Tech Vs. Business?

An anonymous reader writes "I've recently found a spot in a large company, and I'm noticing that here a lot of people on the technology side are very anti-business. Tech makes up about 40% of the total line of business staff, but the whole LOB is only a tiny percentage of the larger company in the financial industry. I personally haven't seen this before in prior jobs, but I'm told that this animosity is commonplace. So I come to Slashdot to find out if others have experienced this adversarial relationship between business and tech, and if so, what was the effect on the overall success of the business?"

Comments

Re:common place

[NoobixCube]

I've often considered tech to be like plumbing. The users of both have no idea how it works, basic knowledge of how to use it, and only care when it stops working. Users expect it to work like magic all the time, and the tech/plumber always has to put up with the disgruntled user's shit. Both are looked down upon by most people in society, yet both are absolutely essential to today's way of life.

I work for a large financial firm too

[religious freak]

Luckily, the department I'm in has a great relationship with the business, relatively speaking. They say we cost too much, we're too slow, and we're "vague", but I'll take those as compliments when they could just call us assholes (bankers aren't really known for mincing words).

With that being said, I know that certain departments within this massive company have a very different relationship and there is a lot of animosity between the business and the tech side. Incidentally, those are the departments which are currently being outsourced to India (not saying that I can't be next).

IMHO after years on both the tech side AND the banking side, I can say that the two cultures really aren't compatible. After all, our range is stoned hippie/crazy genius and there's is buttoned down tightwad/midwestern church going Republican. There's not a whole lot of overlap there - there will always be culture clash.

However, this is not an excuse to treat your business people badly. They are the ones writing the checks, they are the ones to whom you must explain what is possible and what is not, and they are the ones that are ultimately doing the work that is paying your salary (yeah, they couldn't work without us - but we definitely couldn't work w/o them).

If you are working in a polluted atmosphere where people talk terribly about the business, I'd suggest you change it. And if you're not in a position to change the culture, I'd find another job. Not only is it soul-crushing to work in a hostile environment, but your department's days may be numbered anyway.

One thing I have noticed

[navtal]

One problem that facilitates animosity between the business side and the tech support side is that if you do everything right and are a little lucky nothing will happen to the network. I cant tell you how frustrating it is to see an IT admin who dosnt do their job get praised for fixing something that never should have happened and is ultimately their fault.

Re:One thing I have noticed

[Tablizer]

taking care of things with very few problems. I had a poor review from the business manager due to what he said was low productivity. In other words, since I was not running around all day fixing things it meant I was not doing anything. He never saw the preventative maintenance.

Perhaps you need to sit down and explain your perspective and try to understand what you are being compared to. You may have to agree to write up a progress report/log that shows all the activity you do and what kinds of things it prevents. If you keep people informed, they are more likely to trust you. Whether that's "fair" or not is another thing. Life isn't always fair, but communication can go a long way. Most managers hate being in the dark.

Re:One thing I have noticed

[bzipitidoo]

This delusion is typical of engineering majors in general, and EEs especially. EE is regarded by nearly everyone as the hardest discipline offered at the undergrad level. It goes to the EE majors' heads, and they get to thinking they can do anything, and that CS problems are trivial. You will be amazed at how they will be struggle with a fairly simple problem such as the elevator problem, and then upon figuring it out (or being told the answer), will forget how it stumped them and think that it was actually very simple (it's not especially difficult, but it isn't entirely trivial), and dismiss all of CS as similarly simple. They are constantly underestimating the difficulty of CS, and fail to grasp that algorithms are not just another kind of mathematical formula. You can't apply a Fourier transform or a Laplace transform or any other sort of mathematical transform, or a series expansion, or a linear or quadratic or whatever approximation to a CS problem and expect a solvable formula to pop out. But EEs think that way, and persist in applying that sort of thinking to CS problems. What programming they have done is all short assembler programs to run controllers. The programming is not seen as much, it is just a small unimportant part of the "real" work of creating devices. In such work, they might never encounter a situation where they actually have to know something about algorithms.

I first ran into this decades ago. I thought perhaps the EEs had expanded their viewpoint over the years, but from an encounter about 5 years ago, I'd say not. The EEs have an astonishing amount of trouble appreciating the difficulties of CS. If the EEs have trouble, just think how bad it is for the poor business major.

You could at least explain what you mean

[Jane Q. Public]

... by "anti-business"! There are about a thousand different things you could mean by that, and frankly I have no idea which of them you mean.

Do you mean they are "anti-giant-corporate-monopolistic-practices"??

Do you mean they don't want to see your company make a profit?

Do you mean they take a stand against certain business practices engaged in by this corporation?

There are many, many more. So: WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN? Your post was about as clear as mud.

Re:You could at least explain what you mean

[rapiddescent]

I've worked in many financial firms doing enterprise IT - typically "The Business" is a group of business analysts that sit between IT (usually known as Production or Manufacturing) and the business stakeholders (i.e. those who own 'accounts' or lines of profitable business streams).

The Business are "supposed to be" experts in deriavitives, swaps, banking, finance or whatever and they ellucidate requirements to the IT folks who concentrate on building the systems. In smaller firms, or tech based companies, this distinction rarely exists.

There is always a degree of tension between the two departments because the IT folk think the business are stupid (because the IT folks generally become more expert at the financial business than The Business) and The Business believe the IT crowd to be slow, expensive and pedantic.

its because IT folks do not communicate the degree of difficulty that non-functional requirements are to deliver - because we think that The business are too stupid to understand.

also, in finance, it is The Business that get the big bonuses and on more than one occasion, I have heard business units say "They built the systems" when all they did is deliver a sub-standard list of untested requirements and manage some ill thought out user acceptance testing.

Does it matter?

[Farmer Tim]

Since it's the financial industry you probably won't be working there long :P

Presentation versus inside guts

[Tablizer]

Business tends to be "presentation oriented". It's controlled by sales, and the sales culture permeates the entire building for good or bad such that perception is everything. Techies tend to distrust salemanship as too superficial, and like to instead focus on building a better mousetrap. The thing is, paying more attention to presentation gets one promoted and recognized more. Thus, techies are forced to choose between focusing on a better mousetrap or "playing the game" to advance.

A compromise is to find better ways to communicate technology to non-techies. Find analogies to common items, such as say laundry when talking about the difference between sorting and filtering. And don't talk down to people: respect their specialty. Show interest in their specialty when you can; or at least aspects of it that interest you. The more you learn about their job, the better you can help them.

Also, even if you can't outright fix something, find a decent compromise or alternative. Don't tell them "no", but rather "I'll have to ponder that one". Show that you are not ignoring them, but putting your Sherlock Techie cap on."

And for every "that's too hard" or "takes too long", throw in enough, "oh, that change is easy, it'll be right up". If you always delay, you'll lose trust.

Re:Presentation versus inside guts

[mandelbr0t]

Techies tend to distrust salemanship as too superficial, and like to instead focus on building a better mousetrap

I tend to distrust sales people because they badly oversell the product. Without proper knowledge of the extent of the technical problem, they will often tell a potential client that a required feature will takes days/weeks when the developer has already told them it's more like weeks/months.

I've seen this problem for the past 8 years, and this animosity between techies and marketroids won't go away until the latter are reigned in. I think I estimate my projects better than the sales people, but the salesperson is only interested in their commission, which is usually paid prior to any support or maintenance contracts.

The net result is that salespeople get paid without any accountability for the actual project. All problems from this point forward are viewed as a deficiency in technical resources rather than a poorly planned sales pitch. I'm not fond of being the scapegoat when I've very carefully explained why the project will take longer than the sales guy thinks it will.

Re:What do you mean, Anti-business?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Or conversely, an IT department that believes it is responsible for a greater part of the companies success than it really is. Most IT folks don't understand how business works. Sales, marketing, accounting, IT and management are all vital parts of a businesses life. They all have to function together to help a business grow or even stay afloat. Often IT derides the other parts because it doesn't understand their contribution, and measures them by their technical skills. Although, the same can happen of any of the other departments measuring another by its own metric. The greatest salesman, I ever met, who could sell ice to Inuits, and sand to Saharan nomads, couldn't figure out how to copy files to a floppy disk, jump drive, or any other form of removable media.

Prior Experience....

[Mr. Flibble]

I am a consultant, so I get to see many different businesses. I have also worked for many prior to consulting.

I can say that those that do not understand business fare poorly. On the flip side, those that understand business, but not the technology that they are supposedly in have problems as well. I have seen both.

Both of those businesses are neither failing not advancing. They are just sort of hanging on. The businesses that understand both do quite well of course.

Re:What do you mean, Anti-business?

[Toonol]

And, conversely, IT staff can and do massively impede productive workers... the parts of the company that make money. Perverse security requirements, upgrades that remove functionality, ridiculous delays to get the simplest things done because users aren't permitted to do anything to their pc...

And will often be quite condescending about it as well; after all, they're the wizards. Users are just muggles.

And you were expecting what?

[Secret Rabbit]

Seriously, tech and business really are two different worlds.

The techies want to learn, deploy, do "cool things", etc. Whereas the business people want to make assloads of money. The problem comes in when these two worlds collide. The business people don't understand that when they change there mind with a complex (software) project, that it really isn't as simple as altering a pie chart on a presentation and takes some (if not a lot) of time. This makes them mad and then they come down on the IT people like they're just being lazy.

The IT people know why things are the way they are, but the typical business person doesn't listen to explanations because in the business world explanations tend to be excuses and CYA. They don't understand that things are different in the IT field nor do they care. Nor do they realise that throwing money at a problem doesn't make it go away. As in, a bug doesn't care how much you're paid, it'll hide as long as it wants to.

But, most of these problems occur because of poor project management. Back in the day, project managers were there to protect the people that they were managing. They were there so the IT people didn't get screwed. But, more and more over time, the project manager has become an extension of the client.

No-one really seems to care that changing there minds constantly (sometimes back and forth) costs a profound amount of time and money. After all, why plan something out when it will waste someone (or someone else's company's) money and not yours.

Polish up your resume and look for a tech company

[viking80]

First, if you work for a company in the financial industry, polish up your resume. Stock up on office supplies as well. You might be in for a tough ride, and be ready to jump ship.

Secondly, if you do IT, work for an IT company. Forget about adversaries, and other BS. Have you ever seen the IT manager promoted to run a financial institution or a hospital, or a become partner in a law firm?

      NO.

But try out a tech company, and you will find that your bosses boss is a tech guy and that there is no ceiling for promotions.

The whole culture at a tech company will also be much more to your liking. Go have lunch at Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo or many other, and you will probably know what I mean.

Re:common place

[Dun Malg]

tech workers are looked down upon, because people only ever come to us when things go badly

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard of an IT guy being [sacked|not replaced after leaving] because some ass in a suit reasoned thusly:

"What do we need an IT guy for? We never have any computer problems!"

Quantitative techniques in business

[try_anything]

In my experience the biggest driver of tech's disdain for business is the farcical nature of some managers' attempts at quantifying certain aspects of their business.

All businesses manage to quantify a few things extremely well -- payroll, revenue, taxes, and so forth. There are many other things that can be quantified in a useful way. However, many business types engage in persistent fantasies about quantifying things like programmer productivity, ROI on buying software tools, and the effect of different business methodologies. Quantifying things is an excellent idea, but it's so overwhelmingly difficult to measure things like management productivity and (God help us all) "project velocity" that 98.6% of all attempts to do so are essentially fraudulent -- just as dishonest as if I pretended that number I just read off my rectal thermometer had any meaning more precise than "most."

Engineers are likely to feel a little twitchy just looking at the number "98.6" because they associate it with the classic overprecise and somewhat incorrect statement that normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees fahrenheit. If that number annoys us, what do you think we feel like when some business type says we should use Scrum because 87% of all enterprise-scale software projects come in 50% over budget, while only 63% of Scrum projects come in 50% over budget? Whenever engineers and business types speak in a common language (mathematics, logic, statistics, controlled studies) it turns out that the business types come off as STUPID, GULLIBLE, OVERCONFIDENT, AND FULL OF SHIT.

Which is not to say that business types are stupid. There are honest and intelligent managers who aspire to quantitative precision and may work very hard at it, but they don't go around waving numbers and graphs because they know the results are extremely difficult to interpret -- more "food for thought" than "results." The guys who make a big deal out of numbers like the ones in the last paragraph are either con artists or victims of con artists. They think that making quantitatively precise comparisons of programming methodologies is a strategic managerial decision that you implement by repeating numbers you read in [blog summaries of] management journals, just like creativity is a lifestyle choice that you implement by your choice of haircut, clothing, and a certain brand of digital accessories. It never crosses their mind that it might be something intrinsically difficult that you can work really hard at without ever producing anything worth sharing -- that's how poorly they understand it.

But it always seems like it's the guys who make up bullshit numbers who write the papers, run the consultancies, get the attention of upper management, and get put in charge of things they don't understand. Business types may have enough patience and faith in management to sit back and watch the pretenders rise meteorically and flame out, but engineers are used to calling bullshit on bullshit when numbers are involved.

Anyway, I could go on, but you get the picture. Engineers accept that not everything can be quantified, and every business decision must, of necessity, rely heavily on guesswork, folklore, and intuition in addition to hard numbers. We can't accept that the business world is full of people who pretend otherwise, without any reasonable justification, and somehow escape being laughed at by their supervisors and peers.

The age-old struggle

[yorkshiredale]

The business guys want it fast, cheap, first.

Engineering want it correct, perfect, however long it takes.

There's the struggle.

Any good business needs to strike a balance between the two. The tension is inevitable, and healthy.

Re:common place

[Architect_sasyr]

computers are still relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of IT gurus to keep a network up and running

I like the rest of your argument but this I have to slap you for. The amount of people I come across in my day to day work (I'm a contract network administrator) who run "MS SBS" or "Red Hat ES" and think they can "network" and be a helldesk is phenomenal. There will always be a need for IT, just like there is always a need for plumbers. The whole concept of making the systems easier to manage is what is killing us properly - home users think they can do it because they hooked their TV up to their laptop just fine, so why should it be hard when they're at the office.

That rant, however, is for another time.

Re:common place

[profplump]

The power company supplies exactly the same product to every one of their customers. And the product never changes. And they only concern themselves with delivering it to your meter, past which they have no concern. You have to hire separate support to deal with every change of your building layout, usage patterns, equipment, or anything else that might change where and how much electricity you need.

Or think phones. Essentially any business with more than a handful of employees buys some form of site connectivity and a bunch of DIDs from the phone company, and then pays someone else to manage the internal phones as a separate system.

You could easily do the same thing with IT -- hire someone to make changes and then leave. In fact, I sell that very service. I charge an hourly rate to come in and make changes to your computer systems. When I'm done I leave and don't charge you again until you want to make another change. Just like an electrician I guarantee my work and will fix mistakes, but I'll charge you for any changes that weren't part of our original agreement.

Anti-business ?

[netpixie]

If you think anyone is "anti-business" then you probably have a flawed idea of what "business" means.

It is not a single cohesive thing, you can't look at a something and say "that's business" or something else and say "that's not business". It pervades and influences everything, a bit like the force, except not always good.

Ask these techies "Do you like getting paid?" They will say "Yes" and that is part of "business"

Ask them "Do you want to produce good products?" They will say "Yes" and that is part of "business"

On the other hand ask them to follow some half-arsed "business" process that you've read about in a book and they may well tell you where to go.

The fact that they are disagreeing with you doesn't mean they are anti-business, it means they are anti-you.

Re:What do you mean, Anti-business?

[ghostdoc]

In my experience, exactly the reverse is true.

Most techies (because our curiosity is one of the reasons we ended up techies) take a lively interest in how their business works even if they don't need to. If you're an in-house software developer, you *need* to understand how the business works in order to be able to write software for it.

But the business folk have no clue how IT works, and no desire to ever find out. As others have said, it's like plumbing to them.

Part of the animosity I've experienced is caused by this very problem. IT people understand how the business works (and all the business, not just one department), and also understand how the tech works, so actually have probably the clearest understanding of the business in the entire organisation. They then have to deal with morons in suits who don't understand anything past their next departmental meeting, and the morons resent being treated like morons.

Re:common place

[Ultracrepidarian]

So if they understood they were a cost center, they would not be looked down upon? I assume you are implying that management is justified in looking down upon them because they are a "cost center". It may be the reason, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.

This attitude sometimes leads to real disaster.

The company I worked for for many years was suddenly seriously strapped for cash. It seems that customer payments had simply dried up. The cause? The clerk that prepared the invoices had been laid off, and no one had bothered to perform that function. She was hired back immediately, and finally found a little respect. We are talking a company with sales of over $100 million here.

In another instance, the woman that entered engineering bills into the computer left to take a job at another company. I told the manager of engineering that I personally knew her work and that he would need to hire two data entry people to replace her. A month went by, and they didn't hire anyone to perform her function. After all, she was just "overhead". End result: Entire company's production delayed by six weeks.

Re:common place

[MadMorf]

...computers are still relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of IT gurus to keep a network up and running,... thus less IT workers needed...large websites and databases will get easier to manage, eventually, the only thing that won't go away is the need for real security...so security is where real IT growth is, computers will get more reliable and software easier to manage...

Let me just say, after 26 years in this business, of hearing this every year, the systems just keep getting more complex and harder to maintain, rather than less and easier.

Windows NT was supposed to make it so anyone who could use Windows could manage a server.

How many MILLION MSCEs do we have in the world now?

Storage systems with Petabytes of data are complex things. Cloud computing is a complex thing. Supercomputing clusters are complex things. World-spanning networks are complex things.

No offense intended, but the only people who think things are getting easier are people who don't know how they work in the first place.

Re:common place

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of our hardware problems are caused by the moving part more commonly referred to as the user.

Re:common place

[Lumpy]

also Most everyone in IT intimidates the rest of the employees very hard. What we do in IT is looked at as "magic" to the other 98% of the employees and executives. People are intimidated when they are around someone that is massively better at something than they are. If your IT people are lacking in social or interpersonal skills this increases the intimidation factor.

You can stand your ground and be polite and warm. I have said many times NO to an executive and they were happy about me saying NO to them. It's all how you word it along with your demeanor and candor.

Plus if you can say, "Sorry but NO, the CTO signed a rule banning that. IF you get him to give you a waiver I'll gladly set that up for you!" Pass that buck hard. Make the overpaid management earn their salary by sending all executive requests to go against police directly to his desk.

Finally, any IT manager or Director worth a damn will buy out of HIS /HER own pocket doughnuts or bagles every friday morning and feed his staff and then have the staff each take a small platter of them to a different department each week as a "thank you for being our customer" and put that on the platter that it's from the IT guys. Give your guys credit for that.

That goes a HUGE way to fix the problems in the workplace.

Re:common place

[Emperor Shaddam IV]

1. Computers aren't that new. The first ones appeared in the 1930's and 1940's. Argueably people like Babbage ( and Lovelace ) and Leonardo DaVinci could have "built" mechanical computers - if they had the resources.
2. Cars have been around for more than 100 years, and we still need mechanics.
3. Working parts has very little to do with it, outside of the fans and harddrives, computers don't have any moving parts. Most of the "headaches" I think are around designing, building, maintaining, and supporting software.
4. Having been in IT for 16 years, I would have to say that things are actually more complex now than ever. There are more software tools, programming lanugages, databases, report writers, operating systems, networking protocols, etc than ever before. And all these tools have a lot more features than they used to. Its getting increasely harder to know "some" of them well. Gone are the days when just knowing DOS, UNIX, MVS, VMS, and OS/400 would bascially give you knowledge of 90% of the hardware running. Or knowing just Assembly/C/Cobol/C++ would allow you to read and maintain most of the source code being used. So I would argue that the need for IT staff is going to continue to increase.
5. True Hackers are hard to find. Most people that consider themselves "Hackers" are just downloading and using the tools other people wrote to crack systems. I'm not a hacker, but I would say that a true "Hacker" would have intimate knowledge of the internals of the Unix kernal, Linux, Windows, be a "decent" C/C++ programmer, know script programming, understand Firewall rules and configuration, and have an in depth knowledge of TCP/IP networking protocols and routing, and the "social" skills necesssary to call and poke around to get information about logins and passwords. 80-90 percent of the people I know in IT don't even have these skills... Hacking is much harder than it used to be. It used to be you just called a "number" using your 1200/2400 baud modem and poked around.
6. Security is just a small sub-set of the big picture. Its important, but I would say that software engineeers, database admins, sys admins, and network engineers are all important and going to continue to be important...

I think you have missed this point. As the speed of microprocessors has increased ( per Moores law ), I think we have seen an increase in the complexity of operating systems and software. Which is requiring more and more IT knowledge and resources.

I think the "disconnect" between IT and Business has a lot more to do with the fact that business "knows" they depend on IT, but they are frustrated that IT can't seem to deliever what they want when they want it. On the other side, IT has to deal with more and more tools and IT staff has to learn more and more skills. And to increase frustration in IT, business users frequently don't deliever clear requirements or they "change" their mind in the middle of projects....

I think moving forward, the disconnect is just going to get worse, not better and the requirement for IT workers is going to continue to increase....