[ale] Let's draft a support personnel competency test! [was: A vent and whine - ignore with dignity]

Richard Bronosky Richard at Bronosky.com
Mon Jun 21 13:30:14 EDT 2010


I would like to draft a list of ~5-10 questions that could be used to
pre-screen (like you would to a job applicant) your support
technician. If they fail, you say "I'm sorry but you do not appear to
be qualified to handle my support requirements, please transfer me to
the next tier of support." I don't know how well it would work, but it
would be a fun exercise. We just may end up creating a new meme in the
process.

Here is my v0.1 draft:
1. An IPv4 address is composed of how many octets?
2. The OSI model is composed of how many layers? Name them.
3. What purpose does an ARP table serve?
4. How many runlevels are there in conventional "system five"? What
does zero do? What does six do?
5. How do you identify and bounce a network interface in a POSIX-like
OS without rebooting?

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 9:51 AM, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-06-21 at 07:26 -0400, Geoffrey wrote:
>> I dumped Comcast (TV) because they were complete idiots.
>
> Aye, most of them are.  However, business class people actually know
> what networking is (gasp!) and know that if you call in and say "look, I
> appear to have a routing issue, and here are the traceroutes..." they'll
> say "oh, let's see that please!" instead of saying "Excuse me, but have
> you checked to see that your coax is secure?  Because you know you won't
> get to MSNBC (but you can get to Google!) if your coax isn't screwed in
> or is disconnected."  GRRRRRR.
>
>> I went with AT&T Uverse and I have been perfectly happy ever since.
>>  I've dealt with both AT&T Uverse and AT&T DSL support, and I can
>>  honestly say they are most definitely from different worlds.  The
>> AT&T Uverse techs know their stuff.  The DSL folks must have been
>> trained by Comcast, they're idiots.
>
> The lower tiers of support are paid a low wage and aren't really
> trained; they just read from virtual sheets in a database somewhere.
> They don't know anything about TCP or UDP or IP or Ethernet, they don't
> even know what a node or a head-end is most of the time.
>
> The people over in business class actually are paid reasonably well and
> are expected as a part of their job to know how the infrastructure they
> support works.
>
>        --- Mike
>
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-- 
.!# RichardBronosky #!.



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