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How To Succeed In IT Without Really Trying
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia discusses the two ways to succeed in IT: through proficiency and hard work, a road that often leads to unending servitude, or the other way; with little effort or proficiency at all. 'I hate to say this, but a number of people in IT positions work harder to make it seem like they're busy as beavers than doing actual work. Quite often this dysfunction starts at the top: When an IT manager doesn't know the technology very well, he or she may hire folks who have no idea what their job is other than to show up every day and answer the occasional email, passing questions along to others with more technical abilities, or to their contacts at the various hardware and software vendors. People like these populate many consulting companies. They rely almost completely on contractors to perform the actual work, serving as remote hands in a real crisis and as part of a phone tree for less pressing issues.'"
I suspect a lot of industries have a similar "hierarchy"
"Contractor" and "consultant" are euphemisms for don't care and kickback. You want a good job, you hire an employee. You want an excellent job, you take on a (prospective) partner.
I wish I could pass things off and not do them. I have a boss who makes me accountable.
I'm an IT guy -- or at least they tell me I am -- and I have no proficiency to speak of; no certifications at all. Everything I ever need to know I find via Google, review of years of misc. whining on message boards, and trial-and-error. It's amazing what I've done with no actual knowledge of my own.
Work for Sony!
Well, up until about a month or so ago.
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
"with little effort or proficiency at all. 'I hate to say this, but a number of people in IT positions work harder to make it seem like they're busy as beavers than doing actual work. Quite often this dysfunction starts at the top: When an IT manager doesn't know the technology very well, he or she may hire folks who have no idea what their job is other than to show up every day and answer the occasional email, passing questions along to others with more technical abilities, or to their contacts at the various hardware and software vendors. People like these populate many consulting companies. They rely almost completely on contractors to perform the actual work, serving as remote hands in a real crisis and as part of a phone tree for less pressing issues.'"
You mean there is another management style? These must be rare ducks indeed.
Cmdr Taco, for example, fits this description to a T...
wake up and hold your nose
I know my IT stuff--inside and out. And I have a proven track record to back it up. Yet at the company I work for (as well as previous companies), I am not considered for IT management positions. Who do they put in those positions? Folks who don't know how to do things themselves, and rely on contractors, etc.
Just be the first in the job, make yourself indispensible an Voila! You rule the shop. Not a big deal.
Until someone with more brains shows up.
I succeed in IT by browsing slashdot and reddit (sorry /.) all day!
Hey, if you're not a genius, figure out something to do with yourself.
A combo I have seen work a lot and I somehow grew into is someone with a Line Job and a Minor in IT. Sure, you leave the weird network stuff to the hotshot, but you can sorta keep the office running answering helpdesk stuff. Then you go back to your regular job.
Accountants end up with this pair a lot because accounting software is some of the trickiest in the business. (You mean Job Cost didn't post because we're more than two accounting months out? Oh. Right. Let's go visit the CFO and hope he doesn't bite my head off!)
Though I am more of a management techinal admin, but the mix is the same. In a small company, being a HelpDesk guy keeps the load off the hotshot IT guy.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"When an IT manager doesn't know the technology very well, he or she may hire folks who have no idea what their job is other than to show up every day and answer the occasional email, passing questions along to others with more technical abilities, or to their contacts at the various hardware and software vendors."
[question I get daily]
"Hey, how do I...?"
'Lady, you have the worlds greatest information resource literally at your fingertips. I guess I should feel honored that you would ask me instead, but damn. Go look it up for yourself. And after you look it up, figure out how to apply it.'
And yes, I've ratted these people out to management. They are still here.
Happens in every industry.
It's already known as the Peter principle.
Nothing new here, move along.
There's no scientific consensus that life is important.
I'd say that the whole reason the IT manager has technical staff is because the manager doesn't know everything, not in spite of it. The technical staff is supposed to know how things work, and pretending to look busy while hiring contractors to do the real work makes me believe that it's the staff that's incompetent rather than the manager.
Once upon a time I had a real job, full-time, salaried job with real, full-time (and overtime) responsibility. After years of hard work, long hours, and being the final go-to guy for everything, my bosses began to make it clear to me that I was their personal slave. (Really, they had always been doing that, I just started to get become cognizant of it near the end of my tenure.) So I gave notice and left.
Sice then I have been doing contract work in major corporations, going on four years now. Once place I worked was in the business of moving packages from one place to another. Another place I worked was a city government. Another was a major hotel chain. And others.
I have been paid more in the contract jobs, have only once been on-call, have never had any meaningful responsibility, and most importantly, have never really had a clearly-defined task. For the most part I've shown up, kept my mouth shut, got paid, and left. The bonus is that has an hourly employee, I got overtime (and it oftentimes it wasn't hard to come up with excuses for overtime).
The full time employees at the places I've worked have had little to zero honest-to-god hard skills. I have worked with people who have had "programmer" in their title who could not touch type. I have worked with "network engineers" who declared they "only knew Cisco" (apparently all the other vendors switch frames and route packets in some bizarre and incomprehensible way, hmm). I have been discouraged, and occasionally punished, for trying to go beyond the call of duty.
Sometimes I am appreciated for my abilities, but more often than not some no-nothing middle manager is in the way preventing me from being any good at anything so that I don't accidentally expose how little he really does in an average day.
But I don't care. I get paid good money, with overtime, to do nothing, and I get months of time off per year.
Once upon a time I thought I was just doing contracting until a full time offer came. Now I'm more than happy to be a contractor, and I turned down a full time position last week. I've never felt so free.
Hard work does not pay.
We have a good thing going here, don't fuck it up!
'I hate to say this, but a number of people in IT positions work harder to make it seem like they're busy as beavers than doing actual work.
In my case, all serious IT management stuff was outsourced to one of the big IT service companies. My work was to act as a liaison between this IT company and my company....mainly because I understood the 'business logic' of what we were doing.
My boss was afraid of computers. In the late 90s when Linux was becoming a threat to UNIX and Microsoft, he just could not believe one could run Linux legitimately without a license.
The most routine tasks I did involved activating and deactivating user accounts...which I sometimes referred to a buddy at the IT company, who would create or delete these users.
Times were interesting. I quit because of boredom!
You need to be "driven" to make as little work for yourself as possible. Which means figuring out how to do it a limited number of times before automating the process. If it can be automated, time you spend doing a particular task is dead, wasted time that could be spent being more productive doing something else.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Smart people get tired of underachievers and it's pretty easy to recognise.
I think most people want to try to do the right thing, follow best practices / stay professional. Often organisations make it easy to get disgruntled, when there's a perception that the brass don't know/care about what you perceive to be the "real" problems.
That aside, the most miserable places to work are usually where people are just phoning it in. You might have a little less up-front stress, but I'd argue the lack of any sort of job satisfaction or doing anything to take pride in would ultimately lead you to be less happy in life.
We all coast sometimes, or make compromises - but if you solely operate that way in your career you won't be getting too far. Especially in smaller tech communities where there is a small degree of separation.
I have worked in companies where those "folks who have no idea what their job is" account for more than 75% of the work-force
We put you on the Internet map,
www.racknine.com
I am one of those poor sods that actually have to do IT work. I am the MacGyver of the IT department. If no one else can figure something out they give it to me. Guess what, I enjoy the status of unending servitude. My boss though is exactly as described. It is my opinion that he is a waste of perfectly good protoplasm and he just got rid of the one person that could back me up. If go on vacation, quit or get hit by a bus he, and the company, are going to be in a world of hurt.
this what you when there is no job training / hire by cert / only hire people who went to a big collage. while passing over the people who did not go or went to a tech school. Now you can get a good manager maybe even have a MBA but you still need a idea about IT to run IT or have a tech manager under you with you just doing non tech manager work.
Easy post your how to do my job question on slashdot.
You've just described the past 10 years of my life. I have been a contractor working non stop for folks who have very good communication skills and can talk the talk but not walk the walk. My phone hasn't stopped ringing. Once you get a reputation for doing good quality work and being technically proficient you become the goto guy. I'm super lazy and do what it takes to make my life easier. Those people with less technical skills than I make my life easy by handling all the other details I don't want to. I actually don't mind those who know what they don't know. It's those who pretend are the worst.
People who have no idea what their job is other than to show up every day and answer the occasional email, passing questions along to others with more technical abilities, or to their contacts at the various hardware and software vendors. People like these populate many consulting companies. They rely almost completely on contractors to perform the actual work, serving as remote hands in a real crisis and as part of a phone tree for less pressing issues.'"
That is not a problem, it is a crucial function. Speaking from experience as a consultant who billed at lawyer-level hourly rates (I'm retired now at a young age, fired my last client a couple of years ago), except for the "have no idea what their job is" part, that is exactly what I did. And it was an immense value add for my clients.
It is precisely my contacts at various vendors and my personal domain knowledge that enables me to translate from client-speak to engineer speak and act as a very intelligent set of "remote hands" that makes it worthwhile for my clients to pay the, frankly outrageous, fees that I charge.
Basically they can pay me beau-coup bucks to facilitate fixing problems in days or they can muddle along for weeks or months trying to handle the situation on their own.
I make no secret about my methodology either - I always hit google first. But I am really damn good with google. I am always ready to train client employees to do what I do with google, but they almost always lack the patience and the domain experience to sort the wheat from the chaff on the net.
Then if google proves fruitless I move on to documenting the problem in as precise a manner as possible and passing it along to the people I know at the vendors involved. Sometimes I go through the official support channels, sometimes I skip them and go directly to the engineers.
Either way, I got results for my clients. Results that they were very happy with and which made it worthwhile for them to keep me around twiddling my thumbs, essentially on "retainer" to be available whenever they needed me.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Agree, but it gets worse...
Unfortunately the IT place I worked for (for over 6 years) ruined a perfectly good IT consulting company by hiring a middle age travel agent (somehow personal acquaintance of one of the partners) to manage its highly experienced and educated IT consultants. She had NO experience with IT, nor was she even a slightly decent manager. Talk about spending the company's money on BS, she was the queen of spending money.
Within 1 year the company was all but dissolved, none of the original highly experienced IT consultants were left... Instead they had a bunch of morons which were the consultants trained, apparently to replace themselves for cheaper pay.
Add another year to that and 90% of their client base has moved on to a different company that doesn't have its head up its own a$$.
I know, it happened to me. I was the last original consultant to go.
TFA doesn't have any definition of "success". Every shop I've worked in has various examples of staff with "what you know" and "who you know". But in the end it tends to work itself out in the "right" way.
"It's very hard for those outside the technology inner circle to determine who has mad skills and who's slacking, until it becomes obvious that certain IT ninjas are the ones who step in to solve the problems again and again."
Those ninjas are usually the ones that find themselves on the short list to stay on when the economy turns south. That sounds like success to me. As a Sr. PHB myself whose technical skills have dwindled now down to still being able to spell EssQueElle and vaguely understanding that data can Hibernate but in a slightly different way than polar bears, it can be very difficult at times to hire qualified technical staff. Personally, I utilize some of my ninjas to help with that process but every once in a while someone makes it in that truly can't cut it. And now that funding is tight, I don't seem to have any of them.
- If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat? - Steven Wright
I have to completely disagree. People who are less motivated and/or talented (which is what’s really being defined here) survive by, answering phones, gathering information, filtering up, dealing w/ easy problems, acting as hands for the more inclined and motivated, etc. Every doctor needs a nurse and every guru needs need subordinates (who updates their own firmware anyway?) Those in “unending servitude” are just awful at demanding what they are worth. This does not reflect the reality I live in, this reflects a person who is confused on how to extract momentary compensation for knowledge.
I guess that you people are talking about IT, not software. I suppose that that's a modern idea - when I started out in the business it was just computers - big things with IBM on the side, and they were pretty much of a piece. You really had to inhabit that world to understand it; users, such as they were, were pretty much at the mercy of the same things as the so called expert; some were keen and took pains to understand what they were doing, others blew in the wind. But like anything else with an intellectual twist to it, taking the time to understand how the environment one is working in works is a worthwhile exercise. I don't think that I am the smartest person in the world, but it took me about 2 weeks to figure out that the best way to approach things was to learn stuff that a) walks out the door with you when you leave and b) other people want. If you want a career in, or involving, computers, best be prepared to sit on your arse and spend lots of time getting to know what you are doing. If you can, and are good at getting things done, this whole discussion is moot. Make your own luck and ignore this horseshit.
because I do the IT work for several small companies and a couple of municipalities. I'm not sure where the notion that consultants are incompetent comes from; if we all were lncompetent we wouldn't keep our clients. The only time I see a functioning network is usually when I've just fixed it. Often I get a call from a new client and have to fix their network when I've *never* seen it work. Many times these networks were set up by someone's cousin or nephew who *really knows computers good". As far as qualifications go I'm a EE from back in the days when vacuum tube theory was all the rage. I became a computer guy when we started using Intel 4004 chips as controller for the heavy equipment the company I worked for was building and just kept on learning new tricks.
My problem is usually with incompetent staff who have been hired on as clerical help and simply promoted up some invisible ladder. As an example, I handled the Internet connections for a local hospital in return for a closet where I could put my ISP servers (in one rack). A new IT boss sent me a letter dated the 15th ( which I got the 20th) telling me I had to have my bear out by the first of the next month (but telling me I had "30 days". I had to find a new location, arrange a feed, and set up a parallel system (with a second router) until everything could be moved so it took me until the 2nd of the next month to finally wheel my Cisco 7004 router out the door. That night the moron called me to see why his Internet connection went down. It turned out he hadn't made arrangements for his new feed yet.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
I have only encountered 1 in 10 IT professionals that actually can fix anything and have been in the business professionally since 1996.
It really is sad.
From TFA:
If you perform enough miracles when other people NEED them ... pretty soon they think THEY are the ones performing the miracles.
And in IT ... without the risk of death or dismemberment should your design/work crash ... that's just the way things are.
People EXPECT computer systems to crash. Which is the perfect environment for people who know nothing to succeed.
(paraphrased) "There are two kinds of people in this world, those that do the work and those that take the credit. Try to be in the first group, there is less competition"
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
The Website Is Down
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
He wants his twenty years of observations back.
For those of you too young to remember, go find and watch Head Office. I love this business.
This one woman who got the job I had applied for... she was utterly clueless. Instead I found a job as netadmin for an ISP. She was calling the level 1 techs constantly for help with problems... but they are clueless as her and eventually they'd shift her onto me. Our responsibility goes up to the modem and her problems were always 100% beyond the modem. So I just stood my ground... and she would rage. "Im regretting going with your ISP." id be like "well unfortunately im not allowed to help with customer's networks, my boss charges $95/hour for that help." she'd reply... "Ive already spent way too much money on tech help. Im going to get help again but if I find out it was your problem you are paying the bill." Which is what they do. They make a big stink until you fix their problem for them.
then I remind myself plumbers have to work with shit. Not figurative shit but literal excrement when they snake the main drain. Man I was happy to pay the plumber to do that about a year ago since I wouldn't have wanted to do that.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Being a plumber would be better. Sure, they work with shit. But in IT, we work in shit!
I am an employee of a very large company that outsources to a very large contract Firm. There is a few local staff to take care of backups and network hardware. So what happens in our case is there is a SLA that is agreed upon. We are one group that gets these services without any say in the SLA. ( I imagine this is some sweetheart deal for Someone )
If there is any "Extra" projects the company wants to undertake there is of course "Extra Charge" So the large contract firm says here is what we are going to do and gives management a price. Which they accept without any questioning of the resources and time it is going to take for the project.
So their project managers seem to be incompetent and they always doesn’t take in to consideration something. Resources, time, and equipment they always mess it up somehow. They fall behind schedule and the local guys are told to pick up the slack.
Recent example we were moving some webservers that nobody has touched in 4 years and they didn't budget for someone that knew IIS scripting. They fall behind schedule and the local guys are told to pick up the slack.
I personally feel like this is just how it is for the next 5 years (duration of the contract) .... but hey I make 100+ get a 401K and a pension I will deal.
... about a week after I looked at an overview page of the project management software we were using, only to see that my name was attached to 80% of all of the completed tasks in an office of 4 other people.
I set up a packet sniffer to see what was going on - 2 of the 4 were looking at porn, 1 was in a chat room for world of warcraft, and the other was reading a blog about programming.
The one who was reading the blog about programming chastised me about a single line of redundant code, and I almost flipped out and stabbed her in the neck with a #2 pencil. I chose to walk out peacefully, instead. There's a part of me that regrets it.
There. Fixed it for you.
There's nothing unique about IT.
Have gnu, will travel.
i really wont go into the full list, but how about the racist, screaming boss who fired the competent, friendly, but mentally challenged worker who had been there for 5 years, because she didnt like 'retards'?
would that happen at a union shop?
what country would you suggest moving to?
It is not as much as the Bad IT Guy gets promoted but the person with the better people skills does.
There are a lot of actually good successful IT people out there. They know their stuff and keep things going, But they also can put on a Tie, talk to others and explain their ideas better, and they go out of their way to show their success.
A good IT Person who is in the trenches while good at their job, but doesn't talk to management and sees them as the Evil overlord keeping them down, is well going to be kept down. They need to put their head out of the trenches document their success work on plans to reduce failures go to those optional meetings, and be useful in them. Otherwise the Bad IT Guy who spends all his time to write reports explaining why it isn't his fault will get notices just because he has a better set of documentation.
I have seen a lot of Good IT people who I wouldn't put up to promotion, Why?
Things like, Not knowing the status of a project in a timely fashion (You don't know if they going on the right track or where they are in the process, making you worry that things are going to be delayed, and you won't know until the last minute, and when asked about the status you just get a good), or Getting too much detail on what they are doing (The opposite extreme, I do not need to know everything that goes on in your project, you are paid to think for yourself and do what you think is right, You do not need approval for every step... Also you drown out the information making it hard to find real problems because there is too much stuff to handle to see if you are actually following the specs).
Needing to challenge everything, Does the manager really need to fight with you for every job, yea it may be stupid but it needs to get done. As Well just being a Yes Man, hey you are hired to tell me that something doesn't make sense or seems way off.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
he or she may hire folks who have no idea what their job is .... passing questions along to others with more technical abilities, or to their contacts at the various hardware and software vendors. People like these populate many consulting companies. They rely almost completely on contractors to perform the actual work
Passing questions along to others can get the job done. If they get the job done, on time, and within budget, what more could you ask? In the business world, there are usually no special brownie points, for being smart and using your own brain to solve a problem/answering a question quickly, versus being clever, and leveraging other people's brains to get the same task accomplished.
Who cares if they wasted a software vendor's time with dumb questions (other than the software vendor)? The exorbitant support fees probably covered that anyways --- on second thought, perhaps this explains why hardware/software support fees are often so exorbitant nowadays.......... clueless end user employees priced into the contracts up front when you buy hardware/software? Ack.
I think passing the questions on to the right person and responding to them, kind of proves they do have some knowledge of what the IT job is. A good IT worker is one who does ask the questions to learn things, rather than proceeding as if they knew something (when they do not)
Not every IT worker is necessarily supposed to be a technical guru who personally knows the answer to every question asked of them. Now knowing who to pass what kind of question on, and what question(s) to ask of the other person or contracter, that can require some more serious brain power.
If you're hired to do a technical job, that means you do the technical job. If you don't know how to do it, you either get training, or ask when things come up you do not understand.
Yes. People who have the technical knowledge are more apt and will be more efficient. It doesn't mean, though, that for example, someone who never adminned a mail server cannot be the mail server admin.
They will just have to be learning the hard way, and possibly spending a lot of time learning from vendors.
Someone has been reading Dilbert lately.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
Please tell me you didn't go to a big "collage". Or at least tell me which one, so I don't send my kids there.
Shhhh, the nerds have to feel like they're the super-special elite.
Ha ha spelling. You, sir, are a big collage.
Everyone is not smart enough to do their job. But they have a family to feed and they are smart enough to make good friends who can do the job. These folks are there all over the place and we all know about them. Those who stick around for a longer time eventually gain some business knowledge that make them stay in the company. However, a lot of these folks get kicked out by good companies within 6 months.
...which is why plumbers make a shit-load of money.
The reason why tech salaries and job satisfaction are on the decline is because, on average, most IT professionals are good at tech, but not negotiation. If they were tech pays and conditions, on average, would be a lot better. You, dear reader, need to be a better negotiator so that every tech gets a better deal and employers are afraid that the next guy will drive a much harder bargain. I don't mean showing the finger type of negotiation, I mean your fist right up their ass feeling their internal organs type of negotiation. My mentor described this as "negotiating from a position of strength".
If you are squeamish about that description, then you don't belong in IT, or you need to consider an IT union. I've never been a member of a union because I'm an ok negotiator, but I sure wish they were more common. Most IT practitioners shun the idea of a union because they think they are going to be the next Gates or Zuckerberg. So instead of supporting the idea of someone who could negotiate on their behalf and focusing on what is needed to get comfortable they refuse to, because they think one day it's gonna be me, I'll have the power, I'll be "the Fister", but they never will be because they're a pussy. IT is a ruthless business and because IT practitioners have spent so much time fisting each other over, management figure thats the way to treat IT professionals. To loan from southpark, I am a dick, you need to be to deal with these assholes so stop being a pussy. Your boss is your enemy, if you don't leave first you boss *WILL* fire you. It's inevitable.
You know that indispensable guy you've been working with who is so cool that has worked there forever, don't trust him. He is so spineless that he hasn't been able to negotiate a better deal for himself the entire ten years he has been there, despite being the fister. Despite being able to turn off the money tap his misguided loyalty is going to make him knife you in the back after he fists you. You may never know it was him, it might be obvious. He will smile, shake your hand and say it's a real pity. His remorse will last as long as it takes for you to walk out the door, probably less. He is a pussy, he will earn peoples hate. I've been him, he's been you.
That's the reality of IT today kids. No more parties on triple hulled catamarans cause the company did a good year, just "you get to keep your job,,, for now". Thats why I keep enough pay in the bank to last 6 months to a year so I can tolerate being fired by an asshole. I don't like something, anything, I look for a new job say "You guys are great, I wish I can stay" then leave withdrawing my fist and a gaping hole where it was. They'll be back in 6 months asking what my consultancy rates are.
Whilst I am polite co-operative, amenable and agreeable I realise these things hold true, there is no loyalty, show me the fucking money and it's all about me. I know you're young, earning 100K a year, well guess what it's the most you'll ever earn. You are a devalued commodity from day one in this ageist industry. Am I bitter, fuck yeah, I love IT. I've seen what it was over 25 years and I see what it is now. So many good people chewed up and spat out. My bitterness and cynicism is what helps me to survive all the assholes I've met.
Outraged, or don't like my attitude, fuck you, I get interesting projects and plenty of variety, which also means I get lots of invaluable experience so pay is comfortable. IT is a ruthless cesspit of spineless two faced liars that will screw you over because that is easier than standing up for themselves. They have no balls. If you can't be a better negotiator then you had better find a union paid not to have those scruples or get out of IT, pussy, they're your choices.
If you can't accept that analysis it's more than likely you are the one being fisted.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Sounds to me like the proficient ones ranting against the hard working ones.
nothing new here!
Shan
I have a relative who is a Master Plumber and he only works on newly-built homes. Pipes that have never been "used". He makes really good money too, and I definitely envy him at times, because he has an actual skill/trade, whereas I am constantly having to find new ways to advance my own skillset.
I've been saying (half jokingly) for several years that my job changed from "IT" to "vendor coordinator". This is not my being lazy (as least I don't think so). It is a reaction to my company (who shall remain nameless) having reduced IT staffing and general IT spend. I previously provided support (network, hardware, software) for one location. Then that was expanded to offering services to our customers. Then that was expanded to multiple sites and I now provide support to over ten locations in three states (admittedly, some are larger and more "needy" than others). This was, however, not a promotion. My previous position ceased to exist. No one took my place at my old position so I need to provide that same support (plus additional responsibilities) but now I do it for multiple locations. While the company was telling us that our role had changed and we should not be involved in day to day support anymore (we are supposed to be more "project managers" and looking for ways to save $$ or generate additional), they were telling the users that we are still supporting them so the users do not stop calling (they are supposed to call a support center in another country). The company has also eliminated most of the corporate IT staff as well (network engineers, server administrators, etc. etc.) and outsourced that work to other companies. On top of this, my salary was frozen for 2 years (due to the economy) followed by a raise capped at 2% last year.The talk is that this year salaries will be frozen again. When asking about pay raises considering the extra work we are doing, we are told "be thankful you still have a job". So... yes. I have become a "vendor coordinator". Not because I want to (I actually like troubleshooting and resolving IT related issues), but because there is no other way to even remotely handle my job. /rant off. ;-)
Get an MBA!
Tom Smykowski: Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
What is said in this post or the article that Scott Adams hasn't been saying, and portraying, for years? Or is it decades? His characters already display all of the dysfunctions suggested, and anybody that has worked in IT (especially in a corporate environment) recognizes the archetypes/stereotypes. Yes, Virginia, there are real nerd geek geniuses who just want to do their work and be left alone (because they love their work) and then there are the incompetents trying to hide in plain sight, the empire builders, the politicians, the pointy haired bosses, the probably bright but cynical and lazy, the eager young interns being disabused of their idealism.
University IT tends (I think) to be slightly better than this on average -- a more likely haven for the competent who want to be left alone -- but even there there are plenty of empire builders and highly placed incompetent buttheads. Legend has it that a very few companies such as Amazon and Google and maybe Red Hat have managed to minimize the "pointy haired boss effect" and get a large crew of iconoclastic nerd genius types to be productive in their innately self-actualized way, but a lot of this is just human nature, being expressed.
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Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Cannot agree more. The solution is to find a better paying job, and leave. Your manager would realize who was doing the real work very soon.
But I am really damn good with google. I am always ready to train client employees to do what I do with google...
Seriously? You think knowing how to type in searches in Google is a skill? (let alone one that is difficult to learn?)
What? You know how to use "site:" "filetype:" and "+" and other people just can't grok it? lol
Google, like Apple, has spent a lot of money to make sure that their product is easy to use and intuitive. "Knowing" how to use Google is not a skill. Neither is having read their "advanced operators" FAQ.
The other posters were right, you were not paid big bucks because of your "awesome" (Lol!) Googling "skills" - you were paid big bucks to be the clueless intermediary they could blame everything on if someone else screwed up.
I ended up treating my IT career like I treat a night at the roulette table. I busted my balls at doing a lot of good work for a lot of stupid people who would rather spend a million dollars on an empty solution than use an in house solution that costs near zero. When I found something I liked, I moved into a niche field. I cashed out my chips for a stable company of medium size. The only way to survive in IT is to only have 1 foot in and one foot out. Like be in HR, but be the database expert in your group.
Unless you are insanely smart thus being able to write your own path (and I mean tear apart a diesel engine, program in C and python and have an argument with a co-worker about 1992 tax code all before lunch smart), then you will burn out in IT.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
TFA could describe the majority of companies in Silicon Valley.
They take the calls and the credit, but pass the hard work on to the small satellite offices in other US locations, Canada or abroad. Those small satellite offices operate under the permanent threat of imminent closure unless they prove that they are "team players" and accept one hot potato after the another from main office. Most of the hot potatoes are caused by brain dead decisions and designs made at head office.
Silicon Valley should be renamed Silly Con Valley.
The trick is to automate the task and not tell anyone. Most people don't realize that it can be efficiently automated. Then kick back are browse the interwebs.
This is completely bogus and really bad advice.. Being mediocre at what you do and taking no pride at all is a real shame. Glorying said mediocrity is even worse... Grow up! It is OKAY for you to work hard and actually EARN what you get in life. I understand there are situations where you might not be able to flourish. If it is remotely important to you, start changing your situation.
If you want to make an impact and have a fulfilling job, get into the strategic power core of the company. Unless you work in a IT company (Software/Hardware), you'll never get there in IT. IT is a customer service department and is treated as such. What happens to customer service departments? They are overhead, additional cost to making the product. Companies will do it as cheap as possible.
evaluate, fix, sustain, teach, stagnate, leave....repeat.
How often you have done that in the past decade is directly proportional to your income. It takes a very dynamic company to repeat this cycle internally for a given IT techie...admins it is difficult. Programmers less so, I saw on organization that purposely shifted people around between functional groups to keep the challenges and ideas fresh. I thought that was smart nerd herding.
I would strongly suggest project managers fall into this as well... very little knowledge just moving paper around for a high wage
I accidentally your first two sentences and almost laughing.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Having been on both sides of this nasty fence, and currently a FTE, I am simply biding my time until I can go back to contracting/consulting. I took this gig because it's stable, pays relatively well for the market, is usually enjoyable, and I don't have a ton of BS to deal with. Still, it's temporary. After two or three years in almost any environment I'm bound to grow increasingly stale, and I've already begun to feel some of that.
Teachable moment: know-nothing (as in they don't know anything), not no-nothing, which is just a double negative for 'something.'
I've worked as contractor, then consultant, now employee, at different places. Even with my skills and motivation remaining the same, one thing I've noticed as an employee is that the company trusts and believes me less than it does consultants.
With three years of specific knowledge in the design, implementation, and support details of our actual network, I can tell them that solution X won't be a good fit for us and they'll ignore it. An IBM consultant can come in an do a week of interviews, two weeks of reading documentation, and tell them the same exact thing I did, but now they take it very seriously. It's not about skills or experience - four years ago I was that IBM consultant. It's about context.
They're paying me a moderate amount to work on whatever projects my supervisor assigns to me, and they'll keep on paying me that same moderate amount unless I do something really awful. They're paying the consultant(s) a huge amount specifically for the task of investigating this option and delivering a formal recommendation. They can document somewhere that "senior management engaged a highly regarded firm to evaluate the options and said firm provided the attached 75 page recommendation" - as opposed to "one of the guys from the network department told us our idea was dumb." Also, if they're paying $200/hour for advice, they'll take it more seriously than advice they're "getting for free" (obviously salaries aren't free, but there's no marginal dollar cost for additional work)
Similarly, not all employees are created equal, and again context matters. Being in a Profit Center rather than a Cost Center makes a huge difference. In a profit center, they want the best possible perceived quality, since that can translate into increased profits. In a cost center, they basically want people who are good enough not to screw anything up, but there's no point in spending extra on excellence.
Note that I said perceived quality. For both consultants and employees, Perceived Value is more important to your advancement and compensation than Actual Value. This leads to TFA's perception that having actual value doesn't matter, but it's not quite that simple. I still feel better about my job when I know I'm doing it well and providing value to the company, and that's a good thing. But if I don't help my management to see that, and some charismatic underachiever puts all his effort into appearing valuable, I won't be all that shocked when he gets promoted and I don't.
There's no easy rules about unions good/bad or consultants good/bad or working "hard" good/bad, it's the context that matters.
I've been through a few of the levels.... an employee, contractor, consultant for large multi-nationals and now run my own IT business.
As per most industries, you always going to get those that want to work and those that dont.
It is extremely dis-heartening to see the quality of consulting out there.... the biggest offender in my specific market is HP... lots of people, huge name, total and complete inability to complete any project in any way that could be considered competent... but they still manage to pick up work. The management (at least the local management) are well aware of the lack of skills - but dont care, as the money still rolls in. They are a prime example of people who actually do absolutely nothing (except create more issues for their clients)
Personal pride in doing your job well seems to be something that is very hard to find in employees...... and BTW - love the earlier union comments (the ones which got rated down) - he's 100% correct... anyone with skills and a good work ethic in IT will never have to worry about a job... there's no need to join a union, as the "job security" is simply being competent at your job.... therefore by joining a union your advertising to the world that you are bad at your job - whinge and bitch about that as much as you want - but thats the simple truth of it.
Remember Nicholas Carr's book and Harvard Business Review article from back in the early '00's, "Does IT Matter?" He wrote that, and tons of people in IT got all worked up at the suggestion that possibly we weren't needed, could be replaced, were a commodity, and such. The outrage seemed to be worse for those who read the title and stopped there.
I didn't care much for the piece, as I didn't see how something as complex and fast-evolving as IT could really be compared to as well-known a business as railroads or to a commodity such as light bulbs. But the main benefit of the whole thing was to start the discussion about what the purpose of IT was for businesses, and that conversation apparently didn't get any farther than to give cost accountants and clueless executives a rationale for sending jobs overseas with as little thought as they'd exercised in taking up ill-considered in-house IT initiatives beforehand.
Which brings up the entire point of business. Businesses don't exist to ensure your success, but their own. If that's at your expense, then you need to do something to re-balance the equation for you. If you don't feel good about the work you have to do every day, reconsider why you're doing it: to help the business make more money, or to keep yourself out of trouble, or to maintain an inflated sense of your own importance. Getting paid is good. Supporting your family or your extravagant lifestyle are reasonable justifications. "Making a difference," feeling important, and other narcissistic aims are likely to lead to disappointment.
For a person indoctrinated with the idea that the work you do should be important, or the idea that your employer should be interested in furthering your career, or other suppositions based on pumping up your sense of self-worth rather than the value you provide to others, coming to terms with this disappointment can be difficult. That's a normal part of life, and, judging from reading most business and IT-related posts, is not uncommon. If you want to rise above all that, consider how you can make the necessary adjustments, take the work and the paycheck for what they are, and start working for what really matters to you, whether that consists of paying the mortgage, owning the sickest gaming machine, connecting with a global network of other people, retiring before you're 40, or pursuing the cleanest, most elegant code possible, or whatever you value. And if you like the people around you and the company you work for well enough, helping them succeed will often feel like success for you as well.