Playing With IT, And Why It Matters

agallagh42 writes "Check out this article at ComputerWorld Canada by Peter de Jager, about how the best IT workers are really just "kids with big toys". How many of you have come across IT workers that obviously have no real interest in technology, and how much does it affect the quality of their work?" (Read more for another article on the more serious side.)

Code_Poet writes: "For anyone that has tried explaining to management the importance of well structured IT in a corporation, here is an excellent article over at The Economist on-line edition that explains the need quite well. Many companies when in a crisis situation just want the problems fixed and want to move on. Few understand it's an integral function of a corporation these days..."

Upshot? Toys are fun, fun is important.

Comments

Re:Right: "Kids with toys".

[MikeFM]

Oh please! The dot com crunch was because stupid suits started companies with no business model and lots of funding and lots of idiots rushing in to buy the companies over inflated stock. It had almost nothing to do with the geek employees.

I work extremely hard. Much harder than most employees. Monitoring systems, hacking together code, etc. Usually on a wage much less than I deserve. A lil time to relax here and there is required to keep me from stressing out and burning out.

This is the same reason I tend to not give a damn if I come in a lil late or take long lunches. When I am at work I am being battered from all sides to keep things running smoothly and don't need the extra stress of following a strict schedule. My brain is usually working through problems no matter where I am so I am working even when I'm not actually at work. Doing something else helps relax me and makes it easier to grasp complex problems.

Re:Doesn't need to affect it at all...

[Black Parrot]

> I work with a bunch of guys, that are as far from the traditional geeks as they come. ... What they do, is write quality code, develop innovative hardware, and usually do it under budget and ahead of schedule.

I congratulate you, and envy you too. In my experience, professionalism is even rarer than joie de hack is. Over half the IT people I've ever worked around lacked both.

I'll grant that professionalism is more productive than joie de hack, but the latter still tends to be much better than neither. Too many people in IT are clueless, unmotivated timeservers waiting for the next paycheck to show up.

--

I just finished interviewing someone...

[Merk]

My company (which incidentally is in Canada) is currently looking to hire some Java developers, and as a guy who knows Java I was asked to sit in on an interview today and ask some questions. I asked a few technical questions, tried to get a feel for how well the jobseeker knew Java, OO principles, and that sort of thing. What I heard was pretty good -- she had used all the same technologies we use, and seemed to understand the technology well, but she didn't seem to have much passion about it.

I took the opportunity to ask her what she really liked doing, and what she thought were the exciting things happening in Java... and she didn't have an answer. All she mentioned was how Java's lack of pointers and garbage collection makes it more forgiving than C++. Because of her lack of real interest in the technology I really couldn't recommend her.

I think to most "geeks" this is all pretty obvious. The more you play with computers, the more you learn, and the more diverse the experiences you can draw on when solving a problem. Most of the time managers understand this -- the exception seems to be big companies that seem to value predictable programmers over their creative (but sometimes more unpredictable) peers.

I've always been able to produce my best work in companies where I had the most freedom to be myself. Sometimes I have a bad day and produce almost nothing. When it's one of those days I often don't even try to program. I know that if I did I'd invariably have to go back and fix it. On the other hand when I'm on a roll I can go through lunch and stay late without even realizing it. Mostly I can get away with that here -- my boss understands because he's the same way. But unfortunately the non-geeks don't always get it. When I have a bad day I still have to show up and look like I'm working, just to keep up appearances. The main problem is that while the IT types get it, the rest of the company doesn't.

So my question is: if we all know that the best coders do it for fun, and are hairy, unpredictable people who have bad days, how do we convince the non-geeks to let us do things in our chaotic way?

Stop Playing With IT

[Puk]

Am I the only one who misread the story title "IT" as "it"? I thought maybe the Americans for Purity had gotten a Slashdot story. :P Scary.

-Puk

Doesn't need to affect it at all...

[spagthorpe]

I work with a bunch of guys, that are as far from the traditional geeks as they come. They all act like they're 10 years older than they are, don't find amusement in a neat hack, hate nerf anything, don't buy geek toys, could care less about the latest greatest gadgets. I'm about five years older than all of them. What they do, is write quality code, develop innovative hardware, and usually do it under budget and ahead of schedule. While I don't like being the only real geek that works here, I do get a lot from the professional experience.

WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?

so true, so true

[StandardDeviant]

I run into this in the sysadmin field (it's one of the things I can do and have done to bay the bills). By nature I like to always be trying out new stuff and be tweaking things. This is a really bad trait to give into as a sysadmin, where stability, caution, and slow-moving perfectionism are the ways to excel. Being a programmer gives me more freedom to cut loose (although not as much as I am with my own code, fast-and-loose is no way to run a project somebody is paying for).

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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

Be careful of what you wish for...

[plover]

Would you trust a surgeon who went home at night and liked his job so much he spent evenings and weekends operating on the family dog and neighborhood kids?

"Hey, Martha, I've got this new spleen-hack that regenerates tissue at twice the normal rate!"

"That's nice, dear, but would you please remember to load the dishwasher before you come to bed?"

Maybe you need a better example...

John

Re:So, you're a *benign* parasite, is that it?

[Golias]

Look at it this way: How many people employ a full-time driver/mechanic for their cars?

You have to have a lot of cars before hiring your own mechanic is cheaper than taking them to the garage.

Correct.

Now, to apply your logic, how many people employ a full-time sysadmin for their home computers?

Not many... However, any company with a serious reliance on information technology owns the equivalent of one (1) Shitload of cars.

Just as somebody who runs a fleet of busses or taxis employs full-time mechanics, a company that relies on doing lots of math in a short period of time (i.e., a financial company) desperately needs a staff of IT professionals who know they're doing.

For a large segment of the corporate world, their data is their product. An insurance company that loses their data and can't restore from backup in a timely manner is a bankrupt insurance company before the month is over.

By the way, I do exactly no (0) system administration work in my job. I'm just a programmer, so I really have no vested interest in the debate to bias my viewpoint. (Our sysadmin spends most of his day swapping files on Napster, and we are all very happy that things are running smoothly enough for that to be the case, but there is no way in hell we would ever lay him off. Less that 50 large a year allows us to never worry about backups, crashes, or system upgrade decisions. We just sit around writing code and let the IT department take care of itself.)