DK

Yes, you could probably be a support person. A level one or two support person. Not beyond that. Even when I was just doing support, I often solved problems that whole teams of people had been working on for days because I had lots of background knowledge and experience and they didn’t have a single clue even what to search for or what was relevant. Being a level one or two support person is all that most people are familiar with IT-wise and so they, as this person does, think that’s all the IT staff there is.

This person also reminds me of the people who think they because they can, for instance, click “next, next, next” on a SQL install on their personal computer that it makes them experts on SQL optimization and design, or that because they know what an IP address is (vaguely) that they are network architects and designers. I can tell you these people are so extremely and ridiculously incompetent in these areas that they don’t even know how incompetent they are and often their “solutions” are so terrible that it’s all I can do to avoid laughing out loud when I am forced to discuss with them.

So, yeah, a person like this can probably do a google search for “how do I fix my Dell printer” and get the right answer, much of the time. But I can also tell you if they Google “how do I configure BGP multi-site failover” that what they get is going to be 80% wrong, and/or inapplicable to their situation, and that furthermore this person would not understand 90% of what they do find if not more. And if they tried to set this up, it’d fail and fail so hard it’d be utterly laughable (I’ve seen this in person). By the way, this is something I can and have set up in less than an hour in the real world because I know what I am doing and have spent many, many, many hours studying this and related topics.

Another case of not knowing what they don’t know. In a way, I like that these people exist because I spend a whole lot of time and get paid a whole lot for cleaning up their messes and fixing the consequences of their enormous and easily-preventable mistakes.