Why do people do this to IT people so often? It seems to be as far as I can tell the only profession that gets treated this way.
There is another side of this that I used to run into when I was doing IT — and which Will still has to deal with. When you are fixing a computer as a contractor, people will often want to sit next to you and “learn how to do it.” This is not the same thing. For one thing, having people ask a stream of questions makes the repair go much slower, and most repairs are not done on an hourly basis. For another thing, it is offensive. The implication is that all you are doing is this one thing — that knowing what to do isn’t part of a vastly larger base of knowledge. No one would ever think it appropriate to ask a plumber to teach them the art while the toilet gets fixed.
Here’s how you can learn what I know: start when you are four years old and are trying to figure out how to use a terrible TRS-80 in a hot trailer that your working-class poor but computer-obsessed dad traded some mechanic work for (instead of food, which you probably needed more).
Then do that for 35 years, increasing your knowledge and skills all the time.
Then you’ll know what I know and be able to do what I do as quickly as I do it.
Easy, right?
That’s why I’m not going to be able to tell you how I fixed that networking problem in five minutes some other people spent three days working on.
Ha! You sound like Will who literally started his business by taking computers out of dumpsters and learning to repair them.
There is this weird belief people have that if something takes you 5 minutes, that’s all it’s worth, even though they would never be able to fix the problem regardless of the amount of time. What this ultimately says is that the greater your expertise, the less it is worth.
But I disagree with you about the TRS-80. It was a magnificent computer! Oh the things you could do with 48 KB! It was the high water mark for Tandy. It was their Windows 2000.
I probably did bag on the TRS-80 too much, but since it was my first computer it also taught me the exquisite frustrations of dealing with them! So that probably colors my view a bit.
That’s why I’m not going to be able to tell you how I fixed that networking problem in five minutes some other people spent three days working on.
That’s an NP thing for sure.
The implication is that all you are doing is this one thing — that knowing what to do isn’t part of a vastly larger base of knowledge. No one would ever think it appropriate to ask a plumber to teach them the art while the toilet gets fixed.
It’s interesting he mentions plumbing, which relies heavily on on the job training and is a fairly discrete field. To your average novice, tech support and systems administration and hardware programming are all “computer skills” without regard to complexity or difficulty. People will repeatedly fail to grasp concepts and not understand that’s a major reason why they will never be able to understand “steps” in some sequential and predictable fashion.
:/
Yeah — I and other IT people run into constant problems at work with customers and management because if you’re in IT, you’re thought and expected to know everything from systems administration, programming of any and all kinds, to all hardware and software platforms, to all storage and all networking. Even though many of these fields are as disparate as accountancy and the legal field.
I got stuck the other day on a troubleshooting call for database slowness, on a database I’d never used in my life, and also not being a database expert or DBA in any way — but I got the call because it ran on Windows and I “knew Windows.”
Thank you, customer manager, for making us all look foolish.