Slashdot Mirror
How Do IT Guys Get Respect and Not Become BOFHs?
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a small software company (around 60 people) as the sole IT guy. It's my first time in a position like this and after about 1.5 years I'm starting to get a bit burned out. I try to be friendly, helpful, and responsive and I get no respect whatsoever. Users tend to be flat-out rude when they have a problem, violate our pretty liberal policies constantly, and expect complex projects to be finished immediately upon requesting them. My knee-jerk reaction is to be a bastard, although I've avoided it up to this point. It's getting harder. For those of you who have been doing this a lot longer, how do you get a reasonable level of respect from your users while not being a jerk?"
If they are not nice, delay the response.
Nice people get fast turn responses.
Just check with your boss first.
I couldn't do it, I became a programmer and now am one of the annoying people bugging our IT guy.
worked in my case. IE when I switched companies a year ago, the people who had respect for me before, knew enough about PC's they still got by. Those without respect got to deal with your more typical corporate IT guy (not a total bastard, but at times). The guy who disliked me the most (actually accused me of sabotaging his win 95 box from the network, to our boss, just 18 months ago) publicly wished me back.
Here's what I did in that situation:
I put up a large white-board, and each time someone requested a job, I wrote it on a strip and put it at the bottom of the list.
When they complained about the delay, I pointed to the white-board and suggested that they negotiate with those above them for priority.
It worked well.........
The last place I was at, I was driven absolutely nuts with incomplete trouble tickets by people who had no clue what they wanted.
"I want an FTP account for a user in [city]."
So I'd reply, give me a hint of which server, what username, what password, and why you're requesting this. Each server had dozens of machines.
I had written up a very clear and concise list of what was expected in a ticket. That was overridden by middle management as unnecessary.
"Can you search the Apache logs for [customer]?" That would be a customer who had a presence in several cities, and each one had several sites. No hint of what was being searched for, the date(s) to search, what server, what city, or anything more than the customer.
And my favorite. "We need this project documented. You have 2 weeks.". That's it, no more real explanation. I'd never worked on the project. Had been categorically excluded from the project. Was not allowed to know anything about the project, and suddenly I was to recreate the project (document building each and every custom app from source), which the steps weren't documented and only vague ideas were given about any of it. I asked for information. I begged for information. I was told "This has to be done or the company won't be paid for the project." One week went by and finally information started trickling in. The last day of week 2, I had everything I needed (at like 5pm on Friday). I wrote up a 20 page document, included both sources and compiled versions, with an explanation of how things worked to the best of my understanding. I made ISO images, and put them on an internal server so the requestor could get them either that night, or Monday morning.
"What were you thinking? Why would you make ISOs. I wanted it exactly as we'd ship to the customer." Ahhh, well beyond spec, but reading minds was part of the job, right? I can read minds, and theirs are drawing a blank most days.
So I burnt the CD's, printed the document, put it in a FedEx envelope with a bogus shipping label, and put it in the managers chair, like it had just come in. He sat on it for two more weeks before handing it off to someone else in house to "test". A month later, he hadn't finished testing. Another week later I was told "You didn't include instructions on ...." No shit, I didn't know anything about ..... No one told me about ..... You're only coming to me now to tell me ..... exists. Why wasn't I told about this when I started, so I could complete your request. The truth? Because they don't know what they want, what any other middle manager has had someone do, or even what other departments are doing. Countless meetings all day long, and no one has a clue.
Am I ranting?
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I am a software engineer working at a firm that has 50% engineering and 50% sales and administration. We use an outside firm for IT support since :
1) We can change our own printer toner
2) If something is broken on our PCs, we either don't trust anyone else to fix it for us or simply need a new PC at which point we reinstall it anyway.
3) There's no such thing as an IT guy that would even understand where to begin to install and configure our tools (which actually suck since we have to enter in hardware addresses just to get them to start)
4) We don't use much more than an e-mail server, a file server, and a Cisco. None of which requires a system administrator on site.
5) Subversion and Wiki servers are run on a separate machine that the developers take control of.
I would seriously pity any fool that would even consider being the first IT guy to start working at this company if it ever grew large enough that it should need one on site. Being the IT guy at a small engineering firm where the people on site have historically simply fixed their own stuff would be a disaster. I've seen it before as well. You just don't ever want to be that guy. The problem is, most software engineers learned a lot of what they know by grinding through these problems on test networks, home networks, school networks, etc... It is very rare they ever had to do a good job and make something that could stay live 24/7. So they don't know what it takes to make a system stable for 60 users that can be depended on, instead, they know that it's just a line in a script, what's so hard about that.
If you want a position where a system adminstrator receives more respect, then go to a non-tech company. For example, the happiest system admins I've heard of work at places like paper mills. Remember that you're working at a company where you're more of a convenience than a necessity. If you got hit by a bus, the software engineers would hate doing it, but they'd just start doing the work themselves instead. In a way, at the company you're working at, you're nothing more than a single person that asks the boss for money for new stuff instead of having 40 engineers dropping receipts on his desk. So, in a way, where you are working, you're simply a secretary.
If you want recognition for your talents, go to a company where instead of being "The guy who could have been a programmer/engineer but wasn't smart enough" and head to a company where you're "The guy who keeps the company running".