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Fire Your IT Boss
theodp writes "Instead of laying off techies who directly help users, Robert X. Cringely argues that the best place to cut IT organizations is at the top. One of the great problems in IT management, Cringely says, is that the big bosses typically haven't a clue what is happening, what needs to happen, and what it all should cost. He issues the following challenge: 'If you are managing an IT shop and can't write the code to render "hello world" in C, HTML, PHP, and pull "hello world" from a MySQL database using a perl script, then you are in the wrong job.' Even with help from Google, Cringely believes many technical managers would fail this test and should get the boot as a result — you can't manage what you don't understand."
I had a manager who has no clue as to what it was exactly that I did. I was the Director of IT/System Administrator for a small engineering company. I was the entire IT staff. I had to improve their IT capabilities, provide better user experiences for the engineers at their workstations, and provide internal support for very complicated engineering software, in addition to providing hardware and software support in a lab. I gave them more than they ever dreamed of in the span of two and a half years, and did it with no budget, only petty cash. In the end, for my hard work, I was replaced by a foreign grad student who did the work on his OPT time for 60% of what I was getting paid. All web services were outsourced to Rackspace for $13,500 per year. Given their cost savings, they decided to buy all new computers (around $6,000 each) and open a new workshop. Turned out their replacement for me couldn't do everything, so they hired a summer intern to pick up some of the work. The summer intern was also paid 60% of what I was paid. Unfortunately, the intern couldn't put a lot of hours in when the semester started, so they had to hire a THIRD person to do the work I used to do, at a rate I don't even know. The supplier of one of the expensive engineering programs heard that I had been fired, and promptly increased the support/maintenance cost of their software by 90% (because they knew the only person there who was trained in their software was gone). So, the manager hires three people to replace me, spending more on them than he did on me, and bought all this new hardware that the staff of three is now struggling to support, and dealing with software that they haven't a clue how to use. The funny part to all this? I was laid off as a cost-cutting measure.
Moral of the story is that a manager should understand and appreciate what his employee's contributions to the company are.