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Living Life in the Digital Age - Living Life with Technology past, present and future. Find me at https://www.lifeat100Mhz.com - Produced by Dave Bunyard - earthdrifter@gmail.com Cover Photo: Charles Sharp Crawford in a Cole car at the Indianapolis speedway in 1910.
In this episode of Life at 100Mhz, we are looking at the future of IT Helpdesks. If AI takes over tier one and humans automatically jump to tier two and three without learning the experience of tier one? How do they learn the soft skills of customer service? Do they need training as a therapist?
Sam:Welcome to this deep dive, I am looking directly at you, the ever curious learner because today, well, we are tackling a massive cultural paradox and it's one that affects almost every aspect of your professional and personal life.
Dave Bunyard:Everything.
Sam:It does. Because for decades there was this overarching assumption that as computers became more advanced we would naturally evolve into a society of like tech geniuses.
Delilah:Right. The idea was that computer illiteracy would just sort of age out of the population.
Sam:Exactly. We thought, oh, new generations are growing up with iPads in their hands. They'll just know how everything works. But I have been looking through this fascinating collection of notes and interviews from a veteran IT professional and, it it reveals something completely wild.
Delilah:That is fascinating.
Sam:We haven't eliminated computer illiteracy at all. We've actually just created a much more complex, deeply hidden version of it.
Delilah:It really is a profound paradox because as our machines have gotten incredibly smart and, you know, supposedly much easier to operate, the actual human beings using them have lost their functional understanding of how the tools even work.
Sam:Right. They just know how to tap the glass.
Delilah:Exactly. So whether you work in tech or you manage a remote team or you just, I don't know, occasionally wanna throw your frazen laptop straight out a window.
Sam:Which I have definitely considered doing.
Delilah:We all have. But this fundamental shift changes everything about how we interact with technology. So our mission for this deep dive today is to explore the radical evolution of customer service.
Sam:Specifically focusing on the present and the future of the IT Helpdesks, right?
Delilah:Right. We are going to examine why IT professionals today have to act much less like mechanics and, a whole lot more like psychotherapists.
Sam:Okay, let's unpack this. Because the contrast between a computer user in the nineteen eighties and a computer user today is just staggering.
Delilah:It's night and day.
Sam:Right. Because in the nineteen eighties, if you wanted to use a computer, you were basically forced to understand it. Yeah. You had to actually conceptualize what a file directory was.
Delilah:You had to memorize command line prompts just to launch a program.
Sam:Yes. You were interacting with the raw logic of the machine just to make it do the absolute simplest tasks.
Delilah:You had to maintain a mental model of the system's architecture, know, just to turn it on and open a text document. But today, we live the era of what is called the magical user interface.
Sam:The magical UI.
Delilah:Right. The primary goal of modern tech companies over the last, say, two decades has been to hide the underlying mechanics of the computer entirely. They want the screen to feel like a sheet of magic glass.
Sam:You touch it and things just happen.
Delilah:Exactly. You touch it and it responds.
Sam:And to be fair, you know, it works brilliantly most of the time. We have developed these incredibly high surface level skills. We can swipe and tap and pinch to zoom and multitask with zero friction.
Delilah:But that magic glass hides all the files in the directories.
Sam:Exactly. So average users have absolutely zero mental model of what the system is actually doing. I mean, we don't even know where a file goes when we hit save anymore. Yeah. Is it on the local hard drive?
Sam:Is it in the cloud? Right. Is it syncing to some server halfway across the country? Most people, they couldn't even tell you.
Delilah:And this introduces a really critical concept from the sources known as complexity debt.
Sam:Complexity debt. I like that phrase.
Delilah:It's a great way to think about it. The designers at these large software companies are under constant pressure to add, you know, more features, more visual delight, more seamless cross device syncing.
Sam:They need people to stay on the app.
Delilah:Right. They are strongly incentivized to prioritize user engagement over actual utility. So every time they hide a complex API call
Sam:And an API call is just a way for two pieces of software to talk to each other.
Delilah:Right? Exactly. Just a data bridge. But every time they hide that behind a simple shiny button, they are essentially taking out a loan on the system's complexity. And the bill for that complexity debt, well, it gets passed straight down to the IT Helpdesks when things inevitably break.
Sam:So wait, let me challenge this a bit. Are the UI designers actually the villains of this story?
Delilah:That's a strong word, but go on.
Sam:Because it sounds like they're creating these beautiful, fragile illusions, and then basically forcing the IT department to pay the interest on that complexity yet. It really reminds me of the evolution of cars.
Delilah:Oh, that's a perfect analogy.
Sam:Right. Like, if you opened the hood of a car in 1985, you literally saw the engine. You saw the spark plugs, the belts, the carburetor. You could visually trace the logic of how the machine propelled itself.
Delilah:You could see how the parts connected.
Sam:Exactly. But if you open the hood of a brand new car today, you just see a giant smooth plastic shield. We all know how to drive, but because the engine is completely hidden, if the car breaks down on the highway, we just panic.
Delilah:Right, you can't just check a spark plug.
Sam:We don't check a spark plug because we don't even know where it is anymore.
Delilah:What's fascinating here is that this lack of a mental model, it dictates the user's entire emotional response to a problem.
Sam:How so?
Delilah:Well, when a system breaks today, the user doesn't just hit a technical snag. Right? They hit a wall of total psychological panic.
Sam:Oh, sure.
Delilah:Because the underlying mechanics are hidden beneath that metaphorical plastic shield you just mentioned, they have absolutely no context for the failure.
Sam:Right. In the eighties, a user might think, oh, my floppy disk is full. I just need to delete some files.
Delilah:But today, they just think, the magic box is broken. I am completely helpless and I am going to miss my deadline.
Sam:Which completely fundamentally changes the relationship between the user and the IT department. Because if the user has no mental model of the tech, they aren't calling IT to learn how to fix it.
Delilah:No, not at all.
Sam:They are calling for a rescue operation. They just want immediate relief from the panic.
Delilah:Exactly. We have moved entirely away from a world where the IT professional was like a professor teaching you how to master a tool. Now the IT professional is a concierge.
Sam:Concierge.
Delilah:Right. Users today operate with a strict utility mindset. They view enterprise software the exact same way they view electricity or plumbing.
Sam:Like when I flip the switch, the light just needs to come on.
Delilah:Precisely. When they flip that switch on the wall, they expect light. If it doesn't turn on, they don't want the electrician to sit them down and give them a lecture on wiring diagrams and voltage and circuit breakers.
Sam:No, they just want it fixed so they can go back to their actual job.
Delilah:Right. And this demands the death of the system first approach for IT workers.
Sam:The system first approach being what exactly?
Delilah:It's the old habit of trying to educate users on the underlying of the software. If you work in support now, you have to stop doing that. You have to curate what is known as a happy path.
Sam:Happy path.
Delilah:Yeah. You don't explain how the cloud server authenticates their credentials. You just say click the green button on the top left to export your report.
Sam:Because anything more than that simple instruction introduces massive cognitive overload for a stressed user.
Delilah:Exactly. And understanding that cognitive overload is actually the only way to explain one of the most frustrating phenomena in modern IT.
Sam:Oh, know what you're gonna say, the shoulder tap problem.
Delilah:The shoulder tap problem.
Sam:Yeah.
Delilah:It drives IT departments crazy. They will spend months building these incredible AI driven self-service documentation tools.
Sam:They use advanced AI to create these flawless internal wikis where any employee can find a fix to their problem in like ten seconds.
Delilah:Right, it's totally frictionless and yet the users completely bypass the amazing documentation and just send a direct message to the IT person anyway?
Sam:Okay. I am gonna confess something to you right now. I am completely guilty of this.
Delilah:Oh, really?
Sam:Yes. I will stare at a link to a perfectly organized company wiki and I will still just shoot over a Slack message that says, hey, I'm locked out. Can you help?
Delilah:You and millions of others.
Sam:But let me push back on the framing here. If you build an amazing frictionless AI tool and people like me still bypass it to bother a human being, isn't that just plain old human laziness? We just want someone else to do the work.
Delilah:This raises an important question and the distinction between laziness and overwhelm is really crucial here.
Sam:Okay.
Delilah:Because it usually isn't laziness, it's executive dysfunction driven cognitive overload.
Sam:Executive dysfunction.
Delilah:Right. When your technology breaks, your executive function is instantly maxed out by the stress of your impending deadline, or just that sudden, awful feeling of incompetence.
Sam:Oh, I know that feeling well.
Delilah:Right. So trying to navigate a search bar in a wiki or formatting a clever prompt for an AI that requires logical brainpower. And in that hijacked state, your brain feels it simply does not have the fuel for that.
Sam:But sending a direct message to a human being saying, help me.
Delilah:That takes zero cognitive load. The human is just the path of least resistance.
Sam:Okay. So how does an IT worker fix that without just ignoring people and seeming like a total jerk?
Delilah:They have to utilize a strategy called rate limiting.
Sam:Rate limiting, like in computer networking.
Delilah:Exactly like in networking. If a server gets hit with too many requests at once, it rate limits the traffic. It literally slows down how fast it accepts data to prevent a total crash.
Sam:Okay.
Delilah:So the IT professional has to re limit themselves. When you get a non urgent direct message from a panicked user, you take a ten-fifteen minute tactical pause before replying.
Sam:You deliberately wait?
Delilah:Yes. You gently enforce a boundary. When you do reply, you might say, I am currently deep in a server update, but the exact fix for your issue is in the AI documentation right here. If that doesn't work, I can jump on a call with you in thirty minutes.
Sam:That is brilliant. You're making the human path slightly more resistant than the AI path.
Delilah:Exactly. You gently force them to realize that using the AI tool is actually the fastest path to getting their pain relieved.
Sam:Wow. But that requires the IT worker to actively manage the user's emotional state which brings me to a concept in these notes that absolutely blew my mind.
Delilah:Oh, the networking protocols.
Sam:Yes. Because if the IT worker is acting as the concierge for a panicked user, they can't just fix the hardware. They have to fix the human being first.
Delilah:They do.
Sam:And to do that, veteran tech workers are mapping computer networking protocols directly onto human customer service.
Delilah:It is a stunning, highly effective analogy.
Sam:Walk us through it.
Delilah:Okay. So, in the computing world, there is something called the OSI model, and specifically the TCP IP suite. To put it simply, for two computers to connect reliably over the internet, they don't just start throwing data at each other.
Sam:Right. That would be chaos.
Delilah:They use a three way handshake. One computer sends a SYM packet.
Sam:SYM. Right.
Delilah:Right. Which basically asks, hello, are you there? The second computer sends a SYN ACK packet saying, I hear you. Are you ready to talk?
Sam:And then the first one replies.
Delilah:Exactly. It replies with an ACK, meaning, Yes, let's communicate.
Sam:Okay.
Delilah:They explicitly acknowledge they are ready, and if a data packet drops along the way, they retransmit it to ensure absolutely nothing is lost.
Sam:Here's where it gets really interesting. Because human communication is incredibly messy and we drop data packets all the time.
Delilah:Oh constantly.
Sam:Human mood acts as literal signal interference. When a computer network has electromagnetic noise, the signal degrades or drops completely. When a human being is stressed out because their presentation won't load, their move is the noise that hijacks the connection. The words they are typing to the IT desk might be completely logical but their nervous system is transmitting total panic.
Delilah:And any experienced IT professional will tell you, you cannot patch a crashing system.
Sam:You just can't.
Delilah:If a user is completely dysregulated and in fight or flight mode, you cannot give them technical instructions. They literally won't process them.
Sam:Because their brain is dropping the packets.
Delilah:Exactly. So the IQ professional has to execute a hard reboot on the human being.
Sam:A human hard reboot. I love that.
Delilah:You have to escalate their hijacked nervous system before you can even begin to troubleshoot the software.
Sam:And the method for executing this human hard reboot is wild. They are taking techniques from Dale Carnegie's century old book How to Win Friends and Influence People and treating them as literal IT protocols.
Delilah:It's brilliant in practice.
Sam:For example, using a person's name isn't just a polite customer service trick, it acts as a system interrupt.
Delilah:Because the human brain is hardwired to prioritize the sound of its own name.
Sam:Right, when a user is caught in a panic loop, they are treating the IT worker like a faceless help desk entity. But when you say hold on Sarah, let's look at this together, it forces their prefrontal cortex to engage.
Delilah:It breaks their panic script and grounds them in the present moment.
Sam:It's an incredibly powerful psychological lever. And then the second Carnegie protocol is validation, which acts as armor removal. Armor removal. Yeah. When you tell a frustrated user, if I were in your shoes and my presentation crashed right now, I would be just as angry as you are.
Sam:You remove all the emotional friction.
Delilah:Because they came to you wearing energetic armor, right? Ready for a fight.
Sam:Fully expecting to be told that they clicked the wrong button and it's their fault. But when you validate their pain, the armor just melts. There is nothing left for them to push against.
Delilah:But there is a massive danger hitting here for the IT workers themselves.
Sam:Oh, absolutely.
Delilah:The danger of the I can never serve enough mindset, if you are a deeply empathetic person working in tech support and you constantly absorb everyone's panic without a filter, your own system is going to crash. Empathy without boundaries is a fast track to burnout.
Sam:And this reframes something I have personally struggled with. I always thought setting a firm boundary felt, I don't know, cold or unhelpful.
Delilah:A lot of people feel that way.
Sam:But an it professional saying, I see your problem, but I need a thirty minute focus window to investigate this. I will update you at exactly 2.00PM. That is actually a warm human SLA.
Delilah:A service level agreement.
Sam:Yes. A human service level agreement.
Delilah:That is a crucial insight into human psychology. Because when a user is anxious, what they are really feeling is a total lack of control and unpredictability. So a vague promise like, Oh, I'll try to get to this today, actually increases their anxiety because it leaves an open loop in their brain.
Sam:It's unpredictable.
Delilah:Exactly. A firm human SLA lowers their anxiety because it provides absolute predictability. You are defining the container of safety for them. They don't have to wonder when help is coming.
Sam:And once you've established that container of safety, how do you actually guide them through the technical fix without triggering them into a panic all over again?
Delilah:You feed them micro stepped logic.
Sam:Micro stepped logic.
Delilah:Yes. When a person is dysregulated they cannot process multi step instructions. If you tell them to navigate through three different sub menus, find a specific network setting and change an IP address.
Sam:They will immediately flood with anxiety.
Delilah:Immediately. You have to rate limit the data you give them. You say, click the blue icon in the corner, you stop, and you wait for them to acknowledge.
Sam:You wait for the ACK packet.
Delilah:Yes. You wait for the ACK packet, and then you say, Great, now read me the error code on the screen. Small, single action request slowly pull their brain out of emotional overwhelm and boot it back into a cognitive logical state.
Sam:Okay, so if this intense, highly emotional human touch is so absolutely vital for de escalating users and getting companies back online, what happens when corporations try to replace the entire helpdesk with AI to save money?
Delilah:Well, this is the existential crisis facing the IT industry right
Sam:now. It's looming over everything.
Delilah:It really is. Corporations look at the tier one helpdesk, you know, the entry level folks doing password resets, basic troubleshooting, routing tickets, and they just see a massive cost center.
Sam:They wanna automate it.
Delilah:They wanna automate it with AI chatbots much in the same way fast food chains are replacing human cashiers with touch screen kiosks.
Sam:Right. Like walking into a Taco Bell and ordering your meal from a giant iPad. Mhmm. But ordering a taco is an incredibly low stakes.
Delilah:Very low stakes.
Sam:If the machine glitches and gets your order wrong, you might lose $3. Yeah. But fixing a broken workstation when you were about to present to the board of directors in twenty minutes is incredibly high stakes.
Delilah:The anxiety factor completely changes the dynamic here.
Sam:Right.
Delilah:Stressed users actively bypass AI chatbots because a chatbot, no matter how advanced, cannot validate their fear.
Sam:It can't remove the armor.
Delilah:It cannot. A chatbot cannot look them in the eye virtually or literally and say, I've got you. We are going to fix this together. Because of this, the automation of the baseline helpdesk is going to create a massive bifurcation in the tech industry.
Sam:A split.
Delilah:Yes. It's going to lead to the rise of what is being called white glove IT.
Sam:White glove IT. I really love that phrasing. Think about the difference between a fast casual place and a high end restaurant.
Delilah:Yeah.
Sam:A robot server will absolutely never forget to bring you lemons for your water. It has infinite patience, right? It will never roll its eyes at you if you change your order. But a robot doesn't actually care if you enjoy your meal. It is simulating politeness without true hospitality.
Sam:It has never experienced hunger, so it can't authentically empathize with you.
Delilah:If we connect this to the bigger picture, AI is going to effortlessly handle the baseline transactional data transfer. But that just means the human IT professional becomes a premium luxury commodity.
Sam:A white glove service.
Delilah:Exactly. The human is no longer hired to act like a robot mechanically resetting passwords or pointing to WikiLINKS. They are hired strictly for the messy, emotional, deeply human layers of interaction that algorithms simply cannot touch.
Sam:So the IT workers who survive and thrive in this new landscape aren't the ones who try to out code the AI or cling to manual troubleshooting?
Delilah:Not at all. The ones who thrive will co op the AI.
Sam:They'll use it to their advantage.
Delilah:Right. They'll build customized AI documentation tools for their specific office and let the AI handle all the repetitive questions from the Calm users.
Sam:The ones who aren't dropping packets.
Delilah:Exactly. This protects the IT professionals' bandwidth, allowing them to be the comprehensive one stop shop for complex relational problem solving. They evolve from ticket closers into premium escalation points.
Sam:So what does this all mean for the next generation? Cause that brings us to a really scary consequence in the notes.
Delilah:It's a huge concern.
Sam:If AI successfully takes over the entire tier one helpdesk, we face a massive crisis for the future of IT professionals. Historically, Tier one has been the crucible.
Delilah:The training ground.
Sam:Right. It was the entry level boot camp where tech minded people who maybe preferred computers to people were forced to learn soft skills, bedside manner, and how to talk to panicked human beings.
Delilah:We are looking at the lost apprenticeship of the IT world.
Sam:The lost apprenticeship.
Delilah:Yeah. If we eliminate that crucible, we are heading toward a massive soft skill vacuum. If new IT hires skip that tier one phase and go straight to back end infrastructure managing servers at tier two or tier three, they're going to suffer from a dangerous black box mentality.
Sam:What does that mean practically?
Delilah:It means they will build pristine hyper logical networks and software systems that work perfectly on a whiteboard but fail spectacularly when real irrational human beings try to use them.
Sam:Oh, wow.
Delilah:And they will fail simply because the engineers never spent time in the trenches learning how average people actually behave under stress.
Sam:The most difficult, challenging, angry users are actually the best teachers.
Delilah:They really are.
Sam:They act as human load testing tools. They are stress tests that force an IT worker to continually refine their human communication code. If you can successfully de escalate a furious vice president and solve their problem while keeping everyone calm, it raises the high watermark for your professional competence.
Delilah:Every other problem feels easy after that. And that trial by fire builds the type of professional influence and organizational trust that no technical certification can ever provide. You become indispensable.
Sam:So if that training ground for humanity is lost to chatbots, how on earth do we train a 22 year old network engineer to have empathy?
Delilah:That is the million dollar question.
Sam:Are we going to see mandatory customer service for engineers classes in college? Or maybe medical style clinical rounds where junior tech workers have to shadow senior staff just to watch them talk someone down from a server crash panic attack?
Delilah:That is highly likely. The tier one job of the future won't be about resetting passwords, it will be service
Sam:Orchestration, meaning they conduct the AI.
Delilah:Basically, yes. These junior professionals will monitor the AI systems and when the AI fails to de escalate a disregulated user, the human will intervene. But to learn how to do that effectively, they will have to lean heavily on intentional mentorship from senior IT veterans.
Sam:They can't just absorb it anymore.
Delilah:No. The days of learning soft skills by accidental osmosis on the help desk are over. Empathy has to become an intentional rigorous ly trained discipline.
Sam:Which leaves us with this final thought to mull over as we wrap up today's deep dive. For decades, the corporate world has tried to train human beings to act with the flawless, emotionless efficiency of machines.
Delilah:We really have.
Sam:But as AI finally steps in and perfectly masters that efficiency, we are left with the ultimate irony. The most valuable, irreplaceable technical skill in the future of IT won't be coding or networking or hardware repair?
Delilah:No it won't be.
Sam:It will be empathy. If technology continues to completely hide the engine under a perfectly smooth plastic shield, human connection will be the only protocol that matters.
Dave Bunyard:Reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People changed my life. I have been doing IT customer service since the nineteen eighties. You need these soft skills to be successful in IT. Your job in IT is a supporting role. You are not the star, never will be.
Dave Bunyard:Your job is to make sure that they can do their job. There are 10,000 things that can go wrong with a computer. When they do, you want to get them working as soon as possible. You want them to call, text, or email you for help, not just when things break, but to make them more efficient. The more they trust you, the faster they will call you for help.
Dave Bunyard:The faster they will get back to work. It's that simple. Thanks for listening to this episode of Life at 100MHz. You can find me at life100mhz.com. This is Dave Bunyard.
Dave Bunyard:Thanks for listening.