Timeline for How do I help my team hire a Tech Support Analyst?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 11, 2022 at 16:59 | comment | added | DxTx | "I intend to stay in tech support for the rest of my life.". Not only that, you also want your hire to stay in that position for the rest of their life as well. Or, at least, for a very long time without any career growth. Good luck! You are going to need that. | |
| Mar 24, 2016 at 6:27 | comment | added | JB King | @GiveLove, I hope you do a better job of understanding questions in your job than you did with mine as I don't believe they were that hard to answer in my opinion. I've been a web developer for 17 years but somehow I doubt many saw that coming in 1993 when I started university. | |
| Mar 24, 2016 at 3:29 | vote | accept | Give Love | ||
| Mar 24, 2016 at 0:06 | comment | added | Give Love | @JBKing: I work at a university. I have also worked at a biotechnology company. I don't know how things will pan out in the future, but right now I feel like I want to die working on this job. And I have a couple of system administrators on my team who feel the same way about their jobs. I'm telling you, it's amazing. | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 23:39 | comment | added | JB King | @GiveLove, how long have you done Tech Support and how long do you intend to do that job? Most big companies prefer people to have career paths and move on to higher level jobs. Look up the Peter Principle if you need a reference on where this can go wrong yet I suspect more than a few companies apply that principle in some form or other. | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 23:28 | comment | added | Give Love | @MelBurslan: I find this offensive, just so you know. I intend to stay in tech support for the rest of my life. Are you saying that it makes me a loser? | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 19:57 | comment | added | MelBurslan | @JasonJanowitz my point exactly. Tech support is and will always be the stepping stone for the techie types, not a career path. And yes as most tech support jobs focus on the metric and the metric is how many tickets you closed in a day/week/month. I have had short lived positions that you were expected to close X number of tickets every week, otherwise considered as under-performing. No the way to treat someone whose main focus is problem solving and complex ones at that. | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 19:11 | comment | added | Give Love | @JasonJanowitz Thank you. You see, in many organizations people look at "tickets" as a nuisance. As people whom you just wish would go away. People look at complaints as a nuisance and a cost. And they forget that feedback, criticism, is a GIFT. It is a gift. It is valuable. | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 18:50 | comment | added | JasonJ | I kinda resent this answer saying that Tech support is not for techie types. Although I am not doing it now tech support can be a great career. My first support job a 100 years ago sent me to a one week class on transact SQL and since then every job I have had involved me doing DBA work. Unless you are working in a organization where you follow a script there is always a change to learn new things and get better at your job. And the reason I left my last support job? Because the focus was on ticket closing without caring if the problem was solved and the user satisfied. | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 18:34 | comment | added | Give Love | It's not about finding qualified interviewees. You were saying, I think, in your earlier comment, that I am cutting out a whole swathe of people who might be qualified for the job. I am basically cutting out people who don't want the job. | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 18:33 | comment | added | Dan | I would ask them why did they apply to a developer position then tell them I'd call them in 2 weeks. However in your answer you're simply saying you don't have qualified interviewees and you're asking how to find one. The answer is it's very hard. There are plenty of people who claim to be a dev and expert at a language who can't even put together a working application when asked. So finding qualified person is difficult especially in any tech field. Your question and statement do not match and I do not know how to help you. As you say in tech support, "Need more information from customer." | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 18:30 | comment | added | Give Love | How would you feel Dan, about hiring someone on your team, who did not want to be a developer and kept asking at interview how soon they can become e.g. a project manager? | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 18:25 | comment | added | Dan | I am a full time developer and was a sys admin at one point during college. | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 18:24 | comment | added | Give Love | Let me ask you this Dan. Are you a developer, or a sys admin? | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 18:23 | history | edited | MelBurslan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 9 characters in body
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| Mar 23, 2016 at 18:22 | comment | added | MelBurslan | Believe me. I have been there. I did tech support about 2 years and wanted to drill my brains out after about 3 months. The pipeline may change and you may need to learn new things but not as fast as a developer or systems engineer has to. And technology enthusiasts thrive on information overload. | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 18:21 | comment | added | Dan | I think you're a bit harsh with this person but you are right that he's probably cutting out a major segment of potential employees by having this very specific person in mind. Chances are he's very difficult to work with and expects everyone to follow a specific path. My advice to OP is open up a little and understand that most people would not show up to work if suddenly money was not a problem. | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 18:17 | comment | added | Give Love | I'm not sure where that idea is coming from, that tech support is mundane. There is a lot of learning in tech support. Learning about users needs, learning how others are using our system, passing this on to developers, helping us guide how our future development work. I get to participate in deciding how our system is built, at a high level. I see that many of the devs and sys admins are very siloed; they don't know what other parts of the organization are doing. I get to have a generalist, broad view of our operation. I really enjoy that. | |
| Mar 23, 2016 at 18:13 | history | answered | MelBurslan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |