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IT Managers Are Aloof Says Psychologist and Your Co-Workers
dcblogs writes "IT managers see themselves as 'reigning supreme,' in an organization, and are seen by non-IT workers as difficult to get along with, says organizational psychologist Billie Blair. If IT managers changed their ways, they could have a major impact in an organization. 'So much of their life is hidden under a bushel because they don't discuss things, they don't divulge what they know, and the innovation that comes from that process doesn't happen, therefore, in the organization,' says Blair."
"They despise stupidity wherever they see it, and they see it everywhere."
Kryten 2X4B-523P
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Worked in the IT field for over 30 years. Seen things and learned things about people I REALLY didn't want to know. But the not sharing of information from IT management to direct reports is very common. Even worse in government IT. But gossip does exist in IT. It is just not as useful. Most of the gossip is personal stuff and not what is going on in the organization. But then again, most organizations never share information with IT (maybe distrust?). So IT is the last to know about changes happening.
Speaking for myself, when I try to describe IT projects that I find really cool to non-technical people (say 75% of the organization), they're just not interested. Not saying they're too stupid to get it, not saying they're too stupid to understand its significance, but they've been conditioned to think of IT as something that other people do. There is a problem on both sides of the culture divide. I don't know, nor do I particularly care which side "started" it, but to overcome it, IT people are going to have to share, and non-IT people are going to have to be more willing to engage.
Yeah, we're just afraid you'll all find out our dirty dirty secret that networks and computers really ARE magic.
Repairo Catfiveo!
Flip Side -- we need to be proactive about communicating with the retards who break our system. How many times have you pushed a patch that breaks something, intentionally? Usually a security threat. You've got the power, send an email to all that explains why you're fixing something, and what liability the company has if it's not fixed. This is called propoganda, and it's good. Also, send out good propaganda when you can. The fucking marketing drones didn't sell anything. Your website sold $300M of product. Make IT look like a profit center, and you look like a god. Make it look like a bunch of dick-bags and you'll be an easy cost center to target.
...with people whose eyes glaze over the second they realize you're talking about computers.
I don't know anyone who didn't start out as an ever helpful enthusiastic talkative person, and they all become jaded over time. People just don't want to hear about it. They have their job, they expect you to do yours without bothering them about it.
Linus Tarvoldo!
Yes, all magic incantations end in "o", but you must put a semicolon at the end for it to work... unless its vbscript.
Present a better idea and it doesn't get a fair hearing. Get brain-dead unappealable policy decisions because the system is geared to the lowest common denominator. Being TOLD what the best UI is.
You end up serving the fucking data, rather than the data serving you.
Boohoo.
"We must find more ways to break down the defensive walls of IT. You know, the ones they built for themselves by spending their whole lives learning, instead of just exploiting the hell out of people around them and casting them aside. Once that's done, we can kick them around like your average receptionist (we call them customer service reps, to give the illusion of respect). We want swappable cogs we can throw away whenever we want! We 'productivity specialists' are sure that's how you foster, 'innovation'."
IT Managers Are Aloof Says Psychologist and Your Co-Workers
The wrong people always get promoted. This is not news for nerds. This is reality.
Give me a story where somebody intelligent and thoughtful gets into management and this would be news. Even on Slashdot, you've got a lot of Managers getting up-moderated for basically telling people that they only promote hard working people (I think we all know this is a lie). Of course Managers and supervisors think of themselves as fair and intelligent, and as rational as Adam Smith's invisible hand. If only they knew!
References:
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/12/28/0058250/ask-slashdot-handing-over-personal-work-without-compensation
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2593454&cid=38510268
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2593454&cid=38510098
Wow, what a ridiculous pile of pseudo science. I've been in IT for 20 years now, and worked with three or four organizations in very different industries. Each time I start out with a really positive attitude, a "this time it will be different" approach. I'm going to be interested, and helpful, and friendly, and communicative. After about a year I can't do it anymore. It's not for lack of interest or trying, it's because the average user approaches the technology they must interact with daily as either a black box or an inconvenience or both. How a person can know the intricacies of double entry bookkeeping but fail to understand why opening every single attachment they receive is verboten is beyond me. Learn a little - just a little - about the tools you need to do your job and then pay attention to what you're doing. Your computer is not that complex to use, and essential to your job. You know the rules for arbitrating a marital dispute in Iowa, but you can't remember not to Save As the document you insist on using as a template?
If I had wanted to be a cat herder or a kindergarten teacher, I would have pursued those options. I went into a field where I had assumed I would be dealing with adults who even if they didn't understand exactly what they were doing they would at least take responsibility for their actions. You can only endure "I didn't click anything" or "I know you've told me before, but how do I...?" so many times. Eventually you really start feeling like you're not being listened to or appreciated, and then you start wondering why you bother talking at all. Nobody I know in this business wants to keep secrets or appear aloof, but when it becomes apparent that nobody is listening to you when you talk, why bother sharing at all?
to that aloofness?"
In other words, this whole article biatched about IT workers, but never even bothered to look for one moment at the other side of the coin: the users who habitually refuse to change habits, who blame IT for every mistake they make, make demands on the IT guys and girls that are not reasonable, and then wonder why IT sees themselves as beleaguered and under siege.
Instead, she boasts that she knew how to tame IT when she was a dean by bullying them with her position---exactly the reason why IT people see themselves as abused and reviled.
How but they install all the same monitoring and key logging software they install on the worker bee employees computers onto the it managers computer then they will be able to see exactly what he/she does or doesn't do.
Rocket Surgeon.
IT subordinates don't like the business decisions passed down from non-IT workers and non-IT workers don't understand the technical implications of the business decisions they make. The IT Manager sits right in the middle of this clusterfuck.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
In a large organization, I see other folks behaving the same or worse as IT managers: ...
- Human Resources, ever try to reason with one of them that their policy needs to reviewed or does not help in attracting talent?
- Finance; yes, once I have the PR, the sole source agreement, the market analysis, I'll get a PO and the invoice will be paid in six months after the vendors berates and tells me that they'll never do business with us again
- Legal or Privacy department; seriously, never ever try to disagree with them or propose a different point of view
- Researchers; full of primadonnas; the leadership is even worse
The article is BS; most of the items could apply to any other area or field
Wearing pants should always be optional.
The IT (in US terms, not technical professions in general) guys are there to enable everyone else to interact. They aren't given much power - only what is minimally needed to give everyone else what they want.
I can empathize with your typical IT guy attitude - you strive to help every day, and do help a lot of people - but end up seeing the same self-inflicted wounds over and over again. At some point, the only way to meaningfully care for people is to take a zen attitude, point them to resources, and accept that most will refuse to take even the simplest steps towards understanding how things break as they misuse them.
And you have to rely on humor over time. The net appearance may be 'aloof' - but it's difficult to help the sometimes aggressively and willfully ignorant often looking to place blame and not end up with the eyebrow-raised incredulous look coming up.
It would be lovely if we could all have a Carl Sagan friendly sage look about us in every difficulty - but we won't. Even Carl Sagan probably looked perturbed and sarcastic at some points along the way - same with Gandhi and Mother Theresa too.
Better aloof than full on BOFH.
Ryan Fenton
Be glad they are stupid. Their stupid is paying your bills.
I am not someone who is offended easily. That said, the author of this article and the 'subject matter expert' that was interviewed have offended me greatly.
Three pages of stereotype. Here, let me summarize and save you wasting 5 minutes of your life. . . . . . "IT people are not the best communicators." oh, wait, this comment was made by someone with an advanced degree in in psychology, I guess it must be legit.
Here is the rest of the article in a nutshell -
IT managers are aloof, technical people with a skillset that an organization cannot do without. They have been 'gifted' since childhood with a technical mindset and they believe that the world is against them. They want people to bow to them as the come into the room (direct quote) and it is difficult to get anything out of them.
I had to laugh when the sme stated that as a dean she could "force them off their high horse". From experience, when managers "force" technical people to do something or provide something, the end result is a piece of garbage that doesn't work right, upsets the customers, makes the IT department look bad and does the "forcer" get blamed for the poor results? No, the IT department loses credibility in the end.
This person doesn't get that most of the reasons IT folks "don't communicate" with those outside of IT is for a very basic reason . . . . . we start talking and we get BLANK STARES as a response!
I love her definition of 'c-level' folks.
The final straw in this article is the last paragraph. Steve Jobs was a BUSINESS MANAGER, not an IT professional. He ran a company and and 'forced' the technical people to dance for him.
It might help to understand where the "typical IT manager" goes wrong by seeing how it can be done right.
One of the first IT jobs I ever had was working for an IT manager of a ~150 user organisation. He was relatively new himself, which wasn't unusual because all of his predecessors were fired one after another. They just couldn't get along with management, couldn't make their needs understood, etc...
This new guy is still there, over a decade later. Why? Because he talked to managers in their own language. Instead of turning up to monthly board meetings in jeans and saying some buzzword-laden crap, he'd turn up in an expensive suit, put on a gorgeous powerpoint presentation which very clearly showed simple charts and graphs of things like "this is going to hit zero in a month, and that's bad because it'll stop our business". Half the time, he didn't even explain that it was disk-space he was talking about, or put numbers on the graph axes. Every month, he'd turn up with nice consistent reports full of simple charts printed in colour onto glossy paper, ending with a simple multiple-choice business decisions with dollar figures and pros and cons.
In the eyes of senior management, he turned IT from a dark pit where money is burned into a clearly separated set of projects and ongoing expenses that made sense to them. Yes, we have twice as many people now, so we're going to need twice as much storage. Obvious if stated right, not so obvious to someone who doesn't even know what "storage" really represents, why it runs out, and who uses it for what.
Here's the thing though: He couldn't solve a computer problem to save his life. That didn't matter, because he just hired competent underlings to do that work.
because managers often don't have a clue how computers work, IT can bullshit their way out of any disaster and create a level of job security for themselves that many other professions can only dream of.
if you can't beat them, join them.
If more women would sleep with us, we'd be nicer people!
project. its really , really, cool... you see we take the general account ledger, and we balance it based on the length of time the charge has been on the current report, whereas before we were simply going line by line ,
im sorry, .. are you ok? it almost looked like you fell asleep there. my brother in law has narcolepsy -- horrible disease. did you know that the first person to discover narcolepsy was sinus grimbald in 1823, when he happened upon a lemur collector in guernsey.. .
There is a flip side to that coin.
I walk around a good portion of my day talking to users and seeing how things are going. I am the opposite of aloof and quite approachable. However, I have been told on many occasions, "Why do you have to make things so complicated?". Drives me nuts.
They literally cannot tell the difference between bullshit and the truth. Both makes their eyes gloss over and they stop listening.
Do you think doctors are bullshitting you? Do you expect them to explain things to you in technical terms as if they were talking to another doctor?
So why IT?
That's the problem. Everyone expects computers to not be that complicated and that we are just overrated janitors. They have no idea just how complicated it can be, and no real appreciation either.
We are damned if we do, and damned if we don't as far as explanations go, and nobody wants to take any responsibility.
How about the famous line, "But you touched it last?!"
I used to work in IT back before I went to college. Without fail, every single coworker I ever had had some sort of weird fetish with being "in charge" of everyone else's data. Regular venting is normal of course, but I found myself constantly having to remind people that we existed only as janitors to support and digitally clean up after everyone else. It seemed to just be some huge inferiority complex.
...what our co-workers think.
Given the article, does your attitude qualify as irony?
A pseudoscience with a lot of power is still pseudoscience (sorry L. Ron). Since you mentioned fallacies, that's the "Argumentum ad Baculum".
Research confirms what IT managers have long suspected, organisational psychologists are perceived as "manipulative" and "self serving".
"I really don't like talking to them," says 20-year IT veteran Charles ("Heap Space") Edwards. "They always seem to have some agenda on their mind, but they can never tell you what it is short of wooly motherhood statements. I want precision, but I've never seen a decent spec come out of the OrgPsy team".
According to the report, 9 out of 10 IT managers "wouldn't piss on an organisational psychologists if their keyboard was on fire".
(Where'd my mod points go!?)
Any conversation with someone you've just met will eventually get onto the subject:
Q: What do you do for a crust?
A: I work in IT
Q: Oh - I need another drink, be back soon (yeah right)
Nobody outside the field understands it. They don't care (& why would they) unless their poxy PC has problems.
Of course IT are going to be somewhat insular.
everyone WANTS computers to be easy, but I don't think they EXPECT it. in fact, they often expect that things will go wrong at every upgrade. the IT department is always at the receiving end of a long list of expletives from all and sundry, so to man the trenches of IT you have to be hardy enough to brush off the insults and realize that it isn't really you personally that they are swearing at, but the system itself (hardware, software, procedures, etc). a lot of people hate being dependent on an IT department, particularly if they are a little savvy and reckon they could fix the problem themselves in half the time, but most people also realize that an IT department is a necessary evil. in many companies there is a mystique about the IT people; many don't even know what IT people do on a daily basis. ask some people and they would be convinced that they look at porn or play solitaire all day (especially if they haven't heard of UT or Battlefield). to a lot of people computers are to be feared, holding them at ransom, a threatening menace that will destroy them should they do something wrong, or that they will get dragged off to prison if they trigger an "illegal exception".
the only other profession that comes close to IT in its ability to baffle the common folk would be the various fields of professional engineering, with all their respective hodge-podge of numbers and symbols.
I have been around since the 50's, and have observed management styles change like fashion.
It struck me hard in in Aerospace, when management went to "training seminars" and came back all holier than thou. I was more concerned with stability of phase-locked loops at the time, and I became very concerned over the lack of concern our managers seemed to express about our products. Everything became "the bottom line". Cost centers. Profit centers. Presentation. What is the minimum amount of effort that will result in getting paid. Suddenly, "Pride of Workmanship" became a bad thing as it was an inefficient use of manpower.
Well, we banged around for a few more years riding on the reputation the guys before us earned.
As we "redefined the organization", our clients re-evaluated what our name meant.
Things dried up.
Being one of the noisier ones bemoaning the micromanagement I had to take, I was one of the first dismissed..
Yes, I have studied "Obedience to Authority" by Stanley Milgram. I would urge everyone to read his book. Its tiny. Its a research paper by Stanley Milgram of Yale University, a psychology major, doing a thesis on what got into the German people to do the things they did to the Jews.
I found the book very shocking. What he did was set himself up as an "authority figure" by wearing a white lab coat, and he would see just how far people would go in obeying him. People would actually electrocute others they did not even know once they had shifted responsibility of their act to someone else. Stanley called this state of obedience as "agentic", as being an "agent" for someone else, who was - as you know - Stanley himself.
Some of us have a moral compass that will not let us do such things. Stanley noted that. There were a few that simply would not obey when they were ordered, no matter what he did. He did not label them "not a team player", but I am sure today's "leadership types" would.
This crap even got into my church.
I have pontificated on slashdot long ago on my spiritual beliefs, why I believe there is a creator, and my frustration with religion.
I sat through one "leadership" lesson, and was told things like "if you need them, you can't lead them".
That goes against everything in me. I have got to make those under me feel worthless and dependent so they will follow me? I call bullshit.
If they are going to follow me, they will do so if they believe I know how to do it and have all of our best interests at heart. More down the line of the of the leader of Terra-Nova. Not because I threaten them with bad performance reviews and layoffs. I've been there. No way I want to inflict this bullshit on anyone else. This kind of crap is for the kids who like to pull the legs off of bugs. The worst leaders I have worked under were the ones who placed great value on "being the leader", not "doing the work". I work best with those whose prime ambition is "doing the work".
This new stuff sounds like some greedy industrialist trying to staff a 1800's style sweatshop with the cheapest possible labor, Its the form of capitalism that gives the whole concept a bad name.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Well said. In my experience as a IT manager, I found most of the users to be clueless and not really interested in the processes on the network that they worked on.
I got tired of being saddled with by people who seemed to want to bitch and whine, rather than doing their jobs with the tools provided,.
Subsequently I am no longer an IT manager
My two bits.
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
My kingdom for a mod point!!
Sand's overrated... it's just tiny little rocks.
I'm not aloof. I'm just an asshole. Get it right!
And get the frack out of my office!
Just because you can't understand the BOFH, doesn't mean his knowledge is secret. If you can't understand him... how do you know he didn't already tell you everything????
The only hard-nosed "dictator" manager I ever had was actually my shop-floor customer in one of my early jobs working at Northern Telecom. But it turned out it was just how he measured people's skills and knowledge -- if you weren't willing to defend your ideas against his "attack", he felt you hadn't thought things through and needed to go back to the drawing board.
Once you earned his respect by arguing your ideas successfully a few times, he became a real joy to work with because he respected your opinion without you having to prove you were willing to defend it again.
Maybe if more IT staff took and applied their courses in logical discourse and philosophical arguments, they'd be better prepared for dealing with such management styles. Too many of my co-workers over the years were lousy speakers and presenters, and couldn't convince anyone they were right about anything, so they were always frustrated and claiming that everyone was against them.
Try Toastmasters or sign up for some philosophy courses at your local university. If you need the practice at presenting an argument, it's invaluable and a lot of fun.
Don't blame people for "not understanding" if you don't know how to express yourself.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I had an instructor in school who proposed the hypothesis that all electronics were powered by by magic smoke. He proved his hypothesis by "releasing" the magic smoke from the device and showing it no longer worked.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
You had me until that line. Any doctor, neurosurgeon or not, who would decide the worthiness of a patient by his station in life or whether or not he is an addict, is not fit to be called "Physician". One of my best friends in life was the head of surgery for a major US teaching hospital. She was the first woman to perform a heart & liver transplant in the US. She testified before Congress numerous times on various issues regarding health and medicine.
She would never hesitate to "take splinters out of some crackhead's big toe" and she actually spent a lot of time treating people who others might consider society's dregs.
I know it was a throwaway line for you and you were just trying to make a point, but to be honest, that attitude seems to have informed your notion of "IT" as well. That IT workers would need to "gear down" their brain to translate things to "normal" people in order to not "snap and take a claw hammer to peoples' faces".
It' doesn't take a "lower gear" to communicate with people who don't spend their time with information technology. In fact, there's not much harder than explaining things simply. It's a skill that few people have, and very few who work in IT. Being able to communicate without condescension is an amazing skill, to be treasured and cultivated. Even (or especially) if your some "Redhat Certified IT Pro".
Just remember, IT pros, there's a clock running on your specialty. Every day it becomes a little less special. If you don't take the time to broaden your approach a little bit, and learn how to communicate, you're going to find yourself about as useful as an IBM card-punching machine in the 21st century.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Australia
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ~ Douglas Adams
As a retired IT manager of 25 years... albeit I was a dino even a decade ago, I don't agree with this assessment. 1) I was never aloof, always super friendly to all, and made my mark by being open with non-IT folks, going the entire 9 yards to explain and communicate - YET- 2) I don't think I was all that successful. I am not sure non-IT folks ever understood (or could) no matter what the effort, and 3) this gained me no respect within the IT community, which would have rather had me keep my mouth shut and spend my time helping them get ahead instead. It was a rough situation.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
Given the article, does the fact we all seem to have kingdoms to give away qualify as irony?
Do you think doctors are bullshitting you? Do you expect them to explain things to you in technical terms as if they were talking to another doctor?
Actually, yes, I do, or at least fairly close. Maybe I'm weird, but I learned enough about anatomy in my education somewhere that simple terms like "fibula" aren't going to trip me up, even though I'm not in the medical field myself. Even if I don't understand everything the doctor says, I'd rather hear it all and ask for clarification if necessary, as I understand enough to know if he's bullshitting me or if he really does know what he's doing. There's enough incompetent doctors out there that I want to make sure I found one who isn't.
Everyone expects computers to not be that complicated and that we are just overrated janitors.
Actually, they think of you as overrated auto mechanics, and they think computers should be just as simple. The problem with computers is that in many environments, you're dealing with not only something that's enormously complicated and to be quite honest, not very well engineered, but you're also dealing with something that's quite opaque as all the source code is secret and you have little idea of what's really going on under the hood, and little to no way to find out. At least with cars, everything is highly modular, each module is engineered and tested, and if you're a dumb mechanic you can just swap in a "known good" part until the problem goes away to isolate the problem. There's no real engineering in most software.
There's a reason they have parachutes.
Often the best way to make money is to milk the company for all it's worth and then bail out with a suitcase full of stock options before the plane crashes.
Never slug it out with your boss if you value your job.
No, your boss being a control freak doesn't count as a valid excuse.
The sad fact of the matter is that to users, IT is just a bunch of computer janitors.
this is my sig
I see the hatred towards IT from non IT comes from the companies higher management.
When IT and upper management get together, they seem to agree on purchases, directions, procedures, levels of security, SLA, costs, goals, and expectations.
These "things" that are agreed on are never explained to the non IT people or managers in the company and it seems these other managers that do know don't tell their own people what they agreed on and why or do not want to take the responsibility for admitting they agreed to the plan. The IT department staff from the bottom up is left to fend for themselves and try to explain the reason we are doing what we are doing and why, often times, you are explaining this while you are in their office under a desk replacing their KB or while in the elevator coming back from lunch. Does everyone think that a Tier 1 or system administrator is responsible for the company IT policy and budget or that even the IT manager sets his own spending and policies without input from non IT company managers?
I see this in my own company daily. I work in a law firm. Our tech committee works with our CFO to form the IT budget. The tech committee is high level IT management and different high level attorneys. They want to reduce costs and agree to cut back on staffing, the CIO tells them we can only do that by only staffing the support center until 9PM instead of 12 PM. Everyone their agrees. Oddly no one tells the other people in the firm and they get pissed when they call the support center at 10 PM CST and no one is there and they have to wait for the on call person to call them back. They complain to the IT department that "this is unacceptable". They should be complaining to their own technology committee person who agreed! IT does not make rules, policies, or buy things at will. They follow agreed terms and guidelines that they were given.
The sad fact of the matter is that to users, IT is just a bunch of computer janitors.
With attitude.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Part of the problem is the (media promoted) idea that an education.means being vaguely literate, and knowing how to learn some guff by rote.
While I accept that most Western educated people know a bit more than the Nigerian terrorists who believe that "book learning is unIslamic (haram)" (makes it easy to persuade a few illiterates that they are good Muslims), the reality is that the margin is not as great as it could be. Far to many people have the attitude "never mind the learning bit, I just want the certificate".
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Absolutely, I've seen this directly a number of times, it's in fact a major factor in deciding to leave my old job.
I worked for an engineering firm, and it's background was that it had split in two about 10 years ago, with it's IT staff going to the other section, leaving no one in IT in the section I was working at. As a result they chose one of the engineers who had a "passing interest in IT" to become the IT manager. Over the next 10 years by paying enough consultants he'd managed to cobbled together something that roughly resembled a network.
I joined the firm as a software developer, with the aim of starting out their software development section from the ground up, but as I had an IT support background I found myself rapidly becoming relied upon for IT support help because I was the first person who had entered the organisation in 10 years who actually had a proper idea of how IT should really be done.
The problems weren't just technical though, the IT manager held grudges, if someone had asked for some last minute help before they went on a business trip, he wouldn't like that, he'd hold it against them and do his best not to help them, sometimes outright maliciously moving their network file share without telling them and waiting until they'd spent some time figuring out why they couldn't connect before fixing it for them. He was socially inept to a massive degree such that when our phone lines went down he dissapeared to another site because he was too scared of the concept of picking up the phone and talking to someone at the other end to get it sorted such that our company was without phones for 2 solid weeks. For the same reason he wouldn't get quotes from other IT suppliers such that the supplier he'd been using all this time was charging him £800 for £450 laptops with the same kind of markup on everything from software to printer cartridges- the fact the supplier had a brand new £50k car, and took him to lunch every christmas didn't act as a clue that his supplier had far too much spare money. I offered to train him on IT security so he could get a policy written and in place pointing out that if we got hacked and data covered by the data protection act stolen, he could be held personally responsible and at the end of the training he said "Right, so can you write the policy then?" as if nothing I'd spent the last couple of days teaching him had actually entered his inept mind - his excuse was that he was too busy, but then as he also had never bothered with IT support issue tracking software and did everything ad hoc, ignoring those users he didn't like's issues then how could anyone ever know what his workload was? Laughably when I'd already made the decision to leave, he managed to lose the entire intranet due to hard drive failure because well, setting up a backup on a Linux box would require some actual effort on his behalf. Lucky I'd taken a copy of the database for local dev work on it. He'd avoid sharing anything with me because he saw me as a threat, knowing full well I could do his job AND mine, but it didn't really work, because I understood his systems better than he did anyway so the only stuff he was hiding was stuff I could figure out myself anyway. Oh, and he didn't believe in UPS' on servers because he had one on a server once and it made it crash, apparently.
I raised it with HR a number of times when it reached a point where it was an outright danger to the business, and whilst they recognised my concerns the attitude was "Well, we've got to give him a chance...", as if the last 10 years of utter ineptitude wasn't bad enough, but the problem is that they'd never known any better - to them, this was a good IT manager, they had no idea how it was supposed to be. Our company was taken over and as part of that our UK operations expanded, lo and behold, they'd been taken over by someone with IT even shitter than they had so he was promoted to head of UK IT, when in reality what they should've done at that point was bring someone wh
Most of them wouldn't know how to fix or maintain their cars either. But at least some of them can drive.
I don't think cars are as simple as you make out. Have you never heard someone use the expression "what goes on under the hood"?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Most organization have Silos (every department that does their own thing). The IT Department is one of those few departments that works with the other departments. We need to make sure there are no conflicts between other departments. For example the information that one department collects needs to match up with an other departments data. So an Engineering Department work with a full breakdown of every part a product uses. The costs and expense of each part will need to be in the finance system. Even though the finance department doesn't really care about parts. But they care about the money flow. So IT needs to keep all these departments who never talk to each other working in sync.
Most newbees in IT want to tell everyone what goes on. What happens, we get yelled at. Because each silo doesn't care what the other department needs they only care what they need, and they get mad because they think IT is giving special preference to the other guy. Your system went down, we got it working, but we don't know why it went down, is not a good answer. Your system went down, we got it working, and we found out why here is why, is not a good answer because then they will point fingers left and right and trying to figure out why IT didn't think of this department use case that they were never told about nor is in their scope to know it will exist. When we do try to explain the problem, most of the time they don't care so they will cut your short.
The reason people hate IT, is because we cannot say Yes all the time. If we did then we wouldn't be doing our jobs. We need to come up with issues and problems to be worked out before hand and make a process for it. Other Departments hate dealing with this level of granularity and think of us just being a bunch of no men. That and because of all the things we need to deal with, we need to stay calm when everyone else isn't, so we just seem cold and impersonal.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.