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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

When I was teaching at Malmö University, one of the professors once shared that he had noticed one constant across all universities he had attended: on average, the librarians are the most helpful, cooperative members of supporting staff, whereas IT people are the most antagonistic, least helpful people. With just one year of working experience there I already knew exactly what he meant.

What we were puzzled by is what causes the difference. One reason could be some kind of selection bias for the kind of work. Another could be that in both cases the "base person" is nice in principle and that it's the work that brings out these personality differences. In that case it would be nice if one could transport "environmental fixes" from the library work floor to IT somehow.

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IT support can be a thankless job. People only need you when something goes wrong, which means you can get a lot of unpleasant people. It also doesn't help that non-functioning technology is often amongst the biggest of many peoples pet peeves, so they already start out from an impatient state.

I can't see the same being quite as true for librarians as people aren't starting from a state where something that should be working isn't.

I used to work in IT support before becoming a librarian and my experience confirms this. Most (but not all, there were many pleasant people who called the IT desk) were in a sour mood when they called, making it hard to keep my own sunny disposition. When people come to a library desk, they're excited about any help they receive.

Extending your second paragraph, when people interact with the IT desk, they're trying to go from a bad state up to their base state. When people interact with a library desk, they're trying to go from a base state up to anything above that.

I can see what you mean, we ( = professor an I speculating) thought that would be factor. OTOH, people go to the doctor only when they're sick, which is also a bad state, but being a doctor isn't considered a thankless job whereas IT is.

Just speculating here, but I think it has to do with how a lot of people seem to look down on IT, and tend to blame them for their problems. With doctors, the people tend to look up to them, and don't blame them for their illnesses[0].

> when they called

I'm pretty sure this makes an enormous difference as well, btw, compared to face-to-face communication.

So we got three examples of service work, where the interaction with the customer completely shapes the experience for everyone involved.

[0] ignoring malpractice cases and such, but that's after treatment, not before.

IT in many libraries is heavily underinvested, both in pay and infrastructure. So, you have too few, average or below-average workers, annoyed with constant struggle with old software / hardware (plus standard IT support problems, like workers resetting their computers by turning the screen of and on again).

Woops, a disk in our 9-year-old array just died. Let me fill that form for financial director, and explain we really do need to buy a new one. Pray so that spare disk won't die in the meantime. "No, we cannot buy a cheaper one". What, new server? We just bought you a brand new expensive hard drive 6 months ago!

I know the struggle. Just make sure that everything is documented and let the other disk fail. Then go home. After a few of these dralas you are either fired or promoted to "we should listen to him"

All the public library librarians I know are amazing. All the university librarians I know are amazing.

For whatever reason though, all the secondary school librarians I ever interacted with (admittedly, a small sample) were the worst kind of petty bureaucrats, who seemed to revel in being deliberately unhelpful, usually for some kind of pedantic trivial reason.

Because of their clientele? They deal with double-talking rules-lawyers all day long. Develop a thick skin and zero tolerance, or they don't last long.

Richard Nixon was president when I last dealt with a secondary school librarian, but for what it is worth, I recall her as very pleasant. In junior high I was a library page, and though I no longer have any recollection of the paid staff, they must have been OK to work with, or I'd have quit or never started.

Can't confirm that - while my school librarians weren't exceptional in any sense, they certainly were not as bad as you describe.

I know I'm generalizing here, but this is another consideration:

Most people who go into IT do it because they enjoy working with technology. When they're working in IT, they want to work with computers, not people. Add in the common problem that techies often have a hard time understanding a non-techie's problem or explaining the solution to them ("You're telling me you don't know what a file browser is?"), and it the above observation becomes somewhat understandable. (Although not really excusable.)

Librarians, on the other hand, know from the outset that they will have to interact a lot with people - in fact, that's what most of their job is about. That's a whole different mindset to start a job with, and it will also attract people who work well with people.

(Having said all that, I have only had positive experiences with the IT support at out university - whenever I went to them, they have always been very friendly and helpful.)

To the other perceptive replies in this thread I can add that many US librarians, and especially public librarians, are attached to a set of service-oriented ethical considerations they associate with the work. It's enshrined by the American Library Association, and many consider it a mission.

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