Sometimes, reflecting on my career drives me nuts.

In my last article, I spoke about the roles I’ve held over my career. I figured it’s not a bad place to start, reflecting on what worked, what didn’t, what I thought my employers did well, what they could have done better. This will be the first of many posts going over my experiences.

In this post, I’ll talk about my first role, the role of the Desktop Support Technician. The desktop technician roles are low salary and fast-paced. It was here I learnt how to troubleshoot. It was here I discovered that people don’t know a thing about ICT, and that’s ok, people have other jobs to do, it’s your job to make sure they can do their job.

In this role, you will learn to listen, be empathetic, think on your feet. You may find yourself eating too many potato chips and crying into your pillow at the silliness of the questions you get asked on a day to day basis. Look at any post on www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin and you will find friends in need, are genuine friends indeed.

The first thing I’ll note is that I’m a firm believer of being critical, but fair. In the interest of being critical, I’ll be forthcoming with my opinions. In the interest of fairness. I will not be listing the names of the companies I worked for, or the people I worked with. This isn’t a blog to criticise former colleagues or workplaces. It is a place for reflection, and advice for those looking to succeed in roles similar to those I’ve performed.

Recapping my last post, the roles I’ve held.

I’ve been in the industry for over a decade now. I’ve been a Desktop Support Technician, a Network Engineer, a Systems Engineer (Wintel), a Police Officer (long story), Managed Services Engineer, a Service Desk Manager, a Service Delivery Manager, a General Manager in a consultancy firm and now, a Project & Services Director at a Melbourne based Managed Services Provider.

So, start with the Desktop Support Technician role.

This was my first real full-time position. I thought I had hit the big time when I got this job offer. I was 20. I had finished my Diploma and attempted my first six months of my undergraduate degree. I put the university degree on hold to go to work full time. I needed that cold hard cash and how else could I afford that $20,000 loan for a car I had taken out? (Word of advice, don’t take out a car loan).

I postponed university because I had a chip on my shoulder, and I already knew it all, and I couldn’t be taught anything at university that my Diploma didn’t already teach me. Was I wrong about that? Yes.

By this stage, I already had a great mentor. A gentleman I still to this day look up to, a great business person who I’ll interview on this blog shortly to share the benefit of his wisdom. It was in this job I met my next two mentors: the company’s IT Manager, and the company’s Systems Administrator. They helped me grow up quickly; they also taught me some bad habits, but ones I’m grateful for having the ability to reflect on.

I came into this first full-time role, cocky and with gumption. The staff loved me. I had my “trademark” (as others have called it) energy, passion, and nerdiness with a stroke of the ability to relate to people.

My advice if you’re going into this role? Enjoy learning about people – your colleagues and your customers. You’ll learn small talk here when someone is breathing over your shoulder wondering why it’s taking so long to fix the mess they call their computer. No one likes an awkward silence or mouth breathers. So get talking.

My second piece of advice? Learn to troubleshoot. No university course I’ve participated in, and no technical certification course (bar a few) have taught proper troubleshooting.

Mark Boyd, 2019, defines troubleshooting as learning to Google, intelligently.

You’ll come up against technology problems that if you can Google the problem correctly, and think like a tech, you’ll get the answer you want nine times out of ten.

If all else fails, here are a few tools I’ve learnt to trust along the way.

The SysInternals Suite – learn FileMon, ProcessMon and Autoruns inside out. I’ll do an article about these tools one of these days. ProcessMon is like Task Manager on steroids.

One example I give to mentees is that using this tool will help you understand what a dodgy application is trying to do, or why that pesky application you’re trying to install, is failing.

Pro Tip – Teachers in particular love asking you to install that crappy “educational application” that their kids “must use to succeed in life” – bought from some dodgy website, with no support from the vendor – learn to troubleshoot, learn ProcessMon. Exploring annoying applications behaviours in real-time with this tool is a Thanos-sent.

TCPView – gets a special mention. Knowing whether the traffic you’re expecting onto your WebServer is hitting the server or not, is a great way to see if you’ve configured it correctly. There are many more uses for this tool, do your research, and I’ll write an article about this one day. Look up NetStat too, understanding these tools and what they do, is invaluable.

WireShark – learn to do packet captures. If you have a passion for networking, you’ll learn to use this tool. To this day, I’ve seen CCIE’s that do not know how to use this tool. It will bother you that these people probably get paid more than you, and don’t know the first thing about using the tool, but it will get you promoted quicker for having quicker resolution times than the guy next to you. Your managers (primarily technical ones) will always throw you the curly jobs, and you’ll become the company’s “go-to person” for those tricky issues that no one else wants to take on.

CCleaner. The original and the best desktop clean up tool. The portable edition (if nothing else) will get you out of trouble. This tool will clean your registry (though the jury’s out on how much of a performance impact it has, in my opinion). It will also clean all that wasted hard drive space for those Exec types that store all 150,000 “critically important” files on their desktop and have consequently, run out of space.

The Command Prompt and PowerShell – some can code, some can’t. I’m no good at it, but basic understanding of commands, or at least how to use them to pull information from them has been my saviour. For heaven’s sake, know what ipconfig /all does. You’ll be asked this in interviews. This has been one of my staple questions when interviewing technical people, even in senior roles, and they have had no idea. Not knowing the answer to this question will make me pass over you in an interview for a technical position almost immediately.

Extending on Command Prompt, learn commands like Ping, Tracert, and learn how WMIC works. Learn what Taskkill is and when to use it/how to use it. Some applications don’t like being stopped. Taskkill will get you out of trouble.

Learn what “.Ini” files are and what they can do. When the crappy Dentist software you are supporting pops up and says “Can’t find the Server”, there is a probably an INI file telling you the name of the server it is trying to reach. And if that INI file is empty on the computer with the issue? Find the right INI file from another computer and copy it over, what’s the worst that can happen. (Be careful here for obvious reasons).

Learn SQL. Learn how to write database queries. Learn how to interpret data. If you can understand how you are performing by analysing your ticketing tools data, and help your boss analyse the data, you’ll be a service desk hero. You can smell that promotion now, can’t you?

TeamViewer, Kaseya, NAble, Labtech, Ninja RMM, Solarwinds – learn these tools. You’ll come across them. Follow the companies on Twitter and Linkedin. While you’re at it, get a professional headshot for these professional profiles. I digress. Sorry.

Enough technobabble, back to the role, what did I learn?

The technical work aside, I learnt that technical teams all value a fantastic desktop technician. I discovered here to never say no to an opportunity. I was replacing printer cartridges and hard drives one day, and building ESXi Clusters connected to Fibre Channel SANS the next.

My advice?

Involve yourself in everything. Stay back with your boss when those upgrades are happening, look, listen, learn, and teach the boss a thing or two.

The bad, bordering ugly?

I discovered that these jobs are low paying, unfortunately. I don’t think they should be. I think people should be able to forge good careers taking these roles on. I’ve met many “lifers” doing these roles, and I’d hire them again in a heartbeat.

Anecdotally, at the company I worked for, I was pushing for a pay rise. I wasn’t eloquent in my reasons, but in Australia, we are paid on an award system (Check out Fair Work Australia). An award system classifies your role and outlines a salary guide for your performance and responsibilities under that role. The role I was performing at the company I worked for should have seen me on a higher level of the award. I was doing work far beyond what I was hired to do.

When I took this up with the Human Resources Officer, I was told (almost verbatim) – “it’s not our responsibility to pay you more if we paid you to be a janitor and you are a qualified doctor, that’s your problem”. I was doing the work of a ‘doctor’ for the salary of a ‘janitor’.

When I recounted this story to my boss and mentor, he wasn’t all that pleased. I’m not sure what came of it, but I know he had my back. It was here I learnt to have my employees’ backs.

Upon reflection, at various stages of career, I’ve taken it too far. It is about balance. If you’re going to step into management roles, you need to learn how to speak truth to power, but you need to do it calmly, and pick the right battles at the right time. Your staff will respect you fighting for them. If you do nothing for your team, you’ll lose the floor. If you fight management too hard, you’ll lose management confidence in your ability.

Pick the right battle for the right time.

I wish this workplace had respected the hours we worked to keep the place running. I wish the elitism of the hierarchy (very wealthy, well to do part of town I worked in) was more inclusive.

So what am I looking for when I hire for these roles?

Communication – can you talk about your passions in or out of ICT with energy? Are you articulate? In interviews, I will ask you to explain how you’d describe a complex server problem, to a non-IT person – in simple terms. Your answer determines your employability.

Troubleshooting Prowess – I’ll ask you to explain how you’d troubleshoot a few simple, and a few complicated issues. I don’t care about the technical result; I care about your thought process.

I’m looking for someone that our customers would want to know beyond the 5-minute interaction you’ll have them. Your customers should be delighted when they get you answering the phone. They should always want to speak to you directly. Never let them, you’re always busy, they are lucky if they get you on the phone, but they should always want to.

A quick story.

I once had a conversation while troubleshooting someone’s computer problems about “how good looking Vladimir Putin was”. I didn’t share this customer’s view, but it kept the conversation going for 20 minutes, with much laughter, while I was clicking away. The person emailed the bosses of the company I worked for and sung my praises for my “winning personality”.

I was promoted shortly after this, not just because of this, but the ability to  make someone laugh while they are having a crappy day, is critically essential in roles like this. Find common ground with those you’re supporting over the phone. Nothing is worse than staying silent on the phone for 20 minutes, keeping someone waiting.

Don’t have what it takes to conduct a lengthy conversation about a topless dictator on a horse? Ask if you can take over the user’s PC and you’ll call them back the moment you’re finished. Explain to them that a broken computer is just another excuse to have another coffee or to read the newspaper. Do anything other than keeping them hanging on the phone with your heavy breathing into the handset.

I’m going to wrap it up here.

The roles that followed this were all follow-ons from this role, an evolution of this role if you like. The next significant role I took on was the Managed Services Engineer, which became my first management role.

I’ll be discussing my first managerial role in my next post, but for now, I’m off to watch the Bachelor, or some such reality TV show.* Trust me, after a long day of toiling away at technical and managerial problems, switching your brain off by not touching a keyboard is an excellent way to unwind.

*I wouldn’t watch that tripe in a month of Sundays. It was a metaphor for “do something with my night that has nothing to do with a computer”. I appreciate the irony of sitting here typing this while expressing that sentiment. Is that actual irony? Alanis Morissette confused irony for everyone.

Mark, Out!