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How Much Respect Do You Get?
droidlev asks: "In our continually fluctuating economy I have seen a drastic change in the level of respect that I receive. As a technician I've grown accustomed to a heightened level of respect when I walk into a client's office. Not to say that I have a God complex, however, it feels good to walk into a room and be appreciated. I'm passionate for the computer work that I do; I'm 'GEEK' for it. People know that I'm there to help and solve their problems. There is good amount of value in this extra level of appreciation and respect. This is especially true when you are developing business relationships (and of course it never hurts to be liked). In recent times, however, I've been cast in a different light; actually more like a darkened shadow. I am now seen as a necessary evil instead of the 'all powerful technician.' So I ask what your experiences have been, either as a computer technician or another professional? Have you seen a change in the level of respect that you receive?"
"Businesses are trying to save every penny they have. Unless something significant goes wrong, they handle a situation themselves. This only compounds the severity of a problem. By the time I get there, everything has gone to hell and I get a look (the it's-all-your-fault look) from every cubicle and every office. In the past, exceptionally dedicated service translated to loyal clients that didn't mind paying a little bit more. Once I was the problem solver, now it seems I am yet another flame to burn their money."
..the level of respect you get. I'm a "techie turned manager," and I can tell you for certain that when I was exclusively a "techie," I was a "genius" and "guru" and people loved me. Today, I'm a manager, and though lots of people still love me, they're also aware that I can affect the amount of pain or pleasure they experience from our IT services. It's a lot more responsibility, which comes with its own share of politics. People know this.
;)
Anybody who manages geeks would be wise to keep that "geeks are our friends" culture going. It's never MY success, even if I was the one whose plan is being implemented, I chose the solutions, got the funding for it, etc. As far as our users are concerned, we just have a really great staff who always looks out for them, even if their manager is a jerk
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
The 1980s through to today have been a spectacular time for American business. The stock markets have grown like never before. Business people, managers, and financial folk have been praised for being the backbone of a growing economy.
But there's a sad truth, evident to anyone who has dipped into that world... and that is, except for their brown-nosing skills and personal connections, business people, management, financial/accountants are mostly useless. It's questionable whether they have any real skills. And now society is starting to question whether these people have any value in the real sense of the word.
The modern satires (e.g. Dilbert) exist for a reason. It baffles people how the "flapping heads" or "PHBs" can be the ones in control, earnings the high salaries. You see, in the past few decades everyone wanted to become managers. And my personal belief is that the business world is starting to crumble because companies overweight in managers and associated staff lack tangible manpower, the power to get real business done.
So you technicians, engineers, and other professionals who can actually do real things... never you worry. Ultimately, you are the ones who have the skills to accomplish what society needs. The market of yesterday - for idiot managers, corrupt accountants - is coming to an end (though it may take some time).
Jesus, we fix computers. We don't perform brain surgery.
I'm in the process of overseeing the work done by an outside tech support company for a nonprofit. Background: I'm a programmer. Mainly Java. Previously, internal , non-technical people were often the overseers and project sponsors for this group. The result is that 4 companies have been used in the past 5 years, with each one chased out due to corruption, incompetence, and regime changes. They recently hired a new company and asked me to be the liason.
I remember the first meeting. The owner walzted in smiling and shaking hands. He recommended a lot of Win2003 upgrades that had nothing to do with pressing needs. I, on the other hand, played hardball. I wore a suit, accused him of being more of a salesman than a techie, and said we needed a company much less myopic. He was completely shocked and his attitude has turned around 180 degrees.
I still have to work with them, but I call bullshit on them frequently, I grill them on what they're doing and why, I refuse to pay the full amount when they make bad decisions, I demand thorough documentation.
Respect them? Fuck no. I'm a watchdog.
The point is that this company, like many others, have gotten burned in the past and are much wiser on how money is spent. They've learned that the tech's word is not final and there will be no blank checks.
Further, don't forget that ITT and Heald churn out thousands of people that can do your job.
But the tides have changed now that I install Firefox for them. They use IE for accessing our many internal IE-only web apps, and they use Firefox for browsing the Internet. And I'm now the hero again. If I could replace their PCs with Macs they'd be even happier but I work for one of the largest companies in the world and they're in very tight with Microsoft.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
*IN GENERAL*
Computers are simpler to repair
Software is easier to troubleshoot
Remote assistance is starting to work
Companies are working hard to eliminate the technician
The goal should be that the mail room guy becomes your "technician" for everything easily replaceable. He will just take a new "computer" from a box, un-plug, re-plug and mail off the failed box for off-site repair. Happily all of your data resides on a server hosted off-site and the OS is loaded into memory on each boot up.
Seriously this line of work is going to be a much smaller segment of the market as the years progress and in ten years there will be no such thing for the most part.
The guy who comes to "fix" your computer will be as unknown as the iceman is today.
This isn't a flame - it's notice to start retraining now and get ahead of the game.
When the Berlin Wall collapsed I didn't sit on my ass in my fat aerospace job waiting for it to be pulled out from under me. I changed industries, took a pay cut and crawled right back up the ladder.
If you no longer command respect maybe today is the time to take start looking elsewhere - no matter how much you enjoy what you are doing now. it's not going to get any better, but it will get far worse.
I'm a sysadmin, and I tell people not in the field that my job is much like that of a janitor.
If I do my job perfectly, noone knows who I am, nor really cares.
If I don't do my job, people bitch about this and that.
On a tangent, I refuse to give autorespect to someone wearing a suit and tie. I always think to myself "Maybe their lawyer put them up to it".
Actually, after being convicted in court of my special crime, I was waiting to sign forms and stuff, and a mother and daughter were talking and the mother turned to me and said "Ask him, he's a lawyer". To which I smiled and said "No, I'm the defendant".
Your statement is very true. I want to point something out though: Disrespect is also earned. _Every_ human being _deserves_ a measure of simple human dignity. To treat someone with less than simple human dignity is uncalled for unless that person has wronged you. (Please not I'm not implying that the statement you made [respect is earned] is in any way in contradiction with my statement [dignity is universal, disrespect also being earned])
This subtle distinction seems lost on so many people I have dealt with. This isn't courtesy, it's basic.
<rant> This is the one thing I wish I could have impressed upon my peers and teachers and principals in grade school: that although respect is earned, DIGNITY is INHERENT. Until someone steps on your toes, it is wrong for you to attack them. Treating someone with dignity doesn't detract from how tough or cool or whatever you are. Treating anyone without dignity when you have no reason just makes you an ass.</rant>
This may be a little OT as I am referring to ALL social interaction and not just that with techs and geeks, but I have seen the statement "Respect is earned" abused so commonly to mean "dignity is earned" that my emotions just go nuclear every time I see it remembering childhood injustices. The sentiment may seem obvious, but alas it appears not to be. It would be worth my life to see it codified, at least socially.
Keep the R-E-S-P-E-C-T, all I ask is dig-ni-ty. Is that so wrong?
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
The second incident happened when I went shopping after spending the day in interviews. I was still in college and this was the first time I had really been out in public while wearing a suit. The level of respect from the sales staffed was an amazing difference from what I was used to. Even average citizens were happen to hold the door open for me.
The lesson I've learned is that while respect is something you can earn, it's also something you can steal by inference. If people infer that you are important, that will treat you that way.
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
I thought about posting a story like this many many times since 2001.
Yah, we're no longer cool. It was happening before 2001, anyone working in a dying dot com could tell you that. More recently however it just seems like folks do not want to pay for my services.
Back around 98, I had no problems negotiating a good salary. If a company wasn't treating me right, i'd simple put my resume out on monster.com or fax it out, and i'd have 1/2 a dozen job offers within a week.
Some of the first few companies I worked at were great. My opinions were valued, and I was often given enough freedom in my job to do what was needed for a smooth running network.
Then around 99-2k things started falling apart. More and more my job function was being scrutinized. It felt like I was in constant competition with my managers to prove my worth.
2001, 9/11, massive layoffs, I just sort of got lost in the sea of resumes that were being pumped out by people not even in IT trying to get a decent paying job. I think this is where folks really started losing respect for IT as a whole. It wasn't the whole phony plumbers with a MCSE making it bad for us, it was the accountants, MBAs, former executives, and salespeople getting these positions, simply because they could put on a better face to HR and hiring managers than most of us socially inept geeks could. They were taking our jobs, and making us look bad with their lack of understanding for the role.
Eventually, I went into private consulting. Started my own company and picked up a few clients here and there. At first my rate was $75@hr, then $60, then $50. I went as low as $30 for one of my clients (They would pre-pay 10 hours a month) Even there, I got myself into a contract that was definetly more benificial for the client than it was myself.
The last client I dropped had 5 offices spread around the bay area, with one all the way in Redding. God damn, what a mess though.
The owner of the company insisted his employees had administrative access to their own machines. Every month those 10 hours of support would be eaten up by running ad-aware on thier spyware laden machines. Originally the contract was just for 3 offices, but when the new offices were brought online, their employees would call me for support. Being I'm a nice guy, i'd happily do what I could over the phone for them.
Things really fell apart when the Redding office came online though.
I had an injury that made me immobile. The office manager for the Redding office, and the owner of the company kept calling me up saying it needed to be done that week, and they were threatening to bring in another tech if I couldn't get that office online that week. I asked many times, "Hey, are you sure that office is ready?" I didn't want to lose that customer, so I told them I would subcontract another tech to go up there and be my remote hands.
Part of their setup is homebuilt routers and freeswan VPN's. Despite my debilitating condition, I spent the night before sending my tech up there preparing the client machines. They had no data for me on the DSL. The office manager LIED and told me they had DSL ready to go up there, but she just pretended to be a ditz and couldn't click start>run>cmd>ipconfig. She just kept telling me it wasn't working but she could browse the web just fine.
Well, Redding is about 500 miles from where I live. Did I mention that yet? No, I guess not..
My tech gets up there and the building has no power. There are no phone lines set up. Construction guys are working on generators. The floor was still bare uncarpeted cement. No furniture, No DSL, no desks to set the client PC's up on, nothing. Just a bare building. My tech called me up freaking out. There wasn't anything he could do.
So he did the best he could, even staying an extra day to wait for the DSL company (frontiernet I think) to get out there and at least get us a dial tone into the building.
Again, just t
I just got a call from one of our remote offices 5 minutes ago. Since the 2 months i've been gone this is what's happened.
Apparently, after I let the contract run out the company president hired the phone guy to do the IT stuff. He went around to all the offices badmouthing me, saying I didn't do this professionally, didn't do that right, this wrong ect.
The guy tried to add another office to the VPN. Right after trying, all the offices went offline. Without even looking, I know what happened because I made the same mistake myself.
In a freeswan VPN you have a CA or central authority cert. You make this cert once, then copy it to all the client machines in the VPN. You should in the very least know how to ssh to these other boxes to make it work.
My guess is BOB (no really, thats this guys name) regenned the CA, and didn't copy it to the other machines.
On top of being more expensive than I was ($95@hr) he was grossly unqualified. His services are no longer being used by the company.
I agreed to go out to the site tomorrow because of the office managers begging. It didn't take too much begging, I always liked this guy, and he always treated me with respect. Just one condition, he can't tell any of the other offices he had me out there servicing his PC's.
Maybe i'll write tomorrow about the fine mess i'm going to see.
I got the same thing when I shaved my beard around the time I was 20-21 or so. I was out of work and had been applying for jobs and nobody was interested. I shaved my beard and I had a job within a couple of weeks.
Also, I have bad eyesight, so I wear contacts. When I was in college, I worked as a computer lab assistant. We had regulars that would come in, the usual college lab scene. One day I wore my glasses (with the classic coke-bottle lenses) to work as an experiment and the exact same people that were friendly and used to joke around and never gave me shit about anything were rude, obnoxious, uppity dickheads. And these weren't 19 year old freshmen, either, this was a branch campus full of non-traditional (i.e. older) students.
That pointed out one of the many ways in which adults lied to me as a kid. People are just as shallow when they get older as they are as children.