Ask HN: Is IT support becoming an anachronism in startups? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is IT support becoming an anachronism in startups?

2 pointsdnroberts3 comments

I've been in IT support for longer than I like to think, always striving to make IT a department a technical lubricant that enables a company to grow smoothly. One way that manifested was my goal for new employees to be able to walk in to a station 100% IT complete on day 1: after a brief IT orientation, they should be able to enter their password and get straight to work. On more than one occasion, my IT teams have been told our on-boarding was the best the user has ever experienced.

Recently however, I've had a number of people in both HR and IT proudly proclaim that new employees are handed an imaged laptop and an instruction sheet on their first day -- everything else they figure out themselves and IT as a support organization is nearly non-existent. If their Mac has problems, they hoof it to the Apple Store themselves for service.

I can see some advantages to this -- it has to help get you socialized in a new place and it certainly teaches self-reliance, but IMHO it also discourages standardization -- it feels like instead of 3 IT people doing things 1 way, you could have 50 people doing things 50 different ways. Having developers take time out of their day to diagnose printer problems or spend an hour in line waiting for a Genius Bar appointment also seems crazy.

Is this a growing trend in companies?

I've been on both sides of this. I spent a few years doing IT support and I know how much of a difference a good IT team can make.

On the other hand, I've also seen how much damage a bad IT department can do. In a previous job, I was writing device drivers, but IT only allowed general user access. If I needed software installed (e.g. compiler, text editor), I could submit a support ticket and they'd get back to me in 48 hours. That's 48 hours per program. Once I'd written a driver, I could send another support ticket to have the driver installed. After 48 hours, I could then test it. Just as a pointless side not, but I heard that, as of last year, the IT department was still maintaining the requirement that everyone use Firefox 3.0 for their browser.

A good IT team is invaluable, but a bad IT department can be worse than having no IT department. When you have 50 people doing 50 different things, probably half of them are wasting their time. However, when you have 3 IT people headed down the wrong path, then EVERYONE is wasting their time.

I think it depends on how I.T literate the staff members are and how many employees the company has. Letting staff do their own thing maybe just a symptom of starting out as a few people and not having migrated into the processes of a bigger company yet.

If the majority of employees are developers, their set-up is extremely personal and no doubt having them customise to their liking aids productivity. In that scenario the I.T team are responsible for providing equipment, imaging laptops and keeping the infrastructure running then that would work fine.

I've worked in some organisations where a lot more hand-holding is required and in those situations the I.T team takes on a completely different role - including thorough onboarding.

I am not sure why the end user has to take the laptop to the mac store, we use lenovo and they send an engineer to us to check any issues.

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