I would always tell my students that the best kind of training they can get is by working at an IT help desk. Most of us have bad memories from interacting with a Help Desk. I understand that because Customer Resource Managers (CRM) otherwise known as "press 1 for ... " are universally disdained.
I first encountered a small Help Desk at Penn State, where visionaries such as Bill Verity were hired as systems analysts to help faculty and graduate students use the computing resources on the IBM mainframes. Those old guard, Bill, Dan Bernitt, Chet Smith and others, came from various disciplines. It was a time full of potential.
When I worked at Pitts Comp Center from 76 to 83, the latter part of that as a manager. They were also mainframe based and everyone had to put in 1 or 2 days a week at the User Consultant desk at Old Engineering Hall on the Oaklland campus. Those were fun times as I would get a sausage dog at the Original. I spent a lot of my youth on Oakland.
The Help Desk was an amazing training ground. One had to be aware of a broad range of things, not only programming.
No comments:
Post a Comment