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.'"

Comments

Not limited to IT

[Psychotria]

I suspect a lot of industries have a similar "hierarchy"

Re:Not limited to IT

[dkleinsc]

The general rule, as I understand it, is that nothing generally hurts your career like being productive.

Consider this hypothetical - let's say you're a really good front-line admin. You're also pretty good at managing people, so you're promoted to manage your team of admins. You put together a good and productive team, but occasionally get back in the saddle to help 'em out and show 'em how it's done (and show 'em that the boss might actually know what he's doing).

And now you have just gotten your last promotion, because the company will think that they can't afford to lose your great technical skills to upper management. It doesn't matter that your senior admin who you've groomed to replace you could do the job, they're used to "there's a problem, that guy can fix it", and they don't want to put you in a position where you can't go fix it.

The Dilbert Principle has its roots in reality.

Re:Not limited to IT

[ls671]

> I suspect a lot of industries have a similar "hierarchy"

Maybe not, but IT is the perfect niche for that. Bullshitting will work better in IT and less well in buildings or car manufacturing where mere mortals can spot when the end product is falling apart. In IT, you can sell the equivalent of a building falling apart as a fine technology product if you use enough bullshit and buzzwords.

Re:Not limited to IT

[Moryath]

You can easily tell which ones are the Union Members and which ones are not. You can draw the line right down
the middle and separate those who know what they're doing and which ones do not. Competent = non-union. Easy
as that.

Funny, where I work it's the reverse. Competent = union. Incompetent = hired and fired every 6 months, non-union all the way. Really Fucking Incredibly Incompetent = Indian outsource or H1-B Indian On Visa.

Re:Not limited to IT

[Cryacin]

Well, the funny thing is that those sorts of guys fall into the "Secret Weapon" category. Make yourself absolutely indespensible. Get on the green beret projects, and then get another offer for more money, and watch the counter offers roll in. They don't pay enough? Leave. I've seen plenty of Spandex Wearing, walk on water without getting their damn socks wet, gurus get paid more on contract than the managers that employ them. Plus they get to have much more fun.

Re:Not limited to IT

[PopeRatzo]

That is the law of life.

The only way to succeed in the game of IT is not to play.

IT is becoming the 21st century version of the 19th century shirtwaist factory. Your income will stagnate, your working conditions will worsen, and you won't have a single day that you will not be worried about your job disappearing. If you are the one in ten that actually climbs what used to be called the "corporate ladder" the best you can hope for is that each year your job will become less fulfilling and more disheartening because you'll constantly be having to let experienced people go because they've gotten a few raises and now make too much, and there are always less-skilled, more desperate workers available. You will become the person you hate most, a shit-eating middle-manager who never gets to do anything creative and makes life miserable for everyone beneath him because management sets unreasonable expectations.

If on your first day you have a 401k plan to which your employer matches 10 percent, plan on having that contribution shrink to 5 percent and then zero percent. Whatever health care you start with will get worse over time with bigger deductibles and lower caps because your employer needs to show constantly-growing profits and can always just move the whole operation to South Carolina (as a temporary stopping-place before South or West Asia.

Find something fulfilling, instead. Maybe the culinary arts or crafting trout flies to sell on the Internet or something. Look at your nearby community for small opportunities. Open a dirty-water hot dog stand. It's cash income and at least you'll be appreciated a little bit. When thinking about your career, it's best to expect the worst as far as the future. Things are going to get a lot, lot worse economically. If you are relying on a company to keep you alive, you will lose.

Good luck.

Re:Not limited to IT

[krakass]

You have that backwards. Express isn't union. Ground is. Mainly because of the Federal Railway Labor Act.

Re:Not limited to IT

[mcmonkey]

Find something fulfilling, instead. Maybe the culinary arts or crafting trout flies to sell on the Internet or something. Look at your nearby community for small opportunities. Open a dirty-water hot dog stand. It's cash income and at least you'll be appreciated a little bit. When thinking about your career, it's best to expect the worst as far as the future. Things are going to get a lot, lot worse economically. If you are relying on a company to keep you alive, you will lose.

Yeah, I'm going to disagree with you there. I know the old saying, do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. But my experience is more like, if you do what you love for your 9 to 5, what do you do when you need a break?

I got in to programing when my first choice of career was stalling. It was the peak of the dot com bubble and getting in was easy. I had a knack with computers and was suddenly getting paid for what I had been doing for free. Yes, I am good at what I do. Yes, I did go back for some formal eduction so I avoided some of the mistakes self-taught programmers tend to make. Yes, I know enough to know my limitations.

But while I make a good living, the last thing I want to do when I get home is troubleshoot issues with a WiFi bridge or put together a web site for some hobby project of my wife's. I gained a career, but lost a hobby.

Now I enjoy cooking. And folks say I'm pretty good at it. At least I don't get too many calls from the hospital. (But it might be hard to get an outside line from the morgue.)

Anyway, the absolute last thing I will ever consider it making any money from cooking. There are so few things I enjoy at that level. I can't afford to loose even one.

Think of it this way--most folks love sex. But when you see a pr0n star saying how much she loves sex, do you think, how great for her! Making a living doing what she loves. Or do you think, if it wasn't meth, I'd have to spank it to the Sears catalog?

Re:Not limited to IT

[Machtyn]

I have to agree with this sentiment. If you become indispensable to your company, then you have bargaining power with said company. If they refuse to match and increase the pay over other offers, then walk - it turns out they don't value you as much as you thought.

Sadly, many companies, even small ones, are willing to lose knowledge and talent rather than give a raise. Sure, I left my team at my previous company in a bit of a lurch and a major knowledge drain, but by this point, I hope they have overcome my lose - I left them with as much documentation as I could. I can't help it if upper-management refused to even make a counter-offer.

Of course, now at a large company, another cog in the wheel, bored out of my mind most of the time... but I am getting paid MUCH better. My next position will definitely be a small company where I can contribute a lot.

Easy!

[itchythebear]

Work for Sony!

Well, up until about a month or so ago.

Re:So why aren't they beating a path to my door...

[Chris Mattern]

Well, you see, that's your problem. You know how to do things, so they have you do things. People who know how to get *other* people to do things for them--that's management material!

Re:contractor / consultant

[hamster_nz]

As a consultant doing contract work, I must disagree with you. I don't receive kickbacks, and I care. I treat all customers as though their systems are my own... After all, if they have a big technical issue, it's me who has to work though the night fixing it!

Consultants and contractors have their place. Small IT shops don't often get the chance to build up the depth of skill and experience required for things like infrastructure upgrades (e.g. SAN Storage upgrades, VMware migrations, Database upgrades...).

Maybe you just a very poor judge of which people bring in to help you with things outside of your core business / skill set?

This contractor says it's true.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:contractor / consultant

[NotQuiteReal]

Not always true - I once worked for a very large company as a Contractor. This company was populated with PHB types and was very fond of meetings to track the progress, of... the latest reorg or something. Dunno.

Anyhow, while filling out timesheets and painfully aware of my per-hour rate doing "admin" work for a not-quite-deployed system, I felt like I should be doing something. With my "developer" background, I wrote all kinds of tools to make my "operations" work easier... pretty my automating my way out of a job, which was my goal, since I was on a 6 month contract. I also did the onerous task of reviewing vendor support agreements and such, and pretty much saved the company my salary in un-needed maintenance contracts.

Long story, short, they offered me a full time senior position at the end of my contract. Alas, the company was still a PITA to work (more about process, sensitivity classes, and other bs, than working.) The employees were all pretty much clock-punchers with no initiative, which is a toxic place to stay if you have any personal ambition. The point is, in this case, the employees were worse than the "contractors".

But I have to agree on "consultants" ;-)

Re:contractor / consultant

[RobDude]

I couldn't disagree more; having been both a consultant and an employee.

Maybe my experiences have been unique; but I've been an employee at a large insurance company (Allstate) and a smaller custom software shop (that I currently work out, so name removed). In both cases, there was little motivation to do much more than the bare minimum. I mean, sure, I showed up and did some stuff; but I found very quickly that expectations where low. I didn't have to work very hard to meet them. If the company had a good year and you were doing good - 3-5% raise. If the company had a bad year then 'salary freeze'.

Many people find they get significant raises by switching companies, and this is why. Once you are employed the company figures, 'Well, he worked for X last year, now we give him more than X - why would he quit?'.

I show up late, leave early and surf the web. I've also been pidgin-holed into maintaining and updating a very defined section of the application. Everyone knows, if you have a problem with Y, you talk to me. That's all I do. I do Y. Five years at the same company and after four months of doing good they gave me project Y. I'm still doing project Y. I'll be doing project Y for as long as I work at the company.

When I was a consultant, it was a world of difference. A consulting firm sells consultants. They want to have REALLY GOOD consultants because selling a good product is a great way to stay in business. My current job, we sell a piece of software. They company wants that software to be really good. It's a subtle difference, but it makes a huge difference. The consulting firm I worked for would intentionally rotate us in and out of projects. If you were a Java guy, they wanted you on a .Net project. If you did desktop apps before, they wanted you to do a website. They wanted you to be highly skilled and diverse because that meant they could throw you on any project that came along. They also knew that, after about a year, as a developer on the same project, the learning curve drops to about zero. You don't learn new stuff doing the same old crap. If you were leading a team, it was different, but as far as being a developer, they wanted you to be really good at it.

And, unlike selling software, where your contributions were pretty abstract and subjective; when I was a consultant my time had a very clear value attached to it. The client was being billed for it. If I worked overtime, two things happened. First, I got paid (and my company did too). Second, the client had to pay more. There was an actual expectation of measurable work being done.

Being a consultant was great. I did, at least 2-3 times more work than I do now. I also learned a lot more from people who were really talented and knowledgeable. It was also really hard. I didn't get to spend an hour every day surfing the web and ducking out at 4pm to get an early start on my WoW raids.

Mod parent up.

[khasim]

From TFA:

When peers or customers see how quickly someone troubleshoots an infrastructure breakdown or architects a technical solution, they wonder just how hard it could really be. Also, why does this person get paid so much?

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.

Show me the fuken money

[MrKaos]

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.