Eleven Wireless: A Little of What I Do All Day

I'm now officially one-quarter of the way through my first year of a new job. For those of you that have had new jobs anytime recently, you'll recognize this as the part when you are competent enough to know your way around, who to ask for help, and how not to embarrass yourself at the company meeting. It is not long enough to really know how to do your job well or to know what to expect of the job's long term prospects.

Just what is it that I do? It's complicated, so I'll start simple and build from there. I work for a small company in downtown Portland called Eleven Wireless, whose primary business is helping companies generate extra sources of revenue from the growing demand for ubiquitous Internet access, computers, printers, even iPads. Those little business centers cropping up in hotels, medical centers, banks, and the lobby of your posh downtown condo? Yeah, that's us.

We make money by "monetizing" access to these technologies: $5.95 for 15 minutes of wireless access at a high-end hotel on the beaches of Maui, for example. $0.69 for black and white copies or prints on that all-in-one device. Or an as-yet-unknown fee to rent an iPad for the weekend when staying at a fancy hotel just off Broadway.

What’s my part in all this? Also complicated. My title is “technical support engineer”. The people who work at our building downtown are all “tier 3” support technicians. Meaning you have to have a really nasty problem with one of your business center computers before you ever talk to me. The vast majority of my daily contacts with customers are with IT staff that work for hotels. In the last week, I’ve seen a hotel lose the ability to bill service to their guest rooms because somebody decided to unplug a single hidden cable from an innocent looking black box among a forest of such boxes in the hotel’s phone room. I’ve used SQL queries to generate thousands of internet access codes for hotels to supply to their guests as incentives. I’ve sat on the phone with the support teams of other technologies we touch, getting help to make their stuff play nice with our stuff. I’ve remotely logged in to hundreds of computers, network switches, and printers (yes, you can remotely control most printers nowadays from a simple web interface) to check, configure, and fix a myriad of things.

But technical support is only one of my three major responsibilities. I am the lead support engineer for our entire line of Windows-based solutions (as opposed to the other lead engineers for Mac-based solutions and for network operations), which means that I’m the one who knows the Windows product in and out. Not only am I the lead support engineer for this product line, I am also responsible for deployments—we hire technicians who physically fly to the hotel to unbox and plug in the computer, printer, and networking hardware, but most of them know nearly nothing about our products. That means that once the stuff is unboxed and plugged in, they call me and I go to work, usually for 4-6 hours, configuring the equipment remotely while plugged in to all kinds of fancy IT support infrastructure. Once I do my thing, the technician has to verify that my test prints came out of the printer and then he can leave. If we could install swiveling webcams on the computers we’re installing (and maybe a Roomba with a mechanical arm and a wireless internet connection), then I really could do everything myself.

This is the first technology job I’ve had that really doesn’t require my physical presence. 99% of everything I do I could do sitting at a bench in a park. With technologies like LogMeIn, web-based CRM, email, instant messaging, ssh, the iPhone, and Clear, there isn’t much that I do on a daily basis that isn’t purely digital. Even my phone voice flies over IP.

So I do technical support, product deployments, and also QA (quality assurance). As the lead support engineer for my product line, I also provide QA services to our engineering team. When they finish coding up a new product, they shove me in a room with new product and a clipboard and I’m supposed to find all the ways that its broken (or borked, which I commonly hear around the office) and then itemize the pain for the engineers. So far, the engineers don’t hate me. Never quite understood how the relationship between engineers and QA works on a personal level, I guess I’m finding out.

STEEP learning curve around here. Still learning where they keep the coffee and toilet paper and 401k paperwork. Having a lot of fun with my coworkers. More on all that later.