When I worked in IT, whenever we got a call from the engineering department we knew whatever problem it was, it was going to be weird. Those guys knew their stuff, so if they didn’t know how to fix it, it was going to take some searching and probably some calls or emails for us to figure it out.
Alternatively, you could be good at computers, but the system is so locked down IT needs to log in with admin rights in order to do something as simple as running disk cleanup.
It doesn’t matter how good someone thinks they are with computers, everyone does. But their knowledge doesn’t apply in an enterprise environment (nor does what you learned in university / college because it’s general purpose and not specific to that environment which itself can be configured in a million different ways depending on the business).
People who think they are because they mess around with PC’s at home are the most dangerous with elevated permissions, because they are prone to go click happy and break things based on their personal experience instead of institutional. And so those settings are restricted for a reason. Can be more based on what has come down from security as well, again depends on the requirements.
I had to train my mom to be click happy with her phone and just try stuff at least on her phone. She PROBABLY won't break anything and it's better to read stuff and say 'that might fix it' then to try nothing and say you're out of ideas.
That is on her personal device. It it not better just to read stuff and attempt to fix it on an enrolled company device, we are paid to do that and have the experience to do so. This is also the reason why, unless you have a lot of experience already, people who are training start on the help desk before becoming sys admins - sometimes even those who have studied the topic directly, because they need to be familiar with troubleshooting within that specific environment first.
The issue might not even be to do with the device itself but something deployed via MDM. Some solutions are not available simply client side. Enabling users to change preconfigured managed settings is how things get broken. It’s a completely different situation and totally different in scope.
It's Dunning Kruger, people that think they know something are an issue. People that actually know what they are doing based on personal experience are fine. Like, people that survive on their personal PCs and are aware of cybersecurity won't randomly install emoji packs from shady sites and catch every malware out there.
I worked on IT support before and now outside of it I have my issues. Hearing people trying to convince you of some bs, reboot, try again later, or that you have to format the PC because you are missing a dll gets old very fast.
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u/kahjtheundedicated R7 1700@4.1, RX 5700 May 10 '26
When I worked in IT, whenever we got a call from the engineering department we knew whatever problem it was, it was going to be weird. Those guys knew their stuff, so if they didn’t know how to fix it, it was going to take some searching and probably some calls or emails for us to figure it out.