Thank you for calling tech support, now please die (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for calling tech support, now please die (2015)

arstechnica.com

95 pointsnwrk26 comments

> we weren’t graded purely on call completion time... basing an employee’s performance evaluation on how quickly they get people off the phone is a toxic way to measure work

And yet, it's unfortunately how all too many of these outfits have continued to run their businesses. Being spared this particular indignity was a major privilege.

> phone monkeys such as myself reached a state of "burnout" in no more than eighteen months... I hated the job and needed to quit before I hurt myself

Sadly, a great many of us essentially felt trapped in our positions for quite a bit longer. Never enough available time/energy to pursue greater things when we had bills to pay, and always insufficient meaningful experience to parlay into anything better.

> I’d take a minimum wage job doing manual labor over slapping that headset down over my head again

After way too many years, I finally crossed this bridge. I would prefer janitorial work or being a rideshare driver, and have (gladly) done both since leaving tech support.

> support, I’d rapidly found out, isn’t fulfilling or exciting—it’s a never-ending grind that wears down even the most optimistic and helpful souls... a Sisyphean torment.

This sums it all up in a nutshell. It would be nice to see the whole thing reformed into a ramp for more rewarding work of different kinds, but in our current 'disposable employee' culture, I don't see it happening any time soon. In the mean time, lives are being destroyed and tremendous amounts of potential are being squandered. I can only hope a few people in charge of such operations might read this and think about ways things can be improved.

As a customer, the late 90s were the absolutely most frustrating time to deal with computer customer support. In virtually every case, it was obvious that the customer support person was simply reading from a support database that the company hadn't bothered to put on the web yet, and yet to get these answers it was necessary to let the operator, who generally had no tech knowlege, walk you through a long script of repeating obvious steps until finally you would get to step 50 in their script that said "if you get error 87AB with an nvidia graphics driver, you must frazz the foo in the bios settings", which is all I wanted in the first place.

Gateway was one of the worst, since they generally had OEM versions of hardware that required special driver settings that were completely undocumented. Since this type of thing is generally online now, I honestly don't think I've called customer support for any personal product in over 15 years.

I think I'm the only person in the planet that enjoys doing tech support. I just _love_ it. You get to talk to real customers and fix real problems. Most of the time the fixes are easy so you get quick wins. Callers are be delighted to speak with someone technically competent who doesn't put them on hold forever and all the other crap you usually expect from tech support.

If only I could make a decent living doing tech support I would totally make that my career.

My first job was doing tech support for an early dial up ISP, and it was not for me. On the other hand, in an environment with a corporate desk job where co-workers would come by and ask me questions, it was basically as you say, enjoyable to solve real problems, as opposed to my main job of working on things for clients that you could never interface with directly.

Whether helping people is fun depends a lot on how civilized they are.

I worked at a small startup (our office was a store room in a clothing store) and for the first couple years wrote the software and answered the phones along with another developer. Eventually we got larger and hired a support guy, but I still handled the tricker calls and covered during support guy's vacation.

I did enjoy answering the phone and helping out the customers, though I didn't love the interrupt-driven nature of answering the phone. Being able to interact directly with customers did help improve our software, though. Over the course of many years, I got to know several customers pretty well, and even got invited to one's retirement party (sadly, it was in another state and I couldn't attend).

I think it depends a lot on the environment in which you work. I worked tech support at a large university and we had a lot of autonomy to when it came to troubleshooting and solving problems. It was also a very heterogeneous environment with a wide variety of users which meant we got all kinds of problems to solve. On the whole, I loved that job.

On the other hand I've had friends that worked tech support for a large telecoms company and that was all scripts and zero autonomy. That job sounded like pure hell.

Great to hear that!

I had a similar experience when I worked for a customer with people that really used my software. The fact that I talked with them without any managers in between was a complete game changer. When I've seen them happy when I implemented something small or fixed a bug that had a tremendous impact on my morale. Nowadays I'm earning a lot more but the abstract nature of my work, where you don't see any tactile effects of your efforts is discouraging.

I like working in support, too.

I work for a company that helps developers working with our software frameworks-- we pay a decent wage.

Good luck, maybe you'll find an employer that properly values your skillset.

"Yep," he’d say on mute, with a customer’s sad voice droning on in both our ears. "Once you get the new ticket open, it’s tab three times to get to the description field, and if you need to get into Internet Explorer it’s control-escape, I, enter, then alt-tab back. I’m the fastest tech on the floor here because I never take my hands off the keyboard. If you’re smart, you’ll be like me."

Sounds like my kinda guy!

Control-escape is equivalent to the Windows key; alt-escape is the shortcut that cycles quickly between recently used applications without showing the small bar in the middle, like alt-tab does.

The mega combo is ctrl-alt-tab (or altgr-tab for the international keyboard aficionados) which gives you the application switcher bar, and lets you navigate with the arrow keys without holding down any other keys.

Windows key + tab too

I spent some years at Convergys. And definitely recognize many of the procedures and idiocies described in that article, even though it was in a different country. It's easy to forget how large the call centre business really is.

It's a really entertaining read for me, but I can't place my finger on why exactly. I think crappy jobs are a great plot device in any story though since so many people have that shared experience. The ending is so satisfying to me.

You enjoyed it because the author is a great writer. I felt the same way you did. It's impressive how the story telling was so engaging while the topic is so mundane. I could see this being made into a cult-classic movie a la Office Space.

Article author here, though I'm a few days late to the party. Thank you for the kind words :)

I kept waiting for the tech support call where someone said "Thank you for calling tech support, now please die" but it never happened. Even so, this was a really enjoyable read.

I thought safe mode on windows 98 was also F8. I thought F8 has been the go-to key to get a list of boot options after POST.

Both F8 and CTRL work for Windows 98.

But it probably didn’t matter what he answered in their two-question interview.

Are there call centers for iPhone tech support or only F2F at Apple Stores? How have the problems changed compared to PCs?

Yes Apple regularly advertise for helpdesk employees, they get to work from home though.

The problems haven't changed, helpdesk is 75% assisting customers with reading comprehension, 25% actually solving legitimate problems.

Not all of them though AppleCare is a step up from the ibm/Accenture/Conversys/etc. rum boilerrooms that makes up way to big a portion of the callcenter industry

Apple don't maintain contact centres per se; instead, in the US have a fleet of teleworking contact employees who handle calls, online chats, etc.

From what I hear it's a pretty good gig, minus dealing with the public.

"From what I hear it's a pretty good gig, minus dealing with the public."

It's a pretty good gig, if you don't count the actual gig?

My experience with tech support doesn't involve phones, fortunately. I got some exercise crawling around under people's desks.

Apple absolutely maintains contact centers. There are a couple of campuses worldwide. They also do teleworking, and they employ contact center vendors like conversys.

Replace Houston with Redmond and this is almost exactly the story of my 2nd IT job - as a BPOS tech in the late 2000s. BPOS was basically Microsoft Online beta.

They had a group of 8 of us shadowing people on both sides of the aisle. It was like a shadow village - hidden village of the phone.

Today I learned about the Houston tunnel system.

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