Every IT guy with a few years on the job has had the honor of sharing his knowledge with someone new to the field. Often this is simply helping out a tech who is in a bind because you “saw this before.”

I had the rare pleasure and honor of being entrusted with the training up of a junior tech over the past two years.

What this has taught me is that mentoring a proby is about more than just passing on IT skills, you often learn a lot too…

New Arrival

I remember proby when he just arrived on the scene – his job was to help people with callcenter inquiries, assist with technical stuff in the office and to be an office bound hub for the technicians in the field to work around.

Wide eyed and nervous he was certainly eager, and mostly a quick learner.

His technical know-how was minimal, but more than the actual passing on of knowledge it turned out that I helped him grow in two areas – understanding the concepts behind the scenes, and learning to relax.

Whiteboard

I will make no bones about it – most IT guys in the field today have a lot more technical skill than I have. They understand what needs to be done, and know how to do it. Me, I am showing my age by now. I should have been “flying a desk” since I turned 30 at the latest, yet here I am, two years later and only now moving on out of the trenches.

Until I started my (then) new job, about two weeks or so before the “nooby” I was happy with being a tech. I had fond memories of older geeks spending time patiently showing me the ropes, but always thought that teaching was for someone else. Constantly being in the company of people who where brilliant at what they did and who had much better technical knowledge made me lazy, and now I was confronted with my own shortcomings.

How was I to teach a technician stuff I often did not know?

Enter the whiteboard. If there is one tool every IT shop should have it is at least one whiteboard in an accessible spot where people can gather and learn. Forget the stuffy boardroom whiteboard where suits draw fancy business diagrams and flowcharts – get one in the kitchen or lunchroom.

The whiteboard became a wonderful tool for me to spend time with my proby exploring the larger concepts behind a technical problem. From experience I knew that once you understood the bigger picture you often found a better solution to a technical problem.

“Why would the mail not arrive instantly in his inbox once I sent it to him? Is there something wrong with the server???”

“Well proby…” I take out marker and draws a circle “Imagine a mailserver works like a barrel with a hole in it… water drips in from the top, and the barrel slowly rotates… the dripping water is the mail queue, it comes in on top, and waits there until his e-mail client collects it from the server… rotating… in on top, barrel rolls over and water comes out the bottom… now imagine a whole stack of these… now we can give these barrels names… your PC, the SMTP server… here is his POP server and the little bowl at the bottom is his laptop…”

Stories like those often helped him build a mental picture of what was actually going on – we could then drill down to the actual technical issue at hand.

Learning to Relax…

Freaking out is your enemy. Technicians know it, clients do not. “How long will it take…?” is a dreaded question. So often you want to give the client an answer of some sorts – if only to get the friggin client of your back for an hour.

The problem is, no matter what time you lie the immediate response is either “Why will it take that long?” or “Isn’t there a way you can make it happen quicker?”

Problem is you often don’t know what is causing the problem in the first place, OR you know what the real timeframe is but you don’t have the fight in you to explain to the client that this might take eight hours instead of the lie you are prepared to tell to gain yourself some peace and quiet.

Once you have a client badgering with “what are you doing now” and “here I found this on google maybe this will help you…” it is very hard to stay calm and composed, and even harder to stay focused on the job.

Scanning through TCPDUMP and trying to make any sense of it is impossible if you have someone looking over your shoulder asking you to explain what is going on with the “scrolly text.”

One of the first things I decided to impart was an acceptance that no matter what you do certain things take time, and secondly, something WILL go wrong.

Coupled with those two came the obvious – “…someone, somewhere, is going to be pissed off with you or me when things go wrong, even if it is not our fault…”

While knowing the above certainly helped a little, it often helped to clearly define roles in a crisis, or when I saw proby was swamped. A few times I went to the receptionist and asked her to re-route his phonecalls to me for an hour or so. It would give him an opportunity to get ahead with his workload, or time to figure out a nasty problem.

He always returned the favor – sometimes because I told him so, and it afforded me time to sit and stare at a screen while trying to figure out “…what the f*&k happened here proby?!”

Start a “thing”

I was never much of a high-five guy. I hold a general disdain for macho back slapping. Problem was I had this kid sitting in front of me, bewildered look in his eyes. I remember we just solved something basic, but in his mind we just saved the world from spontaneously disintegrating and he was the cause of it.

I looked at him and instinctively held up my hand – “Well we licked that one, gimme five!” up came his hand and our thing was born – the high-five. The high-five took on many foms, the “you’re my bitch because I fixed it” five, “I didn’t know you knew that proby” five, the “I know that because I am awesome” five.

I also made it known that I am captain awesome, and he should respect me for that. I still can’t believe he bought into it…

Summary

Today marked the end of a road for proby and I. He has taken the step to a full fledged member of our team. In fact he has done that almost a year ago, I just let him think he needed some more training in awesomeness…

Tomorrow I get a new proby. This one will go out into the trenches and see my clients, drive my company wagon and drink my coffee at my favourite clients. Once I am done training him I will be moving on to management, flying the dreaded desk.

Ex proby will now be helping me to teach new proby. Trainee has become teacher. I remember him one day saying “hey, you suck at admin stuff, let me take care of this while you go and see that client…”

Yes, grasshopper is now a valuable asset, confident and capable – and all I did was draw some pictures on a white-board for him.

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