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Find a new job. 100% this is the right move.
IT Career advice on a service desk... Should I quit?
- Thread starter solado
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I can sympathise, I worked on a IT Help desk for a large food company and I hated every minute of it. Non existent documentation and minimal training and horrible shift rotas. The thought of being stuck at a desk with a headset on for the foreseeable future stressed me out. I started applying for jobs in my 3rd month and was lucky to land a really great job as an IT technician.
I now work in a small IT team and am very much hands on with everything and have learnt so much in the 1st year I have been here. Bonus is a can walk to work, and it is better working hours. There are jobs out there, just apply for everything and something should work out.
I now work in a small IT team and am very much hands on with everything and have learnt so much in the 1st year I have been here. Bonus is a can walk to work, and it is better working hours. There are jobs out there, just apply for everything and something should work out.
You gave a big list of items that illustrated what an annoying working environment you have, genuine concerns that would leave most people feeling demotivated, but then threw that line in at the end which dilutes the message somewhat. If you are clock-watching to the extent that you want to claim back less than half of hour of time, then it probably doesn't project that well to those around you (hence the 'not dedicated enough' comment).
Of course you should not feel obligated to work additional time but there is a general acceptance in most workplaces that you might run a few minutes over especially if you are in a position where walking out the door bang on 5pm every day could leave others in the lurch. Where I work if someone tried to claim back a one-off instance of 20mins time in lieu they would probably be met with total incredulity and that's not a case of everyone is regularly pulling extra hours, but just because a single short occurrence would be deemed so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that the damage to personal reputation would exceed any benefit from getting that 20mins back.
Given the paucity of IT positions in your area, have you considered looking further afield? I appreciate you may have ties to the local area making this unfeasible but one of the mistakes I made when starting out after uni was to only really look for jobs in my home town rather than casting the net a lot wider. I then ended up doing a crap job for 4 years before getting out.
It works both ways I'm afraid, the company (or rather the manager) shouldn't really be commenting on leaving early when in fact all he is doing is working his contracted hours. Provide a good working environment and team morale and people will be less inclined to moan or claim 'overtime'.
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Sorry about that... I did a lot of work on that timing system.
I wouldn't dispute that and I am not seeking to justify the behaviour of the organisation/manager, rather explain it. As you say it works both ways, so if the employee is trying to claim back 20mins it will naturally help perpetuate this view that they aren't as dedicated.
@OP Obviously we've only got one side of the story here but it certainly doesn't sound like an ideal work environment! On the other hand there probably are things you can address, some of the things you mentioned are telling... in particular spending too long on tickets, getting grief for not updating tickets properly and getting grief for asking questions. These are partly down to your own experience or lack of it, there are ways of asking questions too... maybe they're all ass holes or maybe you've annoyed some people by being annoying/not making a decent attempt to solve something before coming to them - no one is going to want to spoon feed people and support can be a bit of a sink or swim environment. This coupled with the talk about spending too long on calls does highlight that there are perhaps arras you could work on... yet in both posts you hint that you're the sort of person who wants to clock off right away - in the first post you mention leaving at 5:05 and in the second you mention begrudgingly not being able to claim for some extra 20 minutes... I think it is one thing to be on top of everything, not taking longer than average to handle calls etc.. and then leave on time and rather another if you are not really up to speed and haven't been performing as well as they'd like, in that instance I'd be inclined to stay a bit longer and get yourself up to speed.
Other aspects do however indicate an unpleasant work environment - I'd try to leave as soon as you can, though if you want to stay in the industry it would perhaps be better to stick with the current role until you can land a new one and learn as much as you can.
Other aspects do however indicate an unpleasant work environment - I'd try to leave as soon as you can, though if you want to stay in the industry it would perhaps be better to stick with the current role until you can land a new one and learn as much as you can.
I give it my best to solve the problem and will only go to tier 2/3 if it's a physical hardware problem or a network issue / server that I don't have access to. 99% of the time when I go escalate something it's for a good reason (e.g a patient needs a prescription but the servers down or hard drive throwing errors in event view and crashing) If anything my ass is at my desk far more than any of the other tier 1 guys who are now passing calls to me because they can't fix them. I would be pretty annoyed if someone expected to be spoon fed the answers, I did come from an IT background before my mental health crippled me beyond functional so I do have experience in networking and troubleshooting.
With the >10 minute calls it's for a good reason, one example was a GP practice was down and none of their printers worked. Most of the guys would have logged it and sent it to tier 2 who probably would have picked it up later on that day and been angry about it because they wasn't informed. I decided to take the initiative to work out all the network printers and set them up so the GP surgery could get on with their work and save the tier 2 guys a job who are probably so busy they can't sit down.
If anything the environment is calmed down allot. My manager actually talks to me with respect all of a sudden and has been telling me people are providing feedback of me by name and giving praise. One of the tier 2 guys said he was delighted to get tickets I raise because they're well documented, clear and troubleshooting is extremely helpful for him to go to a job.
It feels this week something changed and I can't put my finger on it but people seem to respect me, One of the tier 3 guys has given me some material and asked if I want to sit down with him and go through a few areas I want to learn. He often pops in the office for a chat to check how my study is going.
Oh nice, that's positive at least. Also do you know how they break down the stats for the tickets - are the numbers passed to second line, numbers closed etc.. closely monitored and also is it logged when someone else from 1st line passes stuff to you?
I guess if you do stick around there then it is worth highlighting some of these things in an appraisal (and certainly making a note of it re: the number of issues others within your team are passing to you) - there are a few points for you to argue or highlight - firstly you're clearly doing the more difficult tickets if you're getting passed them from others in your team ergo you've got a strong argument for having longer time per ticket and this is also backed up if you're passing fewer tickets to second line. The difficulty can arise if you're really out of whack with the numbers you close... like it is great to try and not pass stuff on but obviously you want to still ensure you're closing a similar-ish number to the rest of the team as obviously you can't just do a second line job as stuff still needs to be cleared.
I've not got direct experience of a help desk per say but I did have some brief experience years ago in application support - we didn't have a second line initially it was just a team and then the development teams... the similar scenario/problem we perhaps had was where a ticket needed development time and whether to pass it onto a BA/product owner from dev or whether to do a full spec ourselves (which they were usually grateful for) which could be quite time consuming and take a few hours where we could be working on other tickets... it is difficult to balance as you want to put the effort in to do a bit of the next job above you (in my case it was trying to write awesome specs the developers would appreciate and I guess in your case it is to try and handle some of the 2nd line stuff) but you don't want that to let your main role slip or let your stats look too poor relative to your colleagues.
Anyway just to say hang in there, it can be tough being in this type of role, I didn't have to deal with people who were saving lives but I did have to deal with say some angry traders, their MD and then some global head of X at some big bank all jumping on a conference call while I investigate why some desk's position is out by X million (often because of something dumb one of the traders has done... though you needed to be diplomatic about it). It worked out for me in the end, I moved onto a dev team as they liked the specs I was writing and went on from there - hopefully in a similar vein you can make the next move up in your place by carrying on putting in the effort to take on stuff from the 2nd line job above yours and most importantly - make sure people know about it! Tis always useful not just to be productive/helpful but to make sure that you're visibly productive/helpful - your manager needs to know that you're taking stuff for other team members and that second line team needs to know that you're saving them time and effort too. Hope it gets less stressful for you soon
I guess if you do stick around there then it is worth highlighting some of these things in an appraisal (and certainly making a note of it re: the number of issues others within your team are passing to you) - there are a few points for you to argue or highlight - firstly you're clearly doing the more difficult tickets if you're getting passed them from others in your team ergo you've got a strong argument for having longer time per ticket and this is also backed up if you're passing fewer tickets to second line. The difficulty can arise if you're really out of whack with the numbers you close... like it is great to try and not pass stuff on but obviously you want to still ensure you're closing a similar-ish number to the rest of the team as obviously you can't just do a second line job as stuff still needs to be cleared.
I've not got direct experience of a help desk per say but I did have some brief experience years ago in application support - we didn't have a second line initially it was just a team and then the development teams... the similar scenario/problem we perhaps had was where a ticket needed development time and whether to pass it onto a BA/product owner from dev or whether to do a full spec ourselves (which they were usually grateful for) which could be quite time consuming and take a few hours where we could be working on other tickets... it is difficult to balance as you want to put the effort in to do a bit of the next job above you (in my case it was trying to write awesome specs the developers would appreciate and I guess in your case it is to try and handle some of the 2nd line stuff) but you don't want that to let your main role slip or let your stats look too poor relative to your colleagues.
Anyway just to say hang in there, it can be tough being in this type of role, I didn't have to deal with people who were saving lives but I did have to deal with say some angry traders, their MD and then some global head of X at some big bank all jumping on a conference call while I investigate why some desk's position is out by X million (often because of something dumb one of the traders has done... though you needed to be diplomatic about it). It worked out for me in the end, I moved onto a dev team as they liked the specs I was writing and went on from there - hopefully in a similar vein you can make the next move up in your place by carrying on putting in the effort to take on stuff from the 2nd line job above yours and most importantly - make sure people know about it! Tis always useful not just to be productive/helpful but to make sure that you're visibly productive/helpful - your manager needs to know that you're taking stuff for other team members and that second line team needs to know that you're saving them time and effort too. Hope it gets less stressful for you soon