Linked – Looks like genAI may kill the IT help desk and other IT jobs!
This is probably not surprising to many of you. After all, IT support and helpdesk jobs suck anyway. Alright, maybe they aren’t that awful, but it tends not to be the kind of job you spend 20-30 years doing, so having a tech support chatbot might not seem like the worst thing.
I can understand the desire to offload that work to AI and have users interact with that to self-serve their tech support.
On a deeper level, though, I remember that before I got into eDiscovery and legal tech, I worked in tech support. Many of the smartest people in legal and cybersecurity started at a helpdesk. It’s the starting point for many long and successful IT careers. So, what will the next generation of tech workers be missing if that role goes away?
A couple of things come to mind.
- The art of troubleshooting is often developed while solving end-user problems.
- So-called soft skills, such as personal communication, emotional intelligence, and de-escalation, are often learned by answering tickets and interacting with users.
If the bot is doing tech support, I have to wonder where young tech workers are going to develop these skills and whether the whole industry might be worse off without them.
Looks like genAI may kill the IT help desk and other IT jobs!
