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Is Help Desk a Launchpad or a Dead End?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed Apr 30, 2008 02:32 PM
from the or-just-hell-on-earth dept.
The Almighty Buck
Tracy Mayor writes "Is a gig on an IT help desk really the career death it's always assumed to be? Not always, this Computerworld writer found out, just don't get comfy and stay too long. "
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Submission: Help desk job: dead end or launch pad? by Anonymous Coward
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Is Help Desk a Launchpad or a Dead End? 50 Comments More /

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  • Use the italics tag much?
    • See, this is why I use

      div style="font-style:italic"

    • Use the italics tag much?
      N o t R e a l l y
    • I scanned this whole thread. NOT ONE had a score higher then 1. Yes its a dead end. No one on slashdot went back to rate this.
      Unix admins/apps programmers/ and other lofty sorts see it as a dead end so it is, Such are the population here so QED. Most of these articles say something like: "I worked the HD for 6 months then got promoted and.."
      FEW remarks come from dedicated tech support pros. People who have worked a desk long enough to know the quirks, know the tricks, know how to keep peopel producti

  • Added Bonus... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Spritzer (950539) * on Wednesday April 30 2008, @02:39PM (#23254780)
    Your very own guide to salary.....oh subscription huh? pfft

  • Help desks that push call times and scripts over.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Joe The Dragon (967727) on Wednesday April 30 2008, @02:40PM (#23254804)
    Help desks that push call times and scripts over fixing stuff the right way are a Dead End and good tech people will fail at it and it can lead to you losing good techs.

    Putting a lot TPS report BS in the help desk is also a bad sign.

    There ones that say help desk but you also do network, desktop, imaging, roll outs and other takes as well.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by JJNess (1238668)
      My "Help Desk Support" position is so much more, like you said... and I'm making a good bit of money more at this new position in an engineering firm than my friend who manages IT for a local TV station for 3 years! So while it says "Help Desk" on my resumé, I'll be able to prove it was oh so much more than that.
  • I thought it was good experience from a "oh crap everything broke what do I look at first" perspective. The troubleshooting skills were definitely worth it. Then again, I did my 3 years in help desk during college, and avoided it like the plague after graduation.

    I'd also like to add that the HDI certifications are a joke.
    • HDI certifications are a joke.

      Here let me fix that for you

      HDI certifications are a cruel, joke.

      • Re:Who knows (Score:5, Insightful)

        by techno-vampire (666512) on Wednesday April 30 2008, @03:23PM (#23255602) Homepage
        If you look around one day and realize that you're not one of the youngest or least-tenured people in the room, it's time to pull the cord.


        I did help desk for an ISP. I was never one of the youngest people there and by the time my job was outsourced, I was senior to most of the people in the company. I was still doing help desk, at top level, because I'd come to realize that I actually liked doing it. The trouble-shooting was a constant challenge because no matter how fool-proof you make your software, nature keeps coming up with fools who can manage to mess things up, and with the constantly-changing OS issues of Windows, there was always more to learn. For me, at least, it was a very satisfying job because every day I could go home knowing that there were at least twenty or so people who's days were a little better because I'd helped them. Not everybody can think that way, but if you can, the help desk doesn't have to become the hell desk.

      • I like many did my few years of phone support and helpdesk before moving on to sysadmin work, but I knew many people on the helpdesk and in tech support who were perfectly content with their lives and had no desire to do anything else. I even knew one co-worker who moved out into sysadmin work, decided he didn't like it, and went back to the helpdesk.

        There's nothing wrong with being content in your job and not having a desire to climb the corporate ladder. In the case of Helpdesk work you may one day have

  • Kind of a silly question (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eln (21727) on Wednesday April 30 2008, @02:41PM (#23254832) Homepage
    Is working at Burger King as a teenager a launchpad or a dead end? I guess it depends on your attitude, your ambition, and your ability to learn from experiences.

    Any work dealing with customers will prepare you well for working in any kind of environment where you have to deal with people that are sometimes unreasonable or like to treat others like garbage. In other words, it prepares you to deal with real life. Help desk has the added bonus of being somewhat related to tech stuff, so if you combine it with some learning on your own time, maybe you can end up in a more technical role.

    Most companies will tend to recruit from within, so if they see that you're highly technically competent and are good at dealing with people, you're likely to get moved up out of help desk if you make it known that your ultimate goal is, say, system administration (and God help you if it is). If you sit around talking shit about the idiot customers all day when you're not on the phone, you're probably not going anywhere except possibly the unemployment line.

    In short, any job will give you what you're willing to get from it. Whether any particular job is a dead end or a door leading to bigger and better things is entirely up to the person doing the job.

    On a personal note, I was in help desk for 6 months before being promoted to Unix admin. I got there because I saw a very clear need for improvement in the servers at the company (their Windows mail server was crashing constantly) and I presented a plan to improve things with a Unix-based design and showed I had the technical ability to pull it off. So, they gave me the opportunity, I got the job done, and they promoted me. If you have the drive, any position can be a springboard.
    • This has been my experience as well, both personally and second-hand. Those who wanted to move out/up and showed an ability to do so, were moved out/up. Those who didn't got moved out to the unemployment line.

      It takes a good manager to recognize this, but then again, all promotions require that.
    • I could not agree more. Various technical skills can be taught/learned, but people skills are so often overlooked by people on specific career paths. If there is 1 essential skill to any job, it is good people skills. This means not only learning to deal with difficult customers (as you alluded to in the "BK Lounge" analogy) but also learning to manage people (this includes managing UP as well as managing DOWN).

      I wasn't thrilled at the time to be working at several of the crappy jobs I had in my you
  • The "added bonus" is a site you have to register for. Ass.

    As for helpdesk, depends on the organization. Pretty much any position could be career-building or dead end depending on the organization and where it's going.

    IT seems to get little love in general and helpdesk gets none in particular. I think that it would more often than not be a dead end but it really should be more of a stepping stone in the ideal world. For the new guy just coming into the field, that's the first place he can be of real use. Tha

  • The ultimate help desk job was being Bill Gates' technical assistant. There really was such a job, and one of the people who held it now is in charge of the entire Microsoft Office product line.

  • Every person I've ever worked with that hadn't worked helpdesk was a tool. They had no ability to deal with users. They were sloppy because they (consciously or not) figured someone else would have to deal with the aftermath. And they had an attitude when it came to doing the periodic shit-work that always comes up and doesn't require a brain, just a pair of hands.
    • You can tell almost right away those of us who had to do help desk and those who have not. The ones who did help desk are a little more versed and careful about their wording to the end users. We've been in the trenches of "No, I can't fix that...Why not? Because there is a power outage in your area"

      Those who haven't had to walk through the coals are far more likely to use the exact tech terms and lose the user claiming superiority and user error instead of lack of communication skills.
      • Those who haven't had to walk through the coals are far more likely to use the exact tech terms and lose the user claiming superiority and user error instead of lack of communication skills.

        Having worked on both sides of the "glass IT desk", I can confidently say that virtually all problems do result from user error, oftentimes bordering on sheer stupidity.

        Sorry, but you can only walk so many people - people who use a Windows machine daily, both for work and at home - through the concept of double-clic
  • The trick is to work help desk somewhere that the help desk is meaningful, where you get to do lots more than just answer a phone and read a tree. For instance, I spent two years under "help desk" hacking Perl every day.

    Any job is a dead end if you take it as an excuse to stagnate and never learn anything beyond what's needed for competent performance.

    The trouble with help desk is the reputation as help desk -- you have to be able to convince people that you know something beyond the job title. Of course,
  • I have found my help desk experience to be essential in many aspects of my career. Being able to keep a level head, even when you are in the right, is essential in the business world, especially if you are looking to do any independent software development where you will not only be coding, but also providing support to end-users, many of which lack basic understanding of computers. When you are able to communicate efficiently and politely with your customers, it goes a long way in building and maintainin
  • I work for a major IT company. I started as a tech support for one of their products. While my time in tech support, I took more classes programming, talked with developers of product I was supporting, and even wrote a tool that was implemented while I was working there to help with the job.

    Besides doing my best in the job, and all of these things, I was also searching for a development job within the company.

    Less than 2 years after I started as tech support, I am now a developer of a different produc
  • As mentioned in this article (at least 20 times), it all depends on the organization. In some, helpdesk is it. You don't go much further. In others, they want to promote people.

    In my case, I did an 18 month stint supporting a proprietary case management system (for the State court system). By the time I left, I knew every screen in the app and when people would call in with a question or a problem, I didn't have to look at the screen to know what they were talking about.

    I took that knowledge and went in

  • Some of the skills learned at an IT help desk are extremely worthwhile, and very portable. For example, the ability to speak in an accent so incomprehensible that after only a minute or two, the person at the other end will utter a soundless cry of inchoate fury and slam down the phone. This invaluable skill can get a telemarketer off the line when even an air horn fails.

    If your training includes that particular accent so thick that even a fellow East Asian shakes his head and says, "Huh?", you can pre

  • Lessons learned .... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by johnlcallaway (165670) on Wednesday April 30 2008, @02:58PM (#23255164)
    After 30 years in IT, here are some things I've learned about advancing a career.
    • Never stay at a job too long. Raises don't keep up, jumping ship for more money does
    • Never say "I don't know how to do that". Instead, say, "I'm not sure how to do that, it will take some time for me to read up on it"
    • There is no such thing as wasted time. You get paid the same whether the project gets tossed or not. Learn something from it and move on. It's the company's problem they are going to waste money, not yours.
    • Get rid of the ego and listen, you might learn something
    • Ask questions instead of dictating. 'My way is better because' arguments aren't received as well as "I'm not sure I understand, can you explain why doing x is better than doing y??"
    • Never be the last one out of a sinking ship, your loyalty will probably not be rewarded.
    • Learn something new all the time. When you understand networks and databases and telephone systems and several languages and how business works and how investors operate, you become valuable. Only knowing how to code Java makes you a code monkey.
    • Accept the fact you don't know everything, and question your knowledge in everything you think you are an expert in.
    I think these work regardless of whether someone is in a help desk, development, systems, or management role.
    • Well said sir. The only things I'd add is

      Jumping ship at 1 year intervals look a bit questionable on a resume. Stick it out a bit and then go look for someone who will pay you what you're worth.

      Learning is great, but try to stick to technologies that have a future. With the H1 craze, companies are addicted to hiring talent who already has the experience in whatever languages/dev environment they want, instead of say training people like we did before. After all, if these people don't work out you can

    • Re:Lessons learned .... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by elrous0 (869638) * on Wednesday April 30 2008, @04:16PM (#23256468)

      Learn something new all the time.

      That's the best advice you can give for ANY job, not just IT. Nothing pisses me off faster than a worker who doesn't know how to do something and refuses to learn. A human being who is lazy and incurious is absolutely worthless.

  • But not a dead end either. It's more of an impediment to your technical career. Take it from a guy who fucked up his job interview and had to spend 1.5 years in QA (the offer was too good to turn down). Even though I worked as a developer before I took that job and I've been a developer for over six years after that stint, it's still a big fat albatross on my neck, because every time someone sees my resume they all have the same question - WTF? No matter what I say in response, they'll think I'm not as good
      • This doesn't help out there in the real world. To get hired as a developer, you need to convince the employer you're a big, throbbing brain, first and foremost. Having QA on your resume doesn't help with that.
  • For some people, it's a lifelong career. For me, I had a job that was partially helpdesk work when in college, and now I'm mostly done with my CS PhD.
  • I was doing support for device drivers for a while. I was being paid $35/hour to help in dealing with device driver problems (much of it was on the development side). This is the exception. Of course in the old days, when I called the help desk for SoftIce, I would get the company founders (I was using version .99).

    Of course help desks today are manned by someone laughs when they say, "oh the software is not supposed to let you do that" after it wiped your hard drive. (Avanquest Partition Commander).
  • It was a great start for me. Once a Help Desk Jockey, now a CTO for a multi-million dollar corporation - and in a relatively short timeframe (in my early 30's).

    I remained passionate and driven, and moved around enough to be exposed to myriads of technologies. Volunteered lots of time to F/OSS and non-profit causes (still do) to keep sharp, busy, and seasoned.

    I really feel that all of these little pieces add to success, for any IT pro who insists on professional growth.

    Total: $0.02

  • Help desk is almost always a great launch pad. It's also a great indicator of what kind of company you're working for.

    If you land in the help desk in a decent sized company, and have any brains at all, you're out in a year, 18 months tops. On the flip side, if you end up a shitty company. You'll know within six months, and be working someplace else in 12.

    People that have been help desk for five+ years scare me.
  • No subscription, but it only lists ten major cities [salaryexpert.com] as of June 16, 2007. Better than nothing.
  • The linked salary guide in the blurb goes to a subscription.
    There is a small salary guide [computerworld.com] in the article, I think that should have been linked to instead.

  • Every IT person should start at the helpdesk (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alzheimers (467217) on Wednesday April 30 2008, @03:15PM (#23255480)
    Frankly, I think every person who wants to work in IT should spend at least a year on the helpdesk.

    In my experience, the number one problem with IT is that the programmers and managers really don't have enough interaction with the end users to understand their side of things. Every time there's an outtage because someone kicked the cord out of a server, or every patch that breaks usability in the name of some wizzbang feature, it really falls on the helpdesk to manage and do damage control while you're out "on break".

    To the rest of the company, the helpdesk is literally the face of the IT department. They're the ones who get to deal with irate customers, desperate password seekers, and the social manipulators.

    On the help desk, you learn every quirk of every system your company supports. You learn all the "unofficial" tricks that get things done, regardless of policy or procedure. Most importantly, you learn who to call when situations arise you can't handle. You know *everyone*, so that when application Z is causing catastrophic system failures on your server farm you know exactly who to go to to make it stop.

  • Don't think of it as just Help Desk (Score:3, Interesting)

    by drgroove (631550) on Wednesday April 30 2008, @03:16PM (#23255494)
    I work for one of the 5 largest independent software vendors in the world. We sell a help desk product, which accounts for the lionshare of revenue in that product category.

    If you're starting off in the help desk, be aware that working in a help desk is part of a much larger ecosystem known as IT Service Management. If you're interested in furthering your career, explore as much information around the ITSM space as possible, especially as it relates to the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process framework.

    According to Gartner, of those publicly traded companies which have revenues in excess of $1 billion/yr, 90% of them either have implemented an ITIL process framework, are in the process of implementing one, or are strongly considering implementing one. ITSM is a huge marketplace, with tons of opportunity, and few active practitioners who are both experienced and forward thinking. It's a perfect place to write your own ticket and have a strong future in IT, as well as work with multi-national companies in shaping how they manage IT.

    Recognizing the help desk's (or Service Desk) place in this ecosystem will help you parlay your position into having a role in shaping how IT organizations define, build, launch, operate and improve IT Services back to their customers.

    Service Desk forms a critical part of an IT organization, where Incidents, Problems and Changes are managed and communicated. Known how Change interacts with Release and Configuration Management. Know how these in turn work in tandem with Capacity, Availability, Service Level Management, etc.

    ITSM professionals are in demand. I'm currently hiring 4 ITSM professionals, whose salaries are in the $125k - $150k range. Many of the individuals currently working for me started off in help desk. It's all about your own personal initiative. If you see a help desk gig as a dead end, it will be. However, if you can see the larger picture, you can work your way up to a very rewarding and profitable career in IT Service Management.
  • I am actually experiencing a climb through the helpdesk system, albeit with 2 different companies.

    I started out as a workstation helpdesk jockey, driving from school to school doing basic workstation, network, and server duties. Nothing too fancy, just repairing older PIIs and PIIIs, adding users into a Novell environment, and patching/unpatching ports as needed. The nice side was being able to drive locally, get reimbursed for mileage at a decent rate, and getting close to the staff members and faculty a

    • I started on an Oil & Gas help desk 2 years ago, and since then have moved into an operations role. Some people ARE stuck on the desk forever, but they aren't the strong technical people. The desk does get a bad rap, so people assume you're stupid and you have to prove them wrong in order to move up, but the desk is also used internally as a source of pre-vetted labour so the oportunities are there.
      • "and since then have moved into an operations role"
        Operations is dead end, at least where I work. I do web development, but we are nestled within operations. We have an amazing shrinking budget and things like promotions are nigh impossible. Getting a piece of software is nearly impossible if it costs any real money. Why? We are in operations. Operations is a commodity and an expense, or at least is viewed as such by upper management.
    • I had that problem too, then struck gold about four years ago at the place I'm currently working at. Did helpdesk for a year and a half, then the guy above me quit and all of a sudden I was a system administrator, then I took over programming duties after the company hired a string of busts in that position.

      I guess the trick is to get in some place where a promotion doesn't mean you move from junior phone monkey to senior phone monkey, or to already have 20 years of experience. :|

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