Should programmers take IT help desk positions?

Question

I am a sophomore in college right now. I am majoring in computer science. I am spending time on an open source project, but I'm interested in getting a job.

Today I went in for an interview for a job at my school's "School of Forestry" as an IT Help Desk Assistant. He explained the job as, pretty much solving computer problems for individuals within the School of Forestry. I feel like I could learn some a little, but I do not know, as it almost seems like it would be a waste of time.

I have no "working experience" in programming, although that is what I am majoring in, and what I really would like to do. My job experience is: working in a cannery, making pizza's, forest firefighting.

I am really interested in computer science, I find myself deeply invested in learning about computer science, and I believe I am sure this is what I want to do with my life (well, at least that is what I have been interested in since I was a kid).

At the end of the interview, he ended up telling me I seemed "over qualified" for the position when I told him what I was interested in/what I had done. I wasn't quite sure what he meant, until he told me he was looking for someone who was going to stay interested in working there and not quit, he was looking for a long-term employee.

Would the job as an IT Help Desk assistant be a waste of my time, or would it be a good experience/something to put on a resume? I know it is hard to say how somebody else will feel, but do you feel like this is the kind of job that I should stay away from? Should I try and find job that is more directly related to programming? The only reason I would take this job, is for the experience and short hours.

The thing that scares me the most is he wants a really long commitment, and I'm not sure if I want to give him that, if this is type of job that will not be useful to me in the future.

Answer 1

If you can find something more related to programming, then for sure go for it. But this however, is still a good one to take, it at least puts you in an IT position. That is important for getting any IT related job in the future in my opinion.

And the overqualified thing. Its usually BS, but in IT it actually holds water, and it means exactly what he said. You have now, or will have qualifications that allow you to get a better job, which means you either wont stay long, or will get bored and not do your job like an eager beaver, etc.

I would take the job anyways, and leave when you feel you need to leave. If there is no contract that determines minumum working period take it. Dont feel bad or anything about commitments. DO what is best for YOU, and leave when its best for you.

Answer 2

It's very easy to get "stuck" in a job. Most people are stuck in their jobs. Be sure that when you get stuck, it's in something you actually enjoy doing. If you want to program, help desk is probably not going to be something you find yourself enjoying in the long run.

Answer 3

Short answer, don't take this job.

Based on your previous experience, and on what are you trying to do in your future, this job is not much different then making pizza, except you'll work with computers instead of dough and tomatoes.

I don't know what your interviewer said about this job description, but from the title, it sounds like creating accounts or fixing others computers. Probably that's why he said that you are overqualified, and you'll get bored quickly.

If you don't need the money, and you can afford to wait a couple of more weeks/months, I'd say to continue with your open source project and start on a programming position directly.

Answer 4

If he says you're overqualified, "pretty much solving computer problems for individuals within the School of Forestry" means helping people learn how to send an email.

There are "IT Professionals" and "Developers" if you are aspiring to be the former I'd say stay away.

Answer 5

I think your interviewer was right, you are not likely to stay for long if you have aspirations above the helpdesk - which it appears you do. I would put feelers out in your local community for jobs which contain some programming. I bet there will be companies who would take you on as an intern and provide you with exposure to life as a programmer. That would be much better to have on your CV.

If you want to get involved in programming for people who will really appreciate you just for your skills, then why not find a charity? How about these guys

Answer 6

You're young, so relax! I don't mean to sound condescending here, btw, just to say that if you can find a better job, then take it. Otherwise, I'm sure you could use the cash, being in college and all. And the truth is, the jobs you work during these years have little impact on your ability to find a good job after college. What will ultimately matter a lot more are the classes you took, your grades, and what you did during the summers. Taking an IT helpdesk job to help pay the bills during the school year carries no shame. ;)

Answer 7

Yes Helpdesk work is different and often looked down to, but it is not useless.

At first, you learn what users are doing with the software. Prepare for some nasty surprises there.

Second, you got an opportunity to work on your social skills. It is not easy to find good programmers, it is harder to find good programmers with social skills. That makes you more attractive to future emloyers.

At my job, programmers take turns for the helpdesk (first line). And not the programmers, also the manager and the CEO (of the software department). Because we find it important to keep in touch with our customers. We tried to hire separate helpdesk people, but either, they leave or they switch jobs to programming.

Answer 8

Would the job as an IT Help Desk assistant be a waste of my time, or would it be a good experience/something to put on a resume?

I think a stint in end-user focused support should be a mandatory requirement of every software developer's training. You need some experience of just why users find certain things so difficult, and it'll help you understand end-user and IT department feature requirements better. That said, you only need so much experience, and fair enough, the employer wants someone who'll stick around for a while, which sounds like it probably isn't going to be you right at the moment.

My job experience is: working in a canary, making pizza's, forest firefighting.

Interesting experiment: when talking to girls at parties, when asked "So, what did you do over the summer?", see what different responses you get with "I worked in IT" and "Oh, I fought forest fires..."

Answer 9

I'm kind of programmer and I really took such job at our college - helping students, rarely teachers and such. I can tell you.. It's good job, I get payed for doing nothing, staring to computer and I got time to code things while students ask me easy questions like "Where is the print button in new office 2007?" .. And the thing with social skills, it's a way to go - programmers don't like stupid questions and get nervous fast. I do to not claim that I lost my nervousity over their questions but it helps you to keep calm from outside and not to show that you're eager to smash all of them with your keyboard.

Answer 10

In addition to what others have said, it depends upon the culture at the company. Will there be options to move away from the help desk? I would ask them what they think you will be doing in two years time and tell them what you would like to be doing. If the two aren't compatible then you have your answer.

A guy at the company I work for was on the help desk for many years. I pushed hard to get him moved off the desk and now, amongst other things, he works as a SharePoint consultant and is doing some BI work. This is a world away from the help desk but the customer-facing skills he has learned from the previous position are invaluable.

I started my career as an IT trainer for office applications and Novell Netware administration, and running a small help desk. I moved from there to a development position and within six months of the change was developing and consulting with customers because of my prior experience.

Too many people are held back because they end up as "back-room developers". This in itself is not a bad thing but consider carefully where you want to be in ten years, not just what you want to do now.

Answer 11

If you really need a job in a computer related field and there are no positions in development I would look for a position as an analyst or as a technical writer. HelpDesk is a dead end and there are many other positions that you can learn customer facing skills that will be as valuable as your phone time.

HelpDesk positions tend to require you to follow rote procedure with little emphasis on expository thinking. You'll be forced to always follow the knowledge base and time constraints to close the ticket will force you to always escalate the challenging problems to someone with higher technical expertise. Face it, there's only so much that you will learn fixing someone' Blackberry, and the time you can spend writing technical documentation or working on a project as a business analyst will gain you great interpersonal experience while allowing you to focus on core business processes.

Answer 12

I work (as a software developer) in our University's IT department so I can confirm that we hire students from our Help Desk all the time as programmers. In fact, it is the most likely way to get a job in our application developer group as a student. Typically we only hire upper level undergraduates and graduate students as developers. If you can get a programming job, by all means, do so, but I would not look down on the Help Desk position, especially as a sophomore.

My son is currently a sophomore (ChE, not CS :-( ) and works in our Help Desk. I'll grant you that a lot of the calls are mundane, but he's learning customer service skills, how to explain technical things to non-technical people, and he has quite a bit of time to work on his homework (the phone is not always busy, but it always has to be manned). All of this while being paid. Eventually he'll move on to a research job in Engineering or at least that's the plan, but for now it's a pretty good gig.

[EDIT] My answer would be different if you were graduating. Pretty much when hiring students just out of school, I look at their job history/references to get a feel for their work ethic, not their technical skills. Most CS programs don't do a good job preparing students to be software developers and I fully expect to do a lot of training (and breaking of bad habits) for a new grad. For that reason, too, you might want to think about which programming job you want to take and find an employer who insists on good development practices rather than someone who just needs a lot of code written. Our department gets a lot of work from campus departments that have some crappy code written by a student that now they need to actually work. Most times we just toss it because the design is so poor, among other things. Getting a job in such a department with no mentors won't actually help you to become a better programmer in the same way a good software development organization can.

Sorry for the rant -- I've just seen too much code written by students who got the "cool" programming job and pretty poor software development training overall.

Answer 13

It is advantageous for a developer to take some help desk positions, but this is not one of those positions.

At Microsoft, I've heard, each developer is required to spend some time fielding questions about the software they work on. This is valuable experience. It teaches you what people care about, what assumptions people make when they start using the software, and how Joe User thinks.

That's the difference: helping people send an email or connect to the building's WiFi isn't going to teach you anything. Helping people solve problems with code you've written yourself will make you a better developer.

Answer 14

When I'm hiring new college graduates I much prefer candidates with some relevant computer-related experience over those who delivered pizza or waited tables while they were in school. Nothing wrong with waiting tables or delivering pizza, but programming/IT skills are in sufficient demand that a CS student should be able to find a part time job that enables him to exercise his newly acquired skills. Having that experience while they were in school tells me they are serious about their career choice and they are more likely to hit the ground running.

Should you take an IT position you will see that users quite frequently (attempt to) do amazingly boneheaded things with their computer. You will learn to see that these are not dumb people, rather they don't have the same technical perspective as you do, nor should they since they see the computer as a tool to get their job done, not as an end in itself. This is a tremendously valuable lesson that will serve you for your entire career. When you graduate, land a development position, and begin developing software, you will be able to apply this lesson in software design decisions.

Take the job. At the very least you will get paid for playing with computers.

Answer 15

Yes. You should take it. Maybe not long-term, but you need the experience of living in user-land instead of dev-land.

Answer 16

I worked in a Help Desk for a few months, then found a programming job. IT support is a good place to get started, but be sure to look out for other, more relevant positions. While I worked at Help Desk, I got a good understanding of networks, filesystems, troubleshooting/logic, and dealing with people. Just be sure not to turn your job into a career. I would advise to work Help Desk for a short period of time and learn to be comfortable with computers and networks, then find something more relevant and stick with it for the duration of college. Also, get some relevant internships on your resume. This will far outweigh the Help Desk job when recruiters take a look at it.

Answer 17

This seems like a question I would have asked a few years ago. So I feel I can speak to it pretty well. I am also a CS student and have been doing IT work for a few years.

I wouldn't recommend it to be honest, unless you were supporting a particular product and were able to learn that software well. In that case it might be worth it, you'd get to see the development process from an unique angle.

However, as an IT generalist I find myself very frustrated with the position, Especially as I have gained more and more experience in programming. I find myself in a position now where I am a decent coder yet still doing work that doesn't utilize the skills I want to grow to have a successful career.

What I decided to do is to take a unpaid internship doing real coding work for a semester to pad my resume. I hope this will help me n finding jobs next semester.

One thing doing IT work has done for me is strengthen my desire to be a programmer and actually add value to a company. Being in a support position isn't very rewarding and at the end of the day there is little to show for it.

I took the IT position because it was the only field I could get a decent wage in a few years back. If I was in your place I would at least test the waters on finding a coding job, maybe a department at school needs work on a website or something?, before settling for an IT job.

Answer 18

My sophomore year in college I took an essentially helpdesk position. In my case, it was an excellent opportunity. At the time I took it, I wasn't even really managing the helpdesk but managing the printer window. However, it led to my getting a programming job for the University and ultimately to my first software development job outside of the university. My outside job was through direct contacts between one of the full IT staff and a local entrepreneur who was consulting for a long-distance phone company.

Why it worked well for me:

• An IT position has lots of downtime, particularly in the morning or evening. You can work on homework, or in my case, I wrote programs. During this time, I developed several games. I also taught myself X and sockets programming and wrote my own GUI toolkit. I learned more software development in this job than I did in my classes.
• It provides access to resources. I got accounts on all of the machines and even administrator privileges on large servers. This provided experience that I might not have gotten elsewhere.
• Programming is social. I met most of the serious computer programmers at our university. This is good because it helps drive improvements and challenges you to learn more.
• Resource addendum: By my Junior year I got an office in the basement. This won't sound like much but it gave me an out of the way place where I could concentrate on homework outside of my dorm room.

It worked well for me; however, it will definitely depend on who else is in the department. We had a very strong IT group (it was the University-wide IT group) and in particular, one of them was a leader of the local ACM chapter and a former game programmer.

By my senior year, I was no longer working in the IT departmet. I had a part-time job in industry as a lead software engineer and I was also working as a research assistant for one of the faculty. You shouldn't treat an IT job as the final job but as a stepping stone to get where you want to be.

Answer 19

That job as a Help Desk would be a waste, IMO. Now, if you had a place that had a large IT department and they tended to promote from within, it may make sense to get your foot in the door by taking a Help Desk job. If you enjoy solving problems then the job may be enjoyable, while if you don't then I'd suggest passing.

Some help desk jobs could be about programming in a way if there are scripts to make for setting up new machines or doing routine maintanence on laptops that people use for training that should be inspected periodically.

Answer 20

The helpdesk is a valuable stepping stone. You've got to build experience somewhere, and I feel that keeping it within the IT industry is critical. Think what you want, but your great pizza-making or shelf-stocking skills, even if coupled with a great review expressing your willingness to work hard doesn't mean anything to people looking to hire developers, developers, developers!

Plus, it is a very nice reminder of how stupid people can be. You'll need that knowledge for later. :)

Answer 21

I worked at a customer service/IT helpdesk position for two years during college before I moved up to programming, where I'll probably be working until I graduate next year. IMO it was a great experience, but my case might be unusual - we worked in the same office as the student programmers and were parts of the same organization, and we were their main hiring pool.

I'd stay away if they wanted more than a year-long commitment, or if there weren't any chances to gain some programming experience along the way. In any case you don't really lose anything by working part-time while taking class - you don't have enough time to do a real job (and should be focusing on school work) anyway, so any job is better than nothing as long as you don't start failing classes.