Ask Slashdot: What Are The Lesser-Known Roles Of The IT Department?

chadenright writes: On the same day that I was hired into a new IT position, my new employer also bought a pair of $1,500 conference phones from a third-party vendor, which turned out to be defective; I've spent a chunk of the last two weeks arguing with the vendor. During the process I've learned that, as the IT guy, I'm also the antibody of the corporation and my job is to prevent not just malware and viruses but also junk hardware from entering my business's system. As a software engineer who is new to the IT side of things, I have to ask, what else have you learned about IT?
What fresh hell has this software engineer gotten themselves into? Leave your best answers in the comments. What are the lesser-known roles of the IT department?

Comments

electricity

[Anonymous Coward]

As a web developer, i had to take care of the electricy in the building as well. So basically, whenever there was a power outage, it was my fault. I had to upgrade the fuses in the building, because i figured they weren't strong enough.

Re: electricity

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuses are tricky. Just use a penny and pit the old dude back in. Works great. I work in fire insurance, btw.

With a wire

[Anonymous Coward]

I once got into trouble, for saying something like, I suppose a kettle has a wire on it, that must be our responsibility as well.
ok it may have been fucking kettle.

Here's my list of lesser known roles

[Qbertino]

- maintaining a high-traffic quake 3 arena server on company Hardware without anyone noticing

- coming up with elaborate and well worded excuses as to why I don't have time to set up and maintain MS Office 365 and it's groupware mess and have them let the intern/media-communications do it (the poor fellows)

- explaining for the n-th time to the utterly clueless online team and the consultant PMs what the difference between a client and a server is, why versioning is important, that it's not *my* versioning but *our* versioning, why ci is a good idea, why manual ftp and working directly on live is a bad idea

- stareing, day in and day out with awe and amazement at the ultimate shitfest that is WordPresses application architecture and wondering how we as a human race even got this far ... That's just from the top of my head.

Re: IT is a black hole

[Anonymous Coward]

You can run a company without having an IT department. Outsource it, you will never regret it.

BOLDED response: ROFLMAO

Re: If you thought enterprise IT was just software

[KGIII]

A power chord? You gonna be a rock star?