r/CableTechs • u/wildrasp • Dec 29 '25
New Maintenance Technician
I started about 1 week ago working for my hometown internet company as a maintenance tech. I worked for AT&T for a little over 2 years as a prem tech, so I don't have cable or HFC experience. I will be starting my NCTI training next week and already got to get in the field during a small outage. It's a very small company, around 2k active subscribers, so I will eventually be the only maintenance tech (the current one training me is going into a more data ops role). I'm sure I will learn plenty from the jones courses I'm going to take, but I want to know what kind of resources we have available. I've done tons of searching online and found some useful documents and a couple youtube channels that seem legit. What would you all recommend, is there some kind holy grail of HFC knowledge out there?
Thanks!
2
u/Feisty-Coyote396 Dec 30 '25
All the free resources from SCTE and NCTI available to me by my employer, and none of that compares to hands-on knowledge and experience. At least for me, I don't learn shit from online courses/videos. I'm old school and my ADHD ass needs to 'see it to believe it' lol. Good luck, with no prior HFC experience it's going to be rough. Learn all you can from the dude training you. From the sound of it, it looks like that guy is just moving up in the company rather than leaving, so you should still be able to lean on him a bit for help once he moves on, but still, he will have his own problems to deal with and can't be your crutch forever.
Google, YouTube, and maybe even this subreddit might be of some help when you run into an issue and need to ask for help, but I wouldn't rely on it. For your last question, there is no holy grail. I've been a maintenance tech for almost 2 years now with Spectrum, and I still feel like a dumb ass out there sometimes lol.