Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
I am officially gone from
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.
which is totally what she said
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.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
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.
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.