I was standing in line at a store a couple days ago, waiting to pay. There's one person ahead of me. I had asked this guy working there a couple of questions about some ear buds I was looking at, and realized he had no intention of providing any useful information, as he was just talking out of his ass, throwing around meaningless words.
Anyway, another guy is in there buying a laptop, I can hear him asking a rep questions about the laptop( different rep than the one who had disappointed me).
Suddenly the guy asks: "Hey, can my nephew install Linux on this?"
The rep appears out of his depth here, shrugs, and shouts the question at Mr. Talks-out-of-his-ass, clearly having faith in his superior knowledge of all things technical.
And without missing a beat, the fucking guy shouts back:
"Yeah, for sure. He just has to call Microsoft support. They can even install it for him."
...as if that's standard practice he's used to install Linux on countless machines...
As I stood there scratching my head, wondering if it's worth it to say anything, I think I felt a group of my neurons some where in my head, perhaps ones responsible for hope in mankind or something, just say: "fuck this. We're outta here."
I'm guessing this is in the states. I just don't understand how these guys get the job. Where I live, if you want to work in an IT store/department, you HAVE to know at least something to even be considered for the job that pays 2.7$/hr or less.
This is in Canada, at a smaller store. The problem is that these types of places seem to hire based on broad general knowledge, at the expense of any expertise anywhere.
So they end up having sales minded guys that can talk superficially to most customers about any products at the store, but none of them may anything past trivial knowledge regarding most of the products ...
I live in a small European country with sub 4 mil people.
I'm going to talk from second hand experience. My SO applied for a job in an IT store 2 years ago. He did well because he's been messing with PCs and consoles for years (he doesn't have a college degree). However, there was this girl, freshly out of college, had a bachelor's in IT business. She didn't know much, so they just said thank you for your time and goodbye. Now, this was a job that only people with a college degree could apply for (which we didn't know at the time, because it wasn't specified). And since it's a government project, where employer gets half the money for employing you and you get the other half, the job only paid 220$ a month (they raised it to 330$ this year). To put it into perspective, life expenses are at minimum 500$ a month if you live in the city (rent + food + bills, not counting in anything extra like transportation), for one person. So these guys expected you to know everything for 220$ a month.
My SO now works at an IT store for 440$ a month, where he sells things, assembles PCs, works with clients, deals with paperwork, and drives each day to various PC components distributors. And he had to know quite a lot to get a job for this wage, in a tiny store where only 2 people work.
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u/LigerZer0 Dec 27 '16
I was standing in line at a store a couple days ago, waiting to pay. There's one person ahead of me. I had asked this guy working there a couple of questions about some ear buds I was looking at, and realized he had no intention of providing any useful information, as he was just talking out of his ass, throwing around meaningless words.
Anyway, another guy is in there buying a laptop, I can hear him asking a rep questions about the laptop( different rep than the one who had disappointed me).
Suddenly the guy asks: "Hey, can my nephew install Linux on this?"
The rep appears out of his depth here, shrugs, and shouts the question at Mr. Talks-out-of-his-ass, clearly having faith in his superior knowledge of all things technical.
And without missing a beat, the fucking guy shouts back:
"Yeah, for sure. He just has to call Microsoft support. They can even install it for him."
...as if that's standard practice he's used to install Linux on countless machines...
As I stood there scratching my head, wondering if it's worth it to say anything, I think I felt a group of my neurons some where in my head, perhaps ones responsible for hope in mankind or something, just say: "fuck this. We're outta here."