The problem with this attitude is that you have to be sure you actually know what your doing. I used to have this sort of macho attitude where I was sure I could fix any technical problem ever.
I saw it as a personal insult if anybody I knew took any technical problems to anybody other than me.
The problem with this is that you will often end up out of your depth flailing around in the waters of diminishing returns.
I am now a little older and wiser. For example, recently I was asked by someone if I could take a look at their Exchange server problem after I was done fixing something else.
Of course the Exchange Server had not been configured by me but rather by a 3rd party consultant but they assumed I would be able to fix the issue quicker and cheaper.
Now I have a reasonable grasp of email (well I wrote a basic POP3 server in Java as a college project). But I have never used Exchange before or taken any courses on it. And I had no understanding of this particular Exchange setup. I could probably have fixed the issue after a bunch of RTFM, but would it have taken me 10 minutes? 10 hours? 10 days? I have literally no idea.
There is also the risk of bumbling into doing something that seemed right but would have screwed something up and had the guy who originally set it up badmouth me.
In the end, I just did some basic diagnostics on the users computers looking at mail headers etc in outlook when this was fruitless I offered to call their 3rd party consultant and describe the issue to them as I saw it but insisted I could not do anything further than that.
I saw it as a personal insult if anybody I knew took any technical problems to anybody other than me. The problem with this is that you will often end up out of your depth flailing around in the waters of diminishing returns.
I am now a little older and wiser. For example, recently I was asked by someone if I could take a look at their Exchange server problem after I was done fixing something else. Of course the Exchange Server had not been configured by me but rather by a 3rd party consultant but they assumed I would be able to fix the issue quicker and cheaper.
Now I have a reasonable grasp of email (well I wrote a basic POP3 server in Java as a college project). But I have never used Exchange before or taken any courses on it. And I had no understanding of this particular Exchange setup. I could probably have fixed the issue after a bunch of RTFM, but would it have taken me 10 minutes? 10 hours? 10 days? I have literally no idea.
There is also the risk of bumbling into doing something that seemed right but would have screwed something up and had the guy who originally set it up badmouth me.
In the end, I just did some basic diagnostics on the users computers looking at mail headers etc in outlook when this was fruitless I offered to call their 3rd party consultant and describe the issue to them as I saw it but insisted I could not do anything further than that.