Hacker News Reader

Comment by celeritascelery | Hacker News Reader

I had a recent indecent where I needed a new screw for my work laptop. I walked up to the IT building on site and asked for one. They said they couldn’t get one unless I had a ticket. So I went back to my desk and opened a ticket with IT. It took almost an hour to talk to the person and then they wanted pictures of the missing screw hole. So I had to use my phone to take pictures and upload them to the support website. More waiting. Then I get a report back saying they recommended a complete clamshell replacement (for a screw!). I told them just give me a freaking ticket please. They finally did and I went to the on-site IT building and they put in a new screw in 2 minutes. But the whole process took almost 4 hours. Half a day wasted for a screw.

View on HN

And how much time would the IT guy have wasted finding that screw? So you think everyone knows exactly what screw goes in that hole? There’s likely a not insignificant amount of time needed to just figure out which type of screw it was.

Beyond that, every user thinks their issue is “just a quick question”. When you have 100s of people who all think that, that’s a whole week of work right there.

And often times something that looks small can turn into a big problem. Why did that screw fall out? Screws don’t just “fall out” for no reason. Did the threads get stripped out? How did that happen? If so maybe the chassis needs to be replaced. Did it pop out because of a swelling battery? If you don’t start with a ticket, there’s nowhere to keep track of all that.

So find a screw that fits, give it them, file a ticket for them, and if they come back then look deeper.

Or just swap the drives with another laptop and send them on their way and then diagnose the other laptop later.

I worked in IT and our mission was always to get the customer working again as quickly as possible, and put as much work on us as possible.

That’s how you add value as an IT organization.

So they save a week of work, but they do it by pushing months of work onto other departments, for a HUGE net loss in productivity.

The work is there regardless of who does it. It’s a net zero change in total amount of work. It’s more efficient to have the user with the problem to write up the initial report, as they’re the ones with the most details. And it’s better to let IT focus on actually solving other things than to have a highly paid workforce just writing up tickets.

The IT guys would have loved to just fix it for you in two minutes, but unfortunately HR or someone else forces them to stick to the sticky process.

This was my experience too when working in IT for a little bit. Many were happy to just sort problems out there and then but I could clearly see they were being reprimanded by HR for fixing issues without tickets. However, there was one callous and jaded printer technician who basically wouldn't even speak to someone unless they had a ticket opened.

Real fun when your review is all about number of tickets closed. You get bitter quick.

I expect I could game that system pretty effectively.

That’s the depressing part. You gotta be an ass to game it

Why would HR care whether an IT support staff was following the IT team's ticket process? HR is there to recruit, help hire, help fire, explain benefits packages and vacation policy, sometimes address workplace personnel conflicts, sometimes help teams budget salaries, and so on. IT's policies are made and enforced by IT management/leadership. I've never heard of any company where HR had any input whatsoever into an internal engineering or support team's processes.

Different organizations have different structures and different distributions of responsibility. I could absolutely see some places having HR be the place where metric-based policies originated, even for the IT team—and even over the objections of the head of IT. Especially if it's a place where the head of HR is a VP/C-suite, but the head of IT is just a Director. (Shockingly, not everywhere sees IT as being as important as other divisions.)

lol - you'd think that HR would be there for these things in most organisations, but in many they are petty bureaucrats. HR are not your friends.

They are not your friends, but also they very rarely have even ability to care about internal processes of various departments. As in, your boss may need HR to supervise as he is trying to take disciplinary action against what he perceives as you not following internal rules.

But HR themselves wont check whether you do jira tickets or whether you do something else. For HR, IT is one of many departments with own set of rules that HR does not get to decide.

Ticket count dictates headcount, work that isn't tracked with some kind of elaborate process isn't actually work nowadays.

It's been my experience that IT management want to see metrics and dashboards for everything. The want to be able to plan, allocate resources, and justify purchases and staff.

How many of these did we do, how many of those, how long did it take to close this type of ticket, etc. So while the technical people could fix things on the spot, they are not allowed to due to the demand for metrics and tracking.

I can see both sides of the debate, but there needs to be a good balance. We can get stuff done and provide metrics without too much overhead.

> how long did it take to close this type of ticket

About ten times as long as wihout using the ticket system and involving middle management

They wants metrics for everything but surprisingly they always refuse to measure the time people are using to fill those tickets and time spend in meetings everybody dislike.

Maybe, but I’ve noticed there’s a big difference in IT departments who will open a ticket for you/do it together, vs. ones who will only confirm that they won’t talk to you until you go back to your desk to open a ticket. I started my career in IT and have worked in both kinds. Some IT departments really have an us vs. the world mentality.

Needing tickets is just reality. Companies see IT as a cost center so they need to justify their existence, which they do with tickets. Creating tickets itself doesn’t need to be adversarial, but the process can be used to try to get people to leave you alone (or at least make it onerous to do so) if that’s what you want.

Around here, I as a support guy could theoretically open a ticket. But I'm shielded by policy, so users cannot call me directly. Instead they will reach a call center (same for emails) where tickets are written down, classified and assigned. It usually takes an hour from initial call until I even see the ticket.

When you see this, this is almost always a management vs IT issue, and you're just suffering the fallout of it.

With this said, if the management demands IT has tickets, this is something that must be reiterated to every employee. "If you go to IT without a ticket, they cannot and will not help you"

While you as an employee may not have been adversarial, it is extremely common for angry users demand help right now for their life ending issue that's more important than anything else in the world! You know, they need that PDF printed right now... While you happen to be working on the server that's keeping 100 other people from working.

I was the IT support tech who would input tickets for people instead of insisting they call/walk-in with a ticket. The result was management gaslighting my ticket numbers as artificially inflated and being highly critical of my work. Wound up on a PIP.

(Realistically, everyone outside the department knew me by name. They would call and ask for me any number of ways including outright lying. They'd tell me I was the sole source of any problems getting solved! "Everyone else in that department can't do a thing.")

Please just put tickets in before you reach out to IT and have the number ready. Print it off, even.

Bureaucracy and paper pushers always get in the way of doing actual work.

If you've ever worked in IT support, you know that the ticketing process is about the only thing that keeps the idiots at bay, spamming support directly with the most inane issues.

You may be quite adept with computer machines, but work a few days in IT support, and you'll understand why there is a ticketing process.

Yes and no.

I think at least a part of that problem is that the usual support ticketing process infantilizes users. If you call in and the first question is along the lines of "is it plugged in? have you tried turning it off and on again?" then of course your next ticket will take that level of questioning into account. And call in even for a switched off monitor next time. Because they wouldn't ask that question if that wasn't their job to fix, right?

Also, of course users will try and fail to fix issues themselves. They should be applauded for the intent and empowered to be successful next time (if possible). Instead they are usually berated for failing and breaking stuff along the way. Which leads to the usual sheepish "I didn't do anything, I didn't touch it, it always was broken like that".

Of course there is a minimum number of imbeciles. But most people can be educated and empowered, so they do behave like adults when dealing with problems. "The system" just has to give them that chance.

I agree entirely, and thank you for providing a more thoughtful analysis.

My experience: when tech support are (very) competent, (very) patient, (very) people-loving people, left to do their work in a low-turnover place with no ticket system, it is (very much) more efficient in the short-term, and absolute magic in the long-term.

I worked in IT. I had two techniques for people with inane questions -- number one, acknowledge their request and tell them they are in the queue, then follow up the next day asking if they still need help. Usually they had either figured it out or asked a friend by then. Number two was to just teach them where to figure it out for themselves as a ticket update, and then close it out the next day.

If they actually came by, we would just help them and then file a ticket for them to track our work.

There is no reason to force people to file tickets before you help them.

They absolutely should force people to file tickets before helping them, if the IT department is understaffed (which is an entirely different problem).

Understaffed or not, if you want to be perceived as a cost center that gets in the way, sure require tickets to do any work.

If you want to be seen as a force multiplier for the business that helps people get work done quicker, then actually help people and do the record keeping on your time, not theirs.

Yeah so you have people doing primary business work[1] doing the work of support people[1].

[1] Primary business, the shit the makes the money. [2] Support, shit that is done only to support #1.

It's been a long time since I've worked in a support-adjacent role, but IME it was always less about "keep[ing] the idiots at bay" and more about covering the ass of the help desk.

Things that take a support person 5 minutes are the bulk of the job, and those things have to be accounted for. If you slack on that, people will make their own determination of what constitutes a "simple" issue, you'll wind up with most of the issues the help desk solves not showing up in their metrics at all, and it looks to the higher-ups like the support people are just lazy.

In the places I've worked, support always _loved_ the "idiots" because their problems were simple. Being able to resolve a ticket by putting in a single screw, telling the person to turn on their computer, or initiating a password reset was the easiest kind of win you could get.

Not really. The process is what keeps IT guys from being overloaded by 5 people competing who is going to push them harder so that their issue take priority. Or simultaneously screaming at them when they will be done. And it prevents them from drowning in issues reported by multiple channels (mail, chat and phone) spending time trying to organize them into single queue or figuring one which mail has additional information to what was said in which phone call.

Process like jira tickers are literally the thing that improves quality of life of non-idle IT worker.

Your example is actually example of the above. You want your screw to be treated as #1 priority right now. Allowing the technician to finish what he was doing and only then get to your request is not fast enough. But, with that being the norm, work becomes jumping between tasks and trying to finish three things parallelly. It becomes impossible or super ineffective to finish larger tasks.

It's called metrics or kpi.

The idea of a ticketing system is to put everyone in a line and have them wait their turn. You were basically trying to skip the line. Yes, it was something trivial and easily fixable - but it was also something that didn't really affect your work productivity--your laptop wasn't falling apart, was it? So you could have put in a ticket and waited your turn like everyone else. Perhaps there were others with productivity-affecting issues that needed to be taken care of first.

The only way they are being unreasonable is if your company is in the high single or low to mid double digits of employees and they are using it as an excuse to avoid work. For large companies, there's enough trouble with managers and officers of the company all thinking they can just take an IT worker at their pleasure regardless of other workload, so they're probably going to be extra defensive for anyone else.

You should work IT servicedesk for a few months for a large company that doesn't want to plow money into IT and see how it is.

The down votes you’re getting here just really highlights how out of touch many developers (HN users) are from the reality of IT. All of your points are spot on, and anyone disagreeing with them simply doesn’t have enough experience to have a valid opinion.

IT Operations lives and dies by all the “5 minute real quick” tasks. The fact is that many requests fall into that category, but there can be 100s of those per day. The only way to manage that is by forcing people to open tickets, and then handle them according to priority.

This points to an IT department that has no slack. If you want to run a company that moves quickly, why would you have IT be the bottleneck?

As with all the other criticism in this topic, the fault is with the execs, and not the frontline IT workers.

Running with no slack is the definition of every company on the planet, except FAANG where they are swimming in money. From a business standpoint it makes no sense to pay people to sit around doing nothing just in case someone comes by with an extremely non-critical issue.

Running a tight ship may not make everyone happy, but it does force people to prioritize what really needs to get done vs what’s not critical.

I'm a sysadmin with decades of experience, many of them user facing and in IT support. I disagree with them. Hopefully I have enough experience to hold an opinon.

Triage is incredibly useful in life and death situations, and has some value in many others. Sticking to unmovable policy no matter what however is not IT Support, it's Corporate, Faceless IT Support that makes everyone who isn't IT dislike us.

The world doesn't have to be this way, and rigid adherance to policy and your disparaging attitude are some of the main reasons I hope I never have to work in soulless corporate IT again.

I think there is no right or wrong answer here. Imagine if IT just fixed that screw without a ticket. All good. Few mins. Now a few days later, there is sudden issue with the laptop. Guess what the customer will say ? They will say "Oh I donno, the IT guy put a screw in here last so may be something happened because of that". Now, there is no audit trail and accountability and details and boom, the IT person's job is at risk because they did not follow protocol.

No one wants to take 4 hours to replace a screw. But the answer is not always so cut and dry. The best we can do is to find a balance. For example, the IT guy fixes the screw right there BUT ensures a ticket was put in by the customer within next few hours.

Just let people open a ticket from a station at the IT desk, or let IT open the ticket themselves for a certain class of items. Similar to an over-the-counter permit at a building department. Municipal governments figured that out decades ago ;).

I've also had IT folks open a ticket for me on the spot. They know what minimal info to type to describe the problem, the longest part is telling them your name or employee ID number. They then close it immediately.

Yes that's a good way to go about it.

Yuck! There are reasons processes like that exist as annoying as they are. At a certain scale orgs have to make a queue or else nothing gets done. I work at a scale up and have seen the phenomenon with my own eyes. Easy enough when there are 10 employees. A lot harder when you 10x that number.

The situation you describe does sound pretty extreme though. Maybe your org is large enough to warrant it who knows. I don't think I could work someplace that had that much red tape.

Strange how like, dunno, drop in tire shops, works without ticket systems.

I think there can easily be two queues. The formal ticket queue and the "lets just do it to save admin"-queue.

Like, big tasks can't block small fast tasks due to congestion.

As I said, this particular anecdote does seem extreme. I am just making the point that at a certain scale it gets harder to do out of band tasks if you don't scale up the staffing to match it.

Walk-up service desks are absolutely normal in Big Tech.

The person who asked you to open a ticket was actually declining to solve your screw problem. They figured there was a high chance you would not bother to open a ticket. Also if you do open a ticket, they can assign it to someone else and from their point of view the problem has gone away.

The person recommending a clamshell replacement was telling you "I don't know what screw goes in that hole and actually I don't know how to order that off the vendor's website". They do not turn screws for a living and don't have the technical vocabulary to cope with your problem.

The only way they can get rid of you is to make it the vendor's problem; which means they need to transform your problem into something in the vendor's catalog. Hence, clamshell replacement.

When you went on-site with a ticket it seems like the front desk had no easier option left than to find a "screwdriver turner" (with the big pile of broken stuff in the back room) and get them to actually fix your problem.

Well, that's a problem with the management of the service desk. Most walk-in service desks log the ticket for you.

But it would have been interesting had you told them you couldn't use your computer because the screw is missing, and how do they expect you to log the ticket? Sounds like there is an arsehole in the service desk. I'd lodge a complaint internally.

At my last job they would just open the ticket for you after you left and immediately close it with a brief description. Walk up IT is fantastic when done right. At least they didn’t have to call a Dell or HP tech to come on site and install the screw.

You should walk a day in their shoes. Hand someone a screw and the next day someone else will come up and ask for a new monitor, and when you ask for them to request a monitor in the ticket system they will get all upset and talk about how they heard that you gave out supplies to someone else yesterday. Why can't you do it today?

Serving walk-up requests for equipment like monitors is one of the most basic functions of our IT. They ask for your username and file an auto-closing ticket on your behalf right there. When supplies are tight, like with M1 Macs, you have to get on a waiting list. But anything they have in inventory they will give you if you ask.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com