Work is finally looking at adjusting my contract to match the pay with what I actually do. During their massive 'restructure' (mass firing and culling of roles) I was dropped down a level - I fought to keep my salary the same and they agreed, but the lower level meant my pay increase ceiling got much lower and I've now hit that ceiling after only 2 years in the job. So my boss and her boss and his boss have agreed to figure out a way to keep me on board, because if I can't keep making money I bounce. If I bounce, an entire Department goes tits up as well as any others I was supporting in my spare time. When your restructure planned to cull about 100 jobs and you lost nearly double that, things get a little hairy and you suddenly ask even more of your remaining staff than ever before - thankfully, I like being needed. But I also like being paid. Current plan is to reinstate me at the higher level, which should allow for about 3-4 years of pay rises and by then I'll have ideally moved to a higher up job. However, nothing will compensate me enough for being the in-house "tech support" for a bunch of Academics. Some earn around 180k a year for a cushy post-medical role. One used to be a neurosurgeon. Operating on brains with precision and an absurd amount of knowledge crammed into his head; but I got a call from him asking if I knew how to attach a document to an email. Another stormed into my office saying her computer had died - so I went in and pressed the power button. They're good people - just amazes me what they appear to have traded in for the pursuit of academia. Got a collar for our cat - he ventured outside for the first time since we got him! There's a lovely three part photo series of his wander - first he is sitting by the open door, next he's outside looking back through the glass and realizing his safe space is actually in there, the third photo is a blur as he streaks back in to safety. Still, he went outside again soon after and seems to be happy to try his paw as he feels comfortable.
It amazes me how little academics know about computers. And some of that stuff I thought was common knowledge. A post-doc came to ask me yesterday how to connect to the network printer... Google "how to connect to network printer"... I am completely puzzled. For basically every computer-related issue, I am the #1 person to ask. I never say no. I want to help. But sometimes it really makes me wonder how those people manage their day-to-day life. But there is another level of weird. Does something like "programmophobia" exist? Some deeply rooted fear of anything coding/programming? Because I swear, academics (specially in biology and medicine) have a major case of that. The moment my boss was not able to open a file (with 10k rows and 40 columns) in excel, it probably downed on him, he is doomed. Instead of accepting that he has a problem that he needs to fix (learn coding), he directs it to other (like myself). The battle between us started 3 years ago when I started using R to analyse my data. Since then, I have been constantly told that my data analysis is "too complex". I have a few terabytes of firing neurons that I need to make sense of. How the fuck am I supposed to deal with that??? I think anyone in science that is under 50 and cannot code (or is not learning coding) will be jobless in 10 years. No way around this.
So here's the thing. For whatever reason, roughly 80% of any given task can be accomplished without too much advanced knowledge. That probably seems like a gross oversimplification but if you think about your day, how much of it could someone else do with some rudimentary instruction? Now granted: the roughly 1/5th of your day that requires your advanced knowledge and experience will likely tear down all the good the 80% has (and then some). More importantly, you as an expert likely have a sense of where the dividing line is: they won't be able to fly the plane into the ground if you hand the stick over at 30,000 feet but if you go take a leak while you're on approach, there might not be a cockpit to come back to once you've zipped your fly. The people you deal with? Yeah. Nearly all of the stuff they're asking for they can handle. But they don't believe that. More than that, they don't feel familiar enough with the technology to be able to distinguish between the stuff they can screw up and the stuff that ends up as twisted metal. Dollars to donuts every single one of them has a story where they were simply following directions on the Internet and before too long they'd BSOD'd the entire lab. "How to" and "network" often give you results involving "sudo" which gives you dire warnings about passwords and thermonuclear armageddon and frankly? Scaring people who don't have the confidence to hack at root keeps a lot of trees from dying. I find that the more intelligent a person is, the more weight they give to the risks of attacking something they don't understand. And unlike you, they didn't grow up with it - they were peacefully typing on an email and then all of a sudden they need to figure out what Dropbox is. Before too long they're expected to screencast their lectures and have their notes up on Canvas and every year brings yet another digital encumbrance that they're having to integrate into a practice that was working just fine, thank you very much. And really, it's all just an excuse to be laughed at by the people who understand it. You say "learn coding." They hear "learn Hindi." How do you start that? And how do you keep the nose up while you're doing it? Because if you're doing it on work stuff at least you're getting paid, but you're also likely to go Tango Uniform. If you do it in your off hours you now have a thoroughly lame hobby. I think you're right - if you can't code under 50 you're screwed. But I also think that you can make your own life a whole helluva lot easier if your instinct is to sherpa them through the nasty bits. You have a skill they don't and if you can be open and forgiving and friendly about their shortcomings they will come to you for help and it's always great to have a superior that depends on you for the stuff they're too embarrassed to be able to figure out.
I get your point. Showing them (and explaining) how it is done is the better solution for all, but it takes so much more time than doing my 3 clicks, specially on tasks done only once on a machine (like the network printer). Funnily enough, my boss seems to try and get rid of me. Even though I won the coding battle (the whole lab is learning coding now) I seem to be someone he doesnt want to have around too long. There could be many reasons (I am not easy to control) but it still feels weird. When you feel like an asset to the lab but it's not enough to be kept.
I was a SysAdmin at NASA in the 1990's. Best SysAdmin job ever. Geeks everywhere, who WANT TO KNOW why something doesn't work, or how it is supposed to work. I even had lunch one day sitting on a decommissioned one of these: