Respect Your Youngers

Three sentences into the technician’s explanation, I’d already decided to tell him to give it up as a bad job, return the machine to the customer, and tell them it they needed to buy new laptop.

Was that a knee jerk reaction? Years of experience and multiple run-ins with this exact problem (or ones very much like it) informed my decision, coupled with my understanding that the technician – a kid I’ve been mentoring as he navigates his way into a career in IT – has a habit of latching onto a problem like a bulldog with a new chew toy.

It turns out, I was dead wrong.

This blog is part mea culpa for rushing to judgment;

part promotion that you should hire this kid Right. Fscking. Now.;

and part cautionary tale about how age and experience can get in the way of solving problems.

What it is NOT is a detailed explanation of the problem or the solution, for that, check out the technician’s blog on it – Part 1 is here, part 2 is here.

The Problem

While he waits to find a full time job, my young friend has been building a small side-business fixing people’s computers, setting up their internet, and other general tasks. It’s a job that pushes him to know a lot of things about a lot of technology, but at the same time puts him in contact with the most challenging situations – homeowners with limited funds, minimal technical know-how, and high levels of stress. It’s not a typical business where users can send their documents to a printer down the hall instead of around the corner. There’s no IT budget to replace broken systems. There’s no corporate standardization to limit the range of computers, peripherals, or software. And to top it off, most systems and software are well past their “end of life”. Home users intend to use things until they stop working, which is when my friend gets involved and the impassioned request is often “But can’t you just… you know… get it working again?”

The issue at the heart of this story was a familiar one: A laptop that was brand new back in 2018 would no longer boot. A quick look told my friend that the BIOS was corrupted. This, by itself, wasn’t a problem. My friend was able to grab the correct BIOS from the Lenovo support site.

The challenge was that Lenovo only supplies their BIOS as .EXE files. In order to upgrade, you need a functioning operating system. But the laptop in question couldn’t get to that point, because the BIOS was corrupt. There was no chance to boot, whether from the existing hard drive, a bootable USB, or anything else.

What could have solved the issue was to have the binary version of the bios – the .BIN file. From there he could have used a BIOS programmer to rewrite the BIOS and get the machine back on track. But there was no .BIN file available.

Lenovo provides a utility to extract the .BIN file from the .EXE, but the software only runs on a Lenovo machine. My friend didn’t have a spare Lenovo laptop just lying around.

And so he was stuck – tantalizingly, frustratingly close to a solution, but with no way to get the machine fixed.

And of course, the customer understood none of this. They just wanted their laptop fixed. It had been working fine up until now. They couldn’t fathom how things could go wrong so suddenly.

The Conversation

As I said, my initial reaction was to pack it in. Yes, it’s sad that the machine COULD be fixed, but that’s how things go sometimes. Give condolences to the homeowner for their loss and move on.

I’ll admit it’s much easier to deliver that kind of news as a 57 year old grizzled veteran with 35 years in tech and (usually) 20 years seniority on the homeowner themselves. People tend to refuse that same kind of message from a kid whose high school diploma is still warm off the printer.

For context, I’ll also add that my friend’s last job had been a mess of misunderstandings, resulting in him working for 60 hours to repair a corrupt hard drive, and involved him buying a new motherboard, new hard drive, and 3 different types of cables.

So I was eager to make sure he didn’t fall into the same trap.

It turns out he’d only spent about 10 minutes on this system so far, and he knew he could fix it in about 5 more minutes, if only he had a Lenovo machine to run the EXE-to-BIN utility.

For many of us, the paths of our careers are littered with “This should only take 5 minutes” jobs that took hours, or even days. I didn’t want to see this job turn into one of those.

Which is why I counseled him to end the engagement and move on. My intention was to try to shield him from the types of frustration I’d run into in the past: Working on a weird edge-case problem for more hours than you could ever possibly charge for; (maybe) Finding a solution at the end of those hours, but that solution being so weirdly niche and edge-case that it would never apply to anything else; and perhaps worst of all, creating a reputation as someone who can’t tell the difference between not giving up easily and tolerating (even inviting) abusively impossible tasks.

In my years I’ve seen more than one colleague mocked behind their back for their tenacity. I’ve heard executives deride coworkers even as that person worked days and nights trying to fix a problem and keep a valued customer.

I didn’t want to see it happen to this kid. So I told him to walk away.

The Solution

I won’t keep you in suspense. He solved the issue, and it did not take hours. Here’s what my friend did:

• Pulled the hard drive from the original machine
• Copied the registry keys identifying the machine as a Lenovo laptop.
• Wrote those registry keys over the matching ones on his personal HP laptop.
• Ran the EXE-to-BIN utility on his HP, which was fooled by the registry change
• Extracted the .BIN file and loaded it into the BIOS programmer
• Flashed (and fixed) the corrupted BIOS on the customer’s Lenovo laptop

All told, he took about 30 minutes (not counting my conversation with him) to execute this repair.

The Lesson

If you’ve been reading from the beginning of this post, one lesson (at least) should be obvious: Just because you’ve had poor experiences in the past isn’t a good reason not to try today. Sometimes the quick answer based on experience is the right one, but often (maybe even more often than not) it’s a knee-jerk reaction that’s equal parts laziness and fear. We should always learn from our experiences, but we shouldn’t let those experiences control us.

But the other lesson is, in my opinion, more important; as well as more relevant to the job market today: This is a kid who hasn’t been able (yet) to secure a level 1 helpdesk job. But take a look at the lengths he was willing to go to solve a customer’s problem. Consider the level of insight needed to even consider – let alone execute – the approach he took.

If you are in a position to hire folks, please remember that what you see on a resume is not even close to the whole story of what this person can do, let alone what they could learn to do with a little encouragement and opportunity.

In the current state of the IT job market, we’d all be better served by adjusting both our assumptions and our hiring practices to identify diamond-in-the-rough candidates like my friend.And if you happen to be in the market for an intelligent, eager, enthusiastic, creative IT practitioner who’s at the early stage of their career, go ahead and contact him.