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How to Stop the Dilbertization of IT?
Alien54 writes "In the simplest terms: too many IT workplaces have become Dilbertized -- micromanaged, bureaucratic and stifled creatively. It's become an environment where busy work is praised and morale is low. How is it possible to bring IT's appeal back? 'IT professionals that have worked in the field for a long time often speak about a shift in their work where they have gone from tossing ideas back and forth to make for better technology solutions to fighting fires all day. "There's less emphasis on creativity, and more on maintenance. Tweak this, work on this ... In being reactive not proactive, everything is a crisis. Something has to be done right now, putting out fire after fire, going a long way to making IT a less pleasant environment," said Skaistis. Beyond making for a unpleasant work environment for the techies already in-house, this firefighting serves as a warning to potential recruits: you will not like this job.'"
If your fighting fires everyday maybe its time to start water cooling.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Ten years ago the internet was just coming into the public awareness, there was tons of infrastructure growth, and lots of issues that didn't have very clear cut solutions.
These days most of the growth has slowed, things have been tried and proven or cast aside, and we're transitioning to more of a steady state environment. Even where there is lots of growth we know how to handle it and growth has become routine too.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Fist of Death.
Welcome to the world profiled, catalogued, and databased such that every person is pigeonholed into their own individual spreadsheet cell--and heaven help them if they should try to take up more space than the metaphorical spreadsheet maintainers (the stock brokers, analysts, and accountants) have allotted.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
To summarize what I was trying to say above^
The frontier is becoming civilized.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
1. Many IT shops are in financial institutions or other businesses where systems are handling millions or billions of dollars. In that situation you don't want a whole lot of creativity. Every time you change code you introduce risk, and the more money at stake, the more risk-averse you are.
2. I'm not sure creative new techologies are needed right now. A lot of creative new technology emerged during the dot-com boom, and the tools and talent were subsequently bought up cheap by corporate IT shops. The IT industry still has not digested the technology it already has.
3. If you want creativity, shun the larger shops and go work for a startup, or start one up yourself.
If your job sucks, quit.
Every IT pro out there who does nothing about this situation beyond bitch about it on Slashdot isn't going to accomplish anything, and the only thing management will understand is not having enough workers to meet deadlines and an inability to hire replacements because of its reputation.
You can throw a million excuses at me, but the fact of the matter is that as long as workers passively sit there and take it, nothing will change.
1) IT folk need to understand that they are there to solve business problems, not IT problems, and need to leave a little more about business, instead of making business people learn the IT language.
2) Currently, if you're good at your job, you will be promoted to management in IT, which means you will no longer code, and have to learn to manage people. What would be better is to create a senior position that has the money of management, but allows a great coder to remain a great coder.
3) People in the organization have to be punished for causing problems that they look to IT to fix. Due to others lack of planning, we're constantly having to pull micicles out of our asses. But while we take the risk, others get the reward. This has got to change.
Just my opinions...
I think we are going through the same process in IT. There are a variety of methods of production and management, some of which are highly arcane. The standard of documentation and management in many companies seems to be low, to say the least. IT staff just do not understand kaizen, quality management, or any of the wider corporate things that can actually help them do their jobs better. They confuse better tools with better working practices. Strangely, in the early days of IT things were often better because the tools were limited in performance and scope and the organisation had to be built carefully around them (I was there...)
When we get past this stage, things will change. Quality will be built in to the processes. I suspect there will be far fewer applications in use, and many of the tools available will be greatly simplified. (The same ought to apply to business as a whole; it's hard to understand why the majority of office workers need Powerpoint or the decoration features in Word to do their jobs well.) Fewer people will be employed in IT, and their jobs will be better defined.
The question I don't know the answer to is what they will actually be doing.
Pining for the fjords
Companies are moving more and more to Dilbertization. Why? Because they want classic managers in charge of IT. In the early days, IT managers were kind of the strange ones in the management pool. It was because they were IT guys that were promoted into management, despite formal management education. Most large companies hired, from outside, their managers for other departments. Those that were hired from inside were "management material".
Companies now want to get away from the IT guy as manager. They want the IT guy to be a specialist. Managers aren't specialists. This means, the tide is toward managers who have 20,000 foot view of IT. Sweeping the tide back with a push broom would be easier than stopping the trend.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
If you believe in such deep associations then why bother to post AC? Wouldn't you want to have a good piece in your comment history?
Intelligent AC posts are suspicious by nature. Who wouldn't want to take credit for a timely intellectual response unless they had some trollage scheme in mind?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Sure, but if that's true why is it such a hostile work environment? Its one thing to be a start up where even a few days of a server being down will kill it, its another thing being in a company that needs two triplicate forms for the part, JSA (Job Safety Analysis) and the placement of two cones to change a hard drive. This is even when they work there.
I mean, why would anyone WANT to work in a field where a degree doesn't help that much and the starting pay is worst than some retail stores? God help you if you have to change jobs, it's almost as bad as being an airline pilot in that respect.
This is a predictable result of managing tons of users who all want to treat a complex machine that can perform millions of functions as though it were an appliance like a toaster or a microwave. The "I just want it to work but not if that means I have to learn anything" crowd are high-maintainence users when compared to someone who knows the utility of understanding the use of the tools you need to do your job.
Think about it this way. A car does only one thing, and yet you are required to obtain training and a license before you are allowed to use one. The idea that you can use a general-purpose device and not have to learn anything about how it works is an absurd pipe dream that has generated a lot of profit for the likes of Microsoft, but there is an expense to that idea and the expense is shouldered by support staff who act as a surrogate for the knowledge that the users did not want to learn. Much of IT really has changed from finding creative technical solutions to babysitting "permanent n00bs", you know the ones who can use a machine for five years straight and somehow manage to never learn anything new about it. Not everyone wants to be a tech? I'll buy that, but not knowing much about the tools you need to do your job and depending on someone else to pick up the slack doesn't sound very responsible, and never picking up more skill over the years, well, that takes work.
I used to be in the IT industry, and it is precisely this situation that made me decide to get into another line of work. As a hobby, I can really enjoy computing. As a profession, I became so sick of the willful helplessness (when all the tools and information are available and people don't learn anything simply because they don't care, but when there's a problem they sure do care then) and pure laziness I kept encountering that I ended up deciding that it wasn't for me, that there are less stressful ways to earn a living.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
When a technology is new, everyone has to be a bit of an expert to use it. As the technology matures, all the low hanging fruit gets picked. After that point, everyone can use the technology without being an expert and only the experts can make usable contributions.
A non-computer example would be the automobile. In the beginning, every driver had to be able to keep his Model T running. They didn't even have automatic spark advance so the driver had to control that as well as the choke the throttle and steering and brakes. These days, the vast majority of drivers never pop the hood except to add washer fluid.
IT is no different than any other technology. As it improves and becomes more efficient, people no longer have to do things they used to do.
Your argument assumes that management and labor are on equal footing.
My opinion is that there is a small but significant grey area between where one is ready to quit a job on moral/ethical grounds, and ready to quit a job on aesthetic/personal/professional grounds. Lots of people (myself included) have experienced some amount of this grey area, and could probably benefit from this discussion.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
Making IT exciting, Is this onshore of offshore we're talking about?
Those wonderous geek toy filled beautiful workplaces where the brightest of the bright got to have board room meetings in their jeans, un-tucked button-up shirts and slightly fashionable eyewear. The most disturbing noise would be the slight hum of the CEO's segway as he drove down the hallway.
Uhm... sounds like a dotcom to me. Those all bit the dust over half a decade ago.
Unfortunately, after the first initial puppy love affair with the Internet, business has gotten much smarter about IT and tends to give it more realistic budgets for technology and man-power and expect real targets from IT that can be managed.
Also, as any industry matures, consolidation is a natural market movement. There are no longer 2343292385243 small companies out there doing XX (XX being something that actually did turn out to provitable). There are likely 5 - 10 much larger organizations doing XX. Any large organization, by its very nature, will probably feel Dilbert-ish.
I still feel that depending on what you are doing and where you live, you stand a good chance of finding a decent place of working and earning an honest dollar... Unless you would rather play with geek toys all day and impress others with your uber-geekdom rather than buckling down and actually performing a role that helps a business turn a profit.
I prefer to see it as socially stratified. What we're seeing is the triumph of social precepts over scientific precepts.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
(1) Ownership: instead of relying on short-term tactical projects and maintenance, create teams to 'own' each area of your business and technology - empower them to make business and technology decisions in that space (2) Measurement: setup appropriate metrics for your teams in their area - judge them against these metrics (a combination of business performance, system performance, uptime etc.) (3) Agile: don't stifle them with heavy methodology - rely on your teams to install the right processes for them: enough documentation, enough release management, enough testing - if they're not getting that right, a heavy process won't help them For an example of a company who IMHO get this right, take a look at this interview with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels: http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&p a=showpage&pid=388
I disagree.
God. Remind me not to apply for whomever you work for.
IT payscales are tanking and, along with them, respect for the profession and whatever remains of a skilled workforce. The almost-daily outcry from Bill G et al asking for "cheaper engineers and programmers" and the rush to outsource IT abroad hardly helps.
Show me the money.
The answer to your question is that for in-house projects, IT needs to be separated into distinct engineering and operations groups.
.war or .ear file just like you would for any other customer. As a developer, operations should be your only customer, and your relationship with them should be the same as the relationship you would maintain with your most valuable and critical customer.
IT Engineering is what the OP obviously favors. Designing new technologies, building better solutions to existing problems, and increasing productivity through these incredible meta-tools we call computers. IT Operations is about taking these technologies, cataloging their shortcomings, and doing what is necessary to implement them and keep them implemented. Engineering is about the introduction of new ideas; Operations is about the constant war to keep those ideas safe from entropy.
Often, these goals are in direct conflict. It is only natural for a solution developer to recognize the shortcomings in their product and want to fix it. It is in the best interests of operations that a stable server not be changed unless absolutely necessary, and then only when the changes have been thoroughly tested, put through miles of red tape and human business process, and signed off on by people whose jobs are on the line if the application goes down. The idea that you can write a program and be the person who runs it most effectively is a false one in any mission critical application. When there's money on the line, red tape and paperwork is the only way to make sure that it keeps flowing.
So to be successful in IT, we on the one hand need developers who are free to try radical new ideas in an environment that rewards creative solutions to entrenched problems, and on the other hand we need a static environment ruled by business process and red tape, which stifles unproven concepts and chokes creativity. The only solution to this is to separate these groups completely, and have development treat operations as a very stodgy customer. Too many companies don't realize that this split is necessary to maintain their financial longevity, and have the same people who develop their applications responsible for their day-to-day operations. This situation not only leads to frustrated development staff who feel creatively stifled, it is also in the long term project suicide. In-house developers should not only be relieved of the responsibility for running their code, they should in fact not even have logins to the servers on which their code is running.
Professional standards of code release need apply, too. It's not enough to release code to production via CVS checkout, you need to write an installer with an uninstaller and an upgrade path, just like you would for commercial software. It's not enough to run an ant build on your server via an NFS mount back to the depository, you need to compile a
But one person wearing the development and operations hat? That leads to nothing but frustration, burnout, entropy, and failure.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
That's what the
"Debt" is a ten thousand year old playground game.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Before a culture must change for the positive again, it must see the greivious errors in its ways from the top down - meaning, academics who teach about how to work within those cultures - elsewise the culture will continue to stagnate indefinately. This would probably be a cataclysmic failure in the industry, I'd guess - though we could get lucky and simply change our ways of operation through happenstance.
I don't think it likely.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It wasn't an intelligent AC post at all. It was simply quoting someone (and citing his ref, so good for him =D). Not a bad comparison at all although the phrase "analogy rape" comes to mind. LOL. If religious associations are indeed getting to be such close descriptions of the IT industry, then perhaps Dilbertization is the least of your problems :P.
and focusing on root cause, not the current fire. Get things working again and then take the time to find out why things went wrong. 85% of service interruption is caused by human error. Companies and techies spend money and time constantly fixing the same things over and over again. If you take time to find the root cause, using ishikawa and other techniques you can actually stop running from fire to fire. One huge thing though is that a LOT of IT people like being the firefighters because they get more glory, and unfortunately a LOT of managers don't reward employees who aren't firefighters, and fix problems before they impact production. When things are quiet, that means that someone did their job right. Proper problem management will decrease calls to the service desk (helpdesk) and decrease first level resolution rates- you're not solving the same problem over and over again. A knowledgemangement system helps with this.
d ent_Managementl em_Management
d =19
Check out the ITIL definitions of problem and incident management:
Problem Management-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL#Inci
Incident Management-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL#Prob
Another good one- http://serviceinnovation.org/
I've seen Greg Oxton from serviceinnovation speak and here's a link to where he describes the true impact of errors on the user community. (starts really getting into impact on slide 11)
http://itsmf-tampabay.org/WordPress/?attachment_i
My 2 cents
Just get a new job. Sure this may sound like a bad idea because most say that it doesn't look good on your resume to have had 8 different jobs for the past fifteen years. I would typically agree with that notion but it has been my experience that there is no shortage of need for GOOD software developers or other IT personnel who are enthusiastic about there jobs and seek continual job growth in their area of expertise.
"Many IT shops are in financial institutions or other businesses where systems are handling millions or billions of dollars. In that situation you don't want a whole lot of creativity. Every time you change code you introduce risk, and the more money at stake, the more risk-averse you are."
Creativity is still important even in stodgy places like financial institutions. A lack of creativity can cause excessive complexity and risk. People write 1000 lines of code to solve a problem when it could have been done in 150 if they were more creative. And they write code that requires modification every time a slightly new variation of the same old problem turns up, instead of coming up with something more flexible that doesn't need the code to be changed every time.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
I've been in IT for 18 years: worked for small (35 people) and large corporations (95K) and large (80K) and small (5K) government agencies. The Dilbert factors haven't gotten worse in 18 years, just well lampooned by Scott Adams and others. What I know, without a doubt, is that the Dilbert factor increases with the size of the organization, and I think that's true for any organization. If you are dying from too much Dilbert in your company then it's time to downsize.
There are no silver bullets for silver bullets
Dilbertized -- micromanaged, bureaucratic and stifled creatively.
I think IT employees have gotten spoiled by the wild dotCom days, where management hadn't figured out how to manage IT yet, where salaries were high, and where people in IT were left to do whatever they wanted.
In the end, IT is little different from accounting or any other administrative function: it's not about self-actualization, independence or creativity, it's about performing a business function reliably, predictably, and efficiently. It's about implementing what management, sales, and designers tell you to implement.
If you want to be creative and/or independent, IT is the wrong function. The people who can be creative inside a business are marketing, R&D, graphic design, strategic planning, and management.
How to stop the Dilbertization of IT?
Nuke the site from orbit.
... and then they built the supercollider.
You're the Hero. Of course your code will work ... you're the Hero.
... you might as well not be there at all for all they know. You have to find some way to keep reminding people that you are the one handling the problems BEFORE the problems become problems.
When a problem pops up, you slay it. You're the Hero.
People seldom ask why the problem popped up. They're too happy to have it removed. And the next one. And the next one. And the next one.
Simply put, bad practices result in bad code. So the Hero becomes the firefighter. Unless s/he moves up or onward.
The easy solution to this is not socially acceptable (unless instituted by a savvy boss). Signs indicating "X days since server crash" or such tend to divide the department between the Hero's and the Thinkers. And that creates its own problems.
People do not value things that they do not have to think about. Until they are forced to think about them. If you're doing a great job and all the updates are transparent to the users
There's less emphasis on creativity, and more on maintenance.
Welcome to IT! It's great to hear that you've taken a job working on America's information infrastructure.
IT is like a roadway. You spend a shitload of effort to build it - designing bridges, blasting through mountains, cutting through forests, etc. Then you're done, and then, for the next 100+ years, it gets maintained thanks to an additional shitload of effort. IT is perhaps a bit different because a roadway can't be screwed around with as easily as, say, your accounting software.
New hardware, new software, new technologies, new customer requirements. Maintaining software is the core of what IT is. And well-controlled, well maintained software is the difference between organizational success and failure.
If you haven't maintained software, then you are not qualified to design or build new software.
Shared delivery means, you are working on several client accounts. When you hear this: RUN.
Whether you are 1st, 2nd Deep TS, shared delivery means, that your butt will be dragged where the fires are burning, and you will never ever have a decent relaxed day.
I remember at other places, when we completed a project and deployed everything to be deployed (after fixing problems), we always had a few easy days. Go home early, take long lunches, play games and so on....
Shared delivery means you go dead every day.
Oh well, it also means that you are sold several times to clients, but get only 1 salary.
Many companies are starting to do this, and it is the recipe for crappy service, and leaving employees.
Alot can be said about the quality (or lack thereof) of people who enter the IT field and how that effects the industry. However.. after reading the book "Peopleware" , I have to agree with the view that the 2 biggest factors are bad management and bad enviroment. If the concerted combination of those two influences stifles creativity and creates and atmosphere that is dull and boring and full of "documentation" and "following the rules to a T"... you are going to get burnout, plain and simple. I worked the last 10 or so years for a company doing IT consulting and it resulted (last summer) in my wanting to put a gun barrel in my mouth. Now i'm on my own (barely making ends meet) but infinitely happier.
Umm didn't Microsoft just claim the other day that they were short 3000 people and needed more H1B visas. I bet I could go to any college down right now and find almost that many techs in just one city looking for a decent job who just need some training.
It is "Classic Management" promoted by the Pointy Haired Bosses that cause most of the problems in IT today. What we need are a new breed of managers that understand IT and participate in the IT work that is being done. "Participatory Management" is the new 21st century management and "Classic Management" is the 12th century management when managers were slave owners and slave drivers who didn't understand what their workers are doing and thus cannot manage them properly.
Managers need to get out of the Middle Ages and join the rest of us in Modern Times.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
too many IT workplaces have become Dilbertized -- micromanaged, bureaucratic and stifled creatively. It's become an environment where busy work is praised and morale is low.
Maybe you just need to find another job. I'm a developer and life could not be better. Sorry to ruin your day.
Most fires result from things unexpected - and unexpected stuff results mostly from unforeseeable and incalculable circumstances.
standardization of all enterprise-wide operations, and setting up measures and intervention procedures for all possible outcomes within the standardized stuff would considerably reduce the number of fires coming up every given interval of time.
with enough standardization, you can use automated procedures too - scripts, crons, countermeasure software, whatever you can name and further reduce manpower load on the organisation's it dept.
as EVERY enterprise has their own different set of applications and procedures, every enterprise (who do not rely too heavily on one external vendor) needs to develop their own firefighting procedures. this is a creative work in itself - the more success in this, the more free it will get, and the cycle will feed itself with the creativity that is drawn from available time.
Read radical news here
IT's the bottom of the barrel in terms of tech jobs. A lot of people don't go into CS because they think CS degree will get them IT jobs. People even confuse electrical engineers and computer engineers as one in CS - or hell - in IT. Dilbert's an engineer - he's not an information "technologist" ....
I completely disagree with your assessment. I just got out of IT (as in help desk/support/system admin) and into a pure programming job. The reason was I've seen 3 good friends lose alot (wives, friends, any semblance of a life) in the IT industry because IT is anything but a steady state. IT people are still asked to deal with gargantuan complexity and growth. They are expected to roll out insanely complex systems at the drop of the CEO's hat, just because he feels like it. At least in the late 90's people expected this stuff to cost money. Now a days what used to get quoted at $5 million is expected to be handled by a single guy making 600 users, Windows 2003 AD, Cisco Call Manager, Cisco IPCC, more than 40 PRI circuits, and 3 DS3 WAN circuits. These 2 guys manage the routers, switches, firewall, everything. When presented with the impossibility of these 2 people actually handling the workload managements response was "Sorry, if you don't like it, we already talked with xyz outsourcing corp, you're lucky to have this job". Mind you, this company is a very large call center. Their entire operation depends on IT. If the network is down they lose > 100k/day. If users can't log in, it costs > 1k/hr/person. And management isn't willing to address issues. It is also bizarre that they are pulling the "we'll outsource you" card, since they just brought IT back in house after a disasterous "outsourcing" expedition over the last 2 years.
I quit this world one month ago (after 7+ years at least partially performing general IT stuff). Now I purely develop software. I'm happier now than I've been in 8 years. I only work 40hrs/wk, my cell phone never rings after hours, and I don't have pissed off disdainful users cursing me at every turn because they forgot their password or had number lock turned on and couldn't log in for 10 minutes.
The problem is that many (most?) companies nowadays see programmers as commodities, creativity as risk, planning and careful deployment of systems as expenses. They have managers that don't know anything about technology, deadlines impossible to meet, no recognition for merit and talent. The consequence is that systems crash all the time, "workarounds" are the rule and the good professionals are overloaded with work to make up for all that people that work with them that don't have a clue.
With such perspective ahead, it will be no wonder if in a near future the best brains will go to finance, law or any other profession that may offer what IT used to do.
Stop hiring Dilberts!
Seriously, most IT people are Dilberts. Those of you that work in IT: How long did it take you to learn how to do what you do? (Don't include time spent on Slashdot!) IT people tend not to be very socially astute, and they really aren't as responsible for a business' sucess as they think they are. You're about as important as the guy that changes light bulbs and breaks into drawers when people forget their combination.
stop requiring a BS OR MS for low level jobs like help desk and pc tech. Whats is next a PHD?
Also get rid needing people to have 2-3 years experience for the same jobs.
Mod parent up!
Oh, wait, they did...
Well, mod him up some more!
Asshole managers - that's the whole game in a nutshell.
Well, actually "asshole primates" is the whole game in a nutshell - asshole managers are just a subset.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Longtime IT professionals are perhaps remembering the days before everyone had what amounts to a powerful, but unstable and insecure, server on his or her desktop.
It's as plain as the nose on your face. Walk into a Mac shop and sniff the moral. Walk into a Windows shop and do the same. Big difference. And someone is trying to tell me that it's just due to the profession maturing? Right.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Should have used preview...
Sorry slashdot ate my post, here is the whole thing:
I completely disagree with your assessment. I just got out of IT (as in help desk/support/system admin) and into a pure programming job. The reason was I've seen 3 good friends lose alot (wives, friends, any semblance of a life) in the IT industry because IT is anything but a steady state. IT people are still asked to deal with gargantuan complexity and growth. They are expected to roll out insanely complex systems at the drop of the CEO's hat, just because he feels like it. At least in the late 90's people expected this stuff to cost money. Now a days what used to get quoted at $5 million is expected to be handled by a single guy making less than 50k/yr. And when it doesn't happen, they are fired or required to work 24x7 to pull off a miracle. Any slight flaw is seen as a complete failure. Paradoxically, budgets have been cut so severely that there is no such thing as a "test environment" and IT is expected to have some sort of magic ball to predict exactly what is going to break when massive changes are rolled out.
I still have 2 good friends in IT. They both work 60-70+/wk. One travels 75%+. The other is officially on call 24x7. He estimates that he gets a call between 2-6AM at least 4 times a week. He is one of 2 people managing more than 600 users, Windows 2003 AD, Cisco Call Manager, Cisco IPCC, more than 40 PRI circuits, and 3 DS3 WAN circuits. These 2 guys manage the routers, switches, firewall, everything. When presented with the impossibility of these 2 people actually handling the workload managements response was "Sorry, if you don't like it, we already talked with xyz outsourcing corp, you're lucky to have this job". Mind you, this company is a very large call center. Their entire operation depends on IT. If the network is down they lose more than 100k/day. If users can't log in, it costs more than 1k/hr/person. And management isn't willing to address issues. It is also bizarre that they are pulling the "we'll outsource you" card, since they just brought IT back in house after a disasterous "outsourcing" expedition over the last 2 years.
I quit this world one month ago (after 7+ years at least partially performing general IT stuff). Now I purely develop software. I'm happier now than I've been in 8 years. I only work 40hrs/wk, my cell phone never rings after hours, and I don't have pissed off disdainful users cursing me at every turn because they forgot their password or had number lock turned on and couldn't log in for 10 minutes.
If you want to control your life instead of your boss controlling it, you need to join a democratically run union. United we bargain, divided we beg. IT is no different from any other industry. The working class and the employing class have different interests. The bosses are already organized, why aren't we?
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
3. If you want creativity, shun the larger shops and go work for a startup, or start one up yourself.
Or a large shop in crises! Kinda like a big elephant on crack (instead of a small enraged mouse).
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
I don't mean to insult you here or anything but you are coming off sounding like a socialist here. The business needs of the business are paramount here, and the business is owned by the shareholdres/venture capitalists and the execs are the management directly hired by the owners to run said company. With all of the workplace laws that have been built up in this country over the last 150 years I think workers are sufficiently protected from any abuses. That leaves salary, perks and benefits as the only thing an employee needs to worry about in regards to THEIR business needs. Obviously a company has to also meet the needs of its customers or it goes out of business.
Thus for the employee if you don't like what your company is offering, look for work elsewhere. Unless of course you are advocating that employeees should be getting something other and in addition too their overall compensation that they currently get. I don't mean to put words in your mouth but it seems to me that you are implying that workers are unpaid workers providing slave labor or something.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The idea that software ideas can be "owned" is the real cancer that's killing IT. One can never quite solve problems in the most straightforward manner, nor can one cooperate with others. The anti-science of copyright and patent law makes sure of that.
IT has become an endless wheel-reinvention. Were it not for open source, it would be completely unbearable. And yes, the GPL "depends on" copyright - but as we've always said "without copyright the GPL would be unenforceable. It would also be unnecessary".
Take a look at the work place today, even for IT. Just like school, it grossly resembles a factory. 8-5, 1 hour lunch, produce something, go home, wash rinse repeat. The only solution is to stop using the factory worker model when it comes to handling IT. Stop putting pressure on the need for people to spend "8 hours" doing work. Instead demand results and let the people use the best tools available to do that particular kind of job. If your an "admin", you should be responsible for maintaining your infrastructure 24/7. This means when things are working, your filling in TPS reports to keep Connie in HR occupied in between filling up coffee for VP Bob.
I wonder how many "Remote Management" software vendors actually allow their employees to work from home... I'd bet very few. Why? Because you cant run a factory like environment, where your CLEARLY on top with a nice office while everyone else works in cubicle land.
Its more than just IT that suffers, its society as a whole. Our schools are run in a similar bullshit fashion that doesnt really do much to motivate those who are there to learn. Its not just academics that suffer from this as well (seems like College's/Universities are the only institutions that actually have this figured out).
We have all this wonderful technology that can push industry, commerce and education light years into the future, but we are mired with early 20th century management techniques, and ideas. Perhaps I'm just an idealist, but having gone from High School to College, I found the difference between the two environments exhillerating. In University, I picked courses of interest, scheduled things to fit my time, and was actually able to learn a LOT more than in High School, where I had to try and keep myself from passing out with boredom as the evolutionary failure in the back of the room tried to learn and sleep at the same time. I get similar feelings during my 8 hour day at work, except I'm only competing with absolute boredom.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Simple answer: because they are scared.
Many who gained 'management' titles during the 'dot com era' would call tech support if their computer was unplugged by the cleaning crew, others came in from comfy mainframe positions where the technology changed at a very slow pace . These people don't know the technology, and have only been able to manage projects by inflating the budget, or leaning on the young programmers (overtime, etc). Also, they completely lack understanding the work which is being done by their direct reports, making accurate planning and measurement impossible. Also, coders who started with the internet boom and are intimately familiar with the technologies are finally getting into management.
It's a lot of pressure for them, add to that the fact that many of the 50 yo+ boomers just purchased a McMansion with little money down and a fresh 30 year mortgage. Now upper management wants to know why a 'simple' project takes a million dollar budget and rather than chance angering someone who could fire them, they would rather just lean on the people who report to them. A short term solution at best, but hey, that's what gets them though the quarter.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Most of IT might seem to involve putting together off the shelf solutions, but that's because the industry is much bigger. In contrast, the cutting edge seems much smaller. There are still quite a few people working on clustering systems for bioinformatics or better tree sort algorithms, but compared to the number of database administration jobs, those jobs are few. If you want one of them, get a PhD and spend a few years proving yourself. Don't expect a job in the latest research if you have a BS in software engineering and have been spending the last five years writing Java code for a bank.
We don't need tens of thousands of 170IQ creative types in IT any more than we need them in plumbing or electrical engineering.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
...it's not, "You are a professional engineer, I trust you, go and fix this," it's "I am a PHB trying to make my mark. This is how you should do it. What do you mean, that's not 100% of the solution? Do my bidding, serf."
What do you mean, that didn't fix it? Are you stupid? How dare you suggest that your idea may have been right.
Are you an imbecile? It should have taken you 2 hours. Why has it taken you a week? You make me look like a dick in fromt of MY boss!
Here's an idea why don't you ${YOUR_FIRST_IDEA}.
It worked? Good. You are crap and are getting no pay rise this year. I am a professional. You are lucky to have a job here.
Stick Men
This is an interesting question that we have talked about in my graduate level classes.
IT is shifting from a low skill worker base to a high skill worker base. This is because a lot of the base technologies are perceived as mature. After all, most development in the hardware and operating systems arena seem to be more incremental rather than revolutionary. The real ground-breaking work being done in IT right now is in application development, especially applications that are specific for industries or specific organizations. This is why many organizations are outsourcing programming because it is more cost effective to pay a vendor for a specific application, or a bunch of programmers in India to write a program at a less cost than to have an in-house programmer write it. Hardware is powerful enough that the code does not need to be optimized to run well - thus the quality of the code does not need to be good quality.
I foresee a day when solid state, networked devices will take over the corporation and the need for an IT department will diminish. Until that day comes, the support technician will be required to keep things operating smoothly, putting out the fires. There is no need to invest in IT as the technical side of IT has made employees as efficient as possible. In order to increase efficiency, organizations are investing in applications that automate worker functions, reduce the need for overhead, and allow companies to better focus on their primary business functions - which in most cases means less IT.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
The employees and customers are as much a part of the business as the major shareholders and executives.
No, they are not. The owners own the business. That means that they own it. They control it. The employees work for the business for an agreed-upon compensation. The owners can do whatever they'd like with the business, and do not have to have approval from the employees or the customers. If the employees don't like it, they have the right to leave the company. The parent is right... you're talking about Socialism, or you have no grasp of the fundamentals of private property.
I don't respond to AC's.
Good luck doing something IT-related that people are WILLING to pay you for.
Big business has succeed and turned the Internet into 'online television' where everything is free^Wsubsidized by big business.
This makes it all but impossible for IT-pros to make a living online WITHOUT being in somebody else's employ.
The anti-capitalistic mentality here at Slashdot doesn't make matters any better yet (likely) everyday there is another PR piece^W^Wstory showcasing some for-profit company here.
All this site seems to be good for anymore is occasional INTERESTING, NON-COMMERCIAL news stories and the noteworthy comments that go with them.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
"IT professionals that have worked in the field for a long time often speak about a shift in their work where they have gone from tossing ideas back and forth to make for better technology solutions to fighting fires all day"
To me this suggests that the fires were set during the "creative" period. Creativity in software is all very well, but diligence is also very important.
If a 5-year period of rapid creativity is followed by 5 years of security firefighting, does that not suggest that your creative process also created problems?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'll just conclude by simply stating that health care is the direction to go. Per capita, the health care industry has the highest job growth potential and a critical shortage. As a relatively senior IT man, I made about 56,000 a year. This is on experience alone as I have a Criminal Justice Degree and no formal C.S. education. I have to work around 50-60 hours a week, counting on-call time. As an entry level x-ray technologist at the local hospital, I would be earning the same money while only really working 32 hours a week and a sign-on bonus. It is well worth returning to school for a 1.5 years to do this. Plus, x-rays are now high technology and the experience parlays well. My advice, work smarter not harder.
i, for one, welcome our pointy haired overlords
But US Citizens won't sign the "Indentured Servitude" contracts, unlike the H1B applicants.
If you're not the boss, sometimes you don't get what you need to do it properly the first time.
That IS the problem in most places: management overrides IT without the slightest notion - or care - about the consequences.
You can't do it right the first time if you've been ordered to do it wrong the first time.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Welcome to reality, that is what work is all about..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
I once worked for an interfering, micromanaging, annoying, unimaginative, and unengaging manager whose solution to the Dilbertization of the workplace was to BAN ALL DILBERT CARTOONS.
It seems the cartoons made us employees cynical.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
so they use college credentials instead. It's horribly wasteful but the EEOC won't sue you over it.
Pretty easy. Over time good people who can find jobs elsewhere leave and dilbertesque organisations die by themselves.
Wow. That's about all I can say. That's an impressive display of crying for a bottle.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
is one side I'm seeing here, and the other is "I'd like to enjoy my work."
Dilbertization is endemic, as several people pointed out. It's in universities, old businesses, new businesses, everywhere. It's not working anywhere, but it keeps spreading like a cancer because stopping it would require using totally different organizational DNA.
Sure companies need to make a profit, and universities need enough money to stay afloat, and governments need to stay within their budgets. But money can't be the only motivation. That does not work. Organizations that scrabble purely for money soon don't make any money either. Nobody actually wants money. They want good products, or enjoyable work, or interesting educations, or uncorrupt governments. You make money by providing those things. And you can't provide those things using slave labor.
There's no point saying, "Damn slaves. They just don't work hard enough for the corporations." Slaves don't. Workers whose abilities and experience are respected and respectably paid are the ones who work hard without being whipped all the time.
And isn't that what the original post was all about?
The conference's location is in Cinerator. If the PHBs don't know how to get there, show them the entrance.
Oh, and make sure that they know the heater is acting up so them remain for the duration.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
The problem is that IT has been taken over by Business School Product. They have no grasp of science, no feel for aesthetics, they only have feel for next quarters numbers and covering their ass. This is what Business School teaches. One needn't know anything about an industry in order to manage it, Business Schools build this into their Product. They will never, ever learn a new skill unless it is something useful for climbing the corporate ladder. The best thing IT can learn is to weed Business School Product out. Dilbert's boss is hiding in every last one of them.
That only works if the Dilbertesque organizations aren't being artificially propped up. Stock investors love money mills and Dilbertesque organizations are great money mills. Dilbertesque organizations have massive amounts of internal strife and are easy to manipulate. Once they become large enough then the internal strife isn't even an external consideration anymore. There will always be enough workers to get the job done. It's just money in and money out on the accounting ledger.
When there's a monopoly on money (Federal Reserve, Wall Street, DC) overseeing which organizations (all of which are kept in a perturbed state) become big and which don't there isn't anywhere else to walk to. It's all the same.
Metaphorically: It does not matter which game you choose to play in the casino. The House always wins the most.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
I don't know if this and the rest of your comment are original material or not but it is profound, so I decided to say so rather than use mod points as I originally set out to do. More and more in my own observations of the modern world the term "game the system" pops, unbeckoned into my head and I don't even remember when II first learned the term.
I do remember in short studies of game theory learning that it is easy to construct a game in which a mutually beneficial outcome works against outcomes with are "best" for all participants. What continues to surprise me is not that such games spring into existence in the real world, but that those who have at least some power over the game rules continue to do nothing to change them so that the outcomes that are best for the individual are more synchronized with those that are best foor the organization.
I guess that's a round about way of saying "why doesn't someone above simply fire the PHB?" And if the problem exists at a higher level, why doesn't someone above that do some firing as well? Examples in the real world are easy to find. Imagine a Microsoft without a CEO who makes a PR blunder every time he opens his mouth. Imagine if Ken Lay, or the Enron board had fired Jeffry Skilling when he first announced that he wanted the company to be "as asset free as possible" rather than giving him even more authority to implement such a PHBesque notion.
In all my career the Dilbert-like (and this is certainly not a new phenomenon) activities have only sometimes been initiated by my immediate boss, and almost never at the top of the company, but somewhere in the murky in-between, where rumor has it that people are all first cousins or go to the same church (because there is no other rational explanation for their existence).
I suspect that in some very successful companies there is still one of those overpaid (though not in such case so much overpaid) people who can peer down into the organization and burn off the underbrush so that those doing constructive things have more chance to grow. Most companies somewhere along the line lose these key people at the top and become the Enrons and Microsofts of today.
One big problem though in many countries it is harder and harder to fire people for a variety of reasons, even when they grossly under-perform, or mis-perform. We have to look no further than our governments (particularly federal) for just how bad this can, and probably will get even for companies like Google that start out with so much talent and enthusiasm. Even if they can at first have a fairly good control over their talent pool (as they grow rapidly) at some point there are going to be full of "Wallys" who no one can figure out what to do with, but who have kept enough within the rules to avoid being terminated.
I don't by any means think, as the article implies, that this is confined to IT. Quite the contrary, we see it everywhere more and more. The change, if it is going to happen at all (I'm not optimistic) has to come from our elected officials who can once again make it easy for companies to clean house. After all, in a society that more and more takes care of the unemployed and under-employed, worse things can happen than being the victim of a corporate "downsizing". the question is whether there is anyone at most companies making sure that the right PHBs and Wallys are let go during such events.
This is silly. "Creativity" does not mean "being a cowboy." A creative solution can be implemented carefully, after thorough testing and validation. On the other hand, a non-creative solution can be implemented in a sloppy and haphazard manner. Handling large amounts of money means you need to be careful and disciplined when you design, test and implement a solution. It doesn't matter if the solution is creative or not.
I disagree with your second point, too. Even if I grant that "the IT industry still has not digested the technology it already has," that doesn't mean that existing technologies solve the problems that people and companies have. It would be nice if they did, but it's just not realistic to think so.
Your third point, though, is right on the money.
This is exactly why I changed my major from IT. There is no room in the industry, due to supplier contracts, licenses, or whatever, for creativity, and the environment that has emerged is unappealing to me. Which is why I've changed to chemistry, along with many people I've talked to who have grown up around technology, and had wanted to be in IT, who have changed to other fields as well.
If it's not careful, IT will cut off it's talent pool, if it's not happening already.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
This isn't just an IT job problem. It's the problem of bosses who don't want to risk getting fired if they let their underlings fail because they were allowed to be creative. The real issue can be solved with a shifting of workplace hierarchies. If the place is more of a level structure and not a power ladders (which is usually based on politics) creatively will grow. If your creative idea fails not only do you loose your job but your boss losses his or her job. On the other hand if my creative idea succeeds then my boos takes the credit. So as a worker I have little reason to actually be creative, I either loose my job or get little credit. My boss benefits by not allowing creative ideas because he or she keeps her job and maintains the status quo (bosses don't like personal change or personal risk) keeping a job is easier then finding one. So what are the benefits of creative ideas? well business can grow and income increase but in that area the boss (manager) won't see a large increase in personal wealth through a creative idea even if the company does. so allowing creative ideas is more of a risk in the traditional office structure. If my screw up only cost my job then my boos would be more willing to allow creative ideas. So what if we changed management? If each employee was part manager; a deadlines manager, a financial manager, an hr manager, an equipment manager, a programs manager, a negotiations manager and so on. If management tasks were shared the risk of my creative ideas harming others shrinks. If I do mess up an idea I get punished by loosing my management task (and some pay) and maybe the other management task are switched around. If my mess up shows you aren't a good deadlines manager then you get switched to what I was.
Spread the word.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Lets face it, another aspect to this is the weird sense of entitlement many in the IT world have.
I could actually fit into the mold the article describes; I fix things, I do it quick, I get to the core of the problem and deal with it. In my current place, when I first came in there were more then a few developers who loved nothing better than to sit around 'designing' or thinking of ways to design a solution, all the while ignoring minor details like deadlines, consumer demand, etc. There is a time to refactor, but you certainly dont refactor every goddamn time you fix a bug.
As I started to get into the codebase more, I saw more and more places were logical errors were built into the software; so, I started going in and doing nothing more than adding try catch blocks in suspicious places and logging the errors.
What happened? Voila, it started to be apparent that after I checked in code, more and more errors were being seen in the log files that werent there before. So all of a sudden Im this irresponsible cowboy who came in and started writing bad code - why, look at all the errors!
Once I pointed out a couple of times that the errors were from code that had been developed by the people who sat around and designed things all the time, that these errors had been happening in some cases for years but had been getting eaten, all of a sudden these developers started looking for other places to work because this just 'wasnt the type of atmosphere they wanted to work in any more'. I take that to mean they were increasingly expected to get results, when in the past before my arrival they had quite a few of the business/project people intimidated.
Another factor Ive seen in many places is lack of documentation. A developer who has 'designed' a tight system but doesnt document it bears a great deal of the responsibility for any future errors by future developers. I dont know how many times some arrogant schmuck has said something like 'well there can only be one solution to the problem, there is no need for documentation as any good developer will see that one solution and bad ones wont'.
This kind of self delusion as to ones own importance/intelligence is rife within the IT community. While the issues that the article describes do happen, those issues are more often caused by non-technical people driving deadlines etc than it is the developers who are willing to do the work.
In my experience it is equally likely that the developer who gets things done is just less self absorbed, less pretentious and more willing to bust-ass than some pompous asshole with letters behind his name who seems to think some tasks are beneath him.
One subset of primates learned how to exploit the others for fun and profit.
Ten thousand years later the game is more complex (bigger population sets, larger financial numbers, includes multiple social levels) but it's still the same.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
When you sell yourself cheap, only losers want you. You wont get calls unless someone has an emergency, and you can bet that half the time, their check will bounce anyway.
This is a hard lesson for Consultants to learn, but CHARGE MORE, bitch!
If your services are worth something, make the fuckers PAY for it. If you provide a comprehensive IT solution including everything you mentioned, why the fuck are you willing to give it away? Prospective clients will think maybe you just got out of jail, or you are on some FBI pervert list.
Are you a professional, or not? If you charge like a beginner, potential clients will assume you are a beginner. First, stop charging by the hour and charge on the value of your services. What is the value of a 99.999 uptime network to a small-to-medium size business? Charge for that by the month, not the hour, with a penalty clause for downtime. Share the risk, and clients will appreciate that you care about what you are doing, and not just racking up a fee.
I dont care what you are charging right now, DOUBLE it, and I bet you get more (and a better class of)clients.
Finally, make sure you are damn good at what you do.
Profit, bitch!
In those "good old days" alluded to in the story, I.T. as a corporate-wide monolithic structure did not exist. Technology was handled by various business units on an as-needed basis. The supposed efficiencies of a corporate-wide I.T. have never been evident to me, but the dangers of an entrenched class of PHB I.T. management has been well demonstrated. Disband I.T., fire the C.I.O., make technology projects accountable to the business units, and you'll go a long way to solving most of your problems.
Of course, if the "uncreative" 1000 line version is 7-times bigger for the right reason, it is avoiding clever-clever tricks so it is easy to determine that it does what it's supposed to and it's easy to maintain.
The most bloated, boring and uncreative code I have ever seen in my life was a safety critical system that had the potential to kill hundreds of people if it went wrong. It might have been bloated, boring and uncreative but it was also blindingly obvious what it did, how it did it and that it did it right. There is a place for creativity in software, but there are also some places in which creativity can be a bad thing -- and as well as the safety critical domain, the financial sector is probably one. Sorry folks, but I think the place for creativity is likely to be in novel applications, not the mainstream, and as somebody else has pointed out that means that the interesting stuff is in the small software houses.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
That babble was an intelligent post? Every day I wonder what your diagnosis would be more and more.
Sir, your tin foil hat seems to be a little sideways.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Training makes you (slightly) experienced, not smart or talented. A third-rate programmer with a zillion technical certifications and a degree is still a third-rate programmer. There are companies out there -- I know, because I work for one -- which are happy to hire people straight out of college, or even during college, as long as they're quick learners, highly self-motivated, have personalities that mesh with the rest of the team's, and are capable, creative problem-solvers. Training does not impart any of those things.
Which isn't to say it's useless, but there seems to be this fiction that training can somehow cause one to be qualified for any job on the planet. You can take physics classes all your life and still not be Stephen Hawking.
Dilbertization is INEVITABLE in any hierarchial organization. There's nothing whatsoever you can do about it.
It's causes are ultimately all within human nature. Starting with the technologists themselves, they're all in competition with one another. Each wants to be recognized as the alpha geek. Furthermore, some are lazy and some are energetic. the lazy ones hate the energetic ones because they make them look bad. The energetic ones hate the lazy ones because they're not carrying their weight. Finally, the TALENTED technologists are repulsed by the thought of being promoted into management, but the inept ones love the idea, as do the closet fascists.
The professional managers, middle-managers, "project managers" (ha!) and other undead minions of all standard IT organizations are just as dysfunctional. Secretaries are sullen, convinced that everyone thinks they're stupid (in some cases, this is astute on their part). Project managers, like the fawning little lap-dogs they are, tell management whatever they want to hear, often totally fucking over their staff by agreeing to ridiculous deadlines that cannot be met. Middle managers often know nothing whatsoever about technology and run their areas according to whatever management theory is currently in vogue. Worse, they often rate employees by how well they schmooze, not how well they code. Nepotism is rampant. Other minions, like managers selected to represent users in design meetings, often are in way over their heads and only want to cover their asses and contribute enough to meetings to LOOK as though they've got things under control.
If you work in a private company, you can be fired at any time for any reason, and often your fate is totally arbitrary. Knowing this, you MUST always keep your eyes open for new jobs; companies are like women, they never want available developers, because they think there must be something wrong with them (so they stick to poaching from other companies). If you think you're going to be fired, you have to start interviewing right away before you lose that "I'm still employed" cachet. And you have to know who is a "special friend" of which bigshot so you don't accidentally step on the toes of so-and-so's asshole cousin and prematurely end your career.
If you work in civil service, you can't be fired easily but this means that you always end up with at least a few totally useless idiots in your department. They KNOW they can't be fired, so they just sit around like barnacles, slowing the whole boat down. At most, the part of the staff that'll actually be able to DO anything will be 25-50% (and they'll be bitter and snarky about it -- can you blame them?). The rest are all deadwood. The same is true for management! You see these ridiculous men in their fifties, already mentally a senior citizen, just waiting to retire at 55. They DREAM of a "25/55" deal and talk about it with anyone they can pidgeonhole. Finally, because the deadwood just wants to be left alone to play some stupid downloaded Windows game (which probably was a trojan) they'll pretend they're really busy to the boss and you won't be able to get ANYONE to agree to let you build anything, even if it would make the whole department more efficient.
The whole system is completely, hopelessly, irrepairably FUBAR. It's a clusterfuck of legendary proportions. The only way to survive within it is to make yourself invisible and get your work done as efficiently as you can, while not getting drawn into any politics, never suggesting anything, and never volunteering for anything.
NO CARRIER
Too late...
Creativity?
Do you see the beauty in a well-designed UI? The pleasure of using a properly designed input screen? Is art a value proposition? YES! So what's the value proposition in IT? Greater value to the organization? Compliance with the laws and regs? Zero-Day Start?
If you do really, really well, and solve problems before anyone notices that a problem was coming, do you get recognition? Is that the creativity gap?
It's hard for me to see the creativity option in technical analysis. I respond to problems, resolve the issues, get my clients back to work. Even when I determine the root cause and send the developers off to fix the product, I feel more like the Angel of Death than the Deliverer. My manager encourages me to be 'proactive'. Like, do I ask my clients to break stuff so I can offer them the fix I already have waiting? Do I call them and ask why they aren't having trouble?
IT can be creative. When your CEO demands a logging tool so he can know who is surfing pr0n on work time, you can get creative and recommend first publishing a top-ten or top-hundred list of sites visited. Things measured improve...
Of course, those opportunities are rare. I suppose even Monet had slow days...
-rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I think that the IT "professionals" and their "managers" deserve each other. I'm generally disgusted with "managers" who are little more than "reporters" or "spinners" of activities to their management, preoccupied with administrative minutia, and the IT workers who are dweebs with no context, little personal integrity, no knowledge of IT and computing, and do little more than regurgitate the microsoft propaganda du jour, and whatever those ignorant, lazy and biased "journalists" publish in their technology fashion magazines. The IT whiners are no better than the managers they so liberally disparage because they lack the courage to get fired for "doing the right thing.". Managers and workers, stand up and be counted!
1. Many IT shops are in financial institutions or other businesses where systems are handling millions or billions of dollars. In that situation you don't want a whole lot of creativity. Every time you change code you introduce risk, and the more money at stake, the more risk-averse you are.
Part of the risk is stagnating and falling behind your competitors.
It used to be HR and the accounting departments that codified and enforced the corporate culture, now with HIPPA, SOX, ITIL, etc. the IT department has become the enforcement arm of culture control. IT was originally supposed to help productivity, accuracy, responsiveness, etc. Now it is the Taliban going around with cultural compliance as the foremost goal.
If you like oppressing people and "being right" then the new IT is for you - there is a big crop of IT people who enjoy making people's work life suck and then standing around smugly gloating that they do it to keep the corporation safe from lawsuits and fines and worse.
>> the IT career is shifting from a creative, motivating path to a bureaucratic one
>> With such perspective ahead, it will be no wonder if in a near future the best brains will go to finance, law or any other profession that may offer what IT used to do.
Please God make it not so !
With the world in the state it is right now, the last thing we need is creative lawyers and accountants !
'You're there to make sure the shit they bought runs'
Uh... right. Just like the bosses are there to make the company run efficiently, rather than build their own self-serving empires.
Management doesn't care about your hard work, it just wants you to appear to work hard. Put that creativity into a false facade of working hard, stress, and excuses for failure. It isn't like you will benefit from doing your job well.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I hear this as a statement denying Moore's Law -- or something similar. Granted, there is a lot of work using well-established techniques and tools, but if you think we have arrived at a steady state, I expect you are repeating the viewpoint of some people in the industry in the 70's, the 80's, the 90's and every decade since. We are no where near running out of opportunities for innovation in IT.
sig file missing --- (A)dlib, (R)etry, (F)ail?
> In being reactive not proactive, everything is a crisis.
Simple cause: Too few staff. No-one has time to be proactive if they're always trying to fix whatever broke yesterday.
Simple solution: Employ more good staff. Of course that's not easy either, we're usually seen as a business cost, rather than an asset - even in software companies, so headcount is near impossible to find. Even when you get headcount, the candidates are chosen at the first round by HR, and then filtered by PHB's. Such is life...
I think this article will do even more to ruin morale. My managers are always, ALWAYS asking "what are the other guys doing" or if they want to implement something, will say "And, you know, Hertz does it does it" or some crap like that. Once they learn moral sucks everywhere, why bother to improve it? One example of my Dibertness: I maintain Domino servers, but not apps. We have very sensitive data in the DBs. Somewhere, back before I started, it was decided that the server admins would not have application(database) access. This really sucks when we are trying to work on crashes or performance tuning. Never mind that I've been working with this app for a dozen years and I can find several ways to get at that data without working very hard. But I don't even need to do that, as I have the certifier AND access to all the IDs and passwords. I mentioned to my boss about how this was a real problem sometimes. "Oh, no. We really need to keep access separate (he knows we have the ids and certs) Besides, that was a big positive point for us in our last security audit." So, in order to satisfy an incorrect bullet point on a flawed security audit put out by a company that obviously, in this respect, hasn't a clue as to what they are doing, my job sucks a noticeable bit more. Dilbert enough for you?
Sounds like your friends either suck at their jobs, and thus don't expect to ever be able to get another one, or they are gluttons for punishment. If your bos expects you to work 70 hr weeks without compensation, or be on call 24/7, or do impossible projects without any money, you should just quit. There are always other jobs out there if you are good at what you do. It sounds to me like your friends will let people walk all over them and their managers know it. Why hire an extra employee when you can get the ones you have to work for free? I don't care if you make $10/hr or $1000/hr, if your boss treats you like shit, and has no respect for you, quit and find a job somewhere else. The only people who can't do that are the ones who managed to sneak their way into a job they weren't capable of doing in the first place, and they will do anything to keep it because they know ir probably won't happen again.
My org is
VP -> Director - 4 Managers -> 5 Managers -> Programmers
How screwed is that?
Worse, we spend 6-8 hours each week doing time tracking and work notes (all required)
combine with email and we move at the speed of sloths
What it takes is for the real upper management to realize just how convuluted the lower management is making the place. Combine that with gutting the middle layers and IT might stage a comeback
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Some people get disproportionate amounts of credits for stuff, and those tend to in two categories, people close to executives and people who get approached by customer executives first.
Too many times I've seen a technical person get shipped off for *months* to work on the technical details of achieving an unreasonable schedule. They'll work long stretches of 7 day work weeks at 10-12 hor days to make up for overly-optimistic schedules hundreds of miles from home and family. They come back to a pat on the back and maybe a 50 dollar gift card to a restaurant (though admittedly, their room/board/travel for the months away were covered..).
Meanwhile, the project manager who set the insane schedule, kept their ass comfortably in their desk chair for 9-5, M-F days, for the most part just asking the technical guy 'how close to done are you', and repeating that data to customer executives and their own management chain. This project manager gets promoted in recognition for their 'stellar work to make it happen'.
Same with sales to a degree. Some sales situations, particularly in technical sales, requires a fair amount of work. Other times, I've seen cases where a customer without provocation approaches sales and says "Here is a very large, specific set of stuff and I am buying from YOU, place the order". In making it happen, sometimes its a tall order and technical people are called in, working long weeks of long days far from home. At the end, a note comes out congratulating 'all who made it happen', and then lists everyone, the list more often than not includes some executive who barely has a vague notion about it happening at all and the salespeople who in some cases just did the equivalent of forwarding a customer note verbatim to a sales system. Technical people are just interchangeable cogs that were simply there regardless of the miracles they pull off.
People removed from the direct customer pay-out and from higher-level managers just frequently get overlooked. I've seen this in several companies and I learned a long time ago volunteering to overextend yourself just ends up screwing me and making some undeserving person look good, so I refrain from things that I know will end in travel and long hours. What little credit there is to be had for going 'above and beyond' for many doesn't scale up at all beyond putting in just a little extra effort.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Organizations have no loyalty to their IT departments. Vendors try to go over, around and through the IT department to show their goodies to the higher ups and throw out the buzzword of the day littering in-flight magazines and through a combination of lies, fear and half-truths try to get management to buy off on the IT trinket of the day. And if the IT department doesn't play along, they have a consulting department full of IT professionals who will be happy to implement it for them. Companies waste a phenomenal amount of time looking at sales presentations and dealing with vendors. It's amazing. Simplify.
The other thing I see is organizations being badgered and raped by a combination of Dell and Microsoft. So much overhead to support their stuff. You can't just run a decent firewall and push out disk images as you need them. There's firewall, anti-virus, backup servers, mail servers, management servers, web servers, database servers and the clients plod along at a level just above a calculator. Most home users have more freedom and functionality that most enterprise desktops I deal with all week. It's insane.
If I'm setting up an office tomorrow, there's not going to be one piece of Microsoft software on that network, anywhere. Not because I don't like them...I don't but that's besides the point...but because their stuff brings insecurity, liability and complexity. All the major software would be web-based or framed, open source databases, outsource email to Google, OpenOffice. All I want is an internet connection, Smoothwall and Ubuntu on slim desktops. No off the shelf software, custom web apps. If I can't build them I'll pay some of you to help out. Macs are welcome, one copy of Windows will be grounds for termination.
My network at home goes for months without any problems. We have more problems in a hour at the customer than I have in a year and they spend all their time working on their computers instead of working.
And dealing with vendors. I need to set up a phone system sales people can't get through. One of you help me with that part.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Exactly! It is all about the money. The IT workforce mostly consists of guys loving what they do. Guys loving what they do aren't so picky about what they earn, they just want to do the stuff they love to do. Couple that with a almost total disdain for unions from the younger generation and you get the situation you have now. In the corporate world, what matters is the money. If you earn 10$/hour then you are only worth 10$/hour, if you earn 50$, then you are worth 50$, good for you. But more importantly, the amount of respect and employment benefits you receive is linearly proportional to the amount of money you earn.
The corporate world knows this, executies knows this, unions knows this, young programmers DO NOT know this. Therefore, while their skills may in fact be the company's most valuable asset, they are treated like just a bunch of resources that you can swap in and out, whichever way you please. Everyone should know that that is complete BS. There is a world-wide SHORTAGE of skilled IT professionals.
I wish techies all over the world would ask themself "Why am I not getting a larger slice of the cake?" because that is what the question is all about.
Football Odds
Non-Alpha Nice guys eat whatever Walmart has on Special.
My work here is done.
Dude, if you or anyone you know works in such situations... get the HELL out of there. If you have any of those skills, you can start anywhere but there. I currently make around 70k and I work from 8-5 and I take 1 hour lunch break and scatter 'plumbing' breaks throughout the day. They know that if they lose me, they lose a lot of money because of all the custom work I am doing. They can't outsource me, because I'm the guy they outsourced to.
If they really know all those protocols, let the company outsource (or threaten to), they will probably end up being the contractor on site doing the job, but then outsourced. I worked direct for a company, got fired because I didn't want to bend to the advertising manager's every whim (very archaic and bureaucratic company, and he was good friends with the CIO), and I got the next week the offer from a company they were forced to outsource to, to go back there and continue the same job, I declined, but you see what happens when managers screw you. Oh yeah, it was a Fortune 500 company and due to this and many other reasons, they are in progress of being taken over by competitors.
Another job I did was sysadmin and I was there 2 years, again the CEO was Dilbert's pointy haired boss and everything had to be done whenever he felt like it. I left as did many others. Their whole helpdesk was replaced within a year after I left (I was the first and showed everyone that you CAN get a job elsewhere these days), their 'custom' programming team (6 persons; programmed a totally custom ERP system tying in to their server park, website and customer database) got together, quit simultaneously and started their own company and now the original company has to source the programming out to them, they do whatever they want on their own pace and get paid big bucks for it.
I constantly get calls and a lot more e-mails with offers because I have the knowledge. Skilled IT workers are in demand, most outsourcing projects failed horribly (what good is an internal IT department that doesn't/barely understand the native language and is located in India) and companies are hiring massively to build up their IT departments again although most of them are on contracts these days. I love being on contract, you get to do a job you like, you do it good and nobody is going to oppose you because you're expensive ($58/hour or more). If you deliver, you can stay longer and you don't have to put up with any of the salaried bullsh*t, because if they call you at night, or ask you to do some extra, you ask, should I put this as overtime (rate x 2.5) or can I come in later tomorrow.
But really, I'm not putting up with the 24/7 crap (unless I get paid big bucks for it and I don't have a partner to live with) or unpaid overtime anymore. They can say you're going to be outsourced, but actually, these days YOU are in demand, those threats are so 2000.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
and passed up for other jobs as a result. Many companies are scared of techies who know more than the little box they expect them to fit in. They know they'll become unhappy fast, and an unhappy tech is a dangerous tech. It's scary when companies don't want people with to much skill.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I still have 2 good friends in IT. They both work 60-70+/wk. One travels 75%+. The other is officially on call 24x7. He estimates that he gets a call between 2-6AM at least 4 times a week. He is one of 2 people managing more than 600 users, Windows 2003 AD, Cisco Call Manager, Cisco IPCC, more than 40 PRI circuits, and 3 DS3 WAN circuits. These 2 guys manage the routers, switches, firewall, everything. When presented with the impossibility of these 2 people actually handling the workload managements response was "Sorry, if you don't like it, we already talked with xyz outsourcing corp, you're lucky to have this job".
Look, they should get one thing straight: Managers BLUFF. I know one employee at my company that was severely underpaid, asked for a raise but they didn't want to give her anything at all. If they'd given her a few grand then, all would be well. Three weeks later, she had a new job and put in her resignation. Then the fun started when they realized they needed her really badly. She got a raise of about 14000$. Yes, she was that underpaid.
I also know of a guy which pretty much built the branch office of an IT support company from scratch, he was both the manager and expert tech rolled into one. He learned that one of his subordinates (hired centrally) made 7000$ more than him, with less skill and less responsibilities. He had a nervous breakdown when he found out, got an instant backdated payraise for a year and the big bosses were like "fuck fuck fuck we can't lose him".
Know your market price and charge it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
My biggest headache at work is the nontechnical people who are mid level managers in the IT department. Some of them come from Finance, others from other non-technical departments in the company.
So what do they do? Instead of running a team like most normal managers they have to meddle to prove their worth and validate their existance. So they do dumb shit like randomly reassign staff, change priorities every two months, and other PHB-style behaviors. They have no technical competancy so they cant help out in the work, so they overcompensate and do dumb stuff.
I would have hoped that these types of people would have filtered out of the IT department by natural attrition (new companies, etc), but they havent and it bothers me.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
"In any heirarchy, an individual will rise to his or her own level of incompetence, then remain there."
That was an amazing, enlightening book and I've never looked at anything the same since. You wonder why you're surrounded by idiots? Read that book... And never take that final fatal promotion!
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Yeah,I've gone through a few managers in my day. One absolutely stellar case evoked *incredible* morale (worked to compensate people in accordance with effort, worked to make sure workload was distributed, proactively monitored things mainly to ensure no one was on an unsustainable burnout path for any significant period of time). On top of being liked by employees (or because of it), he led it from new and a trickling revenue stream to a half-billion dollar per year thing after two years. Then some asshole executive demanded that something be done that our group deemed a bad idea likely to blow up in our faces, and our manager took that opinion forward with specific pitfalls to be addressed before it wouldn't blow up too badly. Manager was ignored, blew up in their faces, and when he pointed out the documentation he had brought forward earlier predicting and warning about pretty much exactly what went wrong, and pointed out the executive who signed off to dismiss our recommendation, the executive in question blasted the manager out of management over the fiasco and has since been promoted. Never before and never since have I seen such a good leader who actually made me respect what a manager *could* mean and how one could *actually* be worth something.
The guy who replaced him rattled off meaningless buzzwords and made a highly motivated effective team completely devastated. He moved desk assignments around pointlessly without explanation, imposed bizarre escalation paths to complicate every little discussion, ceased all motivational measures going on before him, and stopped working to get incentives for his employees. Basically the strategy was obviously wave his hands to look busy, make noise about how much money is coming in, but keep his head down by avoiding asking for money or anything at all that would potentially bother his manager, and waiting to be pulled to the next level before everything would hit the fan. The department ran on essentially inertia without growing meaningfully, but the manager got credit for a half-billion dollar effort, and promoted despite being utterly crappy as a leader (unliked by employees *and* unable to milk the group for meaningful work, usually a manager can at least do one of those). BTW, along the way the amount of money that could be fairly taken credit by our group declined for obvious reasons, but the manager propped it up by claiming credit for loosely related work from other groups that we helped a little along the way. Any person with half a brain at a second glance could see how his trick was being worked just from his damned presentation slide, yet it worked for him.
And yes, the number of "Wallys" has increased dramatically (even people who were doing great with leadership are left to wander as "Wally"s now). Also, people who make plenty of noise about what they do and the value they put in without actually *doing* anything has increased, and those people get a lot more credit and such than those who actually *do*. Cynicism among everyone else not merely dicking around or beating their chests is at an all time high, motivation on the ground. This is more like everywhere I end up working.
I can think of no logical reason how it ends up like this. I could understand running out of steam, but the effort/reward system seemed to just encourage a potentially highly successful group slitting its own throat.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The simple answer is go to work for a company that is exploding in size and caliber, I recently started with such a company, and while there is some busy work, which by the way there will always be, the managers are too busy growing the business to micromanage, they give me a project with a few general guidelines and let me dive in...it is a thrill, I quite hunestly cant beleive that they would pay me so handsomely for this!
Or like me who posts sometimes, a few even to +5, but doesn't have an account.
Amen pavera. IT will suck the life out of you and then suck the marrow from your bones. If you like living on the plantation, and I don't mind in the Masta's house, go work in IT.
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
I did quit :) I'm happy. But in the last 5 years or so, every IT job I've interviewed for or had friends in has been similar. If you want to make more than 50k/yr at least in the Utah market, for IT, you work insane hours. If you can program (I can, my other friends don't) you can get a better job, but pure IT pretty much sucks.
I agree with this completely. Every IT manager / CIO should have to read Peopleware.
In no other job are you asked to do the equivalent of tracing through 10000 lines of code to track a potential threading problem while working around people answering phones and having loud conversations about TV shows. Meanwhile your manager keeps asking you what a thread is and why it takes so long to find one because he needs to present a 10 word summary of the problem to his manager and hasn't programmed since 1973..
After 4 days when you finally find the problem and explain that it's a three line code fix, you're not given the slightest bit of credit because as we know, IT workers are a commodity and anyone could have solved that problem. Even the guy who created the threading issue by putting a static PreparedStatement in a servlet to make it 'efficient' could have fixed it. It said on his resume that he knew JDBC..
Good IT workers are rare. Our office is filled with people with 10 years of experience in XML who try to emulate transactions by writing delete statements for inserted rows because they haven't heard of distributed transactions. They code everything according to 'design patterns' making it a nightmare to debug. Eventually you're the one who gets stuck with the problem of figuring out why credit card transactions are being credited to the wrong customers. Management doesn't see the difference between you and Mr. Design Patterns, except that he gets all his projects in on time and you're always late. The time you spend cleaning that dung heap of design patterns gets charged to 'General Maintenance' and is invisible...
If IT people built cars, they would randomly start reversing on the highway and about every 10 minutes the steering wheel would get stuck while the car tried to figure out what it should do next. Sometimes it would just explode without any reason. Upper management would send a retail manager to put together a team to fix the problem.
Coding is just as much of a thinking job as research.. sometimes it's easy because the problem is simple and well known (power cable not plugged in). Sometimes it's esoteric, and then you really need good IT people with a breadth of knowledge and excellent problem solving skills - you know, the ones you drove away with idiotic management and commoditisation.
I totally agree with you, that is why I got out of IT though, I have programming as well as IT skills, and I enjoy programming more, and there are A LOT more 8-5 programming jobs than 8-5 IT jobs at least in my market. I agree that my friends should totally bail, but they haven't yet.
i wouldn't say that we're running out of opportunities for innovation either. It's just that we've got most of the key innovation for dealing with the familiar issues and problems taken care of. We will be a while digesting what we've got before we figure out the next big problem to fix.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Dilbert resonates with people because they know, intuitively, that the policies that the PHB manifests are the wrong policies by which to manage.
And yet, most of us have 'Dilbert moments' every day, when the broken policies and measures of current business force us into behaviors that we know to be wrong.
Wrong for the business, wrong for the customer and wrong for us.
If you want to have an IT department that doesn't suck, or even a whole company that doesn't suck, you have start by to correcting the policies and measures by which it is run.
Goldratt's Theory of Constraints offers a good set of tools for doing this. Unfortunately, he exposes so many contradictions between what people do today and what they ought to do that most companies can't make the many paradigm shifts that are necessary in order to exploit it.
And unless you can reach the very top of the company, and by this I mean the Board of Directors, you're hosed. You may be able to swim against the current for a while, but eventually, the broken policies, measures and behaviors of most organizations will have their way with you, too.
John SambrookCommon Sense Systems, Inc.
http://www.common-sense.com/
From TFA:
I'd say he hit the nail on the head. In the US at least, many, many managers lack even basic understanding of IT issues. Since they don't know what's possible with technology (at a deep level), they don't know the relative risks or rewards of trying to solve problems with technolgy. So they don't say no to the projects that are expensive and stupid, and they don't push for projects that could be very beneficial.
I believe that If we (IT) developed more of our own into managers, our lives would be much better.
Perhaps it is just a result of numbers. As the field grows, there is more an more boring work to do, in addition to the creative, interesting work. The first guy who planted a crop was probably pretty excited about it; the second guy was hungry.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Clearly - according to your logic it must be Apache since it is so prevalent! You can read the gory details at:
e y.html/
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_surv
Shortly after graduating from college and going to work for what was then the #1 computer company in the world, (hint - Microsoft didn't exist, and yes I'm that old), I found exactly the same things. I even knew of people who intentionally designed in obtuse bugs just so they could be seen to fix them later. Problem free implementations, both hardware and software, were viewed as easy because there were no problems. When talented and effective people left, the resulting problems were never correlated back to their loss. It was just, "Oh we have some problems, don't know why." Thirty years later, things are pretty much the same, there's just more of it.
IT has changed since the days of the late 90s where people who could spell "TCP/IP" would easily get a job. It was a good industry, but so was meat packing, auto work, and textiles. Now, its yet another diluted low-pay industry.
.wav files of a cell door slamming shut when encrypting data than actual security engineering. I have seen programs that claimed to have 4096-bit RSA encryption actually use 64 RSA keys of a 64-bit length. Of course, in reality, this adds up to basically 70 bits of total protection (akin to locking a vault door with a lot of tiny suitcase locks, and selling people on it saying the added diameter of all the shackles is bigger than most vault door locks.) However, people will happily buy crap like this if it looks "secure", rather than stuff that will actually withstand more than a trivial attack.
1: IT has been hit by US federal regulation heavily. Before, I could grab a Mac with MacHTTP, and have a very secure website that would be resistant to almost anything. Now these days, its not how secure the OS is, its how many little certifications it has. Get a security breach, and your OS doesn't have the cute little FIPS or Common Criteria stickers? Expect a long time in Club Fed. So, pretty much, its Microsoft or nothing for the servers and desktops these days, except in large companies who have battalions of legal staff to keep them out of trouble, or small companies with niche markets.
2: Its common for companies to pitch employees out just to hire I9 foreign workers... the employees not outsourced to other countries. So, for the knowledge it takes to be a true IT professional (and not just a clicky monkey), the pay is insanely low for the time put in.
3: The environment has changed. In the last 1990s, there were relatively few hackers who were criminals. These days, hacking is just another crime, like muggings, cement boots, neckties, and extortion.
4: People are a lot more schizo and paranoid these days, while being absolutely clueless to real threats. Security theater is the norm, and people are happy to buy a program that has the big lock icon and the cute
5: Smaller companies are almost impossible to get off the ground because of the cost of entry due to all the pointless patents. As soon as someone notices a company is making money, its hit by patent trolls, and that company is either forced to be bought out by a larger company (with the legal teams), or forced out of business.
I work as a high-end consultant, and my first programming job was doing maintenance.
Guess what? I won't hire anyone who hasn't done O&M on software, for the very reason you stated. And the instant I detect any hint of derision towards maintaining software - the interview is OVER. I may be polite and continue to ask questions, but I won't put any thought into them because the interviewee is DEAD.
Oh, I have to beat clients away with a stick...
Guido von Guido -- Obviously, if you compare a well-run creative solution to a poorly-run noncreative solution, the latter will not seem as good. But all else being equal, the creative solution, by virtue of a change taking place, will be more risky. Financial institutions would rather stick with COBOL systems built in the 1980s than take on risk. In fact, they DO stick w/ COBOL systems built in the 1980s, rather than using the latest spiffy Java-based reporting solution.
This is a stupid cycle.
1- Clueless manager hires cheap person to reduce costs.
2- Cheap person is not qualified enough to do the job.
3- Cheap person ends up doing whatever the manager tells him in order to keep his job.
4- Cheap person becomes spineless.
5- Cheap person becomes manager, being on good terms with all the other managers.
I know, -5 troll/flamebait. I moderated another thread, and felt like abusing the anonymity.
Erm... actually, I work on Wall Street (hence, ACing) and all our reporting systems are written in Java, and are just subjected to brutal regression and unit testing. Nobody here even knows what COBOL is.
Jeez, how many times does this have to be said? THE PLURAL OF 'ANECDOTE' IS NOT 'DATA.' You worked for a shitty company, or had shitty bosses, or both. I.T. is not a dream job--but hell, MOST jobs are not dream jobs--but the I.T. department where I work (1200 people, maybe 50-75ish in I.T.?) is NOTHING like what you describe. Don't let your experience lead you to say al I.T. jobs suck. I know a few unhappy programmers.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
When you have a cost center, you try to optimize it away. minimize costs, so that it impacts the bottom line as little as possible.
Typically no revenue gets recognized by an IT department. They "just" keep things working, not entirely unlike the way janitors keep the floor clear.
I suspect it's that very logic that makes execs think it's a good idea to outsource IT, in the same way many already outsource janitorial services.
On the other hand, software developers are usually part of a business unit, that recognizes some kind of revenue. Things are a lot smoother when execs can see on a dashboard that you appear to be generating more revenue than you cost to them.
That said, if you really enjoy doing IT stuff as opposed to development stuff.. well, it takes all kind.
.. And never take that final fatal promotion! I'd just like to get within 2 or 3 promotions of that final promotion!!!The cesspool just got a check and balance.
For larger companies, and depending on the system, this can make a lot of sense. However, this should not always be the solution. I know from personal experience -- I worked at a small company for about 22 months. We had designers/developers and we had operations. Operations was responsible for staying late to babysit EOD processes and for being oncall to monitor batch jobs. If errors arose, they would need to fix them, sometimes with the help of developers. Two MAJOR problems: 1. Unless you designed the process/software, you didnt know how to handle exception scenarios, especially when an application is first rolled out. *Dont* say anything about documentation, we all know that documentation is fluff or a year old in 95% of cases. So basically, the only viable solution was to hunt-and-peck for solutions that developers could have zeroed into within minutes. 2. Unless you had to get up at 1am and fix your process, you (as a developer) had little incentive to create robust processes/software with proper logging and exception handling. Naturally, software quality issues would result since they would be someone elses' problem. So with that, I would say that in many cases, expecially for smaller groups/organizations, engineering and operations should be handled by the same person. Of course, the person should be given less work seeing that they are now split across two roles.
There is only one way to stop this, and it has to come from the top. The company that i work for (I'll leave to your imagination) is on of the few truly dynamic places to work I have ever seen in action. From the lowest guy there to the CIO we will sit around and have vigerious debate about where we should go,and how to get there. And the new guy's ideas are just as valid as anybody in the company, he may have to defend them a little better then others, but everyone needs to prove themselves first. But after the debates ideas are formed and run with...by everyone. There is no muscle pushing about I've been here longer, I hold this title, etc... just a bunch of people that start move'n in the same direction at the same goal. It can be an awesome site to see.
Look, they should get one thing straight: Managers BLUFF. I know one employee at my company that was severely underpaid, asked for a raise but they didn't want to give her anything at all. If they'd given her a few grand then, all would be well. Three weeks later, she had a new job and put in her resignation. Then the fun started when they realized they needed her really badly. She got a raise of about 14000$. Yes, she was that underpaid.
She _stayed_ ?!
Hi. I would like to know, how did you make the transition from IT tech to programmer?
Did you work on open source projects for the exposure and experience or did you just learn to code on your own and show up for the interviews?
And do you think that being from IT made it easier or harder for you to secure that first programming job?
How do you prove to the interviewer that you're a worthy hire when you might not have done
any programming in your previous IT roles? I see very few job postings for entry-level programmers these days.
Reason I'm asking is because I would like to move out from IT in a couple of years and would like some advice from someone who's done it.
It looks like PBS NOW agrees with you.
Did you go to Business School?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
The massive company's IT I work for is hugely Dilberville.
One new hire computer major asked "Do you actually code?
All I ever do is manage projects/contactors/folks in India..."
If you want to code, don't look at corporate IT.
If you must go corporate go to R&D.
Better yet start your own company from your parents basement.
Skip the immediate cash of corporate servitude and find
a good problem to solve with your coding.
I am 32 now. I believe that i had the great luck of beeing born at the time - maybe a few years to late to observe the rise of microprocessors. When I was 7 years i started with simple electronics. Years from posessing a computer i read a small article about how a microprocessor works. I did not get it fully, but what i understood was not universes away from the real thing at that time. At that time i got a computer (12 years) you would at home typically buy a Commodore 64 or 128. I got one Commodore 128. This is a funny machine. One of the best features is the so called "user port". You have eith IO lines which just ouput a digital signal, freely programmable. I think that i experienced no similar thrill ever in my life than when constructin a cheap, stupid light sensor and measuring with it the 50Hz noise of the lamps in my room (Now i am a physiscist and am good at constructing data acquisition systems).
Nowadays, people have a camera built into their laptops, mobile phones, computers. Even the cheapes webcam hasa data tranfer rate 100000 higher than this light sensor. Howver, even with the most expensive webcams you may not reproduce this measurement. And that is the core of the problem. It is, without buing a microcontroller or additional hardware impossible to "just play". Instead of having LDA #1;STA $IOADDR;LDA #0;STA $IOADDR; for making a single pulse on the user port, you probably have to click-click on the activeX control (a standard defined in a thick manual) which came with the proprietary kit. This is no fun. I had more fun when i played with lego than when i got a ready made thing.
So the problem, that once computers and it attracted people who built and constructed things; sometimes proofs of concepts - you stick twi wires into you computer at take the stupid diode on the top of your monitor. It is a natural process that things are taken over by people who are more like users. Actually I experienced this one or more times with proofs of concepts which I did when i worked i a group supporting the webmaster at our university. When i sat in 1998 in a system programming course in university i was astonished how uninterested the average IT first semester students where in how to use system calls in C. To point that out: I LOVE programming languages other than C. However it is good to know what will be expensive. A simple example: to make an access over the network is ok. If you however do something semantical which requires waiting for a response, you kill performance (Everybody having connected a LED and a light sensor to the user port of his C64 knows that the light sensor does never react BEFORE the LED is turned on. Depending how cheaply you built it it might react milliseconds after that).
As an example there are three approaches to the problem if you find out that you database is too slow:
1) Speed up your hardware (chosen by people who do not undertand and are not intersete in the fact that they dont)
2) Change to a DBMS which handles if better (chosen by the majority of "dilbertized" workers, who understand that they don not understand)
3) do it better and sell it to people of point 2). Bo that by taking a cup of tea, a pen and not talking for how long it takes. Do not write a report before you understood the problem.
Nowadays, even point 3) gets more dilbertized. This is a cultural effect which beliefs in ISO9000 processes to be the best tool for everything. If they are only the future can tell.
+5 Insightful?
I remember when slashdot used to be filled with technically-savvy people instead of the angsty put-upon twatfornothings. Christ, IT's no different now than it ever was--it's got good managers/programmers/admins, mediocre managers/programmers/admins and bad managers/programmers/admins.
You obviously had no grasp on this conversation. Perhaps you were maddened by some bestial need to turn this thread into a personal vendetta against me. I can't possibly think of any other explanation for your complete lack of comprehension.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say your clinical paranoia clutters your ability to express yourself clearly (through mechanisms such as simple disagreements looking like personal attacks to you) and that makes it difficult to see what you're saying. I don't mean this as an insult. Your writing is quite clear and profound in many instances. You are obviously intelligent and thoughtful. At the same time, I feel you need professional help.
I spent 22 years in IT. My goal was, like many system admins, to be invisible. A properly managed system that does not attract attention but "just works as it should" is, by an IT definition, an excellent system. Was I or any other system admin rewarded for this? Hell no! Was the guy whose server room crashed regularly punished? Hell no, he got promoted, for being good at handling emergencies. Emergencies created by his own lack of foresight. That's why IT is dead.
Unfortunately, management today, in every company I've worked with, has different ideas. In management, accounting, what-have-you, if you get noticed, THEN you're good. You have to do something to be noticed. Something big. Something flashy. That's not how IT works. The only time something big and flashy happens in IT is when the UPS explodes and the server room catches fire. That is not a good result.
This is, however, the type of shit that IT outsourcing companies have to do in order to be sure management thinks they are worth the money they are getting paid. I've been asked to fake emergencies (usually just before a budget review) so that our response to that emergency can get us a pat on the back. I learned dozens of ways to make a server look like lightning had hit it without pointing to deliberate sabotage. I basically stopped caring about doing "good" IT, and only started to care about revenue. That's when my career took off and I finally understood the nature of business, where honesty and ethics are a liability and get you fired. Twice, in my case. I'm a slow learner. Now I'm trying to find my moral compass again. But at least I can afford to do so.
When I worked directly for that company that outsourced its IT, I went for at most 3 years without a single server crash. Suddenly, they put servers in MY server room that were almost guaranteed to crash weekly.
Management loved it!
Soon as they saw systems go down, they'd see how fast we got them back up again (easy, when you'd planned or predicted most of the outages in the first place) and just throw more money at the outsourcing company. The order of the day was no longer prevention, but quick fixes to problems. It made us look "better" in the minds of management, and management bought it. Hook, line and sinker. In several companies.
Management that didn't have a clue that each crash actually cost them much more money in lost time and lost sales. Not a fucking clue! When the techs tried to tell them, using management language and sound financial analysis, they still only listened to their counterparts at the various vendor companies. Namely the lying scum salespeople. Not their own techies. I understood why later: because management are by training and experience incapable of understanding honesty and good intentions. When I worked as pre-sales (as in, after I sold my soul and my career took off), I saw exactly how the sales people would lie, cheat and steal to get that contract, then hand off their promises to the poor sap who had to implement it. When said poor sap had to go back and say that what the sales rep had promised either didn't exist or could not be done (I know it couldn't be done and I'd told the sales rep, but he changed the message when talking to the client and I kept quiet), it wasn't the sales rep who got blamed, it was the post-sales installation guy!! Meanwhile, the sales rep still got his nice fat commission, I got my cut, and the poor bastard who had to try to install that box of twigs we sold never got a promotion.
THAT is why IT is dead, folks. You can't manipulate or lie to a machine. It either gets the correct input or it dies. Most technically oriented people I've met are also honest. Often brutally honest. But honesty is a liability in today's business world. So the mindset that makes a good tech is the total opposite of the mindset that allows someone to get ahead in todays "business economy". That's good capitalism folks. No ethics. Honesty sucks. Whoever has the biggest bankroll wins.
So IT, good IT, is by definitio
-- Motto: If it doesn't make sense, always follow the money.
- googlesyndication.com
- 2mdn.net
- intellitxt.com
- ziffdavisinternet.com
- serving-sys.net
- doubleclick.net
Konqueror causes KDE to crash when visiting this website. I think it's time to quit posting eweek.com articles here. Some of them are interesting, but it's just not worth it to deal with all those stupid advertising scripts trying to compromise my computer and install spyware.Financial institutions would rather stick with COBOL systems built in the 1980s than take on risk. In fact, they DO stick w/ COBOL systems built in the 1980s, rather than using the latest spiffy Java-based reporting solution.
It's a matter of taking on risk, but also a matter of nothing gained. Java is just today's COBOL - a pedestrian, generic business apps language for the masses of unexceptional, non-technical "developers". A cross-OS Visual Basic. Their existing systems run just fine without objects. Java is and was born "old tech", despite those lacking perspective who use labels like "latest" and "spiffy" in referring to it. Java and C# and VB.Net are just rehashed, dumbed-down C++, which itself dates back to 1983. What's needed is something genuinely new to go mainstream. Better to wait for a new technology to come along that actually affords them some benefit.
Actually, you sound like some sort of communist. Like the manager of factory in East Berlin or something. Where it is all about massaging the numbers to look good on paper, even if it isn't sustainable, just to meet the numbers required by the overseers.
The fact is that management often doesn't act in the best interests of a company, especially when it comes to issues they don't understand. This is why having "yes men" is bad. That hurt communism, and it hurts capitalism. Management can do things that look good on paper, but are disastrous in the real world. Whatever happened to excellence? If you really want to support the interests of a company, it behooves you to have smart and creative people, who have the courage to tell management that they are making bad decisions. Workers who mindlessly obey and don't offer contrary opinions are not in the interests of a company or the shareholders.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I'm NOT saying be careless. But there's that quote "chance favors the prepared mind" and having more than one way to solve a problem ready and tested is being prepared.
I misread the parent's title as "Mutual Masturbation." I insist that someone post a comment with this title and make heavy use of the circle jerk as a metaphor for corporate IT activity of any kind. Thanks in advance.
Uncreative may equally well mean choosing the wrong programming language; choosing a heavy design which would suit a large program but is overkill for this small one; not bothering to think hard about the requirements; choosing to create a GUI application for a task that really needs to be scripted; and so on.
It happens all the time, and it generates more lines of code and worse software.
Now I purely develop software. I'm happier now than I've been in 8 years. I only work 40hrs/wk
I am a developer. Got a regular work week for me?
Seriously, a 40-hr work week is just a fantasy where I work. The only people that DO work 40 hours is our IT staff. The developers get hammered. It's funny how different our situations are. Only...I can't bring myself to laugh at the moment.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
Most of the new guys I see appearing in the field want only to administer a NT domain. They are usually so anal that the network ends up being almost useless. No right-click allowed, no C: drive for you and all preferences deleted at logoff. Eventually you'll get a script that'll reconnect all your printers at logon. They also have no appreciation of fault isolation. Their only fix is wholesale replacement of units. They push the latest trendy stuff to make their CVs look good rather than furthering their clients' working conditions. Anything that can't run the latest Windows is junked and replaced. All this and a MCSE. And their name in Legion. They are arrogant so that their clients won't dare to press them too closely. Many jobs don't get done because the skills are lacking; but the client is told that there are more important jobs to be done first.
And the upper-level management often gives the task to the mid-level management to figure out ways to save money. What happens is that in order to save money they are cutting off investments in development. Cutting down on personnel and then hope that everything still will continue to work. In most cases the functionality will remain but the wear and tear on the remaining resources will increase and get closer to breakdown. The effect of this may nit be visible until after a year or two when the lack of maintenance and motivation has fallen in which case the sector can be deemed to lack profits and is therefore shut down.
And to have the mid-level management to figure out that they are the problem isn't even remotely possible.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The problem is with the schools..
Kids go to school, get good grades and think they are smart.. when they are not.
from the original article.. appears to be an inhouse tech, upset that they are required to do their job and do it well. and the only reason to be upset is they cannot do it well.
The learning and grading 'curve' implemented in US schools is churning out incomplete individuals and throwing them into a field. it's all about money in the schools. when everyone is failing.. lower the grading curve.. do it over and over enough and soon you are churning out idiots with degrees.. you can see this in many different fields let along IT.
If your a good System administrator.. you will NOT be putting out fire after fire..
because you will have things in order..
reasoned and understood, there are scenarios where an overhead makes the final descisions, and wrong ones at that.. trickling down to fires popping up.
but this is not a problem when the IT personel are schooled in speach and business as well as Geek knowledge.. because they will then possess the faculties to convince peers and higher ups, that they should be the man/woman for 'the job'. 'the job' being the one that includes making descisions.
when I say schooled in speech and business.. you can show your uppers, exact reasoning for your madness in your 'creativity' of choices for change, charts/graphs/statistics and also real people as witness testimonials of your idea, and that it works are needed to be expressed to the descision makers.. if your idea is rock solid and backed by "good education" and embodied in a sound minded (not winey) IT individual.. the job door will open up.. so will responsibility..
If you can't take the heat.. get out of the kitchen.. try your hand at something else.. and let the company hire a true professional.. I'm not trying to step on toes or hurt anyones feelings.. but truth is truth.. there are rock solid methods.. and that's what companies want..
if you can't give that.. they will look for someone else who will.
if you hate fighting the fires that spring up.. your not doing your job right in the first place, or there would be no fires..
savvy?
Why does this (parent) get troll when GP gets +5 insightful. "Troll" asks a very good question. If GP did, it would be interesting to find out where. I did, for 2 semesters and dropped out b/c for me it was a waste of time, but from a pedagogical standpoint the program was very good. Concentration on understanding group behaviour, team building over heirarchy, sustainable business practices vs shortsighted bottom line optimization, etc. In my experience the big company suffers from too many entrenched good ol boys who are not anxious to be displaced by younger business types who want to bring a more creative team environment to the job. Mod parent up . . .
Ten years ago the Internet was getting on for 20 years old ; I (not in any respect an IT person, except for using computers all day every day to do my non-computing job) had been on the net for about 5 years and was considering the costs of getting a broadband connection (128kbps, would have cost around 3 days pay/month ; I didn't get broadband until 3 years ago) ; I had recently got my first mobile phone, and I'd taken to asking people I interacted with for an email-address and a mobile number in that order ; most people I knew had an email address (hell, even my father had one, though Mum still hasn't) ; infrastructure was growing rapidly, and lots of issues didn't have clear-cut solutions.
At around that time I was also seeing people writing exactly this sort of message, though I think it was a while before I discovered Slashdot so it must have been in some earlier forum.
The Internet hasn't changed much in that time, nor has IT. It was mostly fire-fighting then ; dealing with lusers who alternate between wrecking their machines, wrecking their work systems and trying to get porn at work by end-running the IT department. All that has changed is that the machines are faster and the files are bigger.
One thing has gone downhill, I suppose : the Bastard Operator From Hell hasn't been allowed to use his lime pits for years. Booo.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
That's why I began a part-time science degree and now have a job supporting HPC. Much for interesting and fulfilling than protecting websites from themselves.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
That's exactly why I wrote about being uncreative for the right reason. I'm well aware that there are lots of wrong reasons.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
You are aware that it's the PHBs that are gonna do the firing.
Can you imagine a thing more scary?
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
If somebody asks me to work unreasonable amounts of time without proper compensation they will get nothing from me.
Could I be fired? Maybe, I have never been and during most of my carrer I have worked strictly 9 to 5 (with exception of my early years, when I was young and stupid by extension). In many localities (and here I am talking countries and continents) if you are fired for not fullfilling the fantasist expectations of your boss, you bcan build a case for unfair dismissal and have the legal ass of your employer served in a silver plate.
Just say no, there is no excuse if you aren't when the situation merits it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Or where else do you get those friends?
My little anecdotes: I left my first job when I did not get a pay raise I was promised on time. I left my second job when I requested compensation for too much travelling and it was not given. I left my third job when we became clearly understaffed.
If you don't have the leeway to quit whenever a situation is really bad that means you are not managing your carrer correctly, specially during the last 15 years when highly capable people have been on high demand most of the time.
And you can always say no. If they threaten to replace you, dare them to do it, while circulating your CV and making sure you have enough saving to last 60 months unemployed.
In my experience bosses and companies will not do this with somebody that is clearly showing his worth almost killing himself in the work. Training somebody to pick up an stressful job is not a light task, any reasonable person will avoid such situation like the bubonic pest it really is for a bussiness.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
People, even your boss :-) , can learn from their mistakes, there could be many untangibles to a job that makes it worth keeping it....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That's what tends to happen in a large organization. Small organizations are usually more efficient and more meritocratic, thanks to the fact that everyone knows each other's abilities and responsibilities. Scaling those features into large organizations is possible, but hard, and usually fails...and we end up with Dilbertized workplaces.
Honestly, if you don't like the game start your own company and make your own rules, nobody is stopping you.
But big companies make millions, or billions, for a reason: they are more efficient.
You don't like it? Fair enough, but your opinions are not truisms, the organization of the companies may be boring and not that exciting, but it gets many people decent salaries and interesting posibilities out of their working lives.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You can do lots of IT without having an eye on profits, but clearly the topic of the article is about the situations in a bussiness environment.
:-P
SO I declare your post, and by extension mine, off topic
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I am ready to compete in skills for now, and in price when necessary (I don't need 3 computers, 3 MP3 players, expensive hollidays abroad, etc).
Bring it on, I will not try to stup economics by willing economic realities to go away.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Alas, on the other side of the problem lies the "we only grok technology" developers, who don't understand the business side at all. Yeah, none of them do; it's crazy.
You can tell them the project has a budget, that it's bleeding money for every extra week they spend tinkering with their from-scratch templating language, and they just look at you. They say "yeah, about 3 months" for *every* possible project proposal, then just bitch about you when you try to explain how you the customer isn't paying for 6 extra months. Or some of them say "that'll take 3 years" when you show them the proposal for a simple website.
They want to be paid 6 figures for the "magic" they do, even if they spend all day browsing the free fonts online for the subtitles on your contacts page, and the company website has been returning a 404 for the checkout page for 3 days now. You can lay out the figures for them -- "we earn only an extra $10K a year through the website you're managing for us, and maybe an extra $20K of our other business comes through it... but you want us to hire a DBA to help you out?" -- and they say "yeah -- I don't have time for all that database stuff! oh, and maybe some SEO company can help those numbers of yours.. that's not my problem."
If only even a few of them were different.
Sorry man, but this just sounds like a lot of whining. You were modded up as "Interesting" because your story isn't something that a lot of Slashdotters have heard, i.e. it's the exception. You might be exaggerating, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that your story is 100% accurate. If that's the case, your friends to grow a pair and find a new job. I despise it when people incessantly bitch around the water cooler but never forcefully speak up to management or put the effort into finding a new job.
And don't give me the lame excuse that *every* job in your area has been outsourced and there aren't any jobs available. Yes, gone are the days that you could be a break/fix screwdriver operator or a help desk "tech" and make $60k/yr. But there are plently of organizations out there that desperately need experienced and competent IT folk. If your friends have evolved their skill sets with the changing technology, then they're golden. If not, then they ought to seriously consider a career change. But I don't have much pity for people who bitch about what amounts to indentured servitude when they're voluntarily employed.Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
The problem is that IT has been taken over by Business School Product. They have no grasp of science, no feel for aesthetics, they only have feel for next quarters numbers and covering their ass.
I think the key issue is that most businesses at that point are on life support or only do just enough to get by with employees too unmotivated to find work elsewhere.
Which is why you won't see any of those companies ever exploding as an IPO and making millions for the founders.
Many people don't realize that companies who do see business as science and art as well as uphold IT will often dance circles around their competitors who begrudgingly don't even understand the technology they sell to their customers.
Of course marketing does help, but obviously Microsoft, Sun, Apple, and Google didn't get to where they were by simply catering to the shareholders quarter revenue reports. Yeah Microsoft's marketing practices are very dubious in a sense and there were technological issues with their products but from my understanding their IT and their technical knowledge of their employees was considerably outstanding compared to other brick and mortar companies.
Of course any company can change...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
You got it backwards. Information Technology wasn't taken over by Biz School product. It was always a PART of the business school product. And an expensive part at that (hopefully, it paid for itself, otherwise, we are all out of jobs). If you think otherwise, you don't understand who feeds (pays) who here.
/. types would learn the business skills necessary to run a business (and I mean the MBA level skills), then THEY could do the job better. Business and the business world is complex. It's easy to make fatal mistake and lots of people/companies do. Until you know to run your own business, you depend on them. Let me say that again - you depend on them (for jobs at least, and in the context of replying to the parent)
I get a little tired of the MBA/Biz school bashing here.
If
There is a naievete in your post that implies there is no value to business school and that simply, isn't true. The "World of Business" is just as complex and fraught with peril as ANY technical project or dream you can think of. In fact, the WoB almost always funds the technical projects we are speaking of (like IT). Personally, I have found that people who have the knowledge and education to understand what is going on, do the best in business. There are plenty of crazy professors working on projects in a garage. And that's great. I like to see that. But there are MANY more "business people" who are doing better than that. Why? Because they understand business.
When you have mastered financing, the banking system, money systems, derivatives, debt, interest, short-term cash management, long-term cash management, inventory, payroll (and associated HR issues), sales management, marketing, advertising, project management, facility management (perhaps, if you own your own place), accounting, taxes (state, local, and fed), inventory control, budgets, capital project allocation, risk/reward profile analysis, portfolio management, contract law, and anything else that might help you make money ---- then you can run the company and replace all the PHB's.
Remember, its about money. And business schools teach people how to make money. And to make lots of money, you need to know something about the above subjects so you can utilize them to your advantage.
(ps: I do agree with your comment that people stop learning. There is a lot of truth to that statement)
Sometimes I swear someone becomes a leader because everyone else is too damn busy doing real work to bother...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You make an interesting point about the Java of today related to the COBOL of yesterday.
It actually does fit that mold.
So if What's needed is something genuinely new to go mainstream, for the business world, what would that look like? There was appeal to Business BASIC and COBOL. Java has some appeal in the business software space, maybe because of how it simplifies server side development and many businesses moved to mid-tier from mainframes, but what would a genuinely new business programming language look like?
Might make for a good Ask Slashdot question.
Just a general comment on this thread - I agree that risk-adverse is the norm and a good thing in really large (read: Enterprise) businesses.
I work in an Enterprise (I don't mind logging in, but I'm too lazy) and it is the first place I've been where change is *really* managed, and they have seen real benefit to managing change strictly. And I'm talking about fairly normal changes, patches and the like, not large-scale technology changes either.
If only the tools weren't so stinky....
Heck, I've even started to adopt stricter control at my home network & 'data center' (containing my, um, priceless collection of Asian objet d'art).
Guido (can I call you Guido?),
You quote him. He said "...you don't want a whole lot of creativity."
Then you say "A creative solution can be implemented carefully,..."
Notice that you shifted the argument by adding the word "solution". You may not actually disagree with him.
Your disagreement with his second point, different, but equally good.
The third point, from the Hartz Mountains of Germany, we all agree with.
Yes, focus on the negatives. Here's an idea, it's a business, it's not in business to let you code an app that is fun, it's in business to make money.
I hate sigs.
I'd be really funny to hear Dave give that speech though. Too bad he gave up comedy.
I'm wondering what industry/market your CEO friend works in. It sounds like we do similar work, except I do it for the IT departments of small/medium businesses. Anyway, drop me an email if you can, hanales at hotmail.
Thats not what I said, though I could have been clear. What my implication was that there are TONS of people with the aptitude out there who simply don't have the exact right mix or training or connections who fall through the cracks. I know I spent years in such a situation and just now am starting to become appreciated because of my experience, but spent a long long time being significantly underpaid (and still am honestly) because I didn't interview well and my paper trail was minimal.
From a business angle, this is the typical attitude and approach. The problem is that it isolates and compartmentalizes the entire effort (and its costs). Business types like this because it makes projects predictable. They know how much it costs to reinvent the wheel. So the programmers plow through the project, build something that creaks and barely holds itself together, and performs horribly. But it passes its tests, and additional hardware can be purchased to deal with the performance problems, so the company moves forward and onward.
And then when the application has problems, Someone Else has to fight the fires and we end up exactly where this article was suggesting.
You can't manage IT like other organizations. IT is all about creativity and collaboration. When you manage IT like an assembly line, you never get better at what you do. You just churn out widgets. Who cares that Bob's team built a widget already for that other project? They steamrolled through it and produced something hard to maintain and understand, and since we too are due date-driven, it's faster for us to reinvent it than retrofit their solution.
It is possible, however, that IT managers have actually considered all of this, and have determined that buzzwords like "reusability" and "componentization" aren't worth implementing, because it's cheaper to churn out shitty work that just barely meets business requirements than it is to produce good work, because the good work saves us less in the long run than just building something new from scratch and paying more to support it.
At an enterprise level, programmers don't come up with features. Programmers code the features that the business/requirements types come up with. For many types of projects, programmers are not involved in the requirements phase of a project at all, and only if they're lucky, they might be brought in during the design phase. Commodity programmers are normally handed technical requirements, sometimes even an API, and told to code it. Programmers can't just add random features to an application without fully engaging the bureaucracy of the project.
Even when you consider software development companies instead of general IT organizations in non-software companies, the really interesting thought and planning is done by senior architects, not the bulk of the programmer work force.
This, too, is a problem, in my opinion.
I've been programming for quite a while since I was 15, my initial goal was to go straight into programming, unfortunately I graduated in the fall of 2000... Right when hundreds (if not thousands) of experienced programmers in my area were being laid off. Basically I started doing IT because I could get a job in that field even though the pay was less and the hours and stress a lot worse.
In the end, I've got programming experience from school and I've spent the last 2-3 years developing a few online services with friends in my spare time that at least give me a couple of sites I can point to and say "I built that". Also in all of my IT jobs I have at least 1 programming project that I implemented to ease the pain of IT (a computer lease management program at one place, an automated network configuration tool at another). I have extensive experience with OSS, and I have written a little bit of code for various projects, but normally only of the small bugfix type, or adding some tiny functionality that is easy to implement and really not worth mentioning in my opinion.
Having mostly IT on my resume definitely hurt my chances, and it did take me about 4 months of interviewing to land this job. In the end I basically wiped 90% of my resume out and made a new resume that focused almost entirely on the programming projects I've done, explaining them in much greater detail. Once I did that, I got quite a few more interviews (1-2 a week, up from 2-3/month) and I got this job 3 weeks after making that change.
So steps to pull this off:
1) find problems in IT that you can program a fix for.
2) teach yourself whatever language you feel you eventually want to program in
3) start programming, solve the problems you have now.
4) Make a resume that focuses completely on your programming projects.
In a couple places the code I wrote actually made IT bearable enough to stick around for a few more months because it decreased the workload sufficiently to make the job possible.
hot naked chicks. next question.
MORTAR COMBAT!
I don't disagree with you, I think my friends should find new jobs. As to whether or not my experience in unique.. I dunno. I have worked IT at 3 companies (a start up, and 2 large nationwide companies) all three were horrid jobs with endless hours, endless projects, and no light at the end of the tunnel ever.
Then I started my own business doing IT for small businesses and saw the exact same thing in more than 25 customers that I eventually had contracted. No one was willing to pay enough to effectively deploy IT. If I wanted to get business I would have to lower my prices more than 50% just to get people to accept bids. Every single time I tried to stick to what I would consider a "fair" price (making enough to pay a mortgage and my $140 car payment nothing extravagant) the customer would say "well, ok we don't need that now then".
The end result is tons and tons of bailing wire and duct tape holding people's networks together, which, inevitably leads to many more fires which need putting out, more stress, and long long hours fixing stuff. Now I will take the blame on this for not CMA enough, because I was a little naive I didn't have very good "contracts" and many times would end up not getting paid for those long long hours because they would complain that it was my responsibility to make sure that these things didn't happen, and would threaten to sue or would simply not pay the invoice. This did result in me not doing anything for them ever again, but the cost of hiring an attorney to fight for a 2-3k invoice makes it pretty much pointless (IE a zero sum game).
Everything I've seen in IT is pretty uniform across all of these jobs. Extremely limited budgets, limited staff, limited time, and an expectation that everything will just work wonderfully from day 1. I'm sure that a lot of this is the fault/responsibility of IT staff to fix. IT should stand up more, present realistic deadlines, realistic costs, etc to management. For me, it was easier to change professions to programming.
I'm not trying to say every job has been outsourced, in fact in the last year I've heard of at least 3 major outsourcing initiatives that have been reversed and the jobs are coming back because the Indians weren't making customers happy. I'm sure my friends could find better jobs, and I'm sure the pain will get bad enough soon that they will. However, I can't believe that my experience is really that abnormal since I've seen it in more than 30 companies over the last 7 years.
Help - I'm trapped.
Love sees no species.
Wow, that is a really good ratio from what I've seen. I have never worked for or seen a company that has more than 1 or 2 IT for 100 employees. 50/1200 that is 1/24. Yeah if I had an IT job where I only had to worry about 24 people, I would probably love it :).
Yes I worked for shitty companies and had shitty bosses. I don't anymore. I know that programming isn't always a dream job either, and I'm sure I'll have to work some late nights when deadlines are looming. At least I know when those are though. Nothing worse than planning a weekend away with your SO just to have your phone start ringing off the hook on Friday afternoon late, and find out that the SAN just took a complete dump and now you're spending the weekend rebuilding it, that's a quick way to lose said SO.
At an enterprise level, programmers don't come up with features. Programmers code the features that the business/requirements types come up with. For many types of projects, programmers are not involved in the requirements phase of a project at all, and only if they're lucky, they might be brought in during the design phase. Commodity programmers are normally handed technical requirements, sometimes even an API, and told to code it. Programmers can't just add random features to an application without fully engaging the bureaucracy of the project.
I know that but I had to move up a couple of levels because as I said I've not seen MS's code.Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I worked for a company that I have to say had the best middle manager ever. The first thing he did was take his staff and move them to the far corner of the building. Then when people were still coming to them directly, he put up a big glass wall between them and the rest of the staff. Next he made it offical that all comunication between his team and the rest of the office go through him only. Thus upper managment didnt bug us and we couldnt put our foot in out mouths to managment. Next he layed out our objectives clearly, "just keep the ticket number as low as possible, handle a call every 30 min. and if you have an idea to imporve the system write it up and e-mail it to me for review."
Why did he do this? because he understood us perfectly, we are problem solvers. If you give us a chalange and stand back we can work wonders, micromange us and you will get nothing but a big call queue. Why did he know this? because he was one of us. Every day he made it his business to work on at leist 1 call in addition to his work. He knew managment would kill is dead.
How did he reward us? by giving us what we wanted when we did good. For example, he knew I wanted to work the graveyard shift and ditch the day shifts (long and short I'm not a morning person) So when I showed him I was worth it I was permoted to the grave yard shift supervisor. A job I loved for quite some time, then they decided to put cameras in the IT area and the hallways but not the rest of the office. It told us that managment didnt trust us and that for me was it. We found all kind of ways to act out. Eventually I left the job and they got rid of that manager. The desk went right down hill as the remaining staff was dragged into meetings that had no effect on the help desk. I've been to a few other jobs now and every manager I've had has been from a different random department, they dont know how IT works or understand our mindset. They believe that if they instill a Dillbert/office space style system that we will just do enough not to get fired and not enough to outshine them.
I got to tell ya I miss that manager. Dave if your out there reading this I just want you to know man, despite what others in managment may have thought you are the best.
Of course, if the "uncreative" 1000 line version is 7-times bigger for the right reason, it is avoiding clever-clever tricks so it is easy to determine that it does what it's supposed to and it's easy to maintain.
Yeah right. I'm in the process of replacing the uncreative version of some of our stuff with a creative version that will be smaller, easier to maintain, and less painful to run.
The most bloated, boring and uncreative code I have ever seen in my life was a safety critical system that had the potential to kill hundreds of people if it went wrong. It might have been bloated, boring and uncreative but it was also blindingly obvious what it did, how it did it and that it did it right.
But is it fragile or hard to update?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
But all else being equal, the creative solution, by virtue of a change taking place, will be more risky.
Nope. The ceative solution is less risky if you have a good testing process and more risky if you don't. Creative stuff tends to work better and adapt to changes better; stodgy code is frequently brittle, and that's a huge risk.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Heh. I'll jump across the lake for $159k :)
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
And when it doesn't happen, they are fired or required to work 24x7 to pull off a miracle. Any slight flaw is seen as a complete failure. Paradoxically, budgets have been cut so severely that there is no such thing as a "test environment" and IT is expected to have some sort of magic ball to predict exactly what is going to break when massive changes are rolled out.
So break things. Send notifications out widely predicting things like 'potentially breaking domains so nobody can log in' and, when some suit asks why, tell them about testing and change control. Basically, you care too much and you're being exploited.
When presented with the impossibility of these 2 people actually handling the workload managements response was "Sorry, if you don't like it, we already talked with xyz outsourcing corp, you're lucky to have this job"
The proper response is that they can't do it either. If you get pushback, management are idiots - go somewhere else.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It might have been bloated, boring and uncreative but it was also blindingly obvious what it did, how it did it and that it did it right.
I'm sure it exists in some industries (it probably also tends to be Ada code), but I have never seen code like that.
Normally, with code that bloated, it's blindingly obvious that the programmer was cutting and pasting and tinkering until it mostly worked, and probably never did really understand it. Furthermore, it's *not* obvious what it is doing, and I really only come to understand it as I clean it up, shrinking it (nothing off the wall, just eliminating redundancies) and fixing several bugs along the way.
In one of the best papers from the CMG2004 conference, Michael Maddox wrote:
The net results is that people who have been praised for firefighting are going to want to do more of it, and they will act to undercut any effort to raise the maturity level of the organization. Preventing problems would starve them of recognition, and might, in their view, lead to their being laid off. Instead, they prefer to have problems, the more the better.
One of my customers suffered from this very problem, but failed to even see it as a problem, and so continues to this day to publically praise and reward the firefighters.
It's needless to say that unless management intervenes, such companies will quietly turn into Wally, and Asok and Dilbert will leave...
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I'm sure it exists in some industries (it probably also tends to be Ada code), but I have never seen code like that. Pascal in that particular case, but yes, it does seem to be the bondage & discipline languages that work with that style. Normally, with code that bloated, it's blindingly obvious that the programmer was cutting and pasting and tinkering until it mostly worked, and probably never did really understand it. Furthermore, it's *not* obvious what it is doing, and I really only come to understand it as I clean it up, shrinking it (nothing off the wall, just eliminating redundancies) and fixing several bugs along the way. So you don't actually have to do anything you might call creative along the way, then?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Why is this a problem?
IT is supposed to support the business whether you are General Motors or Yahoo!
I suspect many techies will not learn a new skill unless they feel it will advance them (in fact I see it everyday).
I have seen billions wasted by smarter-than-you engineers who took a gamble without understanding the numbers properly, or were star-struck by people on technology vendor management teams, or thought ideas were cool.
This is the bright future you paint for the stock market and investors that you're going to pitch for money. Next quarter numbers is what guarantees your shares and stock options are actually worth something.
The fact you have been modded +5 Insightful is tragic.
29 mpg. YMMV.
- Manual capstan lathes
- Mechanical automated lathes (gear and cam)
- Hydraulic lathes
- Plugboard hydraulic/pneumatic lathes
- Tape driven hydraulic machines.
By the 1990s, any half way decent turning shop would be using entirely CNC machines using hydraulics or electric servos. The same process of consolidation applied to milling machines, ending in the machining center. I worked in manufacturing, as first a research engineer, then a systems designer, and finally in management, between the late 70s and 2000. The consolidation and rationalisation of technology was tremendous.Obviously when I said "individualistic" I meant that individual companies had different manufacturing philosophies and approaches. Volume manufacturing by large groups was in use in the Arsenal at Venice in Dante's day, so on your definition I guess I would have to mean the 1270s.
Pining for the fjords
So you don't actually have to do anything you might call creative along the way, then?
Well, there are degrees of creative. I'm not going to completely stop trying stuff out, but I keep it down to just a couple of things in any given program, document the hell out of those, and pay attention to whether it worked out well, or I just forced it to work in spite of itself.
I do more purely creative programming for schoolwork. I graduate after three more classes, and we'll see if I have to pay attention to not going overboard with experimentation at work after that.
Some jobs are boring, unstimulating, and hectic. And there's nothing that can be done about it!
We work in a different space. I can update code in about a day in production, less if it's mostly isolated or there's an overriding need. On the flip side, we are called on to do more and different things with the same code, so it's not like a heart monitor or anything like that.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
This is a conundrum and not easy to solve at all. There are two MAJOR lies in this area:
1) IT product advertising lies;
2) IT employment / job description advertising lies.
Or at least the public perception of 1) and 2) are both entirely wrong.
IT thrives.
But this is a consequence of lying to users and to bosses of users. Advertising for IT helps sells IT, and makes IT popular. But advertising can only work if they promise "ease of use" and other, related promises. None of them are ever kept as much as they are promised. So the users and their bosses are in need of someone gullible enough to clean up the mess that is left behind.
Would IT advertising go like this:
- You can buy this machine;
- But it does not work logically, OR reliably; instead, there are weird rules, and intricate stuff to be figured out;
- If you belong to a minority of about 3% of the population, you'll be OK;
- If you belong to the other 97, you will SO not be OK.
And then if IT advertising would be quite specific about, say, honestly put aspects of networking, ease of WiFi setup, et cetera - then it would be quite easy to argue that IT advertising is getting it right.
In addition, IT employee advertising also lies. Where does the idea come from that IT employment is "cool"? It's a service job for crying out loud. So here is the second lie that screws up this situation. It builds on the previous lie.
This is how IT job descriptions should look like:
- You will help people who do not and never will "get it" to keep truckin;
- You will have to deal with anger and frustration 24/7, and it is not your fault, but they will act as if it was;
- You will have to face "patients" - people who technically are unaccountable for what they are saying on basis of the not verbalized contract between them and you (YOU solve the problem, not THEM);
- Yet you are not treated like a doctor, but like a scoundrel.
Etc.
This will always be the key to the frustrated and stressed out IT that never will get done what they should get done. It's built in.
>2) teach yourself whatever language you feel you eventually want to program in
.Net other than
Haven't learned much of languages such as Java and VB
hooking up to databases and providing a GUI for user input along with
basic input validation.
Also, I have no experience in a for-real SDLC. Frankly, I have no idea
what "real" programmers do.
How far is this from what employers are expecting?
I will be doing some work using PHP for a friend's small
e-commerce site, but I don't think that will look particularly
impressive on my future resume.
>3) start programming, solve the problems you have now.
I'm starting a new job today (in IT, was formerly in marketing).
I'm hoping to be able to get to do some simple scripting and moving my way up to
simple programming from there.
>4) Make a resume that focuses completely on your programming projects.
I hear ya -- noticed that I did not start getting phone calls until I got rid
of my marketing/business development background in my resume.
You would think that employers would prefer a fellow who not only understood
tech but also the business side of things and is comfortable making presentations
to clients and stuff.
Shows you how little I know about the real world.
I'm not sure I follow your logic here? Why can't IT be managed like other organizations? It has goals and budgets like other departments. This seems akin to saying you can't manage the mail room. They need to be creative as well to get their job done and hand out check stubs, magazines, etc.
Churning out widgets that perform their designed function is a great accomplishment in an efficient business. Accounting and Legal perform assigned tasks without being given "creative freedom". Your assertion that managed IT departments turn out "hard to maintain and understand" code is baseless. It is perhaps true in a badly managed IT shop, but a parent post posited that widget driven IT shops write bloated but easy to understand code. The output of any IT team is driven by the goals, directives and management of the team.
Too many people long for the good ole days when IT departments were new, productivity driving machines. These days IT is an understood cost center in nearly every business. IT is like the highway system in the US. It was great fun designing and building millions of miles of road and bridges. Now someone has to maintain those roads, repaint the stripes and inspect the bridges. It's not the most glamorous work, but it has to be done. Work your way to the top and you can get the best jobs where you get to design the few new projects available. I'm not sure why this is stated as a problem.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
Yeah it amazed me what a drawback IT seemed to be to programming managers. Having at least a foundation in IT helps a lot with various types of programming (especially web, db, and network programming), because you actually understand the underlying system that you are exploiting with your code.
In my opinion if you can't configure and optimize a web server installation you have no business developing software for the web. Same for DBs, or anything that is sending data over the network. If you don't at least have a general understanding of those things, you are prone to write software which doesn't scale on those platforms or which outright crashes things. Some of the worst programmers I've worked with have been bad for this exact reason, as long as everything is working fine, they can code, but as soon as something in the system gets broken they are completely at a loss and have no clue what to even look for or how to fix it. Even lacking an understanding in simple things like permissions causes problems when you start programmatically creating and manipulating files.
Unfortunately, again hiring managers don't agree. They seem to want someone who only writes code and doesn't have an understanding of anything else.
I would say it sounds like you're on the write track, get into your IT job, spend a little time and find out what you spend the most time on, and write a system to simplify the process or eliminate it all together.
While the earlier post about the industry maturing and thus bring about stability is spot on, there is another factor that has caused many otherwise unnecessary controls to be put on IT departments. My job is a unique one that frequently lands me in the IT departments of all manner of businesses. I'm usually at these places off-hours helping to prepare the owner(s) for the pending dismissal of one or more key employees (often some of the IT folks themselves). What I've noticed, time and time and time again is that, unlike other corporate disciplines, IT leadership is still treated quite liberally and with undeserved reverence (remnants of dotcom v1.0). IT leaders in most small to mid business are overgrown children who are proud of the fact that they're 30+ years old and allowed to cover their office/cubicle with Star Wars paraphernalia. I can't tell you how many times I've been called in to clean up some disaster created by the in-house IT 'director' who had no functional backups, no network resiliency, no recovery plan , and no idea what I was talking about when asking him these questions. Of course, all of the office staff are quick to whisperi n your ear about how difficult Joe StarWars is to deal with (I still hear about a half-dozen unique 'Nick Burns' stories a week). If you're reading this at your desk, LOOK AROUND! Have you spent more time, in the past week, wondering how best to arrange your starship collection than wondering how well you've prepared your company for an IT-related disaster? If so, grow up! Or don't - I make my money at your peril an the stories your former coworkers will tell me of your arrogance and incompetence are so much more humorours upon the realization that you're back out in the workforce expecting to get paid the king's ransom you'd convinced your former boss you were worth. When interacting with these types and inquiring whether the basics have been done, you typically get... A. I'm always too busy fighting fires, they need to hire another employee so I can get to the important stuff B. I'm never been given any budget to do any of that stuff C. Yeah, we've got all the gear laying around, I'll implement it when I get time (see item A). The fact is, even with extremely limited resources, good admins can significantly minimize the reactive component of their job and focus on implmentation of newer technology to further stability and availability (hey challange and an opportunity for creativity). Long story short, the IT field is now drowning in a vast sea of moderate-to-highly intelligent children (despite physical age) who have developed an immature and more annoying version of the god-complex which afflicts many an M.D. The management in many companies has come to terms with this or will soon...as this happens you will see the 'bureaucracy', as you called it, increase in an effort to keep IT departmens in check. Those individuals with genuinely brilliant minds and the motivation to match will, in most cases, have little opportunity without just leaving for a startup.
I know you. You're the guy who never fixes anything because everything is either not your fault or not a real problem. You can't tell the difference between doing your job and maintaining a good image with your superiors. I'm guessing you've never had sole responsibility for anything, and someone has always been running around cleaning up after you.
Okay, that's not fair. I don't know you. Here's why I doubt you. As far as I know, there are only five ways for IT to maintain peace with their superiors, and hence avoid abuse and micromanagement:
1. Work for people who understand the nature of the work. (Cheating, really.)
2. Have enough staff to easily deliver on demands, even in worst-case situations. (This is cheating, too, since you're begging to be downsized.)
3. Lie your ass off. (Only works for security, or for IT managers who can get promoted out before the shit hits the fan.)
4. Occasionally deliver bad news without being punished for it. AAAAAAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Okay, sorry, I just needed a break there. Back to business.
5. Sandbag. Deliver everything on a worst-case schedule. If a task could conceivably take three days, never deliver it in less than three days. (Doesn't mean you aren't busy; use the extra time to do the "goldbricking" maintenance and admin work necessary to keep the system running.) Never even admit that something might be possible unless you've done it before.
Number five is the only option that could be described as "professional," and it's really, really hard for people to pull it off. First, it's hard to lie consistently without starting to hate yourself, hate your job, and hate your bosses. Second, it's really hard to tell people you're capable of less than you really are. It's especially painful for green kids. Nobody likes to lie. Nobody likes to sell themselves short.
I've been very, very happy executing number five, and my boss has been happy with me when I have. If I spec something at five days and deliver it in five, HE doesn't know it only should have taken two days. I get a pat on the back. But I just can't keep it up. I'm psychologically incapable of it. I backslide to giving him reasonable estimates, and every time I miss one, I get reamed out.
Here's a question for the managers: Why do you always interpret EVERY estimate as a 90-95% confidence estimate, no matter how it's labeled? Why do people get scolded for missing "best possible case" estimates? Why do you ask for, or even accept, "best guess" estimates if you consider it unacceptable to hit best guess estimates about 50% of the time? Why does it fall on the implementers to lie and only deliver worst case estimates no matter what they're asked for?
There's validity to the clarity through verbosity idea. But it is also true that some creative solutions transform a huge mess of unclarity into a short and simple solution. By this I am saying that creative and "creative" are not the same. There are plenty of examples of "too clever for its own good", yes. Recently, I started working with a small company that has a newly minted development manager with development experience working for a large company. He is incredibly risk averse. As an example, I came in and made an assessment and fixed something right at the core of the application we were working on. He was incredibly resistant and worried about this creative solution. In the end, quality concerns became so great that I was asked to make the changes. Dozens of deeper system issues disappeared.
As a more senior developer, I don't look for "clever" solutions. I look for the creative resolutions which are both clear and significant improvements and I discard the ones that fail that litmus test no matter how "pretty" they might seem. That's a highly developed level of skill, and stifling that good example of creativity is what takes the joy out of IT. And it's not necessary. You simply need management with the maturity and wisdom to trust their people and discern between "clever enough to cost us millions" to "creative enough to save us millions".
So, the solution here is you need better management. Management that can distinguish between what's good and what's really bad, and management that nurtures that same ability in its creative people. Some people are just good. They just come to this as a natural progression of their work and a desire to do it the best way possible. Others need guidance. Either way, those are the people that you want.I believe IT is different because a good development process is more than just keeping your head down and pumping out code. Managers of a project usually don't care how the code is produced, so long as it meets business requirements. There's usually nothing motivating the developer to code according to best practices or to build something in a way that future projects can benefit from it. Development is siloed to that specific project and code is written to the very specific requirements of that project. The programmers that write the code frequently have no say in the design and literally just pump out code by a deadline.
This process differs from a mail room because mail room guys aren't expected and have no opportunity to consider better ways of delivering mail, or of delivering mail in such a way that the next guys delivering the mail can do it more efficiency. It doesn't matter that the mail guys are slow, inefficient, or sloppy in their delivery, so long as the mail gets delivered roughly on time to the right mailboxes, right? There's nothing wrong with that approach with mail delivery because there's no obvious way for a different approach to benefit the business.
In my experience (as an architect in the IT department of a major telecommunications company), the development of a project is tracked completely independently from the maintenance of the project. No quality metrics are assessed for projects that aren't related to the client's requirements. A developer isn't penalized when his applications require twice the maintenance costs of others. A different manager and a different budget deals with that. There's no incentive to do things any better. Likewise, a different manager and probably a different developer are going to be working on the next project, so there's no incentive to do things to help them. Once your project is done, it's done.
Even if you end up with a developer that wants to spend the extra time doing things right, and maybe packaging up a big component he wrote that could be used by others later on, the project manager has an incentive to discourage or prevent him from doing so, because that's extra work that's going to be charged against his project. Nobody will know that 10 future projects would see a cost savings, because that information isn't tracked, because managers don't consider that normal behavior. If the manager lets a developer do this "extra" work, he'll be the manager that went over budget and over deadline for no apparent benefit, and managers are held responsible for these factors.
Here, creativity should be intrinsic, when in fact it's discouraged.
I'm not convinced yet that we're saying anything differently here. IT has some unique properties that require some unique goals, directives and management, that seem to be non-obvious to managers from other organizations. It's entirely likely that well-managed IT departments may get this right, and I've just never come across a well-managed IT department. (I would think companies that are actually in business to produce software would approach this a little differently, since code quality is more closely tied to the bottom line, but IT departments in non-software companies tend to treat IT like any other organization, with the issues I mention above.)
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
creativity also helps when you walk off the stack of FAQs to a problem that "doesn't happen"
/private subnets)
like oh a multiple subnet situation where an ap keeps falling over on one subnet but works in another (public
DRUM ROLL PLEASE
check the gateway device ----- not the obvious solution
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Sir, have you ever stepped inside a business school class? Because you have an entirely screwed perception of the "Business School Product." I have been a geek since I was a kid, cutting my programming teeth on old Apple II and Texas Instrument's TI 99/4a computers. I'm now an MBA and I also have an MS in IT. I have been in IT management for several years and have typically been the one pushing the IT envelope.
My feeling is that MBAs bring structure and order to the otherwise chaos of IT organizations -- a chaos that is perpertuated by arrogant people such as yourself. IT seems to be constantly behind on projects and overbudget due to a lack of project management and communication skills -- skills that are typically lacking in IT personnel. These perceptions perpetuate higher up the food chain such that IT is seen with contempt and is considered untrustworthy.
You say that the best thing IT can learn is to weed out the "Business School Product." If this is the case, IT will never gain respect in the boardroom and will constantly be the organization being cut or outsourced. More than ever, IT needs people who combine technical skill and saavy with a solid business perspective.
Mostly, it's bugfixes and fallout from recent changes (for new requirements). This is a concious choice - changing something that's wrong is faster than testing thoroughly, although we are working to improve our QA process. It feels like we're a small company that got big.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
the trick between "safe" and "clever" code is what results you need
1 DO NOT FAIL ---- in the real world not happening for any code under 20 years of age
2 fail however ----- dangerous code
3 Fail in known ways ----- install error handling code and recover as needed
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"Due to others lack of planning, we're constantly having to pull micicles out of our asses."
Like, frozen mice? On a stick?
I stared at that word for the longest time, wondering what new hip slang term it was.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I'm gonna be nonconformist, and NOT carry the one. Carrying the one is just what the man wants me to do.
1) Management does not want IT people to solve business problems. They want IT people to do what they are told. Management often feel threatend by IT people who have too many business ideas.
2) Being good at your job can just as easily insure that you will not be promoted to management. You can find managers anywhere, but where do you find IT slaves who know your system? Often, the more experience IT guys are asked to take on some managerial duties in addition to their technical jobs. But, IT almost never get promoted to higher level management.
JMHO.
Also, when a system's 'still running' then they don't care when you say you want more money. If you're running flat out holding together a stressed system, screaming for a network upgrade, you won't get it.
Let it drop though, and crash and burn _horrifically_, and then when asked, refer them to your previous 18 emails, and report on the problems.
I can virtually guarantee the 'funding' you've been screaming for for the last 5 years will materialise.
And yes, this has happened to me. Each year, budget a network upgrade, because the switches were flakey and horrible. Keep on 'nursing' them, replacing them, repairing them, updating them, because it's 'short term'. And each year, seeing the 'upgrade budget' vanish again, because 'it's not urgent'.
And then one year, it finally did break. Actually, it was more the case that the one guy who was putting in the effort to keep things going, went on holiday for 2 weeks, and one of the other guys realised this was the only way it would get fixed. It broke, and 'limped' for a week and a half until he came back, because the _rest_ of the department wouldn't let anyone call him.
The network upgrade got approved, and 3 months later, was in place.
Unprofessional to let things break? Yes, probably. I don't like the idea of letting something 'fall over' because no one can be bothered to actually replace it. It smells a bit too much like sabotage to me. But I can't deny that it worked. We weren't lying when we were pointing out, each year, that our network hardware was overdue for replacement, upgrade and recabling, and a lot of our 'intermittent issues' that we were working on fighting fires with, were simply due to that. But it took an 'incident' to get someone important enough to approve the paperwork, to actually do so.
Thanks for the advice, I hope things pan out.
First day on the job was all right...
If it wants to make money off of the development of good software, it's going to have to attract and hire talented and creative developers.
If it wants to attract and hire talented and creative developers, it's going to have to allow for the coding to be fun, to some degree.
Sure, some businesses can get by with legions of cubicle-drones who are competent but uninsipred. But if you're doing anything that's challenging, if you need good developers, you'll have to keep the talent satisfied if you want to make money.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
A desire for a fulfilling professional life does not make one a hippy. Also, it's spelled 'hippie'. Also, your opinions about the benefits of large organizations are not fact - you cannot prove large organizations are more efficient, nor that efficiency is the reason for higher profits - often large organizations have a bigger problem with inefficient bureaucracies than small ones, and are less efficient, but move more money/product overall. You can check any number of publications on organizational theory about this. Also, your characterization of the situation as a game is sophomoric. Also your suggestion that anyone who dislikes their current employer quit and start their own company is disingenuous. That is usually not a viable option. Discounting changing an organization from the inside is ridiculous. That's like saying if I dislike a law or public policy, I should leave the country rather than work for change.
I keep reading all of these all-too-typical horror stories and one thing keeps coming to my mind, which is that if you are the guy who gets it done and your manager/boss/etc is grinding you and asking for stuff that is impossible, either move to another job or just do an end-run around him and go up the food chain.(after you've secured another possible job of course - heh).
Over and over the pattern is: We work like dogs and the boss gets the recognition.
Well, what would happen if the project failed? If the employees didn't do all of that extra work? More likely, the manager, faced with a general revolt and his ass on the line, will take steps to fix the problem(usually it means hiring extra workers).
Oh - and the #1 rule of employment in IT is?
ALWAYS WORK HOURLY. Never ever *ever* take a salaried job with any company unless you are management/getting in as one of the initial employees/partners/etc. "They worked us 60 hours a week" isn't bad if you're getting overtime or even just straight extra hours(hired as a consultant, for instance).
still have 2 good friends in IT. They both work 60-70+/wk. One travels 75%+. The other is officially on call 24x7. He estimates that he gets a call between 2-6AM at least 4 times a week. He is one of 2 people managing more than 600 users, Windows 2003 AD, Cisco Call Manager, Cisco IPCC, more than 40 PRI circuits, and 3 DS3 WAN circuits. These 2 guys manage the routers, switches, firewall, everything.
Indeed. I recall not so long ago building a system which was, indeed, creative. My financial masters liked the idea, but would not let me build it. Instead they hired a vast team of Microsoft and IBM consultants that eventualy built it at twenty times the cost I was planning for. I quit in disgust.
It wokred well though.
I don't think it's innovation they oppose, but risk. Society is becoing distressingly risk averse.
"Cats like plain crisps"
So your point, now, is that it is not the case that management, as a class, acts in a particular way?
The point is that some management acts in some ways and those ways determine the course of the industry.
Because that is exactly contrary to your previous ramblings.
The word "ramblings" is flamebait.
Regardless of which hair you want to split
More flamebait as the post reads quite well without it.
(now, as opposed to your previous sweeping pronouncement about the condition of the IT landscape)
"Sweeping" is flamebait as "some of" was clearly noted in the previous revision.
you are now allowing for the fact that not every employee or manager or the relationships or their circumstances are the same
This has always been allowed for though the major contributing behaviors, written about in TFA, were the topic of discussion.
Shame it only took you a dozen or so times
More flamebait.
copying/pasting the phrase "you're wrong"
Which you are.
before you corrected yourself.
Before the point was expressed in a form which you are capable of understanding.
So, now that you admit
More flamebait
that there isn't a limit to the sort of creative potential that a talented IT person can put to work
No limits, except those imposed by a particular management style, were ever set.
(since, as you now admit
More flamebait
there are places where that's an option)
There are always options. There's no point here except to continue the flamebait.
what is the entire point of your original
To discuss TFA and the systems which have caused it.
rant
Flamebait
which you now contradict?
You're wrong, again. Please revise.
IT people who want to do something more creative, and have the talent to do so, can just go someplace where that's the corporate culture
Unless the management style preventing them from doing so is becoming more prevalent. This was the point of TFA and my initial analysis.
They, and their creativity-friendly new managers
The point of TFA and my initial analysis was that creativity-friendly managers are increasingly uncommon. My original analysis identified the larger reasons why this is becoming the case.
And this, of course
Of course this is flamebait.
is exactly the scenario that you said isn't reality
You're wrong, again.
which is why I and other people countered what you said
You're wrong, again. What you did was launch a diatribe of flamebait and ad hominem attacks--just as in this comment.
Your hissy fit
More flamebait.
about having what you said countered
You're wrong, again, as what you did was launch a diatribe of flamebait and ad hominem attacks--just as in this comment.
is the thing that drew appropriate comments about how you're conducting your conversation
You're wrong, again.
By the way
More flamebait.
you hang onto a sense of victimization
Flamebait, and wrong.
There is only one person controlling what an IT person makes in an economy that can't hire enough good ones: the IT person him/herself
You're wrong, and the TFA and my original analysis describes why.
If you don't have the creativity and talent to find a job
This is personalizing, flamebait, ad hominem.
realize that you don't have it
Or, as TFA and my analysis points out, realize that management increasingly doesn't make talen top priorit
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Ahh... I am familiar with your situation since I actually resided in your datacenter building (6th floor office) when it was called SBC. Hell, I probably ran into you on a few concalls. Terrible food in the cafeteria. Just miserable. Still live in STL. We should have a beer at the Tap Room sometime.
I am now a consultant who sees quite a few IT departments around the world. While most are truly bad, I think IT has more in common with other departments than most people realize. You state: "Managers of a project usually don't care how the code is produced, so long as it meets business requirements." That should not happen as there should be corporate guidelines that are adhered to. Those guidelines and best practices should be developed and projects checked for compliance by senior persons such as yourself. If an advantage can be gained by a few extra hours spent on a project, management should be given the opportunity to make the call as to whether they believe it is worth the effort. That's what management gets paid to do whether the coders agree with their decisions or not.
Accounting has "best practices" that they use in much the same way as IT. There are hundreds of ways to account for assets, cash, revenues, etc. The senior members decide on a methodology and everyone works based on those rules. The product is different, but the management of the process is very similar. If it were not, MBAs would change IT fundamentally so that it was similar. Managers have to manage and they are not about to let one organization be substantially different than the others. That would be difficult and against their interests.
Anyway, agree to disagree. I'm too tired and I don't know if I'm making sense. Nice chatting.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
First, this article could have benefited from some proof-reading ("IT is isn't fun anymore", "Most agree that IT hasn't become commoditized, and therefore easily outsourced.") I realize that I have now opened my writing to scrutiny, and I'm sure you'll find an error or three, but remember that I'm not get paid for my writing :-)
Second, and key, the main problem is leadership. "Everything rises and falls on leadership." IT managers are normally chosen from a pool of technicians that have an interest in more money or position but no real inclination, training, or talent to lead. Leadership is a completely different skill set but routinely treated as a logical extension of the technical craft. I have seen many respected and high-performance leaders that initially lacked a deep technical understanding of the function they lead. More often than not, I have seen technicians turned into managers with disastrous effects because they fail to make that mental shift, to deliberately grow their leadership abilities, and to realize "what got them there won't keep them there." A related problem is that people doing the selection of new leaders don't really know what they're looking for because they themselves got promoted for the wrong reasons. Those people normally favor compliance, and you can easily see how that can lead to the problems sited in the article.
Third, there are definite exceptions to the stereotype, but an average IT worker is less able to develop rapport with others, less communicative, and is less able to read people. I probably just offended 99% of readers, but stay with me. These are not only important teamwork traits but essential leadership traits. I have led both IT and non-IT people, and the contrast is striking. It's just a fact of life that many IT workers choose their field because they prefer to work more with technology than people. This is simply a constraint we must accept and work though.
What's our way ahead?
First we need to help IT workers improve their social skills and view of the world; oftentimes their approach is very damaging to their company and customers, and technical skills don't compensate. I'm suspicious of many high-price self improvement programs, but there are select books, seminars, and programs that can do wonders and have phenomenal track records ("How to Win Friends and Influence People", "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", and Toastmasters are great examples).
Second, we must deliberately find and train our leaders, beginning the moment someone is forecasted to supervise others. The military is deliberate about this, and so must Corporate America. Again there are many books and programs out there, but among the best are "Lincoln on Leadership" by Phillips, "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership" by Maxwell, and "Leading from the Heart" by Kryzyzewski. "21 Laws" has a great DVD curriculum.
Leaders are born... then made.
Alex Svetlev
Actually, what my company calls 'IT' includes application developers, networking & server support, etc.--not just helpdesk type stuff. Our helpdesk is maybe ~20 people, and we also partially support our sister companies.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Please revise and resubmit.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Please read these two helpful hints for composition of a comment and resubmit.
I'll be happy to provide editorial feedback when you have properly structured your thoughts in a manner which is coherent above a second grade level.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Can I work were you work? Can I work in your magical company where the boss never says "I don't care if you think its a bad idea, we're doing it anyway" just so you can spend a week next month staying up all night fixing the bad idea, in your corporation ran by Faeries and Gnomes were Business Analysists also like to spend the extra time/money to do it right the first time instead of paying more in time/money later when it blows up in thier face? Please have Mr. W. Wonka your HR Director contact me immediately.
Seriously though, the problem is, we've lost our magic. We've stopped being the wizards of silicon valley and have gone back to being pocket protector wearing jock-fodder again. Our magic no longer impresses and we're viewed as a glorified secretarial staff. Therein is the problem with modern IT.
A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The woman below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."
"You must be an engineer," said the balloonist.
"I am," replied the woman, "How did you know?"
"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is, technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip."
The woman below responded, "You must be in Management."
"I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."