What happened to IT staff having some grasp of technology?

These days I work as a support engineer for a company that provides an advanced email solution. I take pride in my work, and for the most part, so do my coworkers. Every one of us is expected to know and understand the technology that we are supporting. Why does it seem that the IT staffs of our various clients have no idea what they are doing? I mean, seriously, I could understand if they were calling for real issues, but most of the time, it's for stuff that they should know. It seems that a lot of companies are hiring IT staff using the criteria of "Can you dial support?" instead of "Can you actually handle the job?"

For example, we got a "Priority 1" call to the support hotline from one of our managed hosting customers. Around here, we have 4 priority levels, a "Priority 1" is defined as "System Down. Complete failure of the software or hardware, impacting all users". The customer's IT guy called because our servers were not connecting to their servers, so they weren't getting any email coming in. I suppose this could be interpereted as a System Down, except that our hosted servers were working just fine and could connect anywhere else just fine. The problem wasn't with our servers, it was with theirs. Did the IT guy check their servers first? No. Did he check his servers when we pointed out that our servers were working fine? No. It actually took several hours to convince the idiot that the problem was not on our end. It took no less than three of our tier 2 support engineers and our technical manager telling him the same thing before he would even look at his own servers. And then he wanted us to tell him what was wrong with his server!

Some days I really think the phones need an "Electrocute" button...

My guess is that technology has advanced past the trained staff that can handle it, so anyone gets hired. And people who are good at what they do seem to get quickly promoted. If I actually work with an IT guy who is "good" I know he isn't staying around long.

reply to post by PsychoHazard


Hey, I'm in IT too. And did product support as well.

I think it's a universal attitude by many customers and I guess, bad management. Like I used be like you, then there was new management and we had three leaders in a very small team(that could otherwise, be managed by just one leader..) resulting in much conflict and chaos.

Now I've become like your customer, bored, denied of opportunities, frustrated, and uninspired. Thinking of quiting anytime Think I might open a new thread for this..

[edit on 30-7-2009 by ahnggk]