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I work in IT. So the lie is I know what I am doing, when all I do is google the error code and hope for stack overflow has an answer.
In November I somehow convinced a company to hire me as director of IT. Now I have 7 IT techs and 3 software devs under me. I had never been in a management position before (not even fast food or something like that) but it was like a $30k/yr raise so i took it.
I started off wondering how they hadn't figured out that I had literally 0 idea what I was doing. But I've started to realize that nobody in middle management has any idea what they are doing haha.
So, go and lie to interviewers. Worse case you get fired and you can lie to another set of them. Nobody cares and even fewer people actually understand what's going on.
Knowing to Google the error code then making the error code stop is knowing how to do your job. That's my job as well so I wish you all the luck in the world.
30 years ago you would have checked the manual or read the documentation, not much different just a little faster these days
30 years ago, manuals were worth the read.
I was doing IT 30 years ago.
Back then you'd post a question on USENET and get an answer back from the guy who wrote the program you were asking about.
As someone who did IT 30 years ago, this isn't really true. Manuals weren't very good for direct troubleshooting except that they provided insight into how the device or software works. In my experience problems were mostly solved by people who knew what they were doing, with occasional reference to the old guy who had seen all the weird obscure shit no one else even knew was possible.
There was no manual for the windows registry for example, so when I needed it to not shit the bed on a new motherboard I had to dig into it myself and figure out that if I blew out the PCI bus enumeration windows would realize that it's gone and rebuild it with the new IDs and such for the new hardware on boot instead of looking for old IDs and eating itself when it couldn't find them.
Oh, man, finding registry info was like the Search for the Holy Grail (Monty Python style).
At one time I worked for MS, and was fortunate to stumble on some good tools for it (like an OLE browser, which is originally what the registry was designed for-it was actually called the OLE Registration Database on Win 3.1), and I acquired every resource kit I could find, and pored over them.
Yup, that shit was an arcane art known only to a few, and dared by even fewer. It was like writing modem initialization strings for US Robotics 9600 baud modems when they came out. The 9600DS/HST required an init string that, printed out on a standard dot matrix printer, was literally as long as my arm. Crazy.
Also I veeeery dimly remember something about OLE registration database.. but just that I've heard the name, I never messed with it.
That's not a lie, that's standard operating procedure.
It's hilarious that people think I'm some kind of problem solver for all of their random issues they send over. I've even told them when they send me their errors - I literally copy and paste it into google (and now bing b/c google is becoming cluttered with garbage). Some of them just can't wrap their head around just googling the error code or error string.
Maybe the one thing we can do is filter out the irrelevant answers, and choose the correct/closest solution, that way they don't have to wade into the mess
Knowing how to sift through the results, and read the good answers for key elements, is a skill. One that you improve with experience.
Yeah, it isn't like any one person can really understand everything about everything. There is just too much for anyone to know.
This is a good job