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.'"

Comments

IT is in transition

[Flying pig]

I think IT now is in the state manufacturing was in the 70s. To explain: Before the 70s, most volume manufacturing was quite individualistic. For instance, different car manufacturers had very different approaches to manufacturing. But individuality came at a high price in poor designs and poor quality. As manufacturing volumes ramped up (i.e. the economy grew) the cost of the firefighting become greater and greater. The result, of course, was the development of CAM and CAD, proper workforce training, and above all quality management and control. By the 1990s manufacturing was largely sorted in the larger industries. It employed far fewer people, but the results were pretty good, certainly with consumer products and cars. Nowadays, the only part of the process that tends to be manual is final assembly.

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.

Change careers.

[lancejjj]

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.

Re:Natural Maturation?

[pavera]

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.

Do what every worker should

[delirium of disorder]

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?

Re:Natural Maturation?

[cmacb]

"Debt" is a ten thousand year old playground game.

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.

Ass Backwards.

[LibertineR]

Apparently nobody cares. Because nobody is calling.

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!

Get nontechnical people OUT of IT

[doormat]

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.

Viscous cycle..

[Junta]

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.

But IT *is* dead!

[driftwolf]

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