that is your basic beancounting, but some of it is that if you fix anything the customer didn't ask you to, that just opens the door for them to complain about it later, so a lot of companies have kind of learned the hard way not to fix anything except EXACTLY what the customer reported as an issue unless there's a failure cascade. Maybe the customer brings it in because the fan on a laptop is going out, and they waited so long that the CPU is fried.
I know at least in my case I was averaging around 20-25 repairs/week (doesn't sound like much, but think of it like college credits, where each credit/repair is an undertaking of a couple hours) which totaled up to somewhere between 1000-1100 repairs for 2011. There were times where I was so rushed to try and clear the backlog of units I had, that something might have gotten forgotten. I always tried to treat customer units the same, or better, than I would my own, but then I might be something of an oddity in the field.
At least in my personal opinion, based on observations I've made, there seems to be a trend towards adopting Apple's method of hiring people. That is hire based on personality, arguing that you can train someone to do repairs far more easily than train someone to give good customer service if the tech isn't a people person. So what you end up getting are a bunch of really nice people, who have absolutely no business holding a screwdriver or working on people's computers. Also, at least based on my experience with the nameless retailer, you find that they pay so lousy, that anyone with any real skill will likely find another job very quickly, unless they have some other kind of emotional damage that means they're stuck at a Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples, Fry's or Apple Store.
Anyway, despite the fact that the retailer I worked for was willing to stoop pretty low in a lot of cases, I never once saw anything where they were deliberately looking to ensure that the customer would come back. Most of the anecdotal evidence I've ever heard is that the smaller shops will do things like load a pirated copy of Windows on your system and charge you for the install.
I think a lot of people just kind of invent these conspiracy theories of intentional malice to explain events that are really just coincidental or an honest mistake/oversight. Yours might have been the only unit out of 100 that it happened to, but you have no knowledge of the other 99 units, just yours. Especially if you take your example of a virus that is set to go off after some period of time. The amount of time and effort it would take to make something like that, which could also hide from all AV programs, is quite probably beyond the means of the smaller shops that might consider doing it.
So in short, while this may go on here and there, I suspect it's little more than a few "rogue" techs. The rest is just people ascribing some kind of conspiracy theory to what is more appropriately just plain and simple honest mistakes.
Stone Cold
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I just can't imagine techs sabotaging computers for repeat business. It would be difficult to do and would result in lost business because customers already assume that a later failure is caused by bad repair work.
The repair industry, for any product, is crooked. If they want to make extra money, they'll tell you some part needs replacing when it doesn't, then they'll install some super-cheap/used part charge you a lot for it.
The repair industry, for any product, is crooked. If they want to make extra money, they'll tell you some part needs replacing when it doesn't, then they'll install some super-cheap/used part charge you a lot for it.
I've worked as a technician in two locations and never seen it explicitly. "Set up to fail" is an interesting concept though, repeat virus infections for instance, the owner especially wouldn't train customers on how to avoid them in the future, he would just say things like "we'll see again in a month."
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