Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
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.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
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.
Since it's the financial industry you probably won't be working there long :P
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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.
Table-ized A.I.
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!"
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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 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.
The opinions expressed here are those of this individual, and may not reflect the policy or practice of the collective
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.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
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.
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.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
...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.
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Most of our hardware problems are caused by the moving part more commonly referred to as the user.
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....