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

common place

[markybob]

i've found this to be true in almost every company that i've worked for. tech workers are looked down upon, because people only ever come to us when things go badly and most of us literally "sit on our asses", which they dont see as working. so we're seen as lazy and bad at what we do, because if we were any good at it, they wouldn't be having whatever problem they're having. the best way i've found to combat this is to be honest with your departmental managers and hope that they can spread some love

Re:common place

[kesuki]

I think part of that 'works like magic' mystique is due to how reliable the electric grid, water and sewer pipelines and telephone and data networks have been. it's more profitable for the utilities if the system never fails, or as close to never as is possible. companies probably don't understand why they need an IT department at all, they don't understand why all the utility they need can't just come from an outside company. after all if a company is going to smelt aluminum they don't go around building an atomic power plant to run their smelters, they find a cheap source of electricity preferably reachable by major shipping lanes, and let the utility company worry about where the power comes from.

computers are still relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of IT gurus to keep a network up and running, when a basic desktop computer can get rid of every moving part, there is less to replace and maintain, 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. because hacking is getting more and more economically promising in many places in Africa and former eastern block nations. so security is where real IT growth is, computers will get more reliable and software easier to manage, but hackers are getting smarter and more skilled every single year.

Re:common place

[Nursie]

Are you exclusively talking about tech support?

I got the impression from the question that he's talking about tech in general. In which case I can count myself. I work for $BIG_CORP as a software engineer and there's animosity here. On our side a lot of it stems from -

If our software does really, really well in the marketplace then we might get a reasonable payrise, whilst some of the guys on the business side get to retire from the profits, buy sports cars etc.

If our software does badly then there will be layoffs.

We tend to be ignored and dictated to, as if we're an inconvenience, not actually, you know, the guys that design and procude everything you goddamn sell.

We're smarter than them. In the geeky, pure-intellect, tough-maths-problem way. Many of them are overly loud, arrogant and annoying. Somehow they make more money and are always travelling places and have great cars though...

They're always telling us not to do fun techie stuff (otherwise known as innovation) in favour of endless interface tweaking and repackaging (otherwise known as making software actually usable).

From their side, we're probably moody, have over-inflated senses of entitlement and our own importance, get in the way of "corporate direction" whenever we can, mutter about unintelligible and unimportant stuff all the time, spend all our money on stupid gadgets, are usually passive-aggressive and are nearly always lazy.

Swings and roundabouts. Been the same way in every company I worked for.

Re:common place

[HangingChad]

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.

Part of what I did coming into a new CIO position was simplifying the IT environment. A big component of that was stopping Windows development and moving Windows out of our server mix. The complexity of the whole Windows ecosystem adds overhead and expense without much value...except to MCSE's. The old arguments about it costing more to find qualified developers and support is just tripe. We haven't had any problems replacing our Windows-only staff and vendors at competitive local market rates and saved big on license costs.

We can also match or beat application development times in a FOSS environment. I'm sure those heavily invested in Windows development are seething to tell me how wrong I am, but I prove that every day. We're building big systems on a LAMP stack and pushing the envelope for time to market. I came from a Windows shop, I am...well, used to be...a Windows developer. It's all FUD. You don't need Windows, Windows developers, or all the overhead it takes to keep that ecosystem running in some kind of decent shape. You can deliver enterprise services at a fraction of the cost and at competitive turn-around times. Simplify your environment and you'll save yourself a lot of money and stress.

Re:common place

[mikael]

Some time ago, there was a news article on how an aluminum smelter plant had signed a long-term contract for electricity supply at a bargain low rate. When the cost of gas went up, the management found out that they could make more money reselling their electricity than they could by smelting aluminum.

Re:One thing I have noticed

[rcoxdav]

I know this first hand. I was an IT admin who was 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 and testing that I performed that kept it running well.

Why do businesses even have IT departments

[mosb1000]

Wouldn't it be simpler and better to contract that out? Here are the benefits:

Cost. There's no need to hire and maintain unnecessary staff. If there's an emergency, the contractor can bring in more people to handle it, but most of the time they won't need to dedicate even one full-time staffer to your office.

Versatility. The contractor will work with many clients and many environments. That means that they will have a diversity of experience that will allow them to deal with problems quickly. They will also have the experience to point out better solutions.

Employee satisfaction. The contractors personnel will need to be respectful and courteous to your staffers, or else you will find a different contractor. They will work to find solutions (and charge you more money) rather than making excuses about why your problem can't be solved so they can stay in their budget.

Come to think of it, maybe I should start a business doing this for people.

Re:One thing I have noticed

[chris_mahan]

At my company, there is a strong belief that if it ain't broke, you don't fix it.

So you basically have to wait for the customer to file a trouble ticket for you to fix something, and push a change control for approval, in order for you to fix something you knew was going to go wrong.

What we end up doing is developing the fix and keeping it in dev, until that fateful day when the user happens upon the bug. The we look all mighty because we can fix it insta-magically.

Actually, we no longer do that. We let our managers take the blame now. We say, we knew about it, and we were ready to fix it, but it was low-priority for our boss, so we never did.

Come to think of it, that's exactly how management likes it.

They also apply different standards

[Chrisq]

We once installed a configurable system, and did months of testing to ensure it worked on all configurations, boundary cases, etc.

This was an important financial system, and I know that if it had not worked as required there would have been hell to pay.

Six months later someone decided to check our test data against the live configuration and found a very odd rule, giving people with worse credit histories better interest rates. We queried it and they said it was wrong but "why was the system so hard to understand".

We brought up the original specifications, page diagrams etc. given by business and showed them that it worked in exactly the way they wanted it to. The "difficult to understand" argument was never done again. In fact the whole thing was put down to "just one of those things".

The ID manager suggested that we could query the database and find out how many people were given a rate inappropriate for the risk - and maybe flag the accounts for quick follow up if they had arrears. Almost unbelievably we were told that on "under no circumstances were we to query the database for this information, as the results could be seen as unfair to the business unit concerned". This came from a board level director so we really had to comply.

Again, had an IT problem lead to people being given the wrong rates we all know the first question would have been "How many people are affected and how much money is involved?". The second would have been "who was responsible?".

I believe that the business see the IT department as a car and them as the drivers. If they take a route that leaves them crawling in traffic at 20mph its "one of those things". If the car only crawls along at 20mph its "totally unacceptable".