*facepalm*
- Thread starter Casdawer
- Start date
Helpdesks, god love them.
1st line is to log and dispatch the incident to 2rd level. No doubt there are company / contractual help desk call SLAs, KPIs e.g. ASA they are working to. So, the analyst will just record all details (normally ask a set of standard questions) and pass to the L2 resolver group. They may offer a little bit of diagnostics resolution, if a simple fix or known defect.
The **** here is the L2 person who first looked at it. They should have googled it. But, again, unless the fix is obvious to them they send it off and it soon gets lost in the belly of the helpdesk beast.
Ive been in IT contractor now for 20 years. Worked at all levels of helpdesk including 3rd party vendor support, infrastructure, Unix, DBA, Web. Also been a EA, SAs, every crappy position possible and realised that it doesn't matter what you've been taught, courses you've been on, or stupid titles people give themselves, if you haven't got common sense then you might as well pack up and go.
I now work as a project manager and realise this role is nothing but buzz words, risk /issue logs and delegating tasks, and talking 5hite. should have stayed technical.
Im 44, and the IT world has as much appeal to me now as wearing a pair of trainers covered in dog 5hit !
SBK
1st line is to log and dispatch the incident to 2rd level. No doubt there are company / contractual help desk call SLAs, KPIs e.g. ASA they are working to. So, the analyst will just record all details (normally ask a set of standard questions) and pass to the L2 resolver group. They may offer a little bit of diagnostics resolution, if a simple fix or known defect.
The **** here is the L2 person who first looked at it. They should have googled it. But, again, unless the fix is obvious to them they send it off and it soon gets lost in the belly of the helpdesk beast.
Ive been in IT contractor now for 20 years. Worked at all levels of helpdesk including 3rd party vendor support, infrastructure, Unix, DBA, Web. Also been a EA, SAs, every crappy position possible and realised that it doesn't matter what you've been taught, courses you've been on, or stupid titles people give themselves, if you haven't got common sense then you might as well pack up and go.
I now work as a project manager and realise this role is nothing but buzz words, risk /issue logs and delegating tasks, and talking 5hite. should have stayed technical.
Im 44, and the IT world has as much appeal to me now as wearing a pair of trainers covered in dog 5hit !
SBK
Just imagine a week without the help of Google... Roll on Brain Power week.
But then I would have to actually type in the addresses of websites I want to visit.
Helpdesks, god love them.
1st line is to log and dispatch the incident to 2rd level. No doubt there are company / contractual help desk call SLAs, KPIs e.g. ASA they are working to. So, the analyst will just record all details (normally ask a set of standard questions) and pass to the L2 resolver group. They may offer a little bit of diagnostics resolution, if a simple fix or known defect.
The **** here is the L2 person who first looked at it. They should have googled it. But, again, unless the fix is obvious to them they send it off and it soon gets lost in the belly of the helpdesk beast.
Ive been in IT contractor now for 20 years. Worked at all levels of helpdesk including 3rd party vendor support, infrastructure, Unix, DBA, Web. Also been a EA, SAs, every crappy position possible and realised that it doesn't matter what you've been taught, courses you've been on, or stupid titles people give themselves, if you haven't got common sense then you might as well pack up and go.
I now work as a project manager and realise this role is nothing but buzz words, risk /issue logs and delegating tasks, and talking 5hite. should have stayed technical.
Im 44, and the IT world has as much appeal to me now as wearing a pair of trainers covered in dog 5hit !
SBK
Similar situatuon here. I went into IT because of a genuine love of technology. But all these years later it is draining the life out of me. Outsourcing is really annoying me recently as the company gives up all control of who we employ to a consultancy company. They simply employ the cheapest person. Anyone who gets good will leave the consultancy after a short time and we have a constant turnover of either good but new staff, or poor quality people with poor communication skills who stick around. SLA's are managed but frankly they don't measure the true customer experience. This isn't specific to any one company I have worked for as it seems to happen to them all.
Drives me nuts.
We recently brought our IT support back in-house, having been in a managed service for 5 years. With some of the people they placed on-site, it was hard to see how they were in IT. We now provide a better service at a lower cost, with control over who we employ.
Soldato
- Joined
- 30 Sep 2005
- Posts
- 16,843
I have worked in IT for 20 years, and found that the majority of the people I work with are utter idiots. Their idea for clustering and high availability is manually changing a DNS record. Some days I really struggle having to lower my expectations.
My mind is constantly facepalming to the point I get headaches.
My mind is constantly facepalming to the point I get headaches.
So the 2nd Line Team consists of less than 10 people and we all have roles with that team.
We have a BAU role who deal with the Incidents being passed from the Service Desk.
We have a Maintenance role that deals with Change Management and fixing broken servers.
We have a Request role that deals with user access, printer creation, DNS/DHCP changes.
And then we have the AV role and that involves looking after 25,000+ Desktops, Servers, Laptops & Tablets. And yes, it's an ALL DAY task.
My personal favourite from years ago;
Was working on 2nd line and we were mixed in with our onshore 1st line counterparts.
The guy on 1st line sat next to me was on the phone having a real problem with a user unable to get any display output from her laptop onto the monitor on the desk. Everyone had a laptop and all desks were set up with docks to hotdesk.
He asked me to join the call and see if I could make any sense of the symptoms.
So we went through from the start. Is there a power light on the monitor - yes. Ensure it was the correct input - yes. Etc.
So sounds like laptop right? Is the laptop powered on (dumb but obvious)? Yes. You logged into device ok - Yes.
Asked her to her to press the fn+key combo to ensure the laptop was set to output to the monitor....
Lady: "One second, just need to take it out of my laptop bag".
Me: "Ummm, you don't have your laptop plugged into the dock??!"
Lady: "No, it's the new one with wireless"
I left the call and told the 1st line guy he had it from here.
Was working on 2nd line and we were mixed in with our onshore 1st line counterparts.
The guy on 1st line sat next to me was on the phone having a real problem with a user unable to get any display output from her laptop onto the monitor on the desk. Everyone had a laptop and all desks were set up with docks to hotdesk.
He asked me to join the call and see if I could make any sense of the symptoms.
So we went through from the start. Is there a power light on the monitor - yes. Ensure it was the correct input - yes. Etc.
So sounds like laptop right? Is the laptop powered on (dumb but obvious)? Yes. You logged into device ok - Yes.
Asked her to her to press the fn+key combo to ensure the laptop was set to output to the monitor....
Lady: "One second, just need to take it out of my laptop bag".
Me: "Ummm, you don't have your laptop plugged into the dock??!"
Lady: "No, it's the new one with wireless"
I left the call and told the 1st line guy he had it from here.
Sounds massively inefficient to have someone spending all day managing AV on end user devices (you aren't looking after over 25k devices, this isn't your CV lol). What is it you are using for managing the AV on devices?
Managed properly centrally and with automation you should barely need to even touch anything to do with AV let alone sit and do stuff with it all day. I can't think what you are doing all day with AV?
1st line = log incidents & resolve the easy/scripted stuff they have direct instruction to follow to fix.
2nd line should be flogged the incidents that do not meet above criteria. Strong Google skills good here, although rare from my experience.
3rd line is god. Bow down.
Managed properly centrally and with automation you should barely need to even touch anything to do with AV let alone sit and do stuff with it all day. I can't think what you are doing all day with AV?
1st line = log incidents & resolve the easy/scripted stuff they have direct instruction to follow to fix.
2nd line should be flogged the incidents that do not meet above criteria. Strong Google skills good here, although rare from my experience.
3rd line is god. Bow down.
Last edited:
We're using SEP (Symantec).
So I investigate all WS.Reputation faults, Trojan alerts etc.. (we do get quite a few)
I also fix clients where modules / components have malfunctioned and require repairing and/or reinstalling.