Your latest security headache? Ed from accounting using his kid as an unpaid helpdesk
- Reference: 1600841531
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/09/23/teens_it_support_bill/
- Source link:
A [1]survey by consultants Prolifics Testing set out to determine what it would cost for the tech support services the average teen provides their parents, and it concluded this month kids will, on average, do about £4,200 a year in IT work.
A group of 2,664 young people aged 13 to 18 were, according to Prolifics, polled on what sort of tasks and for how much time they helped their parents with when it came to tech gear. Then, the consultancy factored in the per-hour cost of those same services on the freelance market.
On average, it's estimated the teens did about £528 in security work, £253 worth of data entry, £293 of Excel/Word support, and a whopping £590 for was termed "graphics design and online photography." This is based on hourly rates taken from UpWork, we're told.
Some of the categories listed in the survey are a bit of a stretch in your humble vulture's eyes. For instance, the "copywriting" section [er, how is that IT? – ed.] included things like suggesting social media comments and YouTube video descriptions. The "social media advice" kids were giving out to their parents was valued at £519, or £16.22 per hour on the freelance market.
"The most sought-after IT support was social media advice," the consultants claimed, "with an estimated 32 hours spent by teens teaching their parents how to be social media savvy."
Putting the ass in Atlassian: Helpdesk email server passwords blabbed to strangers [2]READ MORE
The aim of the estimates seems less about convincing cheeky teens to hand their parents a bill (IT services aside, guardians will come out way ahead in that equation what with the years of free room and board.) Rather, it appears the consultancy wanted to demonstrate to youngsters how much money they could be making if they went for a career in IT (and, conveniently enough, consulting.)
Take this info as is, and with a pinch of salt if necessary. We figured you might want a chuckle.
On a more serious note, some of the findings of the study may give companies a reason to pause. With so many employees now working from home during the COVID-19 virus pandemic, we have entered a situation where people handling organizations' sensitive data or confidential meetings are likely going to their family members for support rather than IT departments.
Specifically, Prolifics told us on Tuesday 71 per cent of the kids polled claimed their parents had asked them to solve work-related "technical issues" with their computers and devices rather than go through their company's IT helpdesk when working from home, and 67 per cent alleged setting up a Skype or Zoom call on a parent's behalf.
On average the teens estimated they'd spent about 20 hours helping their parents with security (though much of that was likely not work related) and another 19 hours helping them navigate Excel and Word documents.
Clearly, some of this data is going to be the type of info that corporate offices wouldn't want in the hands of teenagers, particularly with strict regulations like GDPR and CCPA now hanging hefty fines over the heads of so many companies should they expose customer personal information. We're not saying every kid out there can't wait to screw over mum or dad, but well, if something goes wrong, it's not your child your boss will fire. ®
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[1] https://www.prolifics-testing.com/how-much-children-could-earn-charging-parents-IT-help
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2018/08/02/atlassian_advises_jira_password_reset/
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
How social media can be work related, except maybe for the department doing OR, but they are expected to know already how to use social media then.
I think you'll find most teens don't care about privacy and they certainly don't care about their face plastered over the web.
How much time & money
to delete their parents' porn trail before the other spouse trips over it?
Best Kept Secret
Google! Don't tell the plebs they can find answers to their tech issues on Google, we'll be out of a job?? If in 3 years my son can solve my issues, I'm retiring, going fishing, or drinking or both?
Re: Best Kept Secret
Doesn't matter, I'm the first line for friends, family and occasional co-workers and the number of times they ask a question then I type the exact same thing into Google and get the correct answer. "Oh. I never thought of that"
People don't want to know how to use computers, have no intention of learning and are enabled by their management. "I'm not good with computers!" is somehow a perfectly fine thing to admit to despite their job involving working on a computer all day because "That's what IT is for"
Re: Best Kept Secret
Oh yeah! People hired to use a computer all day, and then say I'm not good with computers... HR I'm looking squarely at you, as you've hired some of the least competent computer users for YOUR department...
Re: Best Kept Secret
I used to work with someone whose standard reply to such questions would be an email containing a link like this: [1]https://lmgtfy.app/?q=how+do+I+fix+this .
[1] https://lmgtfy.app/?q=how+do+I+fix+this
Re: Best Kept Secret
Well aware of lmgtfy but it's the balance between keeping the peace (especially family) and another lecture about not being sarcastic to colleagues
Re: Best Kept Secret
Knowing what words to type into google, and being able to tell the difference between real answers and clickbait/scam websites is a valuable skill that most people don't have.
Also, these days seems to feel it has to return links, even if they are completely irrelevant to the question asked. For example, I recently searched for "clean hdmi $cameramodel". It couldn't find anything for that specific camera model, likely because it can't do clean hdmi, so it just returned random stuff about clean hdmi in general. I know what clean hdmi is, I want to know if this camera can do it.
Re: Best Kept Secret
Try:
"Clean hdmi" "
I.e. include the 4 double-quotes
Re: Best Kept Secret
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/627/
I wonder...
Does corporate care what workers think of the Help Desk? Does yours have the patience of a 16 year old and has your company set up a method to show home bound workers how to accomplish a task rather than instructing them to click, drag and check options?
False calculations
So it took your untrained, unexperienced teenager 7 hours to set up your WiFi security? A professional would do that in a few minutes (OK, allow half an hour to enter the new password on all of your devices)
Equating your teenager's time to the same hourly rate as a professional is a complete fallacy.
Re: False calculations
Yeah - in what world? First you have to get through to your professional, navigate the 'all our staff are really busy, but if you leave a message we will get right back to you' phone system, then wait for them to get back to you (Tuesday next week work for you?). Then suffer the 'Oh - you have a BT router - don't think I've ever seen one of those, we always use CISCO' , then have them set the router up in such a way that yes, you can get onto the corporate VPN but Netflix stops working. Then realise 24 hours later that the printer has stopped working, and go back to stage 1, and now with the added 'what Cowboy set this up...' commentary.
And at $15 an hour you won't get much of a professional.
(disclaimer, I don't have teenagers in the house and our small IT support team are wonderful and actually nothing like the above - just in case I forgot to tick the AC box)
A lot of the IT busy work I assign is absolutely intentional
To be honest, our schools curriculum is so easy that the teenager finishes their "four hours of homework" in 30min, assuming they didn't knock it out while pretending to pay attention during their online, socially-distanced class. We need to find productive and mentally stimulating activities or we will all start drinking again.
So, kid, you want a better computer? You're going to build it. Want it to be secure? OK, let's learn something. Want to see if it's really secure? Let's both learn something by trying to nuke it. Welcome to Kali. Good times, valuable skills.
I will admit to having the kids take hours of mind-numbing annual corporate training on my behalf. But they owe me...
teens teaching their parents how to be social media savvy
Remember Mom: If you've put it up on the internet you can't take it back.