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Do You Hate Being Called an "IT Guy?"
An anonymous reader writes "The phrase 'IT' is so overused, I'm not sure what it means any more. OK, maybe it's an ego thing, but I spent a lot of years in grad school, lots of years getting good at creating software, and lots of years getting good at creating technical products and I don't want the same label as the intern who fixes windoze. I'm looking at a tech management job at a content company that is trying to become a software company, and they refer to everything about software development, data center operations, and desktop support as 'IT.' I'd like to tell the CEO before I take the job that we have to stop referring to all these people as 'IT people' or I'm not going to be able to attract and retain the top-tier talent that is required. Am I just being petty? Should I just forget it? Change it slowly over time? These folks are really developing products, but we don't normally call software creators 'product developers.' Just call them the 'Tech Department' or the 'Engineering Deptartment?'"
I can't see why this would matter. Hopefully potential candidates will look beyond whatever their official job title is. I'd change it slowly over time.
Le français vous intéresse?
You're in IT. Deal with it.
I don't think you're going to help attract a lot of talented engineers by changing the nomenclature to the "'Engineering Deptartment."
That aside, I think "Software Engineer," "Software Architect," "Analyst," "Lead Developer," and such are common titles for people who are creating things with software, as opposed to "IT's" tech-support implications.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Sounds pretty petty to me. I have no problem at all with IT and don't see why anyone would. I don't care what my job's called as long as it interests/challanges me and provides a monthly paycheck. If you're that hung up with titles, I'd suggest your problem lies closer to home.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Did the submitter forget his Twitter account password? Is his navel so big that he can't help but gaze into it?
I'm a software developer. In my experience, "IT" is a term used by non-engineers as a catch-all for "that which my English degree failed to equip me to understand". Kind of like when they say "microchip".
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In my view of the industry when someone says IT I think of the technical support, admin and sys planning teams. The ones who make the systems work and keep working.
Programmers and the such, I put in the developers group. Graphic designers, html jockeys or software developers. The ones who make what people see on their desktops look pretty.
You dont call someone who washes your car and gives it a bit of a polish a mechanic would you?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
call me Sue if you'll give me a job.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Like it says
Just call them the 'Tech Department' or the 'Engineering Deptartment?'" [sic]
The spelling Deptartment just called. They need more budget.
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
You ARE in IT.
However, it's the equivalent of calling a Brain surgeon a Doctor
Or referring to a Nuclear physicist as a scientist.
It is kind of vague. Sometimes being more specific is good, as it points out people's specialty more.
the job will be out-sourced soon, anyway.
When I graduated there was the programmer, technical designer, conceptual designer and analyst ladder to climb. And I tried it.
The you realize the tunnel view you get when following such a path. And after a couple of years of having tried to adopt a fancy name -senior consultant, senior anything- I resolved to name myself that what defines me. If people ask I'll tell them I'm a programmer. Doing well for years with a lovely family, a very good income and a sports car that turns heads. But still a programmer.
I can develop products -which is much more than coding-, I can look through the organization and suggest improvements and I can tell anyone paying me he's brilliant. Still I'm a programmer.
Mainstream will never be able to keep cracks charlatans so don't set your hopes too high on job titles.
Consider job titles at Google. Naming Vint Cerf an Internet Evangelist is a way of telling the world that job titles don't really matter and that the substance matters way more.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Potential employees are probably more worried about future employers/their resumes, and it's not unreasonable of them to do so.
Frankly, a respectable-sounding title is one very cheap way for employers to compensate their employees that costs the company absolutely nothing yet is of material benefit to the employee. It's one reason nearly everyone in sales and marketing is a "director" or "head" of some tiny sliver of a given institution's sales/marketing operation. "Director, Central California Sales," "Head of E-marketing Business Development" etc. You're more likely to attract ambitious, driven people if your position comes with a nice title. These are also the sort of people who will work very hard for you, because they're hungry for advancement. Of course, they also are likely to leave the company as soon as a better offer comes along. But I'd rather get 3 years of work from a ambitious employee than 10 years from a just-getting-by timecard-puncher.
IT guys are the scumbags who put desktop remote control software on my suse workstation. They are the reason I keep rootkits (ie, system rescue CDs) in my desk draw, and why most of the guys I directly work with run gentoo.
These are the people who solemnly told me they would improve my WAN latency issue by compressing the link. When I said that won't work they said they could always put two compressors in series.
When they replaced my Dell desktop with an equally crappy ASUS or something they replaced the Dell branded logitech keyboard and mouse with an ASUS branded logitech keyboard and mouse on the grounds that using the wrong type of peripheral might cause "incompatibilities".
Since they stopped supporting POP and SMTP I now have to use outlook inside windows inside vmware, except there used to be outlook web access which stopped working last weekend so I logged a call with the helpless desk and they got the whole story (running firefox on suse, etc) then they had to get me to give them the version of IE I had there (stuffed if I know why). So they didn't fix it (Exchange server cant authenticate me for some reason) and escalated it a few times then the second or third level guy called me back and asked if I had thought of restarting firefox. When I said yes he asked if I had restarted my system (said so, I had an import or ten on the go at the time). This after I had given them the error message which came back from exchange.
I wish I could sack these idiots. In theory they work for my organisation you know, but they seem to have their hooks in us.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
"The phrase 'IT' is so overused, I'm not sure what it means any more.
It means "information technology".
OK, maybe it's an ego thing, but I spent a lot of years in grad school, lots of years getting good at creating software, and lots of years getting good at creating technical products and I don't want the same label as the intern who fixes windoze.
What's wrong with that? Are you really so shallow as this? (Don't answer) I can understand wanting some sort of prestige, but not liking something because the proles get to have it too is one of the worst features of human nature, and it's something that used to get trained out of non-upper-class Americans. Is it really that irritating to be in the same industry as the intern who fixes "Windoze"[sic]? From urbandictionary.com: douchebag "An individual who has an over-inflated sense of self worth, compounded by a low level of intelligence, behaving ridiculously in front of colleagues with no sense of how moronic he appears."
How does the following passage make you feel? Does it make you feel comforted or outraged?
"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."
--Andy Warhol
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Oh, you're in IT.
Sorry you don't have a shiny title to distinguish yourself from the lowly CPU-fixers and computer janitors, but there you go.
You're in IT. Face it. You're in IT. No way around it, might as well say it with me: You're in IT.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Do you really value titles before substance?
'IT Guy' isn't a term of abuse, why should you care if people call you that?
Do they value you in your current position? Of so great, if not fix it or leave. Either way being called an 'IT Guy' is not worth worrying about.
That's THE title at Bell Labs. If it's good enough for Dennis it's good enough for me.
"Don't call me IT Guy, IT Buddy. Don't call me IT Buddy, IT Friend."
Hagrin.com
It drove me nuts being in college and meeting "IT" majors. I would ask them questions like what they like to program in or what kind of Linux they use, but anything I asked beyond the technical skills required to setup a standard home Linksys router was met with a blank stare and an explanation of how good they are with anti-virus and firewalls. It made me wonder why as an aviation major I knew ten times more than any IT major I ever met.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Hey, there's nothing wrong with ego. I, for one, always wanted to be called The High Priest Of The Sun. But then the barstards switched from Sun to IBM servers :p
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Try doing a PhD concerned with the hardware implementation of pretty hardcore mathematics for wireless communications and have someone refer what you do to be "IT". Without trying to sound like some form of zealot, the best thing I did was switch to a Mac. Not because it is a superior environment or anything, but because when someone has a Windows problem I feign ignorance and say "sorry, not sure, I don't use Windows these days".
yup, specially when the client realizes I am a woman, not a guy :)
Would you call someone who designs aircraft engines a mechanic? Would you call someone who designs central heating boilers a plumber? Would you call someone who runs a team working on ALU design at Intel an electrician?
My point is that nowadays IT is actually a trade, and mostly attracts the sort of people who in the past would have become plumbers, electricians and mechanics. Which is not to knock them, because these are essential and valuable trades, but basically they implement what other people have designed and specified. Programmers who are not just coders, systems designers, user interface designers - these are creative professions.
In the UK we have a terrible tradition of confusing professionals with tradesmen, caused by our emphasis on "administrative" skills. We've just had the Government dismiss their principal expert on drugs because he dared to disagree with the irrational "omg smelling cannabis kills you I need a stiff drink or five before I can go back to work" culture of the Government and the Civil Service. In a properly organised world we would sack the Government for lying to us, but in the mind of the Govt., Prof. Nutt's status is about that of a plumber. The point is that you go to tradesmen for advice on implementation of what you want to do, but you go to professionals to tell you what to do in the first place. You somehow need to get back to that position (I say you. I hope to retire in 5-6 years; then it will be someone else's problem. For now, I am quite happy being a software architect, because that is actually what I do.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
One thing is certain: Referring to any group as a deptartment (or worse, a deptardment) will not win favor with anyone, top-tier talent or not.
Software Engineering
Hardware Engineering
Support
Operations
Development
Now, combine:
Database engineering
Database operations department
Desktop support
Deskside support
Network Operations
Network Engineering
ECM (Enterprise Content Management) Developer
Need I go on?
...get over it. It's the same in any industry. If you work in hospitality, you could be a bellhop, a cleaner or a hotel manager. The guy who comes to fix your laptop probably thinks you're an arse too. (I tend to think that about anyone who spells Windows with a 'z'). Also you probably have an over inflated opinion of your job (most people do). For example, all the 'IT Architects' I work with just see 'Code Monkey' jobs as roles to be shipped off to India.
Now, I'm an EMT, I'm trained to save lives.
There are people who are walking the earth today who, were it not for me, would be dead. Not "I was a member of a team", not "If I hadn't been there, someone else would." because of me.
And yet I am referred to by a huge number of people as being an "Ambulance Driver".
Now, I don't see what's so degrading about being referred to as an "IT guy", but if it bothers you, then by all means try to change it. Speaking from my experience as a person who is exceedingly inept at the whole office politics thing, though, I'd suggest not putting that forth as a demand of taking the job, that sort of thing (I've come to find out), tends to make people think you're...well...a pain in the ass.
(Unkie) Reamus
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
I find those that are worried about their title are generally those who obtained a degree and think that anything less than the title of their choice is offensive because they take their degree far too seriously or people who, for whatever reason (ie no degree or just stupid) don't feel qualified for the job and want a excellent job title to reaffirm they're doing their job right and it will help when they're caught out and need to be find a job elsewhere.
We already have numerous title for someone who does programming. Too many in fact and it's because of those two types mentioned above or companies wanting to avoid paying a decent wage by giving you a title that is hard to compare to other titles.
Briefly adding my own $0.02:
In Britain, 'IT' seems more acceptable to be used as a catchall for anything computer-related. In the US, many narrow the definition to helpdesk support, and the personnel responsible for the ongoing operation of anything computer-related. Developers and architects are separate (with DBAs and a few other positions hanging somewhere in the void between) --- I'm not sure if this is a regional distinction in the US, primarily because personnel in these fields tend to move around quite a bit.
Frankly, they're both valuable professions. I've worn both hats, and it's a bit of a shock to make the switch from one to the other, as both fields evolve and change so rapidly that it's very difficult to stay current in both. That said, I can easily understand why one would want their job title to accurate reflect their duties!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
So apparently you want to be taken more seriously, but you decide to drop "windoze" into your question? Do you really think that the people who hand out jobs - and titles - care about your personal prejudices? As a professional, if the best solution for your company is "Microsoft`s platform" then you deliver it, you don't spend time complaining about how no one respects you because your proposal to migrate Visual Studio to vi isn't taken seriously. If it makes sense, make a business case for it and argue for it, but if the guys upstairs decide against it then either shut up or get out. This is what happens every day in Sales, Marketing, Production, Finance etc., but you seem to believe that IT is different.
If you're so obsessed about a job title then insist on it your contract. As some people say, that may make sense if you're concerned about your next job, but how bad is this job if you're already thinking about the next one?
My first IT job was as a basic programmer on the TRS-80 back in the 80's when I was a kid (unique situation where the grown ups had no idea what to do with it but the company thought they needed to do inventory on a computer). Since then I have been called a Web programmer, router jockey, network engineer, NTAC, consultant, etc... The most offensive to me is Engineer, not for me but for those that really are engineers, I have no engineering degree and dont operate locomotives so I qualify for neither. I work in IT, I do alot of things. IT changes so often that there is no box to really put into it as a title description. IT Person works just fine.
I've really never understood the obsession with cool titles, I have worked with others who thought they had to have some goofy title as if it somehow made them royalty. As long as you get a paycheck and are treated with a fair amount of dignity does it really matter?
*sighs*
Right back at you.
I actually broke my mod point to post this- do you understand how arrogant it is that you feel a)you understand the problem based on one or two sentences, b)you are qualified to give advice on the subject, and c)that it's your business to do the analysis and hand out advice? Nevermind that apparently "you spend too much time in front of the computer" somehow turned into:
Half of which is a bunch of misandry. Here's a big cluebomb for you: they liked each other enough to get married. I think one or both of them has been doing something right.
Seriously- Whisky, Tango, Foxtrot.
Please help metamoderate.
Only IT people and drug dealers refer to their customers as "users."