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

well

[mastershake_phd]

If your fighting fires everyday maybe its time to start water cooling.

Natural Maturation?

[JesseL]

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.

Big business meets IT

[HomelessInLaJolla]

The Dilbertization of IT brings the plight of the rest of the working world to the IT industry. This is what the other professions, older than IT, have developed into. The ultimate authority of the almighty dollar, the ability to profile the workgroup and monetize it quarter by quarter, the ability to make it absorb losses and give up profit on demand, the ability to control promotions and maintain authority over the social order has crept slowly into the IT world.

"We'd seen very narrow computer science departments graduating students focused only on specific kinds of technologies, and frankly, it is the least exciting part of the field," said DeMillo. In the minds of the venture capitalists and the stock brokers who, ultimately, allow the business venture to exist, though, those students are the most predictable. They can be profiled and fit into the business projections. Groups of them can be expanded when necessary to give shareholders a good feeling and contracted when necessary to create profit at precisely the right time when nobody will notice if the top level execs and board members take an extra slice.

Their creativity and imagination isn't being tapped the way it was when they were first in IT," said Skaistis. Creativity and imagination is not predictable, it does not fit into the yearly goals, serendipitous discoveries upend carefully planned social promotions and often steal the limelight away from the intended recipient at the most inopportune time. Nobody along the ladder of social control inside of a corporation wants a creative or imaginative star who will probably surface at the least convenient moment and disrupt their carefully planned business projections.

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.

Re:Big business meets IT

[Anonymous Coward]

The big problem as I see it is attitudes like yours: IT is a "creative" field, and profit is somehow evil. What needs to happen is that IT people need to stop being treated like children. Management needs to stop babying IT people, and explain to them that it's their (management's) way or the highway. It's that simple. Whatever. Even someone like a pastry chef - if they're any good, you can present them your management problems ("We have a convention party of 150 all getting coffee and dessert at the same time!") and you listen to their feedback ("I really wouldn't offer the flaming sorbet. How about..."). If they have any savvy at all, they'll say something gentle and grownup, and offer workable solutions instead of saying "NFW." and offending your childish, foot-stamping sensibility of entitlement because you're the daddy.

In your model, reading the parts of the post I snipped, the solution is apparently to fire pastry chefs until you get a warm body who says "Yes, I can do 150 simultaneous flaming sorbets." because, damnit, you want 150 simultaneous flaming sorbets. When it proves to be, in fact, impossible like guy #1 said, you just fire the liar who made you the promises, and you try like hell to get back someone like the first "no man" who offended you with his political incorrectness.

For the sake of whoever owns the restaurant, I hope you're only middle management, because at some point, someone needs to show YOU the door. Thank goodness someone like that can never get to be, say, President of the US. Oh, wait...

Re:Natural Maturation?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

How to change IT

[BlueBoxSW.com]

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...

Re:How to change IT

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

1) Potatoe, Potaughto The only business problems It can solve are It Problems. You can call them what you want, but they're still the same thing. Its really an argument as to the improvement of an organization comes from bottom up, or top down. What piece of IT contributes the most to business productivity? Word processing, spreadsheets, Right? Now what company provides those solutions to more companies than any other? Microsoft. Now, did every company in existence come tell bill gates to drop out of college and start writing a basic compiler for the altair? No. He as a techie, along with every other founder of technology companies, started his business to solve business problems that upper management didn't see. They had to sell them on the idea that giving employees powerful desktops will allow them to be better at their job. Upper management has significant domain knowledge, but the it department has the ability to devise new unforseen improvements the business. The trick is to bring these two forces together harmoniously.

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.

This was a predictable result

[causality]

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.

Re:This was a predictable result

[__aawdrj2992]

I don't mean to sound trollish about this, but I feel that people who can't use MS Office in a position that requires MS Office are blatanly unqualified for their job. However, they make it IT's problem and use far too many IT resources.

If the end user is within your own organization (ie, not a paying customer) than you should instill in them that it is their responsibility to LEARN to use THEIR PC and do THEIR job.

Every CIO should have a sign above his desk that reads "Failure of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."

Re:IT professionals need to grow some balls.

[SRA8]

While this seems like a very limited solution, I would agree. I worked for a Big-5 and noticed month after month that propz went to people who could RESOLVE issues (usually issues created by their own bad coding.) Little propz went to people who simply didnt create issues (by designing properly, testing well, etc.) I reduced my testing one quarter and spend less overtime at work. Naturally bugs resulted. I was promoted for resolving these issues. I quit tech work and became a business analyst. I couldnt work in a position where people were rewarded for being idiots. Though i'm sure this was very particular for this group in a particular Big5, just some food for thought. Basically, what are management's expectations?

Re:The Holy War: Mac vs. DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

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? For the same reasons I browse with Tor, NoScript, Adblock, and disable cookies. I don't like to be tracked.

Minor balkanization

[fahrvergnugen]

The answer to your question is that for in-house projects, IT needs to be separated into distinct engineering and operations groups.

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 .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.

But one person wearing the development and operations hat? That leads to nothing but frustration, burnout, entropy, and failure.

Re:Natural Maturation?

[HomelessInLaJolla]

Remind me not to apply for whomever you work for These days it's everywhere. Any organization of more than 20 people is going to contain some members trying to game the system for their own profit--and it scales exponentially. From an IRC chatroom, to webboards, to startups, to Twitter, to EVE online, to a national corporation, to international corporations such, to global conglomerate investing groups, to world banks... Microsoft, Enron, Google, Apple, Soloman Smith Barney, the Federal Reserve...the game is the same: The first person (people) to the trough eat the largest amount, and often they do it just because they know that, by creating and using debt, they can control the people who come next.

That's what the .com boom and bust was all about. That's where all the money went. There are people who have billions because they actually need to move billions every day--and then there are people who have billions because they know that, as long as they have it, they can control those who come to them in need of it.

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

A way to fix this is problem management

[OmanLegend]

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.

Check out the ITIL definitions of problem and incident management:
Problem Management-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL#Incid ent_Management
Incident Management-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL#Probl em_Management

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_id =19

My 2 cents

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?

[gusmao]

This is not about becoming more civilized, it's about how the IT career is shifting from a creative, motivating path to a bureaucratic one. Of course there is room for creativity, new ideas and concepts are popping up in a daily basis and they are making things better and easier for everyone. Podcasts, ajax, bittorrent, none of that existed some years ago and is part of life of millions today.

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.

Re:Natural Maturation?

[Master of Transhuman]

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.

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:Do what every worker should

[IamTheRealMike]

I've not been "brainwashed" into thinking unions are evil. Up until a few years ago I had no real experience of unions and no opinion on them. I knew they existed and that they provoked a variety of feelings, that's as far as it went.

In the final year of university I had my first experience of unions. The two main academic unions decided they were going to merge, and the resultant petty power struggles turned into a penis contest, which turned into a call for "strike" action.

So they decided they deserved a 25% pay rise. This number came from looking at the amount of new money about to enter the system thanks to tripling of the student fees, money which was supposed to pay for expansion of the system through new facilities, new staff, refurbishment of falling-down dorm blocks and so on, and then multiplying it by two. They claimed this would be required to bring their pay up to the levels found in the rest of the public sector. The source of this idea turned out to be some bogus statistics invented by the unions themselves a long time ago, where they compared the pay of newly minted lecturers to senior police chiefs and other such nonsense.

How exactly do academics get leverage over their bosses, they wondered. Threatening to quit unless they get a raise? Striking? Hmmm, no, these things sound like hard work. They might not get paid at the end of the month! Far better to fuck over the students by refusing to mark their exams, and using their graduations as hostages.

So that's exactly what they did. The unions, and their sheep-like members (which were by no means all of the academic staff, incidentally), bullshitted their way through the summer in a blatant display of greed and disdain for their customers - the students themselves.

University management wasn't much better. Instead of telling the academics to go fuck themselves, they continued to pay their employees despite those same employees not doing the work they were contracted to do. When a few maverick universities tried to stop their pay (after all, that's what happens in a strike), the academics kicked up a fuss and management backed down.

Eventually they got a 12% pay rise (totally unacceptable of course), which used up all of the new money gained from the fee increases. So now the universities are the same as they always were, with dilapidated facilities and over-crowded lectures, except it's 3 times as expensive as before. And they are still riddled with lazy, arrogant and incompetent staff.

I'm sure there have been good and effective unions in the past, with real axes to grind, really bad management and which managed to achieve real good - but the fact that nobody was surprised by this incompetence implies to me that those times are long gone.

true story

[Dystopian Rebel]

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.

Re:Natural Maturation?

[gtall]

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.

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.

Re:Natural Maturation?

[Guido von Guido]

"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."

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.

Thank you

[HomelessInLaJolla]

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.

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!

Re:Ass Backwards.

[LibertineR]

Dude, there are PLENTY of non-loser customers out there, you just aint hangin out with them. Gee, can you tell I am in this business? What are you doing to network? If you havent had a reason to hand out 50 business cards per week minimum, you are not marketing yourself.

When was the last technical event you attended? The last speaking engagement, demo, roadshow, retreat, or whatever the fuck, where you could tell people about your business?

First thing: You gotta believe that your services are the best available, because if you dont, nobody else will either. When you do believe it, it is easy to sell it to people who dont even know they need it. If you start the week knowing that maybe one in twenty contacts is a likely sell, then you know how many people you need to talk to.

So, what the fuck are you doing on Slashdot, MF'er? Code up that web site and get at it!

Re:Natural Maturation?

[digitig]

People write 1000 lines of code to solve a problem when it could have been done in 150 if they were more creative.

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.

You can't stop Dilbertization. It's human nature.

[SadGeekHermit]

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.

Re:Natural Maturation?

[JuicyBrain]

>> 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 !

Re:Natural Maturation?

[Kaboom13]

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.

True...

[Junta]

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.

What I see

[HangingChad]

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.

Re:Natural Maturation?

[guruevi]

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.

Re:Natural Maturation?

[Kjella]

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.

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.

Re:Natural Maturation?

[mrbcs]

or the Peter Principle?

"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!

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.

The need for creaticity

[starkravingmad]

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.

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

Indeed, indeed.

[JavaRob]

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. Absolutely correct. They even have the same haircut, and walk in lockstep (with that funny hop in midstep to allow for the continued ass-covering)! They stop by every 15 minutes to say "you know we're behind schedule on this, right?" and "yeah... I'm gonna have to ask you to come in Sunday, too... mmkay?"

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.

then go learn business

[tacokill]

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.

I get a little tired of the MBA/Biz school bashing here.

If /. 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)

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)