Is a large part of working in IT just playing the blame game?

Sir what you have there is a standard ID-10t error. please reboot....

You should be able to prove this kind of stuff and get different IT management that leads to more competent IT staff......I've walked that path myself before as a software vendor.

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Sir what you have there is a standard ID-10t error. please reboot....

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Good ole PEBCAK errors...

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Is a large part of working in IT just playing the blame game?

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It really depends on the tech and the scenario.

Any tech that's been trained worth a shite starts with the low-hanging fruit and works their way out from there. This often means you check your own environment first (user, PC, network) then look to the software.

We had an issue with an external system our financial and HR folks use that's provided by a completely separate group. Their system stopped broadcasting a certain .jar file that was refreshed every so often when first logging into their front-end. Without the refresh, the front-end GUI would not load and gave only a generic error message (this meant some of our users were working, some were not).

We started from the standpoint that it was on our end. Once we found the problem (and a solution) we opened a ticket with that group. No idea if it was ever truly fixed on their end (they are known for making changes without notifying anyone else).

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PEBCAK is Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard

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We called that "a short between the keyboard and the chair".

oh look, a programmer who has never seen an issue with his code....

End users are dumb. They lie because they don’t want to troubleshoot, or answer in the affirmative to avoid sounding dumb when asked a question. Most issues are end user issues. No shite a reboot, or cable being unplugged.

From there you have “help desk for life” techs who are lazy and have optimized systems to keep their ticket queue clear. Not actually resolve issues.

One of the easiest ways for them to get a ticket out of their queue is to pawn it off somewhere by blaming them.

However everyone can see this, and this is why they are still on the help desk for longer than a year. Productive enough to not get fired, not ambitious enough to move on.


The rest of us moved on to admin, engineer, or management roles.

Depends on your IT Dept. Ones with fairly wide but not necessarily extremely deep employees can usually do a pretty good job at narrowing down any problems. Ones that are fairy deep but not very wide have a little more trouble due to their specialized nature. Wide as in a little practical experience in all areas of IT, deep as in specializing in one area. Also depends on how willing they are to work as a team playing off each others skills. Also some IT Depts do not strive to find solutions just answers. The ones who just try to find answers seem to be the blame game players. My guys are trained to keep asking why until a solution is found. Sometimes that does include blaming someone else, but they are never allowed to let it end there. They are required to continue to work the problem until we find a solution. Sometimes it’s a modification in our configuration and sometimes a modification by a vendor or both.

Where I work, I see the entire I.T. department play 'hot potato' with the service tickets all day, every day. Every one of them find some random scenario that would make it not their fault and they pass the ticket to someone else. After it makes it rounds back to service desk, they'll basically have to write up a goddamn legal brief in order to get the other team to actually consider that it may be something in their scope. Under no circumstance will they actually contact the user to see if what they are suggesting may be on their end. It really gets ridiculous at times because the I.T. department is global so none of the teams actually have an type of relationship with each other. Working as a team on a solution is out of the question.

Best answers are when an end user just says "it won't let me" or "it's not working" when you ask what their issue is. No mention of the errors they receive.