So I had a telephone interview with HR dept at a local computer company. They do Interactive Voice Recording software. The position is for a 'Support Engineer I'. Quite a bit different than the systems admin stuff I've been doing. Got a call back from someone outside of HR to discuss more technical details. Not sure if this is a path I want to go down. I'm thinking about telling then I'm no longer interested. Comments?

 

Is it helpdesk work? Sounds like a fancy title for help desk.

HD has positives and negatives.

Your troubleshooting skills will get honed and you will get real good at diagnosing problems. You'll get even better at looking past the obvious because the people on the other end are either lying or poorly describing what they see. You'll figure out a hundred ways to get in to change the resolution when they can't find the start button or a right click would be the same as asking them to trace a circuit board.

That said you get burned out quickly and if you already have IT talent, which it sounds like you do, you'll be bored fast. Unless you can become a level 2, 3 or manager it will suck within months if not weeks.

 

Sounds like they have 2 support positions for their clients.
www.goldsys.com

 

Yep help desk. It may be great but it will probably be what I described

This was almost always easy money unless you got stuck with the end of month for billing (or whatever their busy time is). I once had to walk someone through a billing while on a pay phone underneath a roller coaster in Kings Dominion. REAL FUN

 

It sounds like higher level support to me. It's a bit different than "help desk", you might be required to do bug fixes and similar things that require some programming. It looks like the clients are larger companies, ie. Dell, GE, Banks, as examples. Chances are you wouldn't be dealing with too many complete dorks on the phone.

Some people love this kind of work. It can be high pressure especially if you're dealing with a situation where a company is loosing big bucks because their phone system is down.

 

Was hoping to get more replies before I called this lady back. I've thought about it and I'm going to tell them I'm no longer interested. My new resume and cover letter are steaming hot and there's like 4 positions I want to apply for today as well as the other position I've already interviewed for.

Viper - Thanks for the post.

 

do the interview regardless.....the practice will help plus you can learn what others are looking for

 

Viper you may be right but it sounds like fluff for a help desk job to me. The "some development may be required." is probably a fancy way of saying....there is a problem with the database, figure it out and write a script or SQL statement to fix the problems.

I'm not saying help desk is bad....in fact I wouldn't trade my years on a HD for anything as it helped me to develop skills that are critical in other facets of IT.

 

From the job discription it looked like it was more oriented towards actually supporting the applications running on servers and stuff. Things like the Solaris and Oracle experience is usually dealing with higher level stuff. Really I guess it depends on what your defenition of "help desk" is. My idea of HD is helping people figure out why MS word isn't starting up on thier XP machine or their laptop is giving erroneous errors. Or, like you said, somebody can't figure out how to work their billing software. "Support" on the other hand is "my product running in conjunction with Oracle 10g on my Solaris server is giving me problems/errors and won't run, it needs to be fixed NOW...." kinda thing.

In the end, you have a customer that needs help, and it's your job to supply that assistance, whatever it is.

 

Sounds like it would be fun for 6 months. That's about the life span of a competent person working a help desk. Some of my best work stories and antics are from working a helpdesk.

If your thinking of moving on up in your IT career, avoid this job like the plauge. However, if your ready for some great laughs and childish behavior until you get canned or snap and quit or kill one of the many, many incompotent idiots you'll be working with by all means sign up!! Just be sure you can secure another job within 6 months and not have to put this job on your resume.

Ahhhhh... the help desk... hacking our own servers, beaning our clients in the head with the very same stress ***** they gave us five seconds earlier, shutting down our e-mail server in ten minutes thanks to some well crafted forwarding rules... ahhh good times. We were such arseholes. I miss that job.

 

D is right you will do some crazy CRAZY stuff there.

We live tested viruses on the sales staffs computers, setup an **** intranet, violated every copyright law written, wrestling matches, raced RC cars through the office, misapproriated bandwidth for gaming purposes....the list is limitless....wow it was fun

 

I almost forgot about the blatent violation of workplace **** rules & copyright stuff.... we didn't wrestle, but did do the mini RC cars and played 'cubical baseball' quite often.

Almost makes you want to work a helpdesk for a few months, doesn't it vader?!

 

I dunno man... I've worked "helpdesk" if you want to call it that for 8 years now at the same job and I love it... pay is GREAT for what I do, no two days are the same, I get paid extra to take pager... overall I really enjoy my job... but then again, my job is not standard help desk where I'm dealing with dumbasses who don't know how to plug in a mouse... we deal mostly with the network admins at the sites so if it is a problem they've already looked at all the "easy stuff" so its challenging and fun.

 

I was on a corporate account, we took calls from the end users directly and dispatched on-site personal as needed. So we delt with the dummies. 1rst tier support blows, period. Sounds like your on 2nd tier... a different ballgame indeed! Plus, everyones definition of 'great' pay is different!

The best support gig is tier 3 and up... only the big problems get to you, you get all the play time and huge pay!

 

I wish I had the "knowledge" to do that kind of work. I am simple tech support for commercial accounts.

I want to end my life when I tell someone to "right click" and they ask, "how do I do that"?