Is IT Support dead?

[lukemg]

Yes, it is dead, I speak from personal and painful past experience !
Technology in this area has been simplified and made incredibly cheap. This has taken all the skill out of any of these 1st/2nd line roles, there is no good reason to diagnose.
There are few barriers to entry, meaning many see this as the first rung to a 'career in IT' - good luck with that.
It's all been outsourced and offshored, local presence is little more than box shifting = £8/hr.
Anyone doing this - get the hell out, suggest ITIL training, incident mgmt, project work, anything you can !

[Jog On]

Yes, it is dead, I speak from personal and painful past experience !
Technology in this area has been simplified and made incredibly cheap. This has taken all the skill out of any of these 1st/2nd line roles, there is no good reason to diagnose.
There are few barriers to entry, meaning many see this as the first rung to a 'career in IT' - good luck with that.
It's all been outsourced and offshored, local presence is little more than box shifting = £8/hr.
Anyone doing this - get the hell out, suggest ITIL training, incident mgmt, project work, anything you can !

What about when the boss' blackberry stops working? I don't think an off shore call centre will suffice..

[dr_beat]

I don't agree. To be good at support involves quite a lot of skill. To be ok at it doesn't. That's the problem.

Yeah I've worked with a few ok support guys! The other day, a guy I work with started sweating when I demonstrated CIDR to him - he needed knowledge of it for an IT Support job at a very large outsourcing company. Also he'd never heard of Classful addressing - he found this out when they asked him to explain the Class A,B,C,D IP ranges. They ended the interview when he couldn't answer it...LOL

Today he's asked if I would spend an hour going through DNS, DHCP and routing protocals - I told him to go and buy a book...preferably Douglas Comer's TCP/IP! His reply was "**** that"...

[Clippy]

Is IT Support dead? Yes & No.

As a value added service yes.
As has already been said, their is little real skill involved as you can Google the solution to most problems nowadays. Also, remote support via tools such as WebEx are a real alternative now.

However, most companies will always need a 'body' on site, mainly for hardware issues and most of the time, let's be honest, they are gonna be swap outs as opposed to diagnose and fix.

The new market for IT Support seems to be the home user but from a corporate perspective, I think it's on it's way out.

[dr_beat]

Yes, it is dead, I speak from personal and painful past experience !
Technology in this area has been simplified and made incredibly cheap. This has taken all the skill out of any of these 1st/2nd line roles, there is no good reason to diagnose.
There are few barriers to entry, meaning many see this as the first rung to a 'career in IT' - good luck with that.
It's all been outsourced and offshored, local presence is little more than box shifting = £8/hr.
Anyone doing this - get the hell out, suggest ITIL training, incident mgmt, project work, anything you can !

I dunno about the £8ph stuff as I still get calls from desperate agencies asking if I could start tomorrow at some company's service desk for a 3 month stint at £18ph in Central Birmingham. 10 minute phone interview or even no interview...

A major outsourcing company based in Birmingham is paying its incident managers and handlers £6ph, their rival is paying £8ph. ITIL is a must qualification for these roles!

Also I note that agencies and employers are tempting people into these roles by advertising that Incident Management is a good entry into IT Support. From past experience the barriers for entry in service delivery is LESS then those for IT support! In fact just about everyone I have spoken to who are involved in service delivery want out and would rather be in support...that's unless you're a team leader which would mean that you're in meetings thus taking you away from talking to plebs on the end of a phone.

[RightLaugh]

my gardener earns £11.50 to cut the grass. That's cash in hand as well.

[PRC1964]

£40 for our chimney sweep to do two chimneys in about 45 minutes and he had time for a cup of tea and some biscuits.

[Churchill]

Today he's asked if I would spend an hour going through DNS, DHCP and routing protocals - I told him to go and buy a book...preferably Douglas Comer's TCP/IP! His reply was "**** that"...

Give me £50 and I'll help you with your spelling. Or are you just a dumb support monkey?

[DS23]

£40 for our chimney sweep to do two chimneys in about 45 minutes and he had time for a cup of tea and some biscuits.

did he do a song and a dance routine?

[dr_beat]

Give me £50 and I'll help you with your spelling. Or are you just a dumb support monkey?

Sorry about that! In future I'll make sure my spelling is correct.

I'm a dumb support monkey.