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.

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...

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?

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.

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?

[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.

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.

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?

[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.

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