
Ask HN: Does rising through the ranks from helpdesk still happen? - punchclockhero
My impression is that it&#x27;s a 90s thing that doesn&#x27;t happen any more and modern tech suppport is deskilled and outsourced.
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duxup
From a position that is just straight local IT desktop support?

I don't see it happen much, at least not straight from the help desk to
someplace else without someone say going to school or doing other things in
the company.

Personally I worked 'tech support' for some high end networking type stuff for
a long long time and that was a good career and still is in many places....
and yet:

Sadly I don't think people think highly of any kind of helpdesk or technical
support anymore no matter what their public statements are.

At every company inevitably support budgets are cut, seen as a cost (even at
places where we brought in a huge chunk of revenue via support contracts), and
the skilled management types try to avoid / stay way from support so there's
very few skilled managers to really stop the trend of cutting into support
headcount, training, tools, and etc.

This is of course all self defeating because when support type roles are
devalued and budgets cut... yeah they're going to suck.

As for the job change I think the issue is that companies don't think anymore
about "What could this guy do?" They just see a list of alphabet soup and
assume nothing ever changes. We had some "university hires" that were great
guys and we wanted to bring up to a salary on par with everyone else. HR
fought tooth and nail because "but they're university hires"... like what even
does that mean? They're damn good employees...

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justaguyhere
In one place I worked, this is what they did : hire a lady (always women) as
the receptionist, 6 months to a year later, she'll be working (assuming she is
interested in it) at a junior position in the marketing department, or become
an executive assistant to one of the big bosses (there were a handful of big
bosses who needed assistants).

I worked there almost 2 years, and saw 3 women move on from reception to
various departments (they also became employees, they were contractors when
they were receptionists). Funny thing is, there was no chance for developers
to further their career there, though they were paid well (we were just 5 devs
with a CTO, so no promotions etc).

Other than this one example, I rarely saw people getting promoted. When people
needed a better work/title/pay, they simply found another job.

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ziddoap
I think this is true across most industries, now adays, not just modern tech.

At the very least, it doesn't appear to happen within companies anymore. It's
more likely that an entry-level position (helpdesk, or otherwise) is a foot in
the door to a _different_ company, rather than being the stepping stone
_within_ a company.

I have nothing to support that, just my anecdotl observations.

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Tomte
SwiftOnSecurity kind of did this, I think. But only managed to get into a
higher rank by changing employers.

