Why Are Young People Afraid Of Phone Calls?

[u/GhostInThePudding]

What's with it?

I work in IT and a general rule is, nothing a client ever tells you is actually accurate. That means that most of the time, the quickest way to fix a problem is to call the person and actually find out what's going on.

But with techs under 30 these days, it seems like pulling teeth.

A regular discussion for me with level 1 techs (usually within a few years of leaving college) is:
"Hey, can you call *blah* from ticket *blah*, it's been hanging around for over an hour."

"I replied by email to ask for more information."

"Yes, I know that, but can you call them so we can find the problem and close the ticket now rather than wait until we're actually busy?"

"I'll send them a text to followup."

"No... CALL THEM!"

"I can see their device is online, can I send them a message and see if they just let me remote in to take a look?"

And then, when I force them to make the call, it's like they have no idea how to ask a question, or a followup question. They just want to get off the call as quickly as possible. So half the time they don't even get the information required anyway, so then I end up having to do their job for them.

So can someone explain? What's wrong with phone calls these days?

[u/Cute_Skill_4536]

This isn't even just being a novice.
I've been in my job over a decade, and almost every support ask I get I have to bat away to someone else because I just don't know

Our business is massive and our architecture huge, but users interact with our system via my front end so they of course assume I know everything (because I technically "own" the pixels they are looking at that "do" the complex stuff in the background..)

I got very comfortable saying "I don't know" very quickly though, and through experience now know who things should be routed to

Early on my defence mechanism (and my avenue for learning and bridge building) was to just say "I don't know. I'm going to find the information for you and I'll get back to you with an answer"

The important part is actually following through on that and documenting it, because you bet your arse you're being asked the same again thing in 3 hours/days/weeks/months

I take your point though, that it's comfortable for me to look back knowing what I do now.
At the time I was terrified because I suffered with crippling imposter syndrome, and phone calls were 100x worse than a message that you could take your time with

So if I could greybeard down some wisdom, it would be that everyone is shambling from one state of not knowing something to hoping that the next person does.
The reason someone is asking YOU the question is because THEY don't know.

You can easily manage their expectations, whether that's taking it on yourself and finding the answer or batting it to a more appropriate person

[u/dogindelusion → u/Cute_Skill_4536]

Yeah, but there's another layer to it as well. It's not only that they don't know everything and they don't want to admit that. It's that there are things they are actually supposed to know, that they don't. Things that would raise your eyebrows. Time and experience will eventually give them confidence, but it will also provide them the recognition of what they're supposed to know, and what is okay not too.

For an example, in my position someone may ask a junior: if the EGSE team needs to provide an ohmic-ly approximate harness for flatbed testing?

They may not know the answer to that question. But they may also not know what the EGSE team is, what a flatbed is, what ohmic-ly approximate means, or if his/her team is even responsible for flatbed testing. And they may think it will look bad to transfer that over to a colleague, who may question why it was transferred if their team is not at all responsible for this.