IT professionals - speak regular English please

[TorontoTrekker]

I have no problem writing in laymen's terms. I've found that many highly technical people are bad at writing plain English, so I can't argue with that.

As far as troubleshooting the issue rather than just restarting: it's a good idea to actually fix the problem rather than just pretend it doesn't exist and hope it doesn't happen again. Taking the time to address the problem now means that mission-critical system won't go down again (hopefully.)

Exactly. Simply restarting the system may get you working again, but it does nothing to prevent it from recurring. As a developer, there's nothing I hate worse than being forced to do a half-assed job on something because the user doesn't want me to take the time to do the analysis and try to determine the root cause of their issue. They just want me to zap the data. I, on the other hand, want to fix it so that it never happens again.

I'll also echo the sentiment that it's necessary to give as much and as accurate information as possible. "I cannot access xyz" doesn't really lead anywhere except to more questions.

A lot of IT staff aren't terribly skilled socially, however and can be assholes so I do have some sympathy, but stating your problem with as much information as possible - especially any error messages - and not leaving out details (like the fact that you did something stupid just prior to your problem occurring) will work wonders.

Yeah, I love just hearing "x doesn't work." Great! That's such useful information!

Yeah, I was getting that all this week. The site I've been working on was supposed to go live earlier this week, but they didn't start user acceptance testing until Monday morning. So naturally, everything is an emergency but I wasn't always getting all of the information I need. (Like: which of the 3,000 pages that have been created for this site were you on? Which form on the page were you entering data into? A franchisee lookup by postal code? A request for a consultation? A newsletter subscription? A request for franchise information? What messages, if any, did you get - and please provide them verbatim. Simply saying "I got an SQL error message" doesn't help at all when any given page might have the capacity to execute 20 database calls.)

Fortunately, the people I work with are generally well-trained and they send screenshots of exactly what they're seeing, and describe what they were doing at the time the error occurred.

Must be nice.

Even so, there's one guy who always sends me screenshots but no context, and it's like a puzzle I have to figure out. What about this shot am I supposed to be concerned about? What's wrong here? We're talking about screenshots not showing any errors, either, just data. Like I'm a damn mind-reader.

My two favourite complaints from this week were "The 'view demo' button takes me to the bottom of the page" (where is this 'view demo' button? Believe it or not, I don't have the layout of all 3,000 pages memorized - especially since I didn't create the content - not to mention that many pages aren't saved in the database but are generated dynamically), and "The 'request a home inspection' box looks weird." (Dammit Jim, I'm a developer, not a designer...)

Oh, and I've also gotten "The site is slow." Well, which page are you loading? Maybe I can tighten the code for one of the modules that's being displayed, or a procedure that's looking up data could be more efficient, but without knowing what you're trying to do, I can't do much. I can't make the site faster by waving chicken entrails over my keyboard, or by taking out every other line of code.

Not to mention, several of them weren't bugs at all - they were related to website content that had been entered incorrectly by the client. Knowing the difference between logic and content is critical to knowing whom to complain to, when you're testing a website where the content is created by the client, not the developer or designer.

Do you want to know the big secret about IT staff? They don't know what exception error 22 is either, but they know how to use Google to find out. Then they follow whatever instructions they find and hope that the problem goes away.

I knew it. Great bullshitters then these people are.

Oh, balderdash. If the screen says "exception error 22" (and I agree that that's a rather user-unfriendly message), then that message is coming from somewhere specific in the code. I can look and see where error code 22 is generated, and troubleshoot the problem.

In fact, one site that I worked on recently has something similar. The users see a friendly error message (something like "An error has occurred processing your request. Our IT department has been notified and will fix the problem. In the meantime, click here to try your request again.") and we get an email that contains the error message and location in the code.

So when I get an email that says "User xyz encountered error 41 on site abc.com," I can find where the error comes from in about 30 seconds, and can generally fix it fairly quickly.

A good developer will do their best to make error messages as helpful as possible, even if it's only helpful to them. It speeds up the process of fixing it.

We are not allowed to contact our IT support by phone. We have to send them an email, and then they call us when they feel like it.

That is crap and it sounds like something you need to make a fuss about and get changed. If the reason is they're too overworked then they need to hire more staff or get outsourced to a company that can provide better service. I've never worked in a company where that would be regarded as an acceptable policy.

It's almost the same SOP at my (rather large) company as well. If you call the help desk, you do get a human on the other end, but their only job is to log the problem and send it on to the *actual* IT people, who call back at their own convenience. What's even more annoying is that you then have to explain the entire problem again, and I don't know if it's because they don't read the report (which I've discovered is true sometimes) or if the first person didn't write it down clearly.

What you call "at their own convenience" is actually "as quickly as possible, given the other priorities at the moment." I have three projects on the go at the moment, not counting one that was deployed about three weeks ago and for which I had to make a small code change this afternoon.

Everything is urgent to the person reporting the issue. Not everything is equally urgent, however, and you don't know everything about what your IT people are doing at any given moment, especially if your company is big, or your IT is outsourced and they have multiple clients, or you're looking for support on a piece of commercial software, as opposed to something intended for in-house use only.

I think that the problem is that people outside our IT department see 15 people on the orgchart, but don't understand that there are only three of us who can write PHP code, and I'm the only one who can write C# or VB code. So everything I'm asked to do, if I have to drop what I'm working on and do it immediately, delays something else.

Oh... and stop using Internet Explorer! It's not standards-compliant. We call it "Internet Exploder" for a reason.

 

[Marc]

If Microsoft can't seem to discourage people from sticking with IE6 I don't we mere mortals in tech support can stop them using using IE in general.

Not that Microsoft make it easy anyway given that to use some of their programs and systems you have to use IE to get them to work properly (remote desktop gateway and uploading multiple files to Sharepoint are to examples I can think of off the top of my head).

 

[MacLeod]

It's a test. They're testing you to see if you're part of their special club of computer-literate people. Learn a few phrases in their language, drop them casually in conversation, and from then on you'll get special treatment by IT people (i.e. they will actually give a shit about your problems).

LOL, I would say this is true to a certain extend. I've been dealing with IT issues for several years now, so when I phone the IT deptartment and tell them my job title. It's almost as if you can hear, the o crap I can't talk my way out of this one as I'm dealing with someone who has some understanding.

 

[trekkiedane]

RTFM

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Indeed, here you have both PLUS a techie who is fluent in jargon:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rksCTVFtjM4&feature=fvsr[/yt]
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I've tried giving as much information about the error as I can from the get go and that usually leads nowhere. I will write an email with a long paragraph of the exact issue and everything I have tried and the hours of Google searching I have done to solve it and will get something back like, "Please unplug the system and plug it back in and let me know how that works." It can be infuriating.

When they walk you through the same things you've just told them you have done before even calling AND invariably come to the same result AND re-route you to a senior techie who then proceeds to walk you through the same steps once again...

Hilarious! It didn't occur to him that you'd load a CD-ROM in the computer just like you'd load a music cd in a cd player?

Weeeelll, some high-end cd players actually need you to load the disc with the data-side upward!