tessap97•7d agoProlific Poster

TIL letting a junior tech shadow me costs me 2 hours a day but saves 10 later

I used to just hand over a ticket and hope for the best, letting new guys learn by trial and error in the back. Last month I started sitting with my apprentice Mike for the first 30 minutes of every motherboard swap or drive recovery, explaining my process step by step. It feels like a huge time suck at first, but I swear I'm fixing fewer callbacks now - he caught a bad PSU on a Dell Optiplex 7050 before I even noticed the symptoms. Has anyone else found that slowing down upfront actually speeds up your whole week?

3 comments

3 Comments

mason_murray87d ago

Honest to god, I disagree. I tried that and ended up spending way more time explaining than just fixing it myself and moving on.

martinez.paul7d ago

Man, I feel you on that. The whole "just explain it once and save time forever" thing sounds great on paper but it never works out like that. I tried walking someone through a simple data fix once and ended up sending six messages back and forth just to get them to click the right button. By the end I could've done it myself in two minutes. It's like people either don't read or need their hand held through every step. Sometimes you just gotta accept that you're the one who's gonna do it.

alext527d ago

Yeah I read something recently that said the real time waste isnt the fix itself, its the mental context switching every time you have to explain it to someone else. @mason_murray8 you hit it right - by the time you write out the steps, send screenshots, wait for them to try it and mess up, you couldve just moved on and done something productive. Its like that old saying about teaching someone to fish but half the people just want you to hand them the fish already. Reminds me of that article I saw about "time debt" where every explanation actually costs you more time than you save.