I’ve worked with a lot of people in IT and very few of them are any good at troubleshooting. I’m great at it, though, even in areas where I am not an expert.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about why that is the case. There probably is not one reason alone. It’s multifaceted. But I was already a great troubleshooter when I had much, much less industry experience than the people around me, so much so that when I was still a lowly helpdesk tech the server folks at my first IT job would call me up to help them troubleshoot issues.

Some of it is that I don’t discount anything and I walk through simultaneously both the most efficacious and easiest tasks/paths first, so I cover 80% of the problem space while most people are still fumbling towards something to attempt. And because I don’t discount anything, I still test things that I “know” can’t be wrong, and that other people insist on telling me I shouldn’t be checking because “that couldn’t be it.” They are usually wrong, but luckily I don’t care much what other people think about this — so I find the answer where it shouldn’t be.

Combine that with just my utter unrelenting stubbornness, I’m a troubleshooting demon.

Contra liberal doctrine, I suspect most of this is just impossible to teach, too. Alas.