I was legally contracted to say yes.
At least it was satisfying to answer NO when the question involved their personal (not a company one) acer cheap mall laptop filled with mcafee, bloatware and socuh combined with the slowest low capacity hdd in existence.
Hell NO
Alright I’m probably the outlier here but… I like helping people with their IT needs, and I’ve always found the problem solving and praise kinda nice. Maybe it’s just a me thing tho
imo - you are not the outlier, you just haven’t yet progressed to the mostly inevitable stage where people take advantage of your help, or their spyware ridden dumpster fire of a laptop breaks and they blame you because you “touched it last” - never mind that was 6 months ago and the only thing you did was change the screensaver timeout.
I like helping people, but not with what I do for my day job. Ask me to shovel your driveway or help you move or proofread your emails or anything but more of what I’ve already spent all day doing.
I actually like helping people a lot, too.
I don’t think IT folks are naturally misanthropic or antisocial, but I personally got beat down so much by wanting to help and realizing they didn’t care to listen, or weren’t willing to learn anything. At all. Even though they came to me with the problem, it seemed they mostly just wanted me to fix it for them with zero understanding required, or to “be emotional at someone” or were lonely.
I also got so tired of being friendly and enthusiastically educational with advising my relatives or friends, only to then watch them completely disregard 100% of my advice they came to me for.
In the former job I’m still putting myself back together from, most of the public peoples who visited me would have been better served by visiting a psychologist / therapist first, but I was cheaper (free). :(
Often when it’s something I do specialize in and I get all excited, that’s when they choose to gloss over and I can tell they just want me to stop talking.
I hate having biases against people, but there very much are definitely “normies” who are threatened by the prospect of having to activate their neurons for the first time since they stumbled out of their highest level of education, and only learned to think when it was forced upon them.
Makes a guy feel pretty crappy. So I’m not as forthcoming with my skillset as I used to be in casual company. Lol
I think what you are describing is teaching not helping. Helping someone is just doing the thing they need help with and thats it. Its not a prerequisite that someone learn something if your goal is just to help them but it is if your goal is to teach them something.
It is nice when people share your interests and want to learn but everyone’s got their own stuff going on and sometimes can’t make room for something new like that.
Except in a minority of scenerios, helping someone do something ≠ doing that thing yourself. It could mean less, or, at times, even more than that.
Take the familiar example of helping a blind man cross street. While you do cross the street with him, the fella ALSO WALKS with you and crosses the street on his legs, not yours.
Are you implying you would be teaching that man how to walk?
When you help someone on a computer, they come along with you too, just like the blind guy. And just like the blind guy, them coming along with you does not mean they will be able to do it themselves next time, or that they want to do it alone next time.
This sounds a lot like “only my perspective is correct” type stuff.
I’m with you but there’s definitely a line that gets crossed fairly often when you help people out with these things.
I used to work in IT, and both then when I was on my personal time, and now, I do not love helping people, but all it takes is someone else doing it poorly would annoy me enough I would end up helping someone
Start talking about logic gates and flip flops and PLAs and FPGA, maybe even throw in few of the ASICs. If they don’t shut up even after that then bring in the big guns and start talking about doping and PN junctions and How BJTs are better than FETs
What they say: “You know about computers, right?”
What they mean: “Can you fix this bug in Microsoft’s software?”“Right, so you see, when a conductor is passed through a magnetic field, an electromotive force is produced, and this force can perform work, which can in turn be used to represent probabilistic information…”
mashes the A button to skip dialog
HAHAAA YOU FOOL YOU HAVE ACTIVATED MY INFODUMP I AM AN UNSKIPPABLE CUTSCENE
tge moment when you don’t use windows for a few years now, yet your windows mates still ask you for help (i can pretty much always help em)
People need to understand the difference between computer science, information technology, software engineering and Tech Support
and “actually needing Microsoft support but coming to you cause Microsoft doesn’t give a shit about private end users”
Tis is the same
ELI5 ??
Generally, but I am likely missing some stuff:
Computer Science: The underlying theory around making efficient computer software (I would consider the hardware side computer engineering)
Information Technology: the process of managing computer software and hardware systems for an organization
Software Engineering: the process of developing software including writing code, prioritizing features / bug fixes
Tech Support: part of IT. Troubleshooting and resolving issues with an organizations hardware and software systems
Computer sciences is mathematics, software engineering is programming, IT support (I’m including infrastructure and infosec here) is making sure that computers run fine for the employees needs.
Don’t let the infosec people hear that you lump them into support. At one of my past organizations they outright refused their workshops to be integrated with the company wide ticketing system. He can use it but not infosec.
No, sorry, I don’t know what kind of ass-backwards somersault your windows machine did this time. Your word doc is randomly missing every third paragraph? Too right mate.
understanding how a cpu works and how to write efficient programs is the easy part.
understanding why windows does [anything] is the hard part.
Yeah, just read that their newest server OS puts a recovery partition to the right of the primary partition by default.
Which is completely useless on a server, and prevents you from growing the partition when you run out of space.At this point, they’re basically saying “Office and AD guarantee our monopoly, so we can push out literal monkey shit, and tell admins to deal with it.”
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes
Edsger W. Dijkstra
And when your radio is broken, you don’t ask a composer
Pro tip: whenever a relative asks you to fix their computer, wipe everything and set up Linux for them. That’ll teach em.
“You use Arch, now, btw”
“Make sure to write that down, because you’re legally required to bring it up at every possible opportunity.”
Did that for my sister but nowadays I just use the excuse: “Sorry I can’t help you, I don’t use Windows anymore”.
The real problem is when a relative know that I’m computer guy and ask me to fix the TV/air conditioner or like my father once did: setup an antenna
I just tell them that I only deal with Linux and that is usually enough to dissuade.
Legit haven’t touched windows in 5 years, I don’t know my way around it
I haven’t used Windows personally in about 15 years and professionally in about 10. I’m pretty useless on anything newer than XP. I even got my wife to switch over to a Mac Mini because at least that has a Unix-like OS and she can still do her audio work on it (in fact, better than a Windows system because their patch QA is light-years ahead of the MS “fuck it, it’ll break some systems but we’ll get that next patch Tuesday” approach).
That’s not to say that I like Apple. I just dislike their OS less than Windows.
You have experienced the pinnacle of Windows (we could probably also add Windows 7 to this). Do yourself a favor and never touch a Windows 10 and especially Windows 11 machine. It’s unimaginable how Microsoft managed to break everything that was working and how clever they are in terms of marketing to sell you stuff you don’t need.
They made me finally switch to Linux because my paid 365 subscription offered me to try the new outlook because Windows Mail was to be discontinued in future. I activated the test and the fun began: Only one of seven accounts was imported into outlook. Of course it was the only Microsoft account (Outlook). All other Accounts were ignored. I thought „Ok migration didn’t work, I’ll do it later manually“ I had a new email. I clicked on it. Edge opened although Firefox was my standard browser. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that I was clickbaited into opening an advertisement by one of the biggest companies on this planet.
This made me immediately stop my work and install Linux Mint. I’m not going back any time soon.
For job related reasons I have to use a lot of VMs. Unfortunately most of them are Windows 10. I created a naked installation years ago and basically use this as the base for individual development VMs. One of these annoyed me for days to make an update. All I could click was „remind me in one hour“ or update immediately. So I chose the one hour a lot of times. I finally let it update. Now my (Windows default!) task bar is transparent and also the whole windows menu. A colleague using the same VM with the latest updates (without changes to installed software) has no issues.
,oh how glad, my ubuntu is broken since update"
Then it’s fun lol
Exactly.
Honestly no problem, if they’re tech literate enough to have gotten that far it’ll probably be okay
Looks like we’re setting up an improvised KVM device! :D
Or even better, install Emacs and run away laughing wildly! Bwahahahaha!
Did that, kind of. The system’s been running flawlessly for like a decade now. I’m not sure if they even understand the difference.
Especially this time of year when people are panicking for whatever reason, people are travelling, people are coming and going, people are buying laptops, devices and phones and the majority of them don’t know how digital files or folders even work (or where they are in a digital system).
If you know anything about computers … just pretend you don’t know anything like everyone else. It will save you so much work and headaches this time of year.
And don’t get soft either … cute girl asking for help? NO … old grandma has a new laptop? NO … your dying relative has a new phone? NO! … your two year old niece has a new tablet? NO! … your drug dealer wants to lower your debt in exchange for fixing their PC? HELL NO!!!
your drug dealer wants to lower your debt in exchange for fixing their PC? HELL NO!!!
nuh uh, if i’m getting paid (getting paid in reduced debt is still paid cuz it’s money i was gonna give him anyway) i’ll do whatever
Yep that’s a contract and I work for those
Every year at Christmas my grandparent in law asks me to fix her iPhone. Something with iCloud account. The answer is always the same: Apple store.
Using Apple requires a PhD in computer science.
i don’t really mind, but i also don’t do anything for free, either. at least feed and beer me.
My answer is usually “I don’t use computers the same way you do, so I probably won’t know what you’re talking about.”
