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Loving this AI revolution so far
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Honestly it's not that much worse than being forwarded off to India where someone's getting paid $0.10 an hour to read off a flow chart to me. If your 24-hour service line doesn't have an actual engineer available after the flow chart It's not meaningfully different than the AI.
Yep. I hate having to phone support lines to be told to run basic troubleshooting like turning something off and on again when that's the first thing that I'll try.
Keep in mind that the service lines also deal with customers who can’t distinguish a CPU from a modem from a monitor. Hence the basic troubleshooting in the beginning.
Yeah, I know they have to follow their script, so I just play along. And honestly, it’s not as if I’ve never made a stupid mistake before, like accidentally leaving something unplugged.
I always start off by telling them "I know what I'm talking about, I work in IT, let's skip the basics, I've tried it all already." but they sometimes still don't listen.
Years back, I bought an Asus workstation motherboard with IPMI, the stupid BMC would reliably crash every 12 hours rendering the IPMI absolutely useless since it would hang upon login. I emailed support and told them that the BMC sucked and asked if they had an internal build I could try... They directed me to the downloads page and told me to download the UEFI firmware 🤦♂️ It took about SIX back and forth emails over the course of a week or so to get them to understand that I was talking about the BMC and not motherboard itself. Their tier one and two support had ZERO clue what a BMC or IPMI was. After begging them to forward me to an engineer who actually knew what I was talking about, they agreed and that engineer sent me an updated build...which still crashes every 12 hours 🤦♂️. In the end my solution was to set a cron job (I run Linux) to execute every 11 hours that logged into the IPMI from the running OS and did a cold reset on the BMC. That worked like a charm as long as Linux was running.
They don't listen because, unfortunately, for every one person telling the truth, there's probably at least three people who don't have an iota of a clue about their system but lie about it because they think claiming they're an expert is a cheat code to getting better support. Ruins it for the rest of us.
I also think it comes off as a bit snotty. Nobody's perfect and asking through the basics is the tech covering themselves, too. And who says that your basics and their basics are identical?
I usually start by giving a detailed description of the problem and of what I already tried in particular.
Obviously it depends on the specific kind of support and the hotline I am calling, but if it's a complex issue, and the support hotline is a national toll free number that's clearly outsourced to whatever crummy T1 support call center, I don't even bother with details. It just confuses them, and I know they have a script that management will fillet them over not following even if they know what to do. Just mash A through the script and save the effort for T2 and higher.
Who knows. Sometimes that T1 script catches things you missed. It's designed to weed out the simple stuff, after all. When you directly leapt to more advanced troubleshooting, sometimes you leave an obvious step behind.
My time is just as important as theirs. I have a busted product that I paid good money for, but now, in order to get useful support I have to slog through the basics which is frustrating and useless since 99% of the time I've already tried everything that they're suggesting.
I worked for Disney+ as a System Administrator and later an Engineer, we'd have servers die all the time (with thousands of servers, we'd easily have 10-20 support tickets open at a time) that would need to be replaced. We pay for top tier support and get stupid suggestions from them like "did you try and clear the CMOS?", "Try and flash this new firmware" even though nothing changed hardware wise in years and it was working fine for years, "try this and send us logs", etc... This type of shit costs businesses a lot of money in downtime. It's a disservice to the customer to not support them at the level that they require. In the end the product would just end up being RMA'd after a week or two of back and forth.
If you went to a doctor for a problem and they suggested all the things you already tried, and then sent you home, would you be happy?
I agree that “I work in IT” gives off “I want to talk to the manager” vibes.
Since when is "let's skip the basics" asshole vibes? It's a waste of time for them and myself to cover all the basics, which I've already gone through.
"did you check the power cord?", " did you reboot it?", "Is it actually on?"
Yes, I'm not tech illiterate. We don't need 5 back and forth emails over the course of a few days to get down to something helpful. Give me the helpful stuff up front. Sometimes this stuff is time sensitive and these support people are costing companies a lot of money due to unnecessary downtime. I used to work for Disney+ and we had servers that died all the time, we'd email Dell or SuperMicro and tell them what the issue was, and then we would spend days or weeks of back and forth doing things we already tried, or things we know wouldn't fix the issue before they finally decide "ok let's replace it". A few times their suggestions even bricked our servers and made the problem worse! We'd say that there was a CPU issue on a server that started crashing and the IPMI logs and Linux itself would point to a faulty CPU or RAM. They told us to flash a new EFI, we would do so, and great now the server doesn't power on at all instead of just crashing occasionally.
I list off everything I did so far, and explain the problem. That usually gets me the best results.
So do I, but that becomes very difficult and frustrating when they have zero clue what you're talking about, like in my above example of the IPMI and BMC. It sounds like you're talking about the Dingle Arm and Reticulated Splines on your Rockford Retro Encabulator.
You likely could have followed their script in less time.
If only shibboleet actually worked...
The alt text on that XKCD is even better:
tbf, customers have a near-infinite number of different issues and problems. those 'flow charts' and scripts are designed to start at a baseline and work up from there and they start with the most common ones. you'd be paying more for whatever it is you're calling in about if they hired only fully-qualified persons that can 'think on their feet' without the flow charts and scripts wrt whatever issue it is you have, troubleshooting it, and coming up with the specific solution for you... a hell of a lot more. and yes, the first thing you should usually try with tech items is a power cycle. ::insert itcrowd-turnitoffandonagain.jpg::
No one is asking for a gaggle of full-time engineers.
The flowchart is designed to fix the vast majority of problems top down. If 90% of the problems are solved by rebooting you're going to reboot. It doesn't matter if the ONT shows your fiber line is not connected. Wow that sucks I understand and don't have a problem with that. But most support these days can't even connect you with an actual engineer once you break the flow chart.
You spend 30 minutes on the phone having them check off check boxes when they get down to the point where there's actually a level two problem, there's no one there to talk to you. Here let us take down your information and we'll get back to you within the next 24 hours.
A couple of decades ago this really wasn't a problem. Level 1 technicians would run their flowcharts if you broke out to a level two technician you wait on the line for 10 to 15 minutes and you'd end up with a level two technician, It almost always solve the problem if it was solvable. Honestly the products I call for support on haven't really gone down in price with the lack of support provided these days. They used to be able to provide me multi-tier support live on the phone with just their existing margins. It's the same thing screwing over pharmacies and retail. They found they can get by with giving less support and having less people work the lines so that's what they're doing.
Something very sweet with living in a country with a different language than English is that the people on the phone can't be outsourced.
The AI problem remains though :(
I'd probably feel very different about the whole situation if the call center is that were being subverted were in my own country.