I used to be. It's a good place to start if you want an IT or systems administration career, and you'll learn a lot about troubleshooting and how to work in a real IT department.
For the bad, what's bad depends a little on you. You'll deal with a lot of different people all the time asking different questions or with different problems. If you prefer to know exactly what to expect out of every day, you won't get much of that. Also if you don't like working with people you don't know well and who aren't technical, in a big company you may be called on to go fix computers for people in Sales, Marketing, Accounting, pretty much anywhere. It can also be a little dirty, people tend to not think to clean their keyboards or under their desks, so a lot of dust and even food crumbs if you have to move cables or computers around. You have to be able to be patient and able to explain things in non-technical jargon to users who don't know much or anything about computers.
If any of those things bothers you, you might want to take a different approach to getting into technology. A NOC (network operations center) position at a data center or ISP is a good way to get into a networking career, and usually involves working a ticket queue of requests that are just about networking issues at a desk, or working in a data center pulling cable.
27 Jun 2013, 3:22 pm
