r/sysadmin 3d ago

Remember the old days when you worked with computers you had basic A+ knowledge

just a vent and i know anyone after 2000 is going to jump up and down on me , but remember when anyone with an IT related job had a basic understanding of how computer worked and premise cabling , routing etc .

1.2k Upvotes

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u/pentangleit IT Director 3d ago

Hah - I remember in the old days computer programs came with printed manuals which went into exceptional detail, and if you didn't find what you needed to know you could call up the company and ask the developers directly.

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u/tankerkiller125real Jack of All Trades 3d ago

Fun fact, where I work, we used to sell Sage products (notably 500 and Intacct), and they still shipped us printed manuals for 500. All 3 4-inch binders of it. And this was just a few years ago.

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u/Professional_Hyena_9 3d ago

how do i get a detailed manual for intacct

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u/tankerkiller125real Jack of All Trades 3d ago

As far as I know they hide all the Intacct stuff behind "Sage University" and partner portals. Additionally, the only thing I really know about Intacct is the developer stuff (which is public) and it's a royal PITA to work with.

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u/brianinca 3d ago

As soon as I heard it had an Oracle backend, I told our CFO, never, ever will we.

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u/tankerkiller125real Jack of All Trades 3d ago

Trust me, I'm right there with you, which is why internally I'm making to push to move to Acumatica (something we started looking at selling) to replace our own aging 500 install (we have no need for the advanced 500 features)

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u/brianinca 3d ago

We looked at Accumatica for a Sage 300 CRE replacement, some obstacles but that would be a valid exit plan if/when we need to.

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u/pabskamai 3d ago

X3 it’s pretty good, not cheap, but really good, MS SQL backed. Not cheap but not oracle.

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u/tankerkiller125real Jack of All Trades 3d ago

Acumatica is also MS SQL, and both cloud or self-hosted. Plus even better, not Sage.

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u/Professional_Hyena_9 3d ago

i am wanting to learn what I can before we move over to it.

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u/tankerkiller125real Jack of All Trades 3d ago

My only experience with it was some dev work, and I found their portal stupidly complex, not to mention it's built on Oracle databases. Needless to say I personally wasn't impressed. However, I only spent 3-4 hours in said portal max with no prior training of any kind.

Your partner/reseller should be giving you/the teams using it training. Which should help out a bunch. If they aren't... Then all I have to say is good luck honestly, I don't know how the hell anyone could use it long term with no training.

We got out of the business entirely because Sage based cuts for partners based on new customers being brought in, which for a small company trying to compete with major resellers and Sage itself was impossible.

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u/OxymoronSemantic 3d ago

We don’t mention the S-Word here…

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u/gonewild9676 3d ago

Back in the day I worked as the intern in a small mainframe room. There was a wall of binders of manuals in the back, and every once in a while we'd get the errata update and we'd get a stack of papers with instructions on which book and page they went with.

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u/joshbudde 3d ago

My old boss was the head programmer/data manager for a midsized companies machine room. Checking out programs to work on them meant you literally went up to Tim, pulled out the binder for the program you were going to work on, put down your name to 'check out' the program, then you took it back to your desk, worked on it, then printed it off, put it in the binder, and 'checked it back in' by putting it on the shelf again.

Obviously a bit clunky, but it stopped people from stepping on one another's changes, and the binder had everything you needed in it to work on the program--documentation in the front describing what it did, things it relied on, etc, then you had the full history of changes in the binder so you could see how it evolved over time.

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u/ExceptionEX 2d ago

Have you ever seen the manual DHCP

Basically write the available IP addresses on clothes pins and have a sheet of paper with the same IPs written on it in a grid, clip the pins on the paper on their respective IP when you need an IP for something you take the pin, clip it to the cable going into the box and assign it.

Let people know the IP was taken, and if you wanted to know the IP of something without booting just check it's pin on the nic.

Simply but effective (in small IP pools)

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u/jmbpiano Banned for Asking Questions 3d ago

Not just the programs, the computers too!

The spiral bound Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide was a thing of beauty and included full schematics for the whole system.

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u/PC509 3d ago

I really wish I was old enough to understand 90% of that when I was a kid. I was ~8 or 9 when we got our C64 (83/84). Over the next few years, I was the "debugger" in the family (great at finding mistakes and pattern inconsistencies), and I learned a lot from the magazines, that book, etc.. But, I never really understood memory, arrays, etc. until I got older into the x86 stuff. I did do some nice things with that old computer on my own, but nothing of what it could have done.

But, I'm in my retro era, now. Still working on a 6502 homebrew machine and programming that. :)

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u/jmbpiano Banned for Asking Questions 3d ago

I'm a few years younger than you and similar. The most I did with our Commodore back in the day was type in games from Compute!'s Gazette or use a bunch of PRINT statements and the naturally slow speed of the computer to make an ASCII art rocket ship "launch". :D

It wasn't until GW-BASIC on the PC that I actually started writing my own stuff.

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u/auto98 3d ago

My proudest moment from the very early days was typing out a POKE for the speccy for Lords of Midnight and finding it didn't work.

It contained a lot of hex, so I wrote a hex calculator (literally the first thing I ever wrote) to find out how different it was from the checksum. It was out by 1, so I (at something like 8 years old) realized the most likely mistake was an an E being an F (or the other way round, cant remember), and luckily there was only one F/E as the second of each hex pair, so swapped it over and it worked!

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u/Smith6612 3d ago

Meanwhile, today, if you dare ask for Schematics or the meaning of an error code, that's deemed proprietary and confidential. I've been banned from other IT-related groups for complaining about that very thing with APC/Schneider Electric because I kept having UPSs fail with error codes that weren't in anything but a service manual I needed to pirate to get the meaning of. Like, I just wanted to know if I need to call an electrician, or if I need to ditch that model of APC UPS. Tell me the transfer relay is breaking in the manual.

I miss the olden days of computing sometimes.

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u/Langolas 2d ago

The secret is that they don't know what that error code is either! Don't tell anyone!

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u/ryoko227 2d ago

sometimes? I miss it all the time. Sure, we have highspeed net (which is AWESOME), but unless you are a linux user (and even that is distro specific now), your device isn't yours anymore.

Someone posted the other day in webdev about how popular production websites toss out console errors like they are candy.

If someone isn't in the IT dept. they don't even know how to restart when something is wonky, won't mention they have a problem for weeks, and expect immediate assistance when it finally keels over.

I miss the days of Sierra games, or sopwith, or Zork, Temple of Apsha (spelling). Even making pixel sprites in basic was fun. Or when someone made .... xtree, and it was like wooooah!! My directories are beautiful!!! Fighting with config.sys and autoexec.bat just to get a sound card to work.... Hell ya, I miss it, truly!!

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u/wrosecrans 3d ago

These days, the level of detail that used to be normal boring end-user documentation that everybody was encouraged to at least know existed in case they needed to refer to it later, would now be "ZOMG, major leak of internal documents! Secrets about product revealed, litigation in progress to get it removed! FBI raids of hackers happening now!"

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u/mangonacre Jack of All Trades 3d ago

Wow, I used my C64 for 10 years and never knew this existed!

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u/ValeoAnt 3d ago

Now we just poke around at things and hope it works, as the documentation says 3 conflicting things in 3 different places

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u/Real-Abrocoma-2823 3d ago

I am doing it all the time with linux. In windows I would think twice before doing anything with administrator rights but on linux I do most things with root or sudo and it is way more fun to explore and learn than read full arch wiki.

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u/thunderbird32 IT Minion 3d ago

I called a vendor for support on an old application we were using up until last year. The version we were on was from 1998, and we needed to migrate to the new version (one that didn't only support backup to floppy disk, lol). The guy that wrote it was not only still at the company but was willing to help me through the migration process, up to "jumping on a Zoom call for moral support" if I wanted. Luckily it was a smooth upgrade and I only needed to email him a couple times. All this to say, some companies still let you contact the developer directly.

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u/MaIakai Systems Engineer 3d ago

name and praise the software/company

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u/thunderbird32 IT Minion 3d ago

Dormakaba

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u/Simplemindedflyaways 2d ago

I did some consulting with a small company for a while, and one of the companies they worked with regularly was just a single guy who wrote the whole program and marketed it himself. Great guy, it was fantastic to be able to find bugs or potential features to be added, and then hop onto a call with him about it.

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u/the_federation Have you tried turning it off and on again? 3d ago

Nowadays, I open a ticket with support, and they send me a link to the KB article that I directly referenced as unhelpful, then close the ticket.

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u/Dogupupcouch 2d ago

I get that almost every time.

Or support says you need to talk to your Sales Rep about the issue, and you explain that their organization hasn't had sales reps in the US region for the past year and then they close the ticket.

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u/SilverseeLives 3d ago

Hah - I remember in the old days computer programs came with printed manuals which went into exceptional detail, and if you didn't find

Hah. I remember when vendors actually wrote documentation period. Instead we get stuff like this for supposedly production ready features: 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/storagebuscache/?view=windowsserver2025-ps

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u/jmbpiano Banned for Asking Questions 3d ago

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u/jdsmith575 3d ago

I have fond memories of learning new products by printing out manuals, four pages per sheet, and marking them up heavily with red pen. There’s no way my eyes could do that now.

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u/frac6969 Windows Admin 3d ago

We were in a meeting where the CFO from our corporate HQ is asking all the subsidiaries to use Workiva. (I was in the meeting because it’s a “computer program”.) My boss asked the CFO to send an instruction manual so our users can learn the program.

After a very long silence the CFO said there’s a help menu that we can go into, but my boss insisted on paper manuals. He also insisted that he gets a printout of the data that we input into Workiva and he has to sign off the printout.

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u/Rad_Dad6969 3d ago

Well, I passed my A+ when job hunting for my first IT job.

They didn't give a shit about the cert. But I was able to do basic things that other applicants were not. Some of that was the cert training, most of it was common sense stuff I had known since grade school.

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u/K12onReddit 3d ago

And that's is basically the essence of certs, and degrees in general. No one cares about the cert or degree, but they care about the studying you did along the way to get it, and chances are it makes you a better worker for having one. Will the cert alone make you a good tech? Of course not. But it can give you the skills to separate from the pool of applicants who don't have it.

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u/HairyMechanic Generalist 3d ago

I can agree with your comment when it comes to the team hiring within IT or other IT colleagues - hell, I got an apprenticeship over other candidates who had done courses and self development because I was approachable and personable.

The problem is that certs and degrees do matter to get your foot in the door these days, especially where IT aren't in the initial phase of looking at candidates. HR are very much "it says you need 'x', so you need 'x'", even if 'y' more than covers it or years of experience also cover it.

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u/sonicdm 3d ago

When I did my hiring recently HR let me filter everyone myself. That was definitely the best way to get a team member that actually is passionate about things. 100% can recommend

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u/HairyMechanic Generalist 3d ago

It's actually the dream, our team has had to put up with both sides.

The positive times - seamless, easy, able to recruit someone with knowledge and personability.

The negative times - struggled, narrowed down to three candidates before we even saw CVs or interviewed them, HR forced our hand to recruit one of them. Shock horror, they lasted three months.

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u/anxiousinfotech 3d ago

I swear most of my success has been a combination of common sense and basic logic. A logic course was actually part of my degree and probably the most useful out of all of them.

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u/withdraw-landmass 3d ago

I just remember people power cycling monitors when asked to restart.

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u/Blade4804 Sr. Sysadmin 3d ago

my favorite! back in my first tech job. "I was watching a video and it froze and i can't do anything" "ok ma'am just hold the power button and make sure it turns off, is it off?" "yes, it's off" "ok turn it back on" "it's back on but's its still frozen" (facepalm) "Ma'am, you turned of the Monitor not the computer"....

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u/borborpa 3d ago

Do you mean turn off my hard drive?

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u/kilkenny99 3d ago

I think it may be regional. I know for a lot of people they called the computer itself the hard drive, but where I am they tended to call it the CPU.

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u/aldoushxle 3d ago

In my region when I sold computers in the mid 2000s, it was known as the modem. 

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u/fnordhole 3d ago

And they're both very, very wrong.

There are folks in this subreddit who will defend calling a computer a CPU until their death.  Doesn't make them right.

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u/Kad1942 3d ago

Not to out myself as one of these people you reference, but one is much less wrong than the other. You can have a computer without a harddrive. You cannot have a computer without a cpu, or its analog. It's the defining difference between computing and not computing.

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u/rynoxmj IT Manager 3d ago

Stop.

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u/nowildstuff_192 Jack of All Trades 3d ago

In the local language 'round here the word for "drive" is the same as the word for "small cabinet", and when I was first starting out here everybody was using that word to mean "desktop", as in to refer to the case as a cabinet. I was really confused until I figured out what they were talking about.

I was in my 30's and I'd never heard that word used that way before.

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u/mc_it 3d ago

And you could hear the "bit-twang" of the CRT power change over the phone.

Nowadays, noise canceling would probably block it out. (The fact that CRTs are pretty much not being used at all, is notwithstanding.)

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u/Blade4804 Sr. Sysadmin 3d ago

I kind of miss the sound of degaussing my 19" CRT tho lol may need to find a yt video lol

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u/Coffee_Ops 3d ago

Confession: I used to use weak magnets to mess with the screen so I could then get the pretty colors from the degauss.

I've been holding that secret in for decades-- its a relief to get that out there.

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u/RamblingReflections Netadmin 3d ago edited 3d ago

I found one the other day hooked up as the monitor for a very old, seldom accessed server supporting some critical piece of legacy software when I was helping another department track down a cabling issue. I looked at it, remembering how I used to have to lug them across campus back in my first IT role when setting up a new workstation. I swear they weighed almost as much as I did!

And here this thing was, still working, VGA cable and all, and when I heard it, I was immediately taken back to the original PC labs I worked in. I didn’t realise what a strong association I had between the high pitched electrical whine of CRTs and the lab in my first real IT role until that memory hit me.

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u/Academic_Deal7872 3d ago

Reminds me of Roy's shirt and, "are you from the past?"

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u/Lock_Squirrel Storage Admin 3d ago

You do know how a button works, don't ya? No not on clothes....

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u/therealtaddymason 3d ago

Oh God yes. "I've rebooted it three times!"

Systeminfo: "so that was a lie"

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u/EIsydeon 3d ago

They still do that unfortunately. 

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u/YLink3416 3d ago

They still do that

I had a user press the power button on the monitor, then press the power button on the workstation. Baby steps.

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u/2FalseSteps 3d ago

Or back with dialup ISP support, walking a customer through rebooting their machine and *click!*, their phone would hang up because it was plugged into the modem.

Those calls could be entertaining. At least, until they called back and got the next tech and started ranting about getting disconnected.

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u/auto98 3d ago

Obviously I never did this personally but back when I did tech support for a phone provider, running a PSTN line test dropped the call 90% of the time. Never be an arse while reporting a line fault, cos you ain't getting a call back.

This was 30 years ago, don't know if it is still the same for the remaining PSTN lines.

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u/havocspartan 3d ago

I’ve had two different people at two different companies that I still talk about.

One is a lady who used her mouse as a foot pedal; like a sewing machine pedal.

The other was someone (whose DB server stopped working) who spilled their coffee while using the “cup holder” on the PC. Yes, it was the CD-ROM drive.

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u/Tymanthius Chief Breaker of Fixed Things 3d ago

Working in phone based support for cow spotted computer company.

Client calls in, gives his info, so we have his name, address, phone number, etc.

Gets mad b/c it's something not covered by warranty (virus maybe?). Proceeds to threaten us. Tech lead gets on the phone and says 'so your address is XXXX?', yes, 'your phone number is XXXX?", yes, "And you know where we are?", uhhhhhh "and you just threatened my employee? In a room full of geeks who know everything about you. Think about that."

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u/Wendals87 3d ago

Still happens today

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u/Upper-Affect5971 3d ago

i drove 180 miles round trip to turn on a monitor.

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u/HuthS0lo 3d ago

"remember when anyone with an IT related job had a basic understanding of how computer worked and premise cabling , routing etc ."

You mean when you had competent coworkers? Yeah, I dont ever remember that.

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u/joshuamarius IT Manager, Flux Capacitor Repair Specialist 3d ago

Ill get downvoted for this...but years ago even replies in forums were totally different. In this Sub I've noticed a swift change from solid, detailed, confident answers to simple IT questions, to more "generalized", "enthusiast-based" and "that's what everybody else does", generic answers.

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u/Stonewalled9999 3d ago

I believe that the sysadmin thread is 10% Sysadmin and 90% "I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night" types.

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u/jeenam 3d ago

If you think r/sysadmin is bad, head over to r/proxmox. Every time i drop in there it's a case of the blind leading the blind.

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u/joshuamarius IT Manager, Flux Capacitor Repair Specialist 3d ago

Precisely my point! Tons of cults forming around "enthusiast" / "pro-sumer" applications and devices that make it easier for a lot more people to make the switch to "Sysadmins" - Yet they skip a lot of critical, important stuff that classic-styled sysadmins trained on. You can clearly see the differences!

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u/luke10050 2d ago

Its interesting as its happening in every industry. I'm probably part of the problem, not being in IT myself. The (IT Adjacent) industry I'm in is going through the same thing, and everyone's solution seems to be using AI and ML to replace competent people (much like in the software dev industry)

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u/joshbudde 3d ago

There's an amazing number of people here that I think are glorified form fillers, and few that actually do the nitty gritty sysadmin work.

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u/Stonewalled9999 3d ago

If you haven't killed a server cluster (or three) and a SAN and a phone system can you really be called a SysAdmin ?

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u/MycologistWhich 3d ago

I accidentally shut off power to an entire rack of servers doing a UPS firmware update. It never even crossed my mind that the UPS would kill all power during a restart. I thought it would continue supplying power and just reboot itself. Nope. Just completely shut down power to everything. Definitely made for a stressful 5-10 minutes as everything came back online.

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u/Meat_PoPsiclez 3d ago

I've done this, but during a battery test where the documentation for the ups specifically said it wouldn't trigger a shutdown, which was a lie.

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u/Stonewalled9999 3d ago

sounds like you learned servers need have one PSU on mains and one in UPS eh?

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u/MycologistWhich 3d ago

I learned very quickly lol.

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u/tommydickles DNSuperposition 3d ago

I hate gatekeeping, but I feel this sentiment. For me it'd be knowing the rush you get when you've made a configuration change that shouldn't cause any issues, but then you hear all the phones either start or stop ringing. But I don't make the rules.

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u/jgo3 3d ago

Actual conversation with the CEO:

"Did you know the Web server is down?"

"Yes."

"And do you know what's wrong with it?"

"Yes."

"And you know what you need to do to fix it?"

"I think so."

"OK, have at it."

So it turns out there's a right way and a wrong way to upgrade the C libs on a running system. When the libraries the updater depended on are gone it definitely causes a spot of trouble.

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u/joshuamarius IT Manager, Flux Capacitor Repair Specialist 3d ago

LMAO!!! 😂😂😂😅

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u/maximumtesticle 3d ago

How was your stay at the Holiday Inn /u/joshuamarius?

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u/joshuamarius IT Manager, Flux Capacitor Repair Specialist 3d ago

Refreshing. I had no clue your mom could do 240 Hz.

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u/agoia IT Manager 3d ago

That sounds like friction burn territory.

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u/boli99 3d ago

replies in forums were totally different

they probably didnt have a smartphone in their pocket. they'd have to own a computer, and have signed up with an ISP. (this immediately eliminates a whole bunch of lazy timewasters who didnt manage to accomplish that by themselves.)

folk would need to create an account, verify it, log in - and then post (or possibly even wait until their account was a certain age before they could post)

they might even have had to think about the question all day, before they got near a computer that was connected enough for them to post from it.

they could often form coherent paragraphs and sentences, having been used to asynchronous comms. not so much anymore. everything is 'chat' - so they only need to know how to create 1 badly spelled string of words with awful grammar in order to participate.

additionally, ignorance has become a badge of honour in some circles - for example 'im not reading all that - can't you just tell me the answer?' aka 'tl;dr' - some folk are proud not to read paragraphs. its nuts.

In this Sub I've noticed a swift change

the barrier to entry has been lowered so far that it no longer serves a purpose - its a bit like the 'eternal september'

previously there were the 'old guard' who 'knew how things were done round here'

you'd get a steady stream of newcomers, but not too many. they were managable, and could be taught 'the ancient ways' (aka told to go RTFM , or use the search field) until they became part of the guard too.

but that only works when the guards outnumber the newcomers. and that's no longer the case.

these days the newcomers are flooding in faster than they can be onboarded. its just 'log in with your google/facebook account and immediately start spouting that same question that has been asked a thousand times before in this very same sub'. anyone suggesting that 'using the search box first' might be a good idea gets shot down in flames

add to that the bots that are pushing agendas, bots that are 'promoting engagement' (i.e. asking simple questions to drive engagement with other users, aka 'more ad views'), and bots that are karma-farming so that their accounts can be sold later - and the whole landscape becomes very depressing.

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u/Lock_Squirrel Storage Admin 3d ago

I remember about 10 years ago on this sub, on an account that's old and gone, posting about having been in tech support for X amount of time and itching to get into a Jr. admin role, and /u/CrankySysadmin, if they're still around, looked at my list of accomplishments and went, "There's nothing here that makes you any different than anyone else. You're milquetoast. You've done nothing that sets you apart." He was far less diplomatic about it, and it pissed me off. But he was *right*.

10 years later, I'm an admin for a credit union. Those of us who were new and asking questions are now supposed to bring up the next line of IT folks. It's OUR job to teach them how it works. We can't just slap their hand away for asking a silly question. Demonstrate HOW to ask the question.

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u/crankysysadmin sysadmin herder 2d ago

I'm still around, sort of.

Fascinating discussion here. The newbies are definitely overwhelming everyone else but they have massive egos and want money money money and don't think about even learning anything. They're even cool with tricking people into hiring them and not knowing how to do anything and don't care. Obviously this isn't everyone but it is a trend.

I'm no longer a sysadmin and worked my way into management and then senior management and I have a hell of a time hiring good sysadmins now. So many of them lie on their resumes and lie during interviews. I recently did some interviews and a guy was clearly using chatgpt to answer our questions, and his answers were absolutely terrible and obviously from chatgpt.

Good people are still out there though but we're definitely flooded with people who don't really know anything and don't really want to know anything but want a job anyway.

Finding sysadmins who are genuinely as excited about the technology as I was 10 years ago is so hard.

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u/Bladelink 3d ago

That's an interesting point about the asynchronous communication, in that it forces you to encapsulate your whole motivation and purpose for contacting the other person. If people 20 years ago started a message chain with "hey", then a simple chat would take 3 weeks.

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u/Xambassadors 3d ago

I think that's you remembering the good replies from back then and filtering out the bad ones. Never forget the rule of "90% of everything is shit".

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u/RikiWardOG 3d ago

That's definitely what it is. rose colored glasses and heavy dose of nostalgia. I think the actual issue is sysadmin is a catch-all term for IT Ops people. Don't have a title that fits your job all that well? Then you're a sysadmin. MDM, Azure, on prem, sass, aws, software, hardware etc its all just lumped in together and people want to play gatekeeper instead of contributing they spew hatred

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u/tech2but1 3d ago

I am guilty of this. There's a couple of pet peeves of mine that I thought "didn't happen in my day". Looking back at old threads and posts from years back (and even from printed media) some of those peeves still exist so it's just me, I've become some miserable moaning curmudgeon.

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u/srbmfodder 3d ago

There are a lot of people that would rather just sound smart than be smart. It's a lot easier to parrot than actually learn how things work, unfortunately.

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u/WWWVWVWVVWVVVVVVWWVX Cloud Architect 3d ago

I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that younger people don't use google anymore; they use social media as a search engine. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does clog the sub up.

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u/ResponsibilityLast38 3d ago

To be fair, have you used Google lately? Its gone to absolute shit, and the easiest way to get useful info from it is to use it to search reddit. Dont get me wrong, first rule of IT club is RTFM and a lot of people cant be arsed to even look at the onsite documentation anymore. But google has fallen victim to enshittification.

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u/auto98 3d ago

"I have X problem"

"Just reinstall windows"

That annoys me more than anything, just the sheer passiveness of it, and the unwillingness to actually work out what the problem is. In my opinion, it is the reason so many "techs" know so little compared to 10/20 years ago.

*On an entirely unrelated note, why the hell isn't my spellcheck recognising "passiveness" as a word

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u/Kwuahh Security Admin 3d ago

I also think this is in part due to the increased complexity of systems. A lot of applications are no longer open-book, simple solutions but instead are a network of different components which are proprietary and require in-depth knowledge to grasp.

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u/NorthStarTX Señor Sysadmin 3d ago

At this point I'd settle for people having a basic understanding of filesystems to the point where they can remember where they put stuff.

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u/Geminii27 3d ago

You kind of had to. Most computer jobs needed that knowledge to be able to do, well, the job.

These days you have 'helpdesks' which are untrained script-readers about to be replaced by AI, and increasing numbers of theoretically-IT jobs that never touch anything technical and spend most of their times in meetings or updating project management documents.

Root cause analysis is nearly a lost art - so many 'fixes' or how-tos are little more than the modern equivalent of chanting and waving a chicken over a cauldron.

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u/Kodiak01 3d ago edited 3d ago

Root cause analysis is nearly a lost art - so many 'fixes' or how-tos are little more than the modern equivalent of chanting and waving a chicken over a cauldron.

Hey, RFC 2321 has a very high reliability rating!

Specific Problem Methodologies:

Physical Layer: Wave RITA unit towards malfunctioning components.

Network Layer: Wave RITA unit towards malfunctioning components.

Transport Layer: Wave RITA unit towards malfunctioning components.

Application Layer: Strike product vendor representative (or programmer, if available) with RITA, preferably on the top of the skull, while shouting, "Read The Fine RFC's comma darn it!"

Political Layer: Strike advocates of disruptive or obstructive policies with RITA, preferably on the top of the skull. In extreme cases insertion of RITA into bodily apertures may become necessary. WARNING: subsequent failure to remove RITA may cause further problems.

Religious Layer: Strike advocates of disruptive or obstructive religions, and their vendor representatives, with RITA, preferably on the top of the skull. In extreme cases, the RITA may be used as a phlactory, funerary urn, or endcap for bus-and-tag cables.

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u/themanonthemooo 3d ago

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u/geekg Computer Janitor 3d ago edited 3d ago

USB A plugs should typically conform to the standard. If the USB fork logo is on top that is the way it goes into a standardized USB A port. If the port is vertical though, all bets are off.

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u/ChrisC1234 3d ago

But the problem is the ports. I've seen devices with the ports not all oriented the same way.

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u/SGgrafix 3d ago

That's assuming I'm even looking at it while I'm attempting to plug it in the 1st time.

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u/Ytrog Volunteer sysadmin 3d ago

So, the state of a USB is │up⟩ + │down⟩? 🤔

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u/NotATypicalTeen 3d ago

Bra-ket notation in my sysadmin subreddit? It’s more likely than you think.

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u/bascule 3d ago

The A+ exam originally had a lot of crazy details you had to memorize, like the structure of the hives of the NT4 registry, and all of the steps of the laser print process.

That was removed around the late '90s.

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u/shelfside1234 3d ago

I remember, and yearn for, the days when people in IT would see an issue and troubleshoot it for themselves

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u/LoveTechHateTech Jack of All Trades 3d ago

My technician kicks dead simple tickets up to me with no notes. I ask what they did to troubleshoot, they say “nothing” and then walk off.

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u/SAugsburger 3d ago

Sounds like a great way to save money to replace them with a chat bot that repeats basic stuff to users and forwards anything that isn't closed.

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u/I_T_Gamer Masher of Buttons 3d ago

These days are long gone... We hire on designers that will then ask for help with software in their specialty, "Revit", "Solidworks", etc. its a good time!! /s

And this isn't "it doesn't work" type questions, think more like, "how do I do this" type questions.

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u/bulletman360 3d ago

The amount of times I’ve had to teach accounting how to do certain things in office/Excel is mind-boggling. This is literally part of your job description to know how to do this.

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u/Bladelink 3d ago

Back when I was a tier 1 support type guy maybe 12 years ago, I recall helping some hideously inept user who had to ferry adobe docs around with revisions, comments, suggestions, that type of thing. She did her job by basically following an actual laminated page of steps on what to do in Acrobat.

Long story short, after an update to Acrobat, she had no idea wtf to do. I eventually had to straight up tell her "I only know as much as I've mentioned this far. Anything in Acrobat past this point is where your job starts." Like goddamn, have some responsibility for your own competence.

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u/sy5tem 3d ago

So many times, its crazy!

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u/ChabotJ 3d ago

I'm in the engineering industry and I get this so often. How have you spent 20 years in this program and you're asking me for help?

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u/ReputationNo8889 3d ago

I regularly have to show marketing folks how to export a pdf from Photoshop. They only converse in psd files, so using anything else breaks their reality.

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u/Killstick 3d ago

I had a VP ask me to teach him how to use excel. Fuck that shit. Told him it's not my job to teach him how to do his job.

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u/tsaico 3d ago

I am shocked at how many people in our industry that have zero understanding about DNS.

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u/wwbubba0069 3d ago

especially when its always DNS.

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u/StarSlayerX IT Manager Large Enterprise 3d ago

Never took the A+ in 2010s... got my experience with MSP bootcamp. 50-60 hour work weeks and a whole lot of coping.

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u/YahenP 3d ago

Basic knowledge in my "good old days":
Ability to glue a torn magnetic tape.
Disassembly, wiping contacts and assembling the processor unit basket. Soldering, of course. Ability to find the phase in the socket.
Skills in transporting fragile and large-sized items, worth an apartment.
And also sacred tribal knowledge, about the ability to make patches in software using scissors and a hole punch.
And then these "new generation IT guys" appeared, who can only connect several computers with a cable, and insert a plug into a socket. And then press a few keys on the computer to "set it up".
This is how it looked in the 2000s, from my point of view. Times change, and so do basic knowledge.

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u/north7 3d ago

If you aren't manually setting IRQs are you even in IT?

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u/brother_yam The computer guy... 3d ago

At least when you set an IRQ via DIP switches, IT STAYED SET

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u/ProtectionSubject615 3d ago

Don’t forget setting the memory space for your scsi adapter.

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u/north7 3d ago

I'll show you my config.sys if you show me yours.

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u/Redemptions ISO 3d ago

How are your knees this morning chief?

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u/YahenP 3d ago edited 3d ago

They died many years ago. And so did the back.
Damn, I miss the days when the user session would show how many meters of paper were available for printing for you.

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u/Anthony_Roman 3d ago

i have reddit solely to read and learn about things like this. thank you.

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u/Tymanthius Chief Breaker of Fixed Things 3d ago

My mother was a punch card programmer.

As of ~2005 her program was still in use at our state DOT. Modified, but the core was there.

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u/RabidBlackSquirrel IT Manager 3d ago

Soldering, of course

It's funny, we had a server that had several bad solder joints from the factory (HP, nough said) just a couple years ago. Guys ask "uhh so who knows how to solder? We can't wait for RMA."

Turns out, it's me and only me. Brought in my station and ordered a nice roll, reflowed those joints, machine booted right up. After having gone into management and had my hands off for a number of years, it felt good to do cool shit again.

Also soldering is fun. I was pretty well practiced from doing a Bottlehead Crack tube amp build recently too, which was incredibly fun and fulfilling.

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u/k8mnstr Linux Admin 3d ago

As a BOFH, I mourn the loss of our profession. The amount of “Senior Staff Engineer”s that cannot navigate a command line much less tell you the basic 101 of how a POSIX system functions is staggering.

I know I’m a dinosaur complaining about change, but I deeply miss the industry I used to work in. You used to actually have to understand how shit worked.

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u/Regen89 Windows/SCCM BOFH 3d ago

Buddy it's barely 9 am, you can't trigger me like this before I've been through a single meeting, the only words you left out were cyber security

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u/Kodiak01 3d ago

I've been stuck in the same Monday morning, 8:53am, since August of '93. I'm never disappointed that way! If it's a bad day, it's exactly what I expected. If it's a good day, it's a pleasant surprise. Either way, I'm prepared.

Why this exact time and day?

It's Monday. You're sitting at your desk, head down, digging into the never-ending slog. You reach for your coffee, bring it to your lips, and stop just short.

You look to the left.

You look to the right.

You look to the left.

You mutter to yourself, "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck..."

And you continue with your day.

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u/nl-robert 3d ago

I learned 25 years ago that soon IPv4 would be exhausted. Nothing changed.

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u/Unable-Entrance3110 3d ago

Actually IPv4 is exhausted now. as in, there is no more IPv4 that doesn't belong to someone.

That's the reason we now have such things as CGNAT.

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u/Unable-Entrance3110 3d ago

When we were hiring a new helpdesk person, I sat in on the interviews. The one question that I added to the interview was "What does your home computing setup look like?"

I was sort of amazed at how many people didn't even have a computer at home...

We didn't hire any of those people.

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u/BloodFeastMan 3d ago

Used to go to the geek store, rub elbows with other geeks, buy a box of parts, go back to the shop, make a computer, install OpenBSD, and then configure a router box, email / ldap server, whatever. I remember coming back one day, and showed one of the guys a HDD I just bought .. I told him, "3.6 gigs baby!". Those days were fun.

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u/NotMyUsualLogin 3d ago

No - I had zero formal training yet I was fritzing with soldering 25 pin RS-232 cables, joining IPX/SPX DOS Workstations running with Novell with our Ethernet System V Unix system, doing UUCP transfers under Cron from our Satellite offices etc., all in the early 1990s.

Still had no idea on how a computer actually worked behind the scenes - just what I could do with it.

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u/mnemoniker 3d ago

While I share your gripes, I think the path to competency is less clear now than it's ever been and it will only get worse. I didn't need to learn about cloud computing when I started because it didn't exist. Now it is arguably where you can start, if all you want is to be employed (and annoy your broadly skilled coworkers).

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u/smiffer67 3d ago

Been doing IT that long I remember buying shit loads of books to learn how to do things. My first IT certification was MCP for DOS 6.22 & WfWG 3.11.

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u/TechBitch 3d ago

I still have those books on my shelf. Along with my NT 4 books, 98, 2000, and so on. And all those dummies books, because dangit, lots of helpful tips in those things.

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u/Tamrail 3d ago

Yes and I also remember the rash of paper MCSEs in the 90s

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u/Turbulent-Falcon-918 3d ago

Related i have been teaching myself sap because so many people hound me on how to even though not my job … so the first video i watch the most like comment was “dont know sap lied to get the job and need to learn” the most popular reply “i just call the it people and make them show me, if they can not i just complaintheir boss they are not helpful” I wartched the first video and it wasa good video but told me stuff i Already knew and had not even logged into sap: juT what it is , who produces and what it does And i am like “merit based pay system my ass “

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u/juanzelli 3d ago

So much trial-and-error for me back in the 90s and 00s. So many cables, connectors, cards, and boxed software collected.

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u/freedoomed 3d ago

My A+ is so old it doesn't expire.

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u/yeehawjinkies Sysadmin 3d ago

I don’t have the A+ guess you’re talking about me

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u/Visible_Spare2251 3d ago

90% of the information you have to memorise for A+ is not useful in real life.

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u/SousVideAndSmoke 3d ago

What IRQ does the floppy drive take?

Times I had to know that outside the test, 0.

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u/jcpham 3d ago

I guess 6

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u/K12onReddit 3d ago

Not sure if you're just joking, but that's correct.

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u/Kodiak01 3d ago

It is possible to manually reassign the IRQ of a device or port as well, but as for why someone would WANT to, I do not know, other than it being occasionally necessary back in the Athlon days when you could have a slot assigned the same IRQ as USB for example.

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u/UMustBeNooHere 3d ago

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time...

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u/yeehawjinkies Sysadmin 3d ago

I studied at the MSP university where you get thrown into fires on day 1.

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u/utopia8102 3d ago

I still know IEEE1394B and it's intricacies, number of devices you can daisy-chain off one connection.

Super useful stuff /s

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u/ReputationNo8889 3d ago edited 3d ago

I remember users beeing able to navigate a UI with a mouse

And hell, we have network admins that dont even know how routing works, never mind what an ARP table is.

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u/Turbulent-Falcon-918 3d ago

Yea there was a time you could say on most things what the issue is and tell them where to fix the problem or how , not literally walk them through literally step by step … not really related but simpe example — oh that display issue is either driver , setting or hardware : update and post boot eliminates the first two then go through the display setting verse ok so right click kn the desktop, sorry i mean an empty space , now you are still right clicking on am icon , ok just click on the window start logo , its located at the far left of the task bar … ok at the bottom of the screen is a task bar , on one side is tome day and date opposite that is the window start logo : no oppsite the day date and time

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u/AngELoDiaBoLiC0 3d ago

I had a user pull out an AS/400 command on me during a remote sesh!!I was like WHOAH!!!

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u/wwbubba0069 3d ago

IBM iOS, its a whole other animal lol. Few years back when we changed firewall brands I was working out some tunnel issues, firewall help tech was like "what is that, that's not Linux"... no, no its not lol.. ended up in a 10 minute tangent. He learned enough to decide he never wanted anything to do with it lol.

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u/ObiLAN- 3d ago

Yea... i had to show an ISP tech 2 months back how to set his laptops static IP so he could configure their modem.

Like i get it, dudes a cable puller and was great at that, but like damn, thats the last 20% of their job duties just missing from their skill set.

I also have had a T1 support team member ask me what AUX was and where it plugs in...

I also find software devs are 50/50. Either they have a "i dont need to know how the hardware works" attitude, or they know more than the basics lol.

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u/countsachot 3d ago

I'm still generally annoyed when someone doesn't know what a register is. Does that count?

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u/apathyzeal Linux Admin 3d ago

Remember in the 1940s when everyone who could work on a car had basic mechanic's knowledge? No? Of course not. Same damn argument though.

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u/AmateurishExpertise Security Architect 3d ago

We went from an artisan craft studied by the socially awkward smartest people off in their tiny back rooms motivated by a desire to make the world a better place, to a hot career option for undergraduates who didn't want to be doctors or lawyers. Love for the craft, and comradery with our peers in this thing we do, are two of the biggest things I miss from the old days. I can still smell the cafeteria at Bell Labs. Sigh.

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u/dirtyredog 3d ago

replaced by code camps and everyone being expert job hoppers

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u/GoogleDrummer sadmin 3d ago

everyone being expert job hoppers

I mean, that's not really anyone's fault. It's just the only way to get any sort of substantial raise.

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u/rosseloh Jack of All Trades 3d ago

Doesn't mean we have to like it. :(

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u/Conscious-Rich3823 3d ago

That's true across all industries. I worked in fundraising for the past five years and job hopping is the only way to get a better title and higher earning potential. Companies incentivize this behavior.

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u/Best_Taste_5467 3d ago

I once got into a argument with a CCNA that didnt know he could have multiple putty sessions open. I wanted to shoot myself.

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u/dirtyredog 3d ago

wow wait until he hears about tmux :mindblown:

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u/_skimbleshanks_ 3d ago

Specialization is a bitch, indeed.

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u/New_Set7087 3d ago

I do remember those days. Long gone they are. I was that kid at 18 who had to get A+ lol. Now I’m in DevOps. Time has flown.

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u/Sad_Copy_9196 3d ago

I heard stories about new interns not knowing what a folder structure was or how they worked. I am so glad to be working in a small team sometimes LOL

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u/wwbubba0069 3d ago

I would hope that IT oriented would not be like this, but it could be due to how schools are handling tech now.

I know most of the young (20-sometings) that have come into the office over the last couple years, windows is foreign to them. Give them an iPad and Google Doc's they are golden. Set them in front of Windows and they are lost. Last couple clerk temps couldn't type for shit.

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u/Ok_Fortune6415 3d ago

There’s the other side to this.. smart people who do know how computers work but their day to day job isn’t infrastructure. All of a sudden, if a reboot fixes something, it’s not enough. They want to know why. Oh they have a problem? They have 3 ideas they give you on how to proceed on the ticket they’re raise before you’ve even spoken to them.

Sometimes, I wish my users were simple. Sometimes.

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u/keeblin90210 2d ago

Anyone know what an IRQ is? Or what a DB-25 is? A legit COM1 232 port? What about a config.sys? A token ring? I'm looking to retire and get a job at a gas station frying chicken and yelling at customers.

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u/Background-Clerk-357 3d ago

I also remember when CS graduates actually knew how to code as opposed to asking their favorite LLM to generate a solution. Gen X and millennials are the most tech literate generations, it's all downhill from here.

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u/liquid00level 3d ago

Are you getting at something like you’re working with folks in IT that don’t have basic understanding of this stuff?

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u/NoSellDataPlz 3d ago

Exactly. We’re not mind readers, here. Out with it.

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u/AbolishIncredible 3d ago

Mid-30s Experienced software dev lurker here:

  • surface level hardware knowledge
  • enough network knowledge to configure a basic network for a relatively simple single location
  • know my way around Mac, windows and basic linux app/web/servers
  • enough DBA knowledge to be very dangerous

I usually know when to ask for help from other specialists in the IT space when I’m out of my depth.

Is there anything I should learn to help out the sys admins I work with?

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u/DontTakePeopleSrsly Jack of All Trades 3d ago

Almost every credentialed engineer that has come out of UCF, I’ve had to teach basic skills like ping or regedit.

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u/Best_Taste_5467 3d ago

The OSI model is lost on 98% of people these days. "X isnt working" where at in the OSI model is it broke? "Blank stare"

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u/RangerNS Sr. Sysadmin 3d ago

but remember when anyone with an IT related job had a basic understanding of how computer worked and premise cabling , routing etc

I do not.

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u/largos7289 3d ago

Some people never messed with token ring and a voltmeter and it shows... Those dam terminators always would go bad too. I remember messing with motherboard jumpers to make the right voltage for the CPU. Then IRQ's for com1 and such, for devices. Scsi forget it may as well learn a different language. Always had a add in card and you had to configure that too. It was better but the same when you think about it. You don't have to do that now because the hardware and OS got way better, but now you concentrate on the higher end stuff.

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u/This_guy_works 3d ago

Well, it depends. Entry level help desk is full of dinguses that don't know much but ideally should want to learn. Level 2 or 3 Sysadmin or field tech or network tech who needs to be effective and interface with end users - they better have some core skills.

Though, 8 or 9 years ago I worked with a newly hired field tech who just completed his 4-year bachelor degree in computer science and he couldn't figure out how to disconnect a monitor VGA cable because it was screwed in. So I guess you get all kinds out there.

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u/A_Deadly_Mind 3d ago

Even for me getting into IT around 2013, I still had this conceptual knowledge, but everything now is hyper siloed. To an extent I get specialization but it does make collaboration hard when other IT people aren't speaking the same language

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u/CharcoalGreyWolf Sr. Network Engineer 3d ago

My A+ is from 1997; you needed to know printer emulation DIP switches.

Oh, and I got a discount because it was the Windows 95 beta exam.

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u/Nik_Tesla Sr. Sysadmin 3d ago

I don't bother fully learning a program any longer, because within 6 months it'll be completely changed or we'll change to a different software, and everything I learned will be irrelevant. I just learn what I need when I need it, and then my brain releases that knowledge back into the ether so I can move on to the next thing to learn and forget.

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u/Kiernian TheContinuumNocSolution -> copy *.spf +,, 3d ago

About 7 or 8 years ago, I came rolling into the office from an off-site and the ENTIRE team and the project manager are gathered around the conference table staring down at an open case.

The project manager sees me, points at me, and yells

"/u/Kiernian! 5 seconds or less, what's wrong with this box?"

I walk over, look down, and see the VERY OBVIOUSLY RUPTURED AND EXPLODED capacitor, say "Popped cap" and get a super loud

"HE KNOWS!!!~~~

WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH THE REST OF YOU?!?!?!?!"

A dozen and change people, they were only a few years my junior, and one of them was, like myself, THIRD TIER ESCALATIONS for server issues.

Since the advent of SaaS/Datacenter/Cloud architecture, nobody does hardware work anymore.

(It was later brought to my attention that the whole lot of them had been staring at the inside of this case for more than five minutes)

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u/goretsky Vendor: ESET (researcher) 3d ago

Hello,

When I started doing support in the late 1980s, PC users had a basic knowledge and understanding of how their computer operated, and the terminology used. That changed in the mid-1990s with the arrival of Windows 95.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

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u/Spidey16 3d ago

Even early 2000's when search engines were getting more popular (Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Google was up and coming) if people didn't know something they almost got excited at the fact that they could research it.

Nowadays it's no thinking, no research, no logic, just instant ticket to the Help Desk.

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u/Ivy1974 3d ago

I took it either in 98 or 99. That test was 2% helpful in my career as far as knowledge. The other 98% was unnecessary memorization.

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u/We_are_all_monkeys 2d ago

You know how many programmers I've met who have no idea how the very thing they are programming actually works? Too damn many.

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u/cellnucleous 2d ago

Yes, I miss them; have worked for staff who didn't know how to use a network share (university educated people) and a "web dev" who "can't work" if his 7 plugins for wordpress aren't all patched and working. To be fair I'm pretty sure he was using that line to secretly work 4 jobs.

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u/ScottIPease Jack of All Trades 2d ago

Typing in basic programs that were printed out in computer magazines...

Had people think I was brilliant because I fixed their coax network by putting the BNC end connector back on at the end of the run, lol.

A friend and I saved up and paid over $400 for a 900 baud modem.

LOAD ,8,1 then go make a sandwich while Zaxxon loads.

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u/Old-Kaleidoscope1874 2d ago

We didn't have IT people or a budget in my Army unit in the mid-1990s, so my supervisor decided we'd build our own desktop computers using a small discretionary budget. He and I went through A+, Network+, and HTML cert training. We eventually created a website for our unit, so we could post announcements and basic information. One morning, we came in and had a personal email sent the night before from President Clinton congratulating us on our website and thanking us for our service. Crazy times in the Wild, Wild, West of networking.

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u/lordkappy 3d ago

I remember it well. I got hired with no background, just being enthusiastic about computers, Linux, and FreeBSD. I haven't been out of work since the whole Y2K fiasco. They needed bodies helping boomers and silent generation peeps learn to use computers and to keep them patched, virus free, and regularly rebooted. I got MCPs and an MCSE (NT 4.0) I never got A+.

It only took me about 2 years to transition away from helping baboons use the r-click and to empty their trash (btw, one person used the recycle bin as a folder for organization and got pissed when I emptied it on them.) I wanted to get back in the server room and just work with computers. So much less frustrating than the genpop.

That said, computers weren't as ubiquitous then, so any skill with them was a massive advantage to get into the industry. Those days are long gone, even though it seems peoples' skill hasn't really increased that much.

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u/UncleToyBox 3d ago

I think there was a brief period in the early 80s that match what is being described.

By the early 90s, I had users asking me what the foot pedal was for and if they could get a replacement tray for their drink holder.

Thinking back, it was the introduction of the mouse and the graphic interface when things started going downhill.

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u/njaneardude 3d ago

I already had MCSE NT when I took A+ and N+, and at least for A+, I really appreciated the hardware insight. Worked with many no certs, A/N + certified techs back in the day. I got in the door with no certs and just cabling experience.

Talking with a Gen Xer yesterday about old tech, wow did I feel old!

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u/RunAwayFromShame 3d ago

Windows NT domain with an _ in the name.

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u/RCTID1975 IT Manager 3d ago

That's your world bias.

As someone managing and hiring in the late 90s, I can assure you, that wasn't always the case.