Why Everyone Hates the IT Department

Barence writes "Why are IT staff treated with near universal contempt? This article discusses why everyone hates the IT department. From cultivating a culture of 'them and us,' to unrealistic demands from end users and senior management, to the inevitable tension created when employees try and bring their own equipment into the office, there are a variety of reasons for the lack of respect for IT."

Comments

Re:Reflections

[gomiam]

I call bullshit. Most ITs I have ever been in contact with have, like most people, no desire to do needless extra work. They will cut down your ability to install software because you don't usually do it anyway and it drives the incidences number down because you can't mess that up any more. They will set up proxies because it suddenly becomes trendy watching the same videos at Youtube once and again, and the organization has better uses for its inbound bandwidth than downloading the same thing once and again.

Then again, some IT departments are bent on keeping their power share. I pity the people unlucky enough to deal with those.

Re:Reflections

[Vellmont]

I've always wondered why our software is so crap. Is it the constant hunt for features, vs. usability, security, stability. Is it laziness. Maybe lack of motivation. Could be all of them. ...
(btw. I'm working for a major software house. Biggest kid on the block)

So you work for Microsoft. I can tell you why your software sucks. I can tell you in one word. Monopoly. One former Microsoft guy explained it to me like this: Microsoft makes most of its money off of corporate package deals. You pay Microsoft one big fee, and get access to all the software it produces. The fee itself is far lower than buying even the big packages that everyone already needs. So Microsoft can sit back and make really shitty software that mostly sucks, but "works" since there's essentially no financial incentive for the customer to go and try some other package.

So no, it has nothing to do with developers, and everything to do with the choices Steve Balmer and crew have made. They've managed to create a culture of mediocrity where there's little incentive to create good software.

You're kind of right, it does have something to do with laziness and lack of motivation. But that lack of motivation comes from the top, not trickles up from the bottom.