The A-Team of IT — and How To Assemble One

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan offers insights into building a crack special ops team ready to tackle the toughest IT assignments. From Air Support (think: the guy who shares a cigarette break with the CFO), to Infrastructure Sherpas, to Über Hackers (Mohawk optional), each of the seven essential members of your IT A-Team must bring his or her special blend of expertise, connections, and temperament to ensure the success of mission-critical assignments. 'Remember, there is no Plan B.'"

Comments

step 1

[thanasakis]

get a big cigar and practice saying "I love it when a plan comes together" while smoking it

Re:step 1

[Pojut]

Step 2: provide Dukematches and Quakematches on top shelf hardware circa mid-90s in the breakroom.

Re:step 1

[SimonTheSoundMan]

I'd just employ Moss, Roy and Jen.

Re:step 1

[Pojut]

Meh...they'd spend all day trying to prank-call pizza places by asking for pineapple, and shoving goths into back rooms who point at blinking lights all day saying "What's going on there?"

Re:step 1

[fridaynightsmoke]

I'd just employ Moss, Roy and Jen.

TEAM players each and every one of them. There's no room for people who can't act as a team on my team.
TEAM! Team team team team team! I even love saying the word 'team'. You probably think that's a picture of my family, nyah-ah. It's The A-Team.

Re:step 1

[bigrockpeltr]

Step 3: There is no step 3!

Re:step 1

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

In 1992 a mediocre COBOL unit was sent to prison by a civilian court for a fraud they implemented but were oblivious to. These men eventually escaped from minimum security house arrest to the Des Moines suburbs. Today, still ignored by the government, they survive as free lance consultants.
If you have a mainframe - if no one else bids on the job - and they are all you can afford - you can definitly hire: The C-Team.

Re:step 1

[morgan_greywolf]

Step 4. Profit!!!!

Re:step 1

[negRo_slim]

Step 3: Get someone other than Micheal Scott to come up your business plans.

Re:step 1

[jeffmeden]

"Plan? You didn't have no plan! You ain't never had no plan!"

Re:step 1

[uncledrax]

You say this like it's a bad thing

Re:step 1

[rijrunner]

Of course, most IT shops want this for $15 an hour. And you have to fill in for the other slots. And they don't know how to evaluate talent or skills.

Re:step 1

[blair1q]

xtrek on the corporate cluster

Re:step 1

[blair1q]

I pity the fool who tries to root my desktop.

Re:step 1

[Anonymous Coward]

LMAO! Nice... I can even hear the drums in the background and the horns come in. Ahh... when life was simple.

Re:step 1

[laejoh]

You have goatse on your desktop?

Wildcard

[DrugCheese]

Yeah I turned off all the environmental controls in the server room.

Wildcard, bitches! Yeeehaaw!!!

Re:Wildcard

[Critical Facilities]

EXACTLY! Why is there no love for the Physical Infrastructure folks? All that expensive gear and all the networking in the world ain't gonna help you when that nice, clean A/C voltage from the UPSs stops humming down to the L630s you're plugged into, or if the room should happen to reach about 100 degrees with about 80% Relative Humidity.

Re:Wildcard

[catmistake]

One of the personality traits that is so common in most other disciplines, and especially in things like sports, never fits well in IT: ego. The best administrators don't give a crap, and rightly so... they are disinterested... they don't ever even have the curiosity to read even an email that might have been left open on a users desktop, don't ever stand around talking about so and so's freak out under the pressure, or who got laid, nor play with or even notice the cubicle toys and pictures with which other workers surround themselves. They may nod polightly at stories others tell, but they rarely, if ever, bring their personal lives into their work, and certainly seem to avoid becoming "a character," in an office, other than donning that loose garb of "social misfit," which is really a beard.

With the work in IT, it is always and should always be about the work, the puzzles, their interest, and never about creating what others see them as, or high-fiving each other after completing some impossible task that the rest of the company can't even fathom the importance of... this A-Team idea is really a bad idea, at it's heart. Loyalty to other workers is a trap, and the political game of the office is not one that should ever be engaged in if you work in IT. Can you imagine it? "The Face-man has been captured by legal. Murdoch, You create a distraction while BA and I empty their bank accounts and destroy their credit!"

An A-Team will fail miserably in IT because of ego. What is needed, of course, are Jedi, i.e. integrity without ego. And we already have that.

Re:Wildcard

[Lucractius]

Speaking as someone supporting the work of such people... if their jedi then their drunk. because ive read their code & it seems on average they cant even put a web page together properly.

The average IT person is just that... average. And average is not a good thing!

Re:Wildcard

[catmistake]

Programming is not computer science. It is merely coding, writing instruction. Neither is the IT specialist a computer scientist; s/he is a computer practitioner. The humility inherent in the position will allow you to project whatever you may to describe them or fit them into your understanding... but you are projecting.

It's the A-ITeam

[Drakkenmensch]

"I pity the foo' who doesn't encrypt his wireless network with WPA2!"

Re:It's the A-ITeam

[Tetsujin]

"I pity the foo' who doesn't encrypt his wireless network with WPA2!"

"I pity the fool" wasn't a B.A. Baracus line. At least, I watched a bunch of the old shows and as far as I know he never said it. It was from Rocky 3. "I don't hate Balboa. I pity the fool."

Re:It's the A-ITeam

[Ukab the Great]

I pity the foo who bar baz

It's a joke.

[AnonymousClown]

The site hung up when I tried going to the third page, but what I read was a joke.

This article belongs on one of those Onion wanna-be sites.

Re:It's a joke.

[Kalidor]

You made it to the third page? The article lost me when they tried to get advice from effective team leads on someone from TCS. It would be so funny if I didn't have such sad vivid memories of the ineffective team leadership displayed every time a Morgan Stanley employee cuckolded any of the management / leads.

Re:It's a joke.

[spun]

Sure, you think it is a joke, but maybe they are just trying to hide from the federal government that is hunting them down for a crime they didn't commit!

I wonder what "The A Team" of IT would look like?

They would be unable or unwilling to kill any process, no matter how corrupt it had become.
They could build a Cray out of old disk drives and EISA cards, but if they tried to hack you they would accidentally hit the Pottery Barn right behind you.
Most of their proposed solutions would involve tossing someone or something onto or into something else.

Re:It's a joke.

[somersault]

Yeah it was a load of crap, I skimmed it and saw this

Here the challenge is to find someone who mixes the requisite coding chops with a measure of humility, says Minco's Adriana Zona.

"You want the genius guys who aren't arrogant," she says. "They want to impress you, so they do in an hour what would take standard developers a week. But the most important thing is they don't challenge you. You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job."

Though extremely rare, the humble coding genius can be found via word of mouth, says Zona. She also weeds out the arrogant ones by asking prospective employees to rate their skills on a scale from 1 to 10.

"A good developer will never say 10," she says. "Technology changes so rapidly no one can possibly know everything. But the arrogant ones will. And a nonhumble developer will destroy your department."

A good developer doesn't need to "know everything", they just need to know how to use a reference manual and be able to adapt and learn. Sounds more like she just prefers people with no self confidence who are desperate to impress others to feel validated - people that she can order around.

Good developers will require specs and explanations otherwise they will probably waste a lot of time barking up the wrong tree. I certainly have made incorrect assumptions in the past about the direction a project will be heading or how the end user will be wanting to use things, so now I make sure to discuss issues where there is any doubt.

It's also great to have a specs document to refer back to if someone comes to you and says "where is [feature]" or "we need this feature!". I try to be accommodating, but it's really not a great idea to be adding features in halfway through the first implementation of a project. Any new features can be added into version two. Or if the "new feature" turns out to be an essential oversight, you may have to rethink the whole project from scratch.. but if they didn't put it in the original specs, it's their own fault.

Re:It's a joke.

[DrgnDancer]

But the most important thing is they don't challenge you. You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job

Yeah this line just blew my mind. "So, in addition to being an awesome coder you need a developer who is psychic? Because that's the only way you're going to get the product you want without providing any specs." What a moron. Also, if you're not providing them the least amount of guidance, of course they're not going to challenge you. You're effectively letting them write whatever strikes their fancy and implement it without any controls. Sounds like a dream job to me (at least until the boss comes back and say it's all wrong and you need to fix it (still without guidance) by Monday).

To be fair, while most of the article was drek, this was by far the worst section. Most of it was merely useless, rather than counterproductive.

Re:It's a joke.

[spun]

You made it to the third page? The article lost me when they tried to get advice from effective team leads on someone from TCS. It would be so funny if I didn't have such sad vivid memories of the ineffective team leadership displayed every time a Morgan Stanley employee cuckolded any of the management / leads.

Morgan Stanley employees enjoy the Droit de seigneur of Jus primae noctis? Damn. this really IS corporate feudalism.

Re:It's a joke.

[syousef]

I wonder what "The A Team" of IT would look like?

Bald, fat and losing hair, or skinny, awkward and wearing glasses...either way middle age and can't get laid.

Re:It's a joke.

[TheRaven64]

To be fair, you were clearly warned in TFS that it wasn't worth reading TFA. It started by saying:

InfoWorld's

Even if you were too lazy to read past the first word, you'd have got the message.

Re:It's a joke.

[AvitarX]

true experts under rate themselves in general, while peoplewho have just broken past beginer over estimate. there is a word for this.

Re:It's a joke.

[Culture20]

#include "stdio.h"
#include "stdlib.h"
int main(void)
{
printf("Hello World.\n");
exit(0);
}

Done. Where's my biscuit? I was promised a biscuit if I wrote a program.

Re:It's a joke.

[toxonix]

Hells Hounds!
"virtualization virtuoso, cloud connoisseur, mobility maven: The ability to wear multiple geek hats is essential"
This is absolute bull shit.
"You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job."
I need to use the toilet.
"A good developer will never say 10,"
TEN TEN TEN TEN you stupid moron. Having people rate themselves on a scale of 1-10 is complete MBA school horse shit.
Nonhumble is a non-word. As far as I can tell, these are actually real people saying these things. Basically this article says that if you are in a position where your ass is toast when you fuck up, you better assemble a team of people you can cover your ass with. Perfect are the Humble Genius, the Sherpa, etc...

"A-Teamers must be up to speed on the smartphones, tablets, social networks, and mobile apps du jour."
Ah yet another article espousing the importance of gadgets. This article was written for Jen on "The IT Crowd". She would get completely into this article.

Re:It's a joke.

[somersault]

I just think her criteria for what makes a 10 is pretty dumb. Being a good developer isn't about "knowing everything" or always using the most up to date technologies, which are often fads anyway..

Re:It's a joke.

[Lucractius]

This sounds like a lot of people i know.

Calling in the IT team?

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly would i need these guys to do?

Sys admin

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it about the position that attracts such deluded juveniles douches? It's a joke? You know, jokes are supposed to be funny?!

Re:Sys admin

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's kind of difficult to call someone a "juvenile douche" with a straight face.

Hint: if you're calling someone a douche, you're the juvenile one.

Re:Sys admin

[Frosty Piss]

Hint: if you're calling someone a douche, you're the juvenile one.

I know you are but what am I?

Re:Sys admin

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, I'm rubber, you're glue?

You sound like a retarded janitor

[spun]

Do you work in a bar in south Philly? How do you like your milk steak cooked, over hard with a side of jellybeans?

Hehe, man I love that show. :)

Re:You sound like a retarded janitor

[elrous0]

I'll take an order of your FINEST jellybeans, please.

Re:You sound like a retarded janitor

[HaZardman27]

That was an amazing episode; especially when he cuts the brake line to the van filled with gasoline cans. The "Who Pooped the Bed" mystery one and the "Extreme Home Makeover" episodes are probably my top two, though.

Re:You sound like a retarded janitor

[spun]

I like the one where Charlie writes a play to impress the waitress. All the Charlie/Waitress episodes are funny, IMHO, because they are married in real life.

Re:You sound like a retarded janitor

[Macrat]

That would be Jelly Belly of course.

Re:You sound like a retarded janitor

[HaZardman27]

Wow, I had completely forgotten about that one! Charlie is my favorite character in the show, and I love the Nightman because it shows just how unstable he is.

Re:You sound like a retarded janitor

[spun]

Charlie Day is a really good actor. It isn't easy to play that stupid if you aren't. And he isn't, he's also a writer and producer. He manages to make Charlie the most likable and sympathetic character on the show. Admittedly, he's pretty much the only one we can sympathize with because he's the only one who isn't a flat out sociopath. Even so, it is kind of hard to make an illiterate delusional retard sympathetic.

Re:You sound like a retarded janitor

[DrugCheese]

I constantly get Day Man stuck in my head.

Fighter of the night man.

Re:You sound like a retarded janitor

[DrugCheese]

Yeah I just realized the other day that he was a writer and producer for it. Very talented, he's also married to the waitress.

Re:You sound like a retarded janitor

[spun]

Bastard, now it is stuck in my head, too.

Champion of the sun.
Master of Karate!

How about ditching the silly names

[Gothmolly]

If you take someone on your team because he's an "uber hacker" or a "Sherpa" then you are spending too much time diddling and playing WoW. Get a good team of professionals with complimentary skills, but don't give them stupid handles.

Re:How about ditching the silly names

[Monkeedude1212]

You're just jealous I'm an uber hacker and I have more epics than you. Also, Gothmolly is a great handle, you should insist everyone call you that.

Re:How about ditching the silly names

[russotto]

Get a good team of professionals with complimentary skills, but don't give them stupid handles.

No, no, he really was a Sherpa. One of those Nepalese guys who climbs the Himalayas like they were nothing and laughs at the silly Westerners who think they did it first. You wouldn't believe the EEO points you get for a Sherpa.

Crack Team

[Anonymous Coward]

He said a crack team, not a team on crack.

Working hard or hardly working?

The guys in sneakers are more like a real team to

[Joe The Dragon]

The guys in sneakers are more like a real team to base things off of.

Prefer to be like Batman

[dcollins]

Always have a backup plan.

Re:Prefer to be like Batman

[McNihil]

and a plan C, D, E, F..... Z. One can not have enough backup plans.

Re:Prefer to be like Batman

[dcollins]

Yeah, it's recursive.

Re:Prefer to be like Batman

[Abstrackt]

and a plan C, D, E, F..... Z. One can not have enough backup plans.

Accounting for what can/will likely go wrong is a great idea, a backup plan will save you a lot of time, money and headaches under those circumstances, but when you start thinking about everything that might go wrong you run into diminishing returns pretty quickly.

For example, my backup plan for my car is my bike, my backup plan for my bike is walking and my backup plan for walking is calling a taxi. Sure I might benefit from a canoe if the road ever washes out or an alternate exit from my yard if a tree falls on my driveway but those are unlikely scenarios that are best left to be dealt with if and when they come up; worrying about them beforehand just creates extra stress.

Re:Prefer to be like Batman

[Nerdfest]

... and a backout plan ... just in case.

Re:Prefer to be like Batman

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, some kind of Test environment. And if you have coders, a development Environ for them to destroy at will.

Re:Prefer to be like Batman

[bigstrat2003]

You'll never be Batman with an attitude like that!

Re:Prefer to be like Batman

[Yvan256]

On tape or hard drives?

Re:Prefer to be like Batman

[Anonymous Coward]

...and don't forget to have a backin plan, for those rare projects which are ultimately successful after many months of disaster.

Re:Prefer to be like Batman

[Culture20]

those are unlikely scenarios that are best left to be dealt with if and when they come up; worrying about them beforehand just creates extra stress.

You'll never be Batman with an attitude like that!

Somehow I think being Batman would lead to a lot more stress.

Re:Prefer to be like Batman

[MyGirlFriendsBroken]

and a plan C, D, E, F..... Z. One can not have enough backup plans.

In my experience preparations A thru G are a total failure, so I tend to go straight for preparation H these days, and haven't needed one beyond that.

Re:Prefer to be like Batman

[Anonymous Coward]

Backup plans are for helpdesk pussies

Re:Prefer to be like Batman

[Lucractius]

But a lot more money.

Ugh..

[The Living Fractal]

What a horrible idea. Not trying to emasculate nerds here, but I think it's pretty safe to say that the "A-Team" embodies a certain degree of testosterone-fueled machismo that just doesn't really work when you're trying to debug 30,000 lines of code by noon on a green screen.

Re:Ugh..

[Pojut]

Computers aren't threatened by knives or guns.

Now, a degausser...THAT'LL get 'em to sit straight and fly right!

Re:Ugh..

[pilgrim23]

Then fill out an incident report specifying what happened in language appropriate to pointy hair, including the requested power point presentation on how to better schedule unscheduled outages... These being the Geek skills that get the promotions..

Re:Ugh..

[Herkum01]

CxO's did not get there because of their decision making abilities, they got to where they were by DOING stuff. Even if the stuff is fluff.

Having an A-Team makes it look like you are doing stuff.

Re:Ugh..

[Anonymous Coward]

I certainly feel sort-of like a member of a special ops team when me and my colleagues arrive at 0300 to rescue a downed mission-critical system. ... then again, it could be the parachute-drop on the way to the data-center...

Re:Ugh..

[ColdWetDog]

Now, a degausser...THAT'LL get 'em to sit straight and fly right!

You should ask your employer to wander into the 21st Century. LCDs are the way to go and no degausser PTSD.

Now, if you really meant an EMP gun ... then I'd agree with you.

Re:Ugh..

[Provocateur]

Well, I was* going to be the ladies' man...

Hey, I can dream, can't I?

Re:Ugh..

[El Torico]

I never had to parachute to a work site, but I've taken a few military transports (mainly C-130s); the coolest was the ride on the Merlin and Lynx helicopters.

Re:Ugh..

[Atrox666]

Yes these dramatic measures generally are a symptom of bad IT.
If you have an administrator that's always saving the day, 9 out of 10 times you should fire them. You'll find out that most of the looming disasters that were happening will stop happening. A white knight can't justify their existance if there is no peril.

Re:Ugh..

[Belial6]

Bingo! That's exactly what I was thinking. IT is full of 'Munchausen by proxy'.

Re:Ugh..

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful

Do you really think its the IT admin who overhears why a dev release is broken and then fixes it that he is to blame?

Try dev's who don't understand cluster systems then put the payment gateway in place with a fixed IP address to one server, when the wrong node of the cluster goes down its the admins fault for fixing it? Get real. I can only assume that you have NO real world experience in being an admin. Your probably one of the dev's who makes this mistake.

I am in the rather unenviable position of being an infrastructure guy who moved into coding. To be honest I am shocked you monkeys keep your jobs, its only cause management cant tell the difference between good code and bad code. Christ the amount of coders who don't even understand OO let alone classes.

The amount of times it has come to the few hours after release and I have a bunch of code-monkeys asking why it dose not work, to find basics like "C:\documents and settings\someidiotdev" in their source code. GRRRRR. Static IP address's no use of DNS, no thought of the firewall. I once had a contractor brought in to redesign the payment gateway and say to me "What is PCI?"

You wanna know why IT is crap as a whole? It's cause 90% of you should not go near a computer. Management puts out adverts at low pay so they can increase immigration and lower wages for the industry. Then we get the glut of "programmers" we have now being paid a poor wage with their day-care degrees that taught them nothing about IT in a business environment. IT is crap because the elite mad it a blue collar job and employed blue collar employees.

So no, these dramatic measures are a symptom of bad middle management and even worse upper management. Pay decent staff a decent wage and IT will rock.

Re:Ugh..

[Anonymous Coward]

What a horrible idea. Not trying to emasculate nerds here, but I think it's pretty safe to say that the "A-Team" embodies a certain degree of testosterone-fueled machismo that just doesn't really work when you're trying to debug 30,000 lines of code by noon on a green screen.

What kind of wimpy geeks do hang out with?

Re:Ugh..

[Macrat]

Yes these dramatic measures generally are a symptom of bad IT. If you have an administrator that's always saving the day, 9 out of 10 times you should fire them. You'll find out that most of the looming disasters that were happening will stop happening. A white knight can't justify their existance if there is no peril.

Or the management who won't budget for the equipment needed for proper uptime?

Re:Ugh..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes these dramatic measures generally are a symptom of bad IT.
If you have an administrator that's always saving the day, 9 out of 10 times you should fire them. You'll find out that most of the looming disasters that were happening will stop happening. A white knight can't justify their existence if there is no peril.

You must have worked different places than I have. While I hear about the occasional yahoo who make problems so that he can fix them I'd say that if you have an admin always saving the day it is a bad mgmt issue.

The issue with the mythical "gremlin Admin" is that to get away with it for very long, the other admins have to be some real idiots. If they document 1 case of sabotage then the gremlin is out on their ear.

Re:Ugh..

[St.Creed]

When my servers go down during the middle of the day because they need firmware patches, I have idiot admins. When they pull out the plugs because "every server is on failover anyway" - except my new development server that has 2 consultants with a nice hourly rate working on it - i have idiot admins. When my connectivity drops from 100 Mbit/sec to 30 Kbit/sec in the afternoon (hasn't been restored yet, it's been 5 days now) I have IDIOT ADMINS working for me who just can't leave well enough alone. They don't even bother to inform us about reboots. Unrequested reboots. For patches we don't want because they haven't been tested.

In fact, tomorrow there's a discussion with management about banning the admins from touching any project server without specific authorization.

And I'd love to ban them from touching ANYTHING without written authorization: I've been on this job for two weeks now and already I've seen more infrastructure broken by them than in 6 months on my last project.

You have bad coders - but I have bad admins. It's not coders versus admins: it's amateurs versus professionals.

Re:Ugh..

[Orestesx]

Waaaahhhh Developers are unprofessional mouth breathers waaaaaahhh

Do you know why IT has a job? To support that shoddy code. Guess what, Software is Hard (tm) and if it was perfect, IT could be run by 1 guy replacing power supplies and hard drives when they failed.

You want to be lazy, and get paid for it. Not gonna happen.

Re:Ugh..

[Wolfrider]

I find your lack of faith... Disturbing.

" White Knights " that genuinely can fix the Bad Things That Go Wrong are worth their weight in GOLD.

Send them on vacation for a month. If things remain quiet, THEN you can start suspecting things like that. Your "9 times out of 10" is pure B.S.!

Re:Ugh..

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish you could get more than +5 moderation points. Really this is a very big problem in the IT Industry. Its not unique to developers, its a systemic issue. For example, I myself primarily deal with technical support in the hospitality industry for public-use and in-room systems. We have to deal with "HSIA" companies who are the A/V and guest network management companies. I can't even tell you how many times I've had to walk a "Tier 3" support technician (usually the highest you can go) through configuring their Nomadix gateway device, or to fix a VLAN issue or some other router configuration that "randomly broke" one day.

Even better are the "IT managers" at the hotels themselves. Not all hotels have them, and as always there are some managers that are absolutely wonderful to work with, but then you get to the majority of them. They don't understand basic networking issues, whether its simple cabling or VLAN tagging. They don't understand how DNS works, or how the gateway devices they have work. You can try to explain it, but they don't seem to have the technical knowledge required to understand what you are talking about.

Honestly, I was shocked years ago when I first started working with people like this. I don't just see this in my current job, I've seen it everywhere (hell, even when I was in school). There are good people and bad people, and there seem to be more of the latter than the former. And its not always there fault. Short of learning it the hard way, there aren't many places that really teach any of this stuff and people (in the US anyways) expect to be able to "go to school" to learn it.

A team.. dreaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake up bozos. Wake up.

No matter how Elite your A team prides itself to be, the management will replace it with a team of newbies from India/Brazil/Vietnam in a flash.

A-team for crack assignments it seems. You are a replaceable commodity, no matter how elite. And management does not see 'A'-ness. It sees the product of 'ability and cost, and that can be equal for any number of teams of varying abilities.

Re:A team.. dreaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like a newbie from India/Brazil/Vietnam, the way you confuse product and quotient.

Unless you actually meant they'll settle for less ability if it costs more, which only applies at the end of the year, when burning through your budget so you don't get cut.

Re:A team.. dreaming?

[DrgnDancer]

You work for the wrong people. When I *tried* to leave I got a 17% raise (The new job would have been 30%, but it was in DC, so Meh). Good companies want to keep good people. It's how they stay good companies.

Re:A team.. dreaming?

[Culture20]

You work for the wrong people. When I *tried* to leave I got a 17% raise (The new job would have been 30%, but it was in DC, so Meh). Good companies want to keep good people. It's how they stay good companies.

So moral of the story is, if you work for the right company, try to leave it? If you work for the wrong company, succeed at leaving?

Re:A team.. dreaming?

[russotto]

So moral of the story is, if you work for the right company, try to leave it? If you work for the wrong company, succeed at leaving?

It's no great secret that many companies reward disloyalty. When they're hiring (in an economy better than now, anyway), it's a competitive process where they have to offer the prospective hire enough to leave his current job, or to pick their offer over some other company's. Once they have the employee, though, the shoe is on the other foot; the employee probably won't leave unless they're paid well below the going rate for new hires elsewhere. So the rational thing for the company to do is to keep compensation just high enough that employees won't jump ship.

Employees who find this offensive will likely change jobs fairly often... and then get labeled as job-hoppers and end up stuck anyway.

This is how they see you, IT grunts

[dkleinsc]

That's why you should read this. Not because it provides useful information to people on the tech team, but because people in the business of managing IT departments really take this stuff seriously. They will try to shoehorn the people they have into the stereotypes, archetypes, and roles they know about, and once they've assigned you to a part, you're going to be doing that part until you leave or the show ends. And if you don't fit one of the parts, they're going to consider you useless.

This sort of thing is especially true for managers who didn't work their way up through the ranks, so they're now faced with a bunch of geeks who are exacting, relentlessly uncovering BS, demand facts and figures, and speak in a jargon they can't understand. It can also be a big issue for the CTO, because even if the CTO is someone who does understand the geeks, the CEO doesn't and often demands that the CTO make the geeks follow a plan they can understand.

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[AnonymousClown]

F'N A when you're right ....

The other thing is if you don't fit into those pidgeon holes, they won't even hire you and just say "you don't have the skills" or "you don't fit in" and then bitch and moan as to why they can't get "qualified" people.

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[The Living Fractal]

I find this is true, but only to a point. If the "IT grunt" is smart, and a good communicator they should be able to convincingly argue for a position that isn't an exact fit into one of the stereotypes or archetypes. They should be able to show a good business case for their position such that the manager can understand why their IT grunt is useful in more than one way. Naturally, it helps to have a manager who isn't just a walking suit.

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[BobMcD]

Challenge: Spin this into a useful observation, if you can.

It's one thing to say 'management sucks, I need my blankie', but it's quite another to scout the lay of the land and pick your way safely through it.

Which are you, former or latter? Which are you encouraging with the tone of your post?

Think about it. Particularly in an economy where being disgruntled isn't exactly an advantage... :)

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[The Wild Norseman]

That's why you should read this. Not because it provides useful information to people on the tech team, but because people in the business of managing IT departments really take this stuff seriously. They will try to shoehorn the people they have into the stereotypes, archetypes, and roles they know about, and once they've assigned you to a part, you're going to be doing that part until you leave or the show ends. And if you don't fit one of the parts, they're going to consider you useless.

Seriously, I'm gonna forward this article to my boss and his boss so they can read it and then they'll truly understand why I've been calling myself the Magnum P.I. of the IT industry! I wonder what other 80's television tropes I can draw upon to secure myself a job for life...

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[dkleinsc]

The observation is easy: If you want to change your professional role significantly, expect to change companies.

And it's not simply "management sucks", it's that management doesn't understand you, so they're doing their best to muddle through, and they seize on information like this because it's all they have, and once they think they understand you they're probably going to keep that understanding of you. They don't have a lot of time to spend understanding each employee, so once they think they've figured you out they aren't going to try to repeat the effort.

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[BobMcD]

And when you switch, how do you know that the new management hasn't also read this same article? Or otherwise developed similar ideas?

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound really, really bitter. Let's see if you can understand what I just heard:

We are all special. Yep, not a one alike. Our personality and quirks are necessary for our job. Nobody can do it like we can. As such, we demand that you prove to us exactly why we should do a task or follow a guideline. Don't worry that we don't have a clue about bringing teams together or what constraints you may be under that we are not aware of; surely, if we are not aware, it is not important. We demand that you prove we are to do our job. If we don't like it, we will bitch all day and night about it and find any inconsistency to throw it in your face. Although you think of us as nothing more than nerdy kids at gamestop babbling over some douchy animation and speaking klingon, we know that our ability to speak in ways you can't understand makes us superior.

Yeppers, you'll never make the A-Team because you're nothing but an A-Hole.

captcha:systemic

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[dkleinsc]

They don't know you yet, so you can present yourself as fitting into the role you want rather than the role you had. You'll still get shoehorned, but you'll get shoehorned differently.

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[BobMcD]

They don't know you yet, so you can present yourself as fitting into the role you want rather than the role you had. You'll still get shoehorned, but you'll get shoehorned differently.

Again, I'll present the opportunity of doing this now, in your present job. There's got to be something on the list that you're good at...

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[Americano]

... because people in the business of managing IT departments...

... will try to shoehorn the people they have into the stereotypes, archetypes, and roles they know about...

... especially true for managers who didn't work their way up through the ranks...

... CEO doesn't and often demands that the CTO make the geeks follow a plan they can understand...

I'm sorry... you were saying something about being shoehorned into a stereotype by people who don't understand you? I lost you in all the irony.

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[Culture20]

There's got to be something on the list that you're good at...

Forget the list. Sysadmins are the MacGyvers of IT. Specialization is for insects and North Koreans.

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[russotto]

I find this is true, but only to a point. If the "IT grunt" is smart, and a good communicator they should be able to convincingly argue for a position that isn't an exact fit into one of the stereotypes or archetypes. They should be able to show a good business case for their position such that the manager can understand why their IT grunt is useful in more than one way.

If the "IT grunt" could do all that, he wouldn't be an IT grunt. You're putting forth the proposition that in order to succeed in a technical position, one must have strong business skills. Which is a proposition often made by managers, but in that context it brings up the obvious question: "If I had great business skills, why wouldn't I have YOUR job?"

Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts

[aug24]

That is shockingly true.

I once had a database design altered by a manager because it didn't reflect the corporate structure:

Division B has data just like Division A, so they can use the same tables with a different top level key, right?

No, Division B reports to Division A so their tables have to hang off Division A's tables even though there is no data dependency whatsoever.

Trying to code the resulting middle tier layer screwed up a multi-million pound project so badly that 90% of its objectives had to be descoped. It also gave me a nervous breakdown.

Just.

Someone found their 'Hackers' DVD...

[gimmebeer]

This is 'how to hack the gibson' all over again. Crash and Burn 4evr!!!1!

Mister T?

[stevegee58]

I won't be on an A Team unless they let me be Mister T.

Re:Mister T?

[BobMcD]

The sad thing is, my IT team already has an 'enforcer', but we're never allowed to let him off the chain. Doesn't fit the culture.

But I could easily imagine the gains from letting him tell some of these folks what he really thinks about them. I mean, they can tell by the 'are you completely stupid' look that crosses his face, but to allow him to actually SAY it would be most useful, I would think.

But again, sadly, it doesn't fit in around here, and it only serves to get him in trouble.

Re:Mister T?

[stevegee58]

Ah pity da foo.

Re:Mister T?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you like this nice glass of milk?

ridiculous

[roman_mir]

you know this entire article is ridiculous because it's full of stupid shit like this:

You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job."

.

The entire article is written as if by somebody who just watched 'Charlies Angels', 'Swordfish', 'True Lies' and 'The Core' and decided to write about this subject as if those movies actually represent reality.

Re:ridiculous

[RedK]

Actually, I think he was watching "The A-Team". Hence the name of the article. What did you expect going in when the very title draws a parallel to a series about a team who "gets the job done, no questions asked" ?

Re:ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

The entire article is written as if by somebody who just watched 'Charlies Angels', 'Swordfish', 'True Lies' and 'The Core' and decided to write about this subject as if those movies actually represent reality.

Hang on, hang on.

Are you telling me Swordfish wasn't real?

Re:ridiculous

[roman_mir]

Yeah, it was real. I always get a blowjob from a hot blond chick while coding. Unfortunately the gun is also real, I managed to avoid the bullet for now, but tomorrow they want me to break into NSA in under 3 minutes. Of-course there will be 2 chicks this time, so I agreed. Wish me luck.

Re:ridiculous

[kramulous]

I'm not saying I agree with the article, it was a joke, but there is not always a specification.

I work as a code monkey at a university and provide research support. Very often, people will rock up not knowing what they want. They have a vague idea what they need. They don't have the skills or the money to push their research through a barrier. That is my job. To go and spend an hour with them to see what their workflow is, what is causing a major bottleneck in that process and automate it. That could be computational, visualisation, network, vms, blah blah blah.

Mostly, they only need a moderately polished solution which enables them to move on and then start appreciating that the next time their apply for grants, they set aside money for development so the job can be implemented properly.

A month or two down the track, I may sit down with the research head/prof. and help them put some sort of document together (I'll try and get some of the technical jargon down and my boss will help with the fluff) so the monkey they hire has an idea of what to do. It builds relationships and trust that lasts.

Re:ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

In a small shop, that actually happens, though - sometimes to new employees.

"Bob, I need a report on our storage servers and archival methods. Have it to me by tomorrow."

"Bob, fix the mail system."

"Bob, go upgrade the AIX machine."

Re:ridiculous

[mjwalshe]

everyone knows you need a 5 man band

The Five Man Band is a group of characters whose members fall into archetypes which all complement one another. They are a very specific team with skills that contribute to the group in a unique way.

The group traditionally includes:

* The Hero — (lead singer) The leader of the group. Can be clean-cut and upstanding, bold and charismatic, serious and driven, or some combination of the three.

* The Lancer — (lead guitar) The second-in-command, usually a contrast to The Hero. If the Hero is clean-cut and/or uptight, the Lancer is a grizzled Anti Hero or Deadpan Snarker; if the Hero is driven and somewhat amoral, the Lancer is more relaxed and level-headed.

* The Smart Guy — (keyboardist, bass guitar) The physically weak, but intelligent or clever member. Often nerdy and awkward played for comic relief. Sometimes unconventionally young (early- to mid-teens). Sometimes a trickster and a buddy of the Big Guy. May be the one with all the "street" connections.

* The Big Guy — (drummer) The strongman of the team. May be dumb. Or mute.

* The Chick — (vocal effects, tambourine) A peacekeeping role to balance out the other members aggression, bringing them to a nice or at least manageable medium. The Chick is often considered the heart of the group. Not always female, but the role is usually taken by the Token Girl (hence the name). Sometimes referred to as "the useless girl".

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FiveManBand

Re:ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it was real. I always get a blowjob from a hot blond chick while coding. Unfortunately the gun is also real, I managed to avoid the bullet for now, but tomorrow they want me to break into NSA in under 3 minutes. Of-course there will be 2 chicks this time, so I agreed. Wish me luck.

Sorry dude, your wife might be blond, but she's not hot! At least you still get blowjobs. Blond, not hot, but a gooood girl ;););)

Re:ridiculous

[roman_mir]

I was thinking about you too, honey. You give blow jobs, you'll do.

I quit reading

[codepunk]

I quit reading as soon as I ran into the comments by the VP of Tata Consulting. The article pretty much lost any sort of credibility right at that point.

Re:I quit reading

[AnonymousClown]

Tata Consulting ....

I will not make joke using Indian stereotypes.
I will not make joke using Indian stereotypes.
I will not make joke using Indian stereotypes.
I will not make joke using Indian stereotypes.
I will not make joke using Indian stereotypes.
I will not make joke using Indian stereotypes. ..... 100 times more ...
I will not make joke using Indian stereotypes.

Re:I quit reading

[Anonymous Coward]

The article was hackneyed from the start, but I don't see a problem with the Tata guy's comments. The point he makes, that team leads should understand technology as well as business aspects, seems sensible to me :-/

No one's willing to pay the bill

[Anonymous Coward]

A-Teams are rare.

Some point I would like to say (I will stick to development as it is my area of interest. I think it applies to others as well though)

1- No one is willing to pay an A team. Why pay for an A team if you can pay an outsourcing company half the price for a less than half production?
2- Do you think an arrogant coder ruin you department? Of course not... he will ask for lots of money. That's why humble ones are asked for.

Turning in my slashdot card

[Ummon]

Wow, when did this site become news for middle management? Sadly off to reddit. Kbythx, Ummon.

Re:Turning in my slashdot card

[BobMcD]

Wow, when did this site become news for middle management? Sadly off to reddit. Kbythx, Ummon.

Well, how many years has slashdot been around? Are they just supposed to shed those of us that got promoted a time or two? Or does it physically pain the rest of us too much to see a few articles on this kind of a topic?

Besides, the wise employee would look to this as a list of things to underscore at their next performance evaluation. Find something that you kind of already do and do-the-hell out of it for the ninety days leading up to it...

Collect Call from Hollywood

[koterica]

Michael Chriton, is that you?

But there IS a plan B:

[fyngyrz]

Plan B - The B team!

Very unrealistic

[vadim_t]

In my understanding, an "A-Team" isn't something that gets created by management, it's a group of people who happen to work together so well that they keep sticking together, because it works great for them. I don't think that's something you can build to a formula. At most you can try to find such a group in a large organization.

And of course, they have the most unrealistic requirements for the developer:

"You want the genius guys who aren't arrogant," she says. "They want to impress you, so they do in an hour what would take standard developers a week. But the most important thing is they don't challenge you. You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job."

Just how is something supposed to get coded, if nobody explains what should it be? That kind of thing only works for independent coders who already know what they want to do, and community open source projects where nobody tells you what to do, you just do it, and if it's good it gets merged. But that's a very un-business-like development model.

Re:Very unrealistic

[BobMcD]

You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job."

Just how is something supposed to get coded, if nobody explains what should it be? That kind of thing only works for independent coders who already know what they want to do, and community open source projects where nobody tells you what to do, you just do it, and if it's good it gets merged. But that's a very un-business-like development model.

We have one of those here - probably two, actually. They only politely listen to your ideas as to how it should function. They're looking for the end product, mostly, and are otherwise waiting for the meeting to end. Then they go back to their desks and draw on what they've already done in the past. They hammer it out 'their way' in short order, produce the result, and move on to the next project. A lot of these requests are so routine to these developers that planning it would readily take more time than doing it.

But again, they know their stuff (particularly their flavor of that stuff), they know the business, and they've been doing basically the same things for years and years.

Re:Very unrealistic

[vadim_t]

Yeah, but what you're talking about can't be made by just hiring people with the right profile. The coders you speak of can do that only because most of the required information is in their heads already. For them a good deal of the spec is unnecessary because it can be derived from their past experience.

What this article seems to be talking about is building such a thing from zero, in the interview room. But that's just not going to happen that way. You speak of something that takes years to happen, and that's if you're lucky.

Sometimes, even if you have people with the right skills, knowledge and attitude, it still doesn't work. For instance, there's one guy I know who seems to perpetually be on the wrong wavelength. Even if our skills mesh perfectly, and we like each other fine, every time he opens his mouth, I go: "huh?". He seems to pay attention to different things, give importance to different matters and so on. And as a result, pretty much everything he says seems to be offtopic or going off on a weird tangent to me. It probably works the same the other way as well. Due to that I don't think we could ever be a successful team, because we'd spend a lot of time struggling to understand each other.

Re:Very unrealistic

[BobMcD]

And as a result, pretty much everything he says seems to be offtopic or going off on a weird tangent to me. It probably works the same the other way as well. Due to that I don't think we could ever be a successful team, because we'd spend a lot of time struggling to understand each other.

If you're missing that sort of thing in the interview room, then I'd suggest that you're not bringing the right people in on the third interview (at the very latest).

To quote Jim Collins (ala Good to Great):

The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you've made a hiring mistake. The best people don't need to be managed. Guided, taught, led--yes. But not tightly managed.

My point would be, if you're not interviewing with roles in mind, then you're not thinking it all the way through. Interviews aren't about "how can I find the best person", but more about "which of these candidates best meets my company's goals".

What do you think of your IT department?

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest, in most every company that I have worked, the IT department seems unwilling to do anything outside of their box.
There are many things an IT department could do to create a better environment, but often there is no real motivation (internal or external) to do so.

Windows OS installation and maintenance gets top priority. Linux and MAC support is usually little to none. Even if the main development environment is Linux. Even if development devices are non-windows and could use support from IT for services like email.
I can guess to the reason for this. Linux users are assumed to be smart enough to fix it themselves. MAC users are also assumed to be self sufficient (and perhaps OSX requires less IT support). Windows requires constant security updates, but is there another specific reason why Windows is given such priority?

What does everyone else think of their IT department?

Re:What do you think of your IT department?

[Darkness404]

Having worked in IT, the problems rest with the technologically-inept managers. For one thing, budgeting. Why, oh why do they base the IT budget on what they spent in previous years? I can't tell you how many IT places crippled do to weird budgeting. Yes, just because we had to spend $100,000 last year when we bought all new servers and replaced half the workstations doesn't mean we are spending $100,000 this year. Or no, we spent only $15,000 last year but we need new servers and its time to replace a lot of workstations.

Windows gets priority because management likes to send us IT people to all kinds of Windows-based conferences so half the people in IT only know Windows. Management also likes to use "buzzwords" wanting us to use the "next big" (Windows-based) thing rather than develop a real solution using OSS technologies.

Almost all the problems that IT has, are problems management has given to us, and until we get some IT people in management, it is going to remain that way.

Re:What do you think of your IT department?

[BobMcD]

Windows requires constant security updates, but is there another specific reason why Windows is given such priority?

In our environment, three basic reasons:

A) Internet Explorer - it's actually specified by the vendor as the only supported browser to interface with their products.

B) Office - and in particular Word, Excel, and Outlook.

C) Active Directory Authentication - ala 'Single Sign-On'

Yes there are 'ways' to get the above on other platforms, but why? At least 'why, on boxes outside of expert hands'?

Re:What do you think of your IT department?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the good ways to smooth out an IT budget is to start asking other lines of business for assistance. Particularly the money making ones.

I had a boss that turned out to be quite the charmer like that. For wireless expansion (amongst other projects) he asked the users/departments in the building if they wanted to be first for the roll-out. They said yes and opened their department wallets....

You'd be amazed how that causes peer pressure to spread to the other areas too.

Re:What do you think of your IT department?

[kent_eh]

Having worked in IT, the problems rest with the technologically-inept managers. For one thing, budgeting. Why, oh why do they base the IT budget on what they spent in previous years?

Because that's how the finance dept budgets all the departments.
No special treatment for you.

Inept is one word.
Bureaucratic is another. (can't deviate from the procedure. can't question the procedure. can't change the procedure)

Re:What do you think of your IT department?

[dbIII]

To be honest, in most every company that I have worked, the IT department seems unwilling to do anything outside of their box.

You need staff time and budget to do that, so some places can and some places can't. MS Windows is of course a huge time sink and even when employed as a linux guy I still found I was spending more than 3/4 of my time helping out the MS Windows guys.
As for Mac support, I was supposed to support half a dozen Mac users along with about 50 MS Windows users on one short term contract. Every few days I would poke my nose into the room full of graphic designers and ask if they had any problems. In three months I had a single question from the Mac users - a new guy wanted to know the ip address of the mail server.
MS Windows is just the squeaky wheel, paticularly before XP SP2.

I can see it now...

[BobMcD]

I can just see it:

In the year 2000, a 'leet' admin team was sent to the breadlines by the dot-com bust because of a business plan they weren't allowed to see. These men promptly escaped from a Geek Squad Double Agency into the Information Technology underground. Today, still owing taxes to the government, they survive as admins of fortune. If you have a problem...if no one else can help...and if you can find them...maybe you can hire...The A-Team

Hey, maybe I can someone to make this into a show!

Re:I can see it now...

[Anonymous Coward]

The show is called IT crowd.

Six Pages?

[alphax45]

Why is this on six pages? Fail!

A more realistic IT crew

[bl8n8r]

We have Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in Windows support. Bert and Ernie (both guys are gay) in the Mac Support dept and then Gonzo and Beaker in Unix/Linux systems department (one of them doubles as Oracle admin). They just hired a new IT manager, promoted from HR, who looks and acts a lot like Miss Piggy.

Re:A more realistic IT crew

[Anonymous Coward]

We have Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in Windows support. Bert and Ernie (both guys are gay) in the Mac Support dept and then Gonzo and Beaker in Unix/Linux systems department (one of them doubles as Oracle admin). They just hired a new IT manager, promoted from HR, who looks and acts a lot like Miss Piggy.

And where does Animal fit in in all of this?

Re:A more realistic IT crew

[dcollins]

"And where does Animal fit in in all of this?"

That's what she said.

Re:A more realistic IT crew

[locallyunscene]

And where does Animal fit in in all of this?

The client.

Re:A more realistic IT crew

[HeckRuler]

Rhaaaarg! STILL TOO SLOW!!!
(double-time drum beat)

Re:A more realistic IT crew

[Macrat]

We have Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in Windows support.

More like Fozzy Bear with a Windows certification from city college.

Re:A more realistic IT crew

[Chowderbags]

We have Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in Windows support.

A chick in IT? Surely you jest!

(kidding, kidding)

Re:A more realistic IT crew

[Culture20]

Swedish Chef as a contractor admin, purposefully doing too many things at once to make his methods difficult to replicate. Sam the Eagle in information security.

Dreamjob

[Anonymous Coward]

I call dibs on the midnight toker...

Intrinsically unstable

[petes_PoV]

Your first hurdle is trying to reign in those egos. Once geeks get above a certain level of (in their own minds, at least) elitism they tend to presume that everyone around them is an idiot. Put two of these people together and tantrums are far more common than any actual progress. Next up is the politics. Who works for whom? Does the network geek take orders from the database wizard? Can the storage guy tell the hairy-arsed windows hacker what needs to be done? Even if you can walk the tightrope of keeping everyone calm - there will almost certainly be tears before bedtime when it's time to apportion the recognition (or blame).

Finally, people with bleeding edge skills need to continually push the limits in order to keep those skills sharp. Does your organisation have enough crises happening frequently enough to stop these people getting bored? (If so, please tell me the organisation's name - I'll sell my stock immediately, at any price). Shorthand secretaries used to often leave jobs where they felt their abilities weren't being used - in the fear that they'd get rusty and their speeds would drop. Real geeks tend to be attracted by the next sparkly, shiny opportunity much more than staying put in one single job for long periods of time.

I cant see this sort of team being a practical proposition - except in the movies.

Re:Intrinsically unstable

[swb]

Where DOES that ego come from? I really make an effort to be gracious and understanding when I work with other IT people (I work as a SMB consultant, usually solo) but to this day when you walk into a room with other IT people you can almost feel the ego battle growing, like two magnets pushing the same pole together.

Even while trying to avoid the ego trap, I do occasionally fall into but it seems to be almost a defense-mechanism -- if you don't put up some front, you get walked on, and usually there it's down to the gutter.

It's occasionally amusing in meeting with prospective clients, though. You can tell that the boss wants consulting assistance on some projects and the lead geek doesn't want any outside interference; the in-house guy ALWAYS knows everything and challenges us on things we've done dozens of times. You know those jobs either never happen or if they do, they will be short and unpleasant.

Re:Intrinsically unstable

[qwijibo]

In my experience, the ego problems go with the people who proclaim themselves as experts, not the ones who everyone else points to as the real experts. Mature geeks recognize ways to benefit from everyone available. The lowly grunt that watches a screen and follow scripts to make red things turn green reduces the number of times the uber-geek gets paged to resolve problems. The DBA may be able to take a program that's running slowly and speed it up significantly all behind the scenes in the database.

I worked with a team of smart people implementing a data warehouse and all of the related components on a very short timeline. All of us had our own different areas of expertise, but working together could get the overall best result by trying to one up each other. Our DBA said we needed the SAN configured as RAID 10 instead of RAID 5 for performance. I showed him that using his realistic test cases, it resulted in a 5% increase in performance for a 50% cost in available space, so he acknowledged that it was a poor trade off given our resources. When you have the right kind of people working together, they'll recognize the right solution when they see it, and it's not going to matter who did what. At the end of the day, a good team will succeed because the focus is on achieving the goal, not stroking someone's childish ego. The trick is finding people who have the experience to know that it's ok to say "I don't know, but can figure it out if no one else knows".

While the composition in the article is TV based, there's something to the different types of personalities it takes to build a strong team. I think the key point is something I tell people all the time - failure isn't an option, it's a lifestyle. Failure is what you are when you give up, everything before that is an unscheduled learning experience. Building a team of strong people just takes the ability to recognize people who don't give up and don't need someone constantly harping on them to keep going.

Re:Intrinsically unstable

[Xugumad]

> Does your organisation have enough crises happening frequently enough to stop these people getting bored?

I'm co-ordinating an A-Team-alike (actually, we prefer to go with the Impossible Mission analogy, but eh), and I'd agree with this. Some really huge organisations may be big enough to warrant a full time independent troubleshooting team (which is what we're really talking about, daft movie analogies aside), but mostly if you need a group like this either something is terribly wrong, or something was terribly wrong in the recent past. We're slowing putting ourselves out of a job, by fixing a very long list of problems that are well overdue anyone looking at.

Structure is also totally different to the ideas the article has. There's three core team members; at the moment I primarily handle co-ordination, both tracking what individual team members are doing, and tracking what's going on with other departments. We have another techy, who at the moment primarily handles logic (so when someone says something can't be described in a machine readable format, he's the guy we pass the problem to), and the third member of the team is less techy, more people person, and does training, support, and general customer relations.

We then hire, bribe, beg, borrow or whatever we need to do, to get others who we need for the current project. Need proof-reading in Russian (no, seriously, we needed that recently for the current project)? Find someone on staff who knows Russian, and borrow them. There is no point in having a fixed group, though, because if problems had a standard one-size-fits-all answer, we wouldn't be dealing with them. This also helps with the ego issue, as we tend not to involve many people for very long.

Re:Intrinsically unstable

[DoofusOfDeath]

Real geeks tend to be attracted by the next sparkly, shiny opportunity much more than staying put in one single job for long periods of time.

Not sure that's true in this economy. I probably qualify as a "real geek", but I'll be damned if I'm going to jeopardize my family's well-being by trading my interesting and stable job for a more-interesting, less-stable job.

Re:Intrinsically unstable

[Fulcrum of Evil]

The flip side is that, half the time, you're being called in to do something that the in house guys have wanted for a year or more, and when the time comes to do it, they don't trust their own people to do it. Instead, they call you in and blow their budget for raises on your fees. You're the enemy, and rightly so. It isn't your fault, it just is.

Re:Intrinsically unstable

[Anonymous Coward]

The easy solution that execs don't like to hear--hire a good team, and pay them more than you have to. Be sure to have a backup plan when one of them inevitably leaves. Make sure they are constantly simplifying their code so it doesn't take another wizard to figure it out. Give them a way to avoid useless tasks.

Re:Intrinsically unstable

[Anonymous Coward]

The "ego" comes from having such a big part of you constantly being tested, constantly being broken, and no matter what decision you've made there is likely several completely different decisions with complex trade offs. How many times after a sale is made does somebody come back and say "oh, this this and this was wrong and since you didn't sign this receipt you've got to stay late to redo all of the paperwork since that happened?" The ego comes from defending yourself, and every time you are right it means somebody else wasted your time in a meeting or doing research or fixing a problem so next time they pitch an idea you're going to want to ignore them a little harder than the last time.

Re:Intrinsically unstable

[dbIII]

Does your organisation have enough crises happening frequently enough to stop these people getting bored?

With a good enough imagination you can worry about potential crises and work around and avoid being bored whether things go wrong or not. When things do happen fixes are already in place so you just tell the boss in the morning "system Y failed last night so we're on the backup which will be slightly slower. I'll get some parts today to fix the real system".
There's always new software toys with promise coming out so you play with whatever has potential in your workplace when you have time.

Re:Intrinsically unstable

[swb]

That's an interesting angle, although most of our clients are small enough and the projects as well -- if we're taking their raise money, they're better off quitting and looking for another job because they're not going to be happy with our fees. But I do get where they think we're taking away from their job/career.

We actually are forming a serious IT A-Team...

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Basically, it's problem resolution.

Most people are used to takign tickets, they take a ticket and they fix an incedent. Sometimes an incident is just stupid user error, sometimes it's a config error.

However, every now and then, there is some ghost error that you can't replicate, but exists intermittently on an enterprise scale. The "A-Team" where we work is supossed to be an advanced troubleshooting team, who's other duties are re-allocated so they can focus entirely on one issue.

These aren't your stnd network and desktop geeks. This is the best person from every IT team. A PM, a network guru, a server guy, an analyst, an app admin, a developer or two, and a super user or two (for out of the box ideas). You switch roles, exchange ideas, and generally dig deep until you either find the problem or reach the back of the CIO's teeth.

Re:We actually are forming a serious IT A-Team...

[Anonymous Coward]

And from that team you generally receive rules and regulations that keep things in check; they also analyze recurring expensive problems and devise long-term solutions to those problems. In doing so they become experienced in the finer details of design and you rely on them to design networks for your company.

Don't forget the hardware guru's in the mix; being able to sniff down a system flipping bits or a transformer tossing out badly regulated power and replace a $50 part is sometimes worth the chalk.

Re:We actually are forming a serious IT A-Team...

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Indeed!
Also, that wasn't meant to be an all inclusive list, just a sample.

Re:We actually are forming a serious IT A-Team...

[Anonymous Coward]

So you aren't the A-Team, you're House.

Re:We actually are forming a serious IT A-Team...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's called 'root-cause analysis'. That's not an A-Team, that's a concept that your company's apparently JUST NOW getting wind of.

Re:We actually are forming a serious IT A-Team...

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

RCA is a process done AFTER you determine the cause. We do a regional RCA monthly. The RCA process usually happens after resolution.

RCA isn't necessarilly done by the top of the top, but most on the board are more than competent.

Re:We actually are forming a serious IT A-Team...

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

darn I never hit preview when I should!

the 2nd sentance should be eliminated.

First rule of forming an A-Team of IT...

[Tetsujin]

First rule of making a team of this kind: You don't need a demolitions expert.

I know, you'd think any kind of team like this would need a demo man, but in fact, at least 80% of the time, high explosives are not the correct answer to your IT woes. This is the voice of experience talking.

Re:First rule of forming an A-Team of IT...

[Abstrackt]

Sounds like someone didn't use enough high explosives!

Re:First rule of forming an A-Team of IT...

[Anonymous Coward]

oh, their gonna have to glue you back together... IN HELL!

From may hours of playing Team Fortress 2, I can tell you that you ALWAYS need a demoman. This is the voice of experience talking.

Re:First rule of forming an A-Team of IT...

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Sounds like someone didn't use enough high explosives!

There is no such thing as "enough high explosives".

Re:First rule of forming an A-Team of IT...

[Anonymous Coward]

in fact, at least 80% of the time, high explosives are not the correct answer to your IT woes.

Maybe not, but they should be!

Re:First rule of forming an A-Team of IT...

[Anonymous Coward]

Debatable.

Is the contract job in a war zone? Hazard pay has strings attached....

Re:First rule of forming an A-Team of IT...

[DoofusOfDeath]

at least 80% of the time, high explosives are not the correct answer to your IT woes

I'm pretty sure the availability of high-explosives changes the question.

You need to think outside the box!

Re:First rule of forming an A-Team of IT...

[Tetsujin]

Look at you, with your head full of eyeballs...

Re:First rule of forming an A-Team of IT...

[prograde]

From alt.sysadmin.recovery FAQ v1.799999999999999998... (1 April 1974):

4.4) Revolvers, cyanide and high voltages: The pros and cons of various luser education strategies.

There has been a great deal of debate on ASR about the best way of dealing with lusers, and at this time no consensus has been reached. What we can suggest, however, is to be sure it is painful, clean, and doesn't harm the computer. That unfortunately leaves a lot of options out; you can't just throw a grenade at them; it will hurt the machine.

ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/sysadmin-recovery

Re:First rule of forming an A-Team of IT...

[Chowderbags]

Well that's what you get when you hire a drunk Scotsman. I say hire the Aussie if you want a straight shooter who's always checking the horizon.

Re:First rule of forming an A-Team of IT...

[Wintywasthere]

I guess the other 20% involves nasty spyware infections, viruses and users who will click any damn thing that flashes.

Nuke the site from orbit, rehire and rebuild - it's the only way to be sure.....

Re:First rule of forming an A-Team of IT...

[Anonymous Coward]

The first rule of forming an A-Team of IT is don't talk about forming an A-Team of IT...

Whaa?

[SnarfQuest]

If I get hired into one of these, will I have to get a mohawk? Because, you see, with my pattern baldness, it will end up looking like some strange japanese samauri thing, and I have serious problems talking without syncing with my lips.

Trained Monkeys

[sycodon]

Notice that each position called for people with very explicit experience.

This illustrates very nicely what I am finding in the job market: No one seems to want people with lots of diverse experience who are flexible and adaptable. Instead, they want trained monkeys that have years and years of experience in one thing.

Thinking for yourself is verboten. Just take the specs and churn out code, or diagrams, etc.

I think this is just asking for trouble, especially in smaller companies. How many trained monkeys can also install and configure a database, then design and create the tables? Not many. So you need to bring in a DBA trained monkey. And monkeys that can actually talk to the users are exceedingly rare.

While trained monkeys have their place, I think they need too much supervision. If they get out of their monkey experience, they are lost and grind to a halt.

Re:Trained Monkeys

[hobo sapiens]

Specialization is for insects.

Sounds like you are looking for employment at the wrong places. You're much better off being well rounded and perhaps having expertise in certain areas than you are specializing in one thing only. A place that expects that out of employees sounds like a factory job. And a dev shop that is factory like is really just a sweatshop. Who wants to only be able to do one thing well? What if your area of expertise is the next J++ (remember that?)

If you look for jobs at smaller places or nonprofits, you'll likely find that what is needed are well rounded people. You'll also find more interesting jobs.

Re:Trained Monkeys

[Anonymous Coward]

Most small companies can actually rely too heavily on the super flexible and diverse IT gods in many cases. There have been several small to mid size companies I have worked with/for that relied so much on my ability to do everything (design the server hardware, implement the network systems, configure the OS's, install and configure the DB systems, design the data structure, design the client applications, and program it all). It makes me so important to the companies that they start having problems letting go when I decide to leave. The transitional period is especially hard when they realize that they are going to have to hire multiple people to do the work I had been doing for them, and that those people will all expect salaries nearly as high as what I was receiving. Usually I end up keeping a contract with them for a long time after taking another position just so they aren't left in a lurch while the new people get up to speed. There have been a few companies that were simply unwilling to admit "jack of all trades" IT is a rare resource and refuse to hire anyone that can't do everything I had been doing.... this usually ends badly when I finally pull the plug on my assistance. As for the topic of creating a crack IT team, in my experience I prefer working with people who are good in many areas, with a specialty. I want people who can see the whole picture, not just their tiny slice, and are able to use their knowledge of the overall problem to come up with unique solutions. Of course I greatly value natural talent and work ethic over education, which gives me better people, but makes finding them much harder. I can pay to get anyone certifications and degrees, but I can't make them smarter or more naturally adept at the required skills.

Re:Trained Monkeys

[sycodon]

J++ ROFLMAO

I've actually seen that once...5 years experience they wanted.

C, C+, C++, Objective C, C#, F#, J++, J#

Oh, the humanity!

Re:Trained Monkeys

[Americano]

It makes me so important to the companies that they start having problems letting go when I decide to leave

Where's your documentation? Your replacement should be able to refer to that and figure out what you did.

If an ex-employer keeps calling after you've left, explain to them patiently that "after date X, if you want help, it'll cost you $200 per hour for consultation, my minimum billing increment is 1 hour, and I will not agree to provide more than N hours of support per week to you on my off-hours."

If you try being a nice guy, they will take advantage of it, and not bother to figure out things on their own. If they know that calling you to answer a single question is going to cost them $200 for the 5 minutes it takes you to have the conversation on the phone, they'll have more incentive to figure out the answer before wasting your time.

Re:Trained Monkeys

[sexconker]

As long as employers list "require X years of language/environment Y, doing thing Z", they'll get shitty applicants and shitty employees hired on the basis of worthless certifications.

When you hire a tech person, the first two weeks should be spent:

3 days of the usual bullshit:
Getting all paper work done.
Getting a set of keys / an id card, getting an office / cube set up, learning where the fucking break room is.
Introducing the new hire to the whole office.
Getting the paper work done, for real this time.
Oh and by the way when there's a fire we all meet out by the Davidson courtyard on the East Quad. You know where that is? No? Let me point to where I think it is, despite the fact that I'm in a room with no windows, and have no idea where I'm actually pointing. Don't worry, you'll find it.

About a week of figuring shit out:
Who is the existing tech team, if any.
What is my job?
Who do I report to?
What is your network setup?
What development environment do you use?
What exactly do you want me to do?
Why are you doing it this way?
Does anyone remember the former guy's password?

A couple days of learning:
Oh, I've never worked with this environment, language, software, etc.
Let me google that and read a few paragraphs while I peruse the existing source code.

Someone with 0 experience should be able to function competently after a few days of looking over existing shit with existing people, regardless of whatever you're setup / needs are.

Re:Trained Monkeys

[TheRaven64]

From this progression, it seems clear that the next language to learn is either O# or C@.

Re:Trained Monkeys

[sycodon]

And the only difference will be stupid syntax differences.

C#
string mystring="";

O@
MyString("") String@

(It's called o@ because all the lines end with "@".)

Seriously though, WTF can't they agree on language structure? In the programming world, regardless of language, there should be only one way to create a new variable and one way to assign a value to it, not half a dozen. Same goes for all the other generic structures.

You want to be different? Create your own framework or build a compiler that provides faster binary code. But you don't have to re-invent the syntax to do that.

Re:Trained Monkeys

[bhcompy]

So you want him to be a technical writer, too?

Re:Trained Monkeys

[Americano]

Documentation of your systems is just as important as your code when it comes to maintaining systems you've built. So yeah, you can either:
1) convince your boss to hire a technical writer;
2) write the documentation yourself;
3) Complain to slashdot about how you're so critical to your ex-employers that they won't leave you alone, even after you've left the company.

If you want to give free work to people, be my guest. If you enjoy being continually hassled with questions by your replacement, don't write anything down. If you want to do a thorough, professional job, you write some documentation of your systems - for yourself, and for your eventual replacement, and you turn that documentation over when you leave the company, with the "$200/hr consulting fee" message.

Often times in my experience, the engineers who refuse to write documentation also write the worst & most brittle code, because they're making it up as they go along, rather than thinking about the problem they're trying to solve, and how they want to solve it, before they start churning out objects and methods.

Re:Trained Monkeys

[stephanruby]

Good question. Sometimes the documentation is written badly, and sometimes the person replacing you is just not capable enough, even with painstakingly written detailed documentation. That's why there needs to be a process of continual documentation review (just like there is for code review), and a continual process of cross-training at the same time. Usually, the companies that don't do cross-training consistently are the same companies that don't do documentation consistently. Those two practices reinforce each other.

Re:Trained Monkeys

[bhcompy]

I understand this. I was just making a semi-jest as this guy was complaining that he already did everything else, and you're telling him to do yet another thing.

Honestly, when you're the jack of all trades you're probably not making great documentation anyways as you end up making it up as you're going along regardless because you just aren't specialized enough in every field to properly make every decision to whatever enterprise level standards one should adhere to. You shoehorn what you know and what you got in to make it work even if you can't explain it. It's part of the job sometimes. Not to mention that if you're coding as well as acting as the IT manager, you're probably not "classically trained" anyways, so you're code doesn't conform to whatever coding standards may have been taught and enforced in upper division CS courses that grade you based on your form rather than your results.

Re:Trained Monkeys

[not-my-real-name]

While trained monkeys have their place, I think they need too much supervision. If they get out of their monkey experience, they are lost and grind to a halt.

Then you should spank them.

Re:Trained Monkeys

[dkf]

Often times in my experience, the engineers who refuse to write documentation also write the worst & most brittle code, because they're making it up as they go along, rather than thinking about the problem they're trying to solve, and how they want to solve it, before they start churning out objects and methods.

Could someone explain this to the developers of Ruby? I and my colleagues have just spent the day trying to figure out what on earth a whole bunch of libraries (some gems, some in core Ruby) were trying to do from some terrible docs (well, RDoc output which barely qualifies...) It helped that I knew most of the APIs from other languages so could point to what was required, but even so... it was just a terrible way to spend a day.

Re:Trained Monkeys

[Lucractius]

See the problem is that even trained monkeys go through the same thing.
They have the same 2 weeks of wasted time.

HR departments should not do Hiring. Leave that to the competent people that already do the work, least then they can spot the morons from their resumes.

But it makes perfect sense to them.

[khasim]

Just how is something supposed to get coded, if nobody explains what should it be?

They don't want to have to explain because they don't KNOW what they want.

They only know the end result that they want. Success and fame and more money.

Translating that into real-world products is beyond them. So they want people who can do that for them. They want magic. They want people who can read their minds, predict the future and turn out world changing products ... and then give all the credit to their "manager".

Why would someone like that work for a manager like that?

Everyone would like to have Superman working for them. Or a whole team of Superman.

But why would Superman need YOU?

Re:But it makes perfect sense to them.

[Toze]

The elves are getting uppity again.

Re:But it makes perfect sense to them.

[Culture20]

Why would someone like that work for a manager like that? Everyone would like to have Superman working for them. Or a whole team of Superman. But why would Superman need YOU?

Because Lex Luthor keeps using kryptonite, but only brings it to bear after Supes mops up the flunkies. A manager's job is to knock the kryptonite away in the final battle. Don't ask me what that means in business terms, I was reading Superman comics instead of getting an MBA.

Re:But it makes perfect sense to them.

[AK Marc]

But why would Superman need YOU?

Where else is he supposed to go? If Superman sucked at marketing himself and didn't like variability, he wouldn't want to be a contractor. So he works someplace. Apparently he really likes the Daily Planet. I've never met a job I couldn't do better than my predecessor (and that wasn't done worse by my successor). If I had the slightest interest in marketing myself or in a variable paycheck that would likely be twice what I'm getting now, I'd try contracting. But I just plain like working on salary. That doesn't mean I can't read minds and give someone what they actually want even when they don't know what they want. So your assertion that Superman wouldn't want to work in that environment assumes that Superman's skills and desires are of a certain type that has yet to be specified. You might be right. You might be wrong. But you are assuming a large number of things to make your statements logically correct.

Re:But it makes perfect sense to them.

[amentajo]

But why would Superman need YOU?

Perhaps he's from Soviet Russia?

In 1977 a crack commando unit in Berkely...

[SoupIsGood Food]

You need to meet more Unix and Mainframe admins, who are either Howling Mad Murdoch or B.A. Barrackus types - the folks who handle the really, really big boxes in the datacenter the boss won't let you breathe on. The two archetypes break down like this:

1) If they can't OS it, patch it, conf it for the network, install software for it and get users authenticating on it, you need to be terrified of it, 'cuz it's not of this earth. Favorite hobbies include comparing stats of completely incomparable systems and freaking out the guy in the next cube. Never met a piece of hardware they didn't like, and they usually name it after someone who has a restraining order out against them.

2) The vendor's tech support calls them for help. Seen every problem imaginable, and can throw it helluva far. Pities the foo who can't fine tune their system for optimal performance at heavy load, at two in the morning, in the rain, upside down, while attacked by bats. Favorite hobbies include reading old versions of the product manual, and writing angry letters to the vendor about spelling mistakes in their release notes. Doesn't really like people or other living organisms.

More formulaic drivel.

[tomhudson]

"You can't tell the business side an idea is nonsense if they're the ones who came up with it," she says

If you can't then:

1. you lack the necessary credentials in their eyes. Your team is not even the "B" team;
2. you lack integrity in your teams eyes. They will not back you up, and with reason.

"It's not a good idea to piss off someone who can have you declared dead on every computer system on the planet," says Kadrich. "You're looking for people with the ability to break into systems and do things to people but who choose to use their powers for justice."

Again, this is just stupid. Fire that person, and fire the person who hired them. Most project fail because of people conflicts and poor communications, not technical skills.

"A lot of guys who know security really well can make something so secure nobody else can use it," he says. "You need somebody who knows where to draw the line."

If you can't follow what they've done, you are not fit to lead, and you've already let the whole ball of wax get even more out of control.

You want someone who's always trying out new things, that superuser who knows more about Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace

MySpace? Are you for real? MySpace? Oh, silly me - it's Troll Tuesday. "new things", "superuser" and "MySpace" are only found together on Troll Tuesday in this universe.

At a certain point, everyone else is an idiot.

[khasim]

Once geeks get above a certain level of (in their own minds, at least) elitism they tend to presume that everyone around them is an idiot.

Think back to your school years. You progress through 12 years of school or whatever. Now compare yourself to someone who's repeated the 3rd grade over and over while you've been moving on.

In most of the sciences (yes, we're talking about computer science) there are a few people who know a LOT and LOT of people know very little.

If you keep learning, you WILL leave more and more people behind you.

Now, how do you feel when you're working extra weekends because those people who decided NOT to continue learning have broken something and YOU are the only one with the knowledge to fix it?

Re:At a certain point, everyone else is an idiot.

[Anne Thwacks]

Now, how do you feel when you're working extra weekends because those people who decided NOT to continue learning are partying with all the hot chicks?

There, thats fixed it for all of us!

Re:At a certain point, everyone else is an idiot.

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Now, how do you feel when you're working extra weekends because those people who decided NOT to continue learning have broken something and YOU are the only one with the knowledge to fix it?

Depends on how much I'm getting paid and how often it happens. At the very least, if you expect me to screw my plans, the person responsible had better be there with me.

Re:At a certain point, everyone else is an idiot.

[kramulous]

It is also my chosen profession and I not only want to be good at my job, I want to be the best. And even then, it's not good enough.

I have to work. I have to probably do it for another 20 years. I don't really see the point in doing something half arsed.

I'm happy with what I earn, now I want to ensure that everything I touch turns to gold. I'll work that extra weekend without pay if that is what it takes.

People confuse ego and pride frequently.

Welcome to the IDG Family of products my friend.

[mb12036]

This article is also listed as "breaking news" by the IDG Family of Products. Thanks to IDG, we have a source for much-needed technical journalism. Recent hits:

1. The Web Is Dead, Long Live the Cloud
2. Why You Don't Need a Cloud Strategy
3. 10 Signs You're A Social Media Adict
4. 10 Warning Signs Your IT Career Is In Trouble (See #3)

How could anyone function without this kind of probing, thoughtful analysis!?!

Wha?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those documentaries are not real?!? I feel my reality slowly melting...melting...

OT in a big way

[GodfatherofSoul]

But, I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's a few years back with George Peppard as the male lead. He has one of the epically greatest monologues at the end. Kind of a shame that he'll be more remembered for the A-Team than that performance.

Ban smoking on the premises

[Anonymous Coward]

Ban smoking both inside and out.
There's no sense in solving one problem while creating more. Craving for nicotine is also a distraction and smoke breaks are an unfair luxury to nonsmokers, not to mention nonsmokers bear a disproportionate burden of healthcare costs for smokers.

Roy Trenneman:

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

The IT Crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0487831/

Mr. T

[juan2074]

Mr. T just threatens users not to do any stupid shit.

There is no plan what?

[Minwee]

So the "best" way to build a team is to make sure that you have exactly one person who is good at each thing, and ensure that they don't have any kind of backup or "Plan B"?

That's frakkin' brilliant.

Until someone on your "A-Team" tries to leave the company. Or take a vacation. Or even go out for lunch. Then your entire organization suffers its justly deserved fate.

No-one is irreplaceable and anything can happen at any time. Just ask Johann Hölzel. Relying on this kind of team is not just putting all of your eggs in one basket, it's also hanging a big "Kick Me Hard" sign on it.

Humour article

[Frankie70]

The article is supposed to be a satire.
Look up the author

Re:Humour article

[Chowderbags]

It's sort of like Poe's Law, except for technological illiteracy instead of religious fundamentalism. There are way too many managers who will read it and think it's the best idea ever, he should add sarcasm tags before this becomes industry "best practices".

Cover for bad management

[Johnny Mnemonic]

If you need an A-Team to run your IT, you're doing it wrong. Not only would they be more expensive and harder to find, but losing any single member means that you have put your entire organization at risk.

Probably a better solution is not to try to cover management laziness and ineptitude with an RFP for unicorns and fairies.

Holy smoking arrogance!

[Anonymous Coward]

"You want the genius guys who aren't arrogant," she says. "They want to impress you, so they do in an hour what would take standard developers a week. But the most important thing is they don't challenge you. You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job."

So this woman doens't want arrogance, yet she expects a bunch of geniuses to be primarily motivated by a desire to impress her. Not a desire to do a good job or take up a nice challenge, no no no, it's all about impressing her personally. And of course, no matter how counterproductive her demands are, even if she is asking these geniouses to work outside in freezing cold coding using punch cards, the most important thing is that she never be challenged by her sla... employees. It is like she took the definition of arrogant and then aimed to take it so far that the concept of arrogance no longer really applies to her - we need a new category to classify her that lies beyond arrogance.

Itil

[DeBaas]

If you have a problem, if no one else can...

  It's just an incident, you fool....

At least

[Anonymous Coward]

At least nobody gets killed in the A-team... well except in the movie.

Maybe get a clue

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe get a clue when hiring your normal it-staff and and not get a pile of shit that needs a "a-team" to fix the broken pile of junk.

Useful article

[Ironpoint]

This article relates everything that is wrong with IT. It provides a very good perspective of how utterly clueless people who shouldn't even be in IT, or management for that matter, think. After reading this article you will have a better understanding of why the majority of IT projects fail and why companies of any significant size only grow by buying small companies.

What they realy said.

[Anonymous Coward]

While it is nice to map certain characters in a team to a team from a TV show, it has no value here. In short they described seven roles in any IT project. However, they still forgot some. What you need is a project manager. He or she has enough IT knowledge to understand an educated technical discussion and compile the necessary information and translate them for the customer (who ever plays that role). Ideally you have a software architect/designer they forgot that role. You need in the infrastructure department someone who can make the network secure. This person normally also administrates the services. In larger infrastructures you might want to split it. To have an overall security person is a good thing for a (larger) company. Ah yes you need developers which do not focus on write the coolest code but to finish the task (which is the thing which divides kids from professionals). For UI design you need a designer with design skills. I was really impressed by that. I thought it would be enough to use a designer who has no sense for esthetic's. They used that approach in Windows 3.0. Ah and before I forget. All your personell should be able to understand real world languages, know certain real world behavior and can actually practice them. In short you do not need nerds, but human beings. So every person on such team must have average soft skills.

If you really want to know which roles and persons are needed for a good software project team: Incorporate knowledge on group dynamics (and understand it). Learn about the roles in a software project. You can look at RUP or V-model or all those agile approaches. In the end you will find a distinguished set of roles. Certain roles shall (if possible) be played by different persons e.g. project manager and software architect, as they have contradicting interests. Knowledge on both can be acquired in a good university study (meaning a bachelor + master degree in CS). For coders it might be enough to have only a bachelor degree.

Been There, Done That

[Terje Mathisen]

15+ years ago I started exactly such a team for my then employer (Hydro, Norway's second largest corporation), I ran it until Hydro was split into multiple independent units, some of them sold off.

They way I set it up was to pick one or two top guys from each of the crucial departments (LAN/WAN/FW, Oracle & MSSQL dbs, Java, C#/.Net, C(++) developers, Unix & Win* admins, etc.).

Each of these departments got the money to hire some extra help, in return I could grab any of the required people for a specific assignment with 2 hours warning. From then on we'd all work on nothing else beside the current task.

I had one requirement for the group (business unit/division) that declared such an emergency: They had to designate one person to work with my team full time, and that person would have authority to accept any kind of change in the project, both technical and economic.

This requirement alone reduced the number of "emergencies" by 75%. :-)

So how did it work?

Pretty good actually: With a total of more than 100 such projects over a 15-year period, we had just two failures.

Terje

IT A-Team personnel No. 5: Coding genius

[Alphanos]

"But the most important thing is they don't challenge you. You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document."

Wow, I think this is just about the worst advice I can imagine.

Apparently, so long as the programmers "don't challenge you" by asking you to "explain what you want", all your IT projects will be wild successes!

Re:IT A-Team personnel No. 5: Coding genius

[blair1q]

If you set no requirements, you can claim anything they give you as a fabulous success, when presenting it to your VCs.

OTOH

[Interl0per]

I agreed with this:

This person doesn't have to be a geek, but does need to be fluent in both tech talk and managementese. He or she also needs to master the delicate skill of telling the bosses no without offending them, says Adriana Zona, director of IT for Minco, a manufacturer of components for military and medical facilities. "You can't tell the business side an idea is nonsense if they're the ones who came up with it," she says. "I call these people the bouncers or gatekeepers -- they guard IT from irresponsible requests. Half of their job is saying no in a friendly way. Every IT department is bombarded with these kinds of requests. If you did them all, you wouldn't be doing the right thing for your company."

More IT/TV Cliches!!!!

[Que914]

...in the business world, things are accomplished but two relatively unimportant but equally arrogant groups: Business managers, who play golf and think they know everything, and IT Professionals, who read Slashdot and also think they know everything. These are there stories....

One print page.

[antdude]

And one who provides one single page: http://www.infoworld.com/print/137701

Academia vs. Corporate

[jeko]

"I work as a code monkey at a university and provide research support. ... They have a vague idea what they need."

It's one thing to work with bright people who have gained a level of real expertise at something -- anything -- and are working with you in good faith.

It's an entirely different ballgame trying to cope with the mendacious, illiterate sociopaths that corporate structure seems to favor.

The OP was too kind. He should have included the whole quote:

"You want the genius guys who aren't arrogant," she says. "They want to impress you, so they do in an hour what would take standard developers a week. But the most important thing is they don't challenge you. You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job."

Think about the implications of that statement, and the employees that manager will end up with. Remember, the article begins with the supposition that the manager knows nothing about the technology involved. What's more likely? That you've found some one-in-a-billion Tesla genius who really can do the same job in 1/40th of the time, or that you've found some lying SOB who just claims to?

Here's something else. Smart people tend to recognize their own worth. They may begin young and naive, but they generally don't stay that way. They're smart, remember? What's more likely, that you've found a mad genius with a catastrophic blind spot -- and they exist, I'll grant you -- or that you've found one of the untold number of bootlicking sycophants who know how to bullshit an idiot?

The academics you're working with are trying to get useful things done. In the corporate world, it's about "managing perceptions," and the people who barge into the meeting bringing cold reality are about as appreciated as bartenders who cut you off after the third bottle of tequila.

It's not a "problem," it's a "challenge." You can always decide to rise to the challenge, and once you have made that decision, the challenge has been met and so it no longer exists. Therefore, problems can be solved merely by deciding they have been.

After the inevitable horrible crash, you simply decide to blame someone else and choose "not to dwell on the past" by "moving on..."

Re:Academia vs. Corporate

[sesshomaru]

What's more likely? That you've found some one-in-a-billion Tesla genius who really can do the same job in 1/40th of the time, or that you've found some lying SOB who just claims to?

Sounds like a pilot I watched recently...

Holy crap

[sean.peters]

If there was ever an instance where "if you have to explain the joke, it's not funny" applied, it's this article.

I dunno 'bout that ...

[Shadowlore]

"I know, you'd think any kind of team like this would need a demo man, but in fact, at least 80% of the time, high explosives are not the correct answer to your IT woes."

"That server over there is spreading a virus" - C4.apply()
"We can't upgrade to HW that meets our needs when the existing HW is still mostly functional" - C4.apply()
"MS wants us to pay for each server that might be running Windows" - C4.apply()
"No need for Business Continuity Planning, our data center will never ..." C4.apply() "...fail"
"the printer still isn't working" - C4.apply()
"We've hired an intern for you, we'll need you to train him on everything you do. You know, just in case something happened to you." - C4.apply()
"The DDOS won't stop" - findOffendingRouter() && C4.apply()
"Hey, who put IIS on our public network?" - C4.apply()
Anytime sledgehammers haven't solved the problem - C4.apply()
"How will we get that rack through the too-small door?" C4.apply()
Someone keeps swiping your keyboard or mouse - C4.apply()

I dunno, seems explosives are a valuable tool that can solve problems at least half the time.

Even if we accepted your assertion that we'd only need high explosives 1 time in 5, that is still grounds for a demo spec. Remember, not all high-explosives make big explosions. A well shaped small HE charge can do wonders.
If that isn't enough to convince you, know that my team includes a demolitions expert ... and someday our paths may cross. <evil grin>

Trained Monkeys vs untrained

[dbIII]

There's leaving detailed notes that anyone with a similar level of experience can understand - and then there is writing Standard Operating Proceedures that untrained monkeys can use. Frequently you need the second because management undervalue your skills until after you have gone and may replace you with a recent high school graduate that plays a lot of video games (that's computer experience isn't it). The smoother the operation you run the greater some people will undervalue your skills. The only ones that will think you are any good are those that remember when things were not smooth.

Re:Trained Monkeys vs untrained

[Americano]

Welcoome to the public relations part of your job, then. If you don't make it clear to your boss what value you're providing to his organization, then you're on the shortlist for outsourcing and / or layoffs anyway. Learn to speak the language he uses.

As far as needing the super detailed opdocs, after you leave the company, they are not your problem. If mgmt hires an incompetent, it's not your job to make that work for them. Offer a consulting agreement at a steep rate, and they'll stop calling you very quickly. There's no need to be rude about it, just tell them, "before I help you, let's talk about my hourly rate."

If you fail to do that, and you keep answering the phone when they call to provide free support, then you're enabling them and the fault is your own for not encouraging them to break themselves of their "dependency" on you.

Re:Trained Monkeys vs untrained

[dbIII]

Been there, done that, but left good docs so only got a few short calls that I could resolve quickly by telling people where to look. No money changed hands, goodwill was preserved and very little of my time was wasted. When they needed a lot of new work done I sent somebody else that had more time, experience and skills in their direction.

Consider this before that meeting

[dbIII]

Either problem admins or you have a lack of communication. Do they even have a clue what you are doing or what is important? Do they even know about your network problem or are you waiting for them to notice? Explicitly setting various machines as outside of their responsibility is probably a good idea and may even be the first they have heard about the importance of keeping that system running.
Why are they rebooting in office hours? Do they merely have the stupid single user non-networked mindset and treat it like their own desktop box or are there problems with out of hours work? Staff that get nothing in return for staying late will be prone to reboot important systems during working hours.

Re:Consider this before that meeting

[St.Creed]

Their problem is that they consider themselves the owner of all the systems. We're just the serfs who, if they grovel, *might* be allowed the use of the system inbetween the real work of patching and firmware upgrades.

They're amateurs, and that's the opinion of all of the 4 external consultants (for 3 projects, and from 4 companies) I've met here. Either that, or having major disruptions every other day is just a sign they're hard at work.

Re:Consider this before that meeting

[dbIII]

Their problem is that they consider themselves the owner of all the systems.

That attitude can develop if they are going to wear all of the blame when go wrong with the systems or if it all comes out of their budget - or else it can be completly unfounded and a hangover from something in their work history.

Either that, or having major disruptions every other day is just a sign they're hard at work.

I've had that early in contracts while trying to unravel interdependant tangles of string pretending to be computer systems and unexpectedly stop something important working during office hours, but it certainly shouldn't happen for very long. However I also had a larger capital budget to untangle those piles of anarchy than the guys that kept the chewing gum and string operations going.
If nobody is telling them what has to stay up and why they may not even know what problems they are causing.

Re:Consider this before that meeting

[St.Creed]

I understand your points, but they don't apply here.

The attitude is a hangover from the 70's, perpetuated by a combination of powerless management, an inability to fire people (it's never happened in 40 years) and a penchant for hiring kids fresh from college - making sure noone with radical ideas about customersatisfaction or structured work gets in.

They have no budget, yet act as if they own the servers. Our servers are paid by our project. Also, they're not unraveling an existing mess, they're sustaining one.

The servers they're stopping have been installed about one month ago. They're as new and fresh as you can get, no dependencies on other systems whatsoever. And then they removed the STORAGE from our DATABASE server by accident. They shut down our production system for identity management (30K+ users, dozens of subscribed systems) for an hour with a hard shutdown, leaving a huge mess for the system administrator to deal with because of all the synchronization issues with dozens of communicating systems. They didn't even realize you could *do* a soft shutdown, if asked.

And all of that still wouldn't be bad if these guys treated them like mistakes or errors. But in fact, they think they're doing a great job! Gaaaahhhh.....

Re:Consider this before that meeting

[dbIII]

Ow!
Best of luck, it sounds like it will be very difficult to even convince them to tell you when they are going to mess with your equipment.

This article is an excuse for child MBA management

[dbIII]

If your manager does not have a clue what you are doing in general terms they should not be your manager. They don't need to know the fine details but they do need to know something if they have the job of allocating resources or employing staff.

In 2004

[Compaqt]

In 2004 a crack hacker tools .DEB was sent to McAfee Virus Detention Lab under the supervision of the "Master Control Warden". These programs promptly escaped from maximum security firewalls to the Palo Alto underground. Today, still wanted by the RIAA, they survive as SOFtware as a service. If you have a DVD or a Blu-Ray no one else can decode, and if you can find|grep them, maybe you can hire... The 0x41 Team

Re:This article is an excuse for child MBA managem

[Lucractius]

And somehow this is a rare skill...
oh wait... didnt they invent management degrees so people didn't need to know what they managed.

and people wonder why things are so bad.