A Small, But Positive, Rant

“I find your lack of problem solving disturbing”  To badly quote the dark lord of the Sith.

I did not want to start off on a rant, but it has been bugging me over the last couple of weeks how even the most basic of problem solving, for a lot of young low level techs, is lacking.

I know people are just starting out but not even asking what version of software or even what error message the user is getting is just plain stupid. Yes, nine times out of ten if a bit of software is going wrong the person who coded it is going to display a hopefully helpful error message.

Even getting the error though you don’t understand the cryptic jargon contained in it, or having the user to mail you through a screen shot (using that handy dandy “Print Screen” button on the keyboard) so you can pass to an upstream tech will earn you quite a few tech brownie points.  Knowing what questions to ask and what information to gather will vastly improve the quality of the fault tickets/cases/jobs that you log. Want to move off that grinder of first line phone support quicker?  Which quite frankly is a thankless job, no one likes being the meat in the sandwich.  Log better calls than the other tech not looking for ways to improve him or herself via internet blogs, and constantly strive to improve your problem solving.

I can tell you from experience, when you are at the sharp end of problem solving deep network or server issues as the “go to guy” it does not get any easier, more stress, yeah well that is a bonus.  So having a strong toolbox of problem solving skills will turn you into an asset that is more likely to keep their job in the current economic climate.

Being able to think laterally when problem solving helps a lot, being stubborn is also a good trait to have. That mail server does not respond to a ping, but your phone is not ringing off the hook with users complaining about no email, yet, how would you go about checking that?

Well what is the solution? It is all well and good to rant to the internet as a whole, but even better to offer solutions.  And with that my reader friends, I propose to start a series of “How to problem solve…” posts distilling my experience and methods gained over twelve or more years at the coal face of IT support.