IT Field Service Engineer - whats it like?

CandyButcher

Thinking of getting into this line of work as I am already 4 years contracting as a Deskside engineer with some basic sys admin responsibilities e.g backups, vm builds however Im not learning much anymore where I am but it is handy location beside my home and I wont get better pay as a field engineer but probably the same pay but on a Pernment contract.

Can anyone in the field game tell me if its good for learning from other or are you expected to know it all when going onto sites. Im looking to get into a role that will allow me to learn from colleagues and senior colleagues, (have field guys got the senior guys on the line for support too?) Does traffic play a factor in working late outside of hours?

sheepsh4gger

I worked in this field and it sucks. To be specific I dealt with engineers who would drive out to do stuff and I would help them with troubleshooting remotely. I think they dream of having a desk job.

It also depends on the industry. But it's likely that you will stay until say 19:00 working on a problem then drive 4 hours home.

There is basically no training just fire fighting. And whatever can be done for you remotely/before you go to a site is done by office employees as they want to minimize time on site. So say I would do a full server build for a customer and set up all of their machines for you to go to the site and plug everything back together again. You would never see how I did it. And you would see even less if something is broken, you would just swap out the computer, maybe do some basic data recovery.

Another silly thing is that the employer will see the office employees doing remote troubleshooting and building of systems/networks as a waste of money so you will get 0 training. It would be sink or swim, google it, read the manual. On the positive side though where I worked there was a lot of precise documentation on how to do things (other than troubleshooting).

CandyButcher

sheepsh4gger wrote: »

I worked in this field and it sucks. To be specific I dealt with engineers who would drive out to do stuff and I would help them with troubleshooting remotely. I think they dream of having a desk job.

It also depends on the industry. But it's likely that you will stay until say 19:00 working on a problem then drive 4 hours home.

There is basically no training just fire fighting. And whatever can be done for you remotely/before you go to a site is done by office employees as they want to minimize time on site. So say I would do a full server build for a customer and set up all of their machines for you to go to the site and plug everything back together again. You would never see how I did it. And you would see even less if something is broken, you would just swap out the computer, maybe do some basic data recovery.

Another silly thing is that the employer will see the office employees doing remote troubleshooting and building of systems/networks as a waste of money so you will get 0 training. It would be sink or swim, google it, read the manual. On the positive side though where I worked there was a lot of precise documentation on how to do things (other than troubleshooting).

Thanks for taking the time to give me
Some insight, I hated the sink or swim learning curve I dont agree with it. I always trained people in, they didn’t realize how good they had it sitting beside me being able to ask me anything all the time. Compared to when I started running form desk to desk sweating googling everything making lots of mistakes that hit my confidence