About Dave

Dave Troyer has spent a little over twenty years in IT support, mostly in the middle of the country. The short version:

Overnight sysadmin for a small data outfit, watching forty terminals and three servers that mostly behaved. Then a decade at a large insurance company: hired onto the service desk phones, promoted into quality control (where he reviewed a hundred-plus documents a week and learned that errors are cheapest before they enter a system), and finally promoted again into running the desk itself: fifty technicians, a thousand-plus employees, Windows 10 and 11 rollouts, the Skype-to-Teams migration, a ticketing-system replacement supervised with the vendor's own engineers, and the ITIL-and-KPI machinery that comes with enterprise support.

After that, several years as a QA analyst on insurance software. Hundreds of production releases, test cases, REST APIs, and billing bugs tracked down from the database side instead of the screenshot side. These days he does independent consulting: managed IT, troubleshooting, and web work for small businesses and a long list of individuals who keep breaking things in interesting ways.

Why this site

Because the advice that's actually useful to someone starting in IT support is drowned out by two industries: the cert-and-bootcamp sellers, and the "six figures in cloud in 90 days" people. Both are selling a destination and skipping the on-ramp. Meanwhile the person on the tier 1 phones just needs to know how the hiring really works, how to survive the queue, and how the people who got out actually got out.

Everything here is written from the desk chair and the manager's office, not from a marketing department. Where something is an opinion, it says so. Where something is a pattern seen across hundreds of hires and interviews and tickets, it says that too.

Details that don't matter much

Dave writes under a pen name (common enough in this business) because the companies and clients in twenty years of IT work mostly prefer not to be written about by name, and because a habit of discretion is easier to keep when it's total. The experience is real; the employers stay anonymous. Corrections and argument are welcome at [email protected].