5 IT Support Issues, and How to Overcome Them
I dislike support. The reason for this is that The Secret Developer is a software engineer through and through.
Configuration and MDM could be set up and maintained by my dog
So, why does dealing with support take so much time and effort? Why can’t we simply let developers get on with creating value for the company?
This article is about my experience, and how I managed to get over the hurdles that IT Support “engineers” have put in the way of me delivering my latest Pull Request.
The Apple Genius
I dislike the Apple genius concept. I’ll let you know why.
At a barbeque recently I spoke with an Apple store employee (née Genius). It’s a normal conversation about their life, and how they wish to transfer store due to changes in living arrangements.
Don’t worry. The Secret Developer had already been drinking heavily, so could hide the boredom
The conversation turned to the poorest of Apple products, the Apple Watch. It’s poor because the thing doesn’t oftentimes charge on any of my three chargers (don’t ask). If you Google it, it seems there might be an issue with the hardware.
To move the conversation away from the Genius commute, I asked about this issue. Is it common in stores?
The fruit-based employee wouldn’t speculate. They went into a robotic “Take it to a store” mode.
It’s a similar closed reaction to when you take an awful iPhone silicon case to a store when it breaks after 2 months.
No dice
Locked Out After A Year
I just lived this. I’ve worked at my current job for 12 months and then tried to connect to the work systems.
Your account is disabled
What might have happened? Have I been fired as I deserve to be?
It turns out that once you’ve worked for 12 months at my company they lock your account. The support representative sounded surprised this happened to a permanent member of staff rather than a contractor.
I can feel that the following assumptions have happened:
Contractors don’t stay long-term (although they do in practice)
The best way of protecting accounts is to lock them
The company has such poor communication that people may leave without IT support being notified
This suggests to me that the problem is much wider than an IT Support issue.
I do think we are not learning, as this happened to several contractor colleagues. So, are IT Support getting calls and then not working on the root cause?
Also to call IT Support and to get my account unlocked took 1 1/2 hours. 15 minutes on hold. IT Support is an internal function in my place of work.
Great use of an expensive employee's time
Password Refresh
Your password needs to be changed every three months. I don’t understand why, as even Microsoft no longer recommends periodic password changes.
However, the main problem is the MDM password does not keep in sync with the Azure password (how). That means you’ll likely be forced one day to change the password on your work machine, but the password you use to access (say) email on that machine won’t change and will be the old password. Until one day it magically syncs. When does that day come?
At a surprise date in the future
Software Updates
We aren’t “allowed” to keep our Mac up to date. Some internal preparation needs to take place to make sure that our corporation can handle the latest version of MacOS.
This led to a previously managed update which wiped all personal data from the machine.
We now get four hours' warning before a forced update. That means when you log on first thing in the morning you need to upgrade including a mandatory restart within 4 hours. I’m surprised since we can have meetings that run for longer than 4 hours straight at work.
Don’t worry. I’m not missed from the meetings
Phantom IT Issues
You know the type of issues. For me, this is the fans on my MacBook spinning up to the “turbine” level even when the machine itself is asleep.
For others, the phantom issues are not really phantom. At the office, the projectors don't work with MacBooks, which is fine except all of our team use MacBooks. It takes 45 minutes for each team meeting to call support, they come in to try to fix it (why? They know it doesn’t work) and then give up.
Sigh
Conclusion
We are all dependent on IT support in order to do our job well. We should be working together as a single team to deliver products and features.
Isn’t this article making the gap between us worse?