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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?
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?
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.
You know how some people have their immune system turn on themselves.
Some IT-departments becomes like that.
Instead of stopping malware and junk hardware they stop everything. It makes their job easier.
A good IT department tries to figure out what the person they stopped was trying to accomplish and tries to find a secure way of doing that.
Blocking everything would be like a janitor keeping everyone else out since maintenance gets easier that way.
While the method works for their immediate task the company cannot survive such measures.
IT is a black hole where money goes but never returns a wise friend once told me. Development/Engineering makes a product. Sales sells it. CEO's,CFO's, COO's all know how to quantify that kind of stuff, but an in-house service like IT? Makes their heads spin. We're also the department that helps inept employees look not so inept.
What you did was not a "lesser-known role" of IT department, it was doing something completely outside of your job role.
Your employer should have asked legal department to do the legal work for dealing with defective purchase. If your employer bought an office chair that broke, would you get involved also? How about defective air conditioner? Or a defective TV? Would you get involved because the TV was "internet enabled"?
If conference phone should be supported by IT, *you* should be the one sourcing and buying it. The IT dept has no input in the purchase, then it has no role when the purchase went bad.
If the vendor claimed that the internet TV was not working due to a deficiency in the corporate network, then yeah, I'd imagine that IT would be involved in proving that the network was not the problem. Which is likely the same argument that the phone vendor is making. "Your firewall is not allowing SIP transit", or "your ISP connection is too unstable for reliable VOIP calls" or some such excuse. If the phones were completely DOA out of the box, I doubt the vendor would be putting up a fight.
In any case, if I went to my company's legal department to dispute a small $1500 purchase, they'd put it on the bottom of their pile of work and get around to looking at it in a few years.
Hell, if it has electricity or moving parts, it seems to be I.T. Yes, you will get helpdesk tickets about the vending machine.
And since I.T. tends to be the one dept that has actual tools and an understanding of systems, our one seems to end up fixing doors.
There's this proverb that computer science is about as much concerned with computers as astronomy is concerned with telescopes. I'd also add the corollary that yes, CS is not about hardware which is why we have computer engineering for designing and building them and IT for operating them. What got to be called "IT" is *exactly* the part where hardware comes into play.
Ezekiel 23:20
Since he describes himself as "the IT guy" I think this is very far from the enterprise, probably a jack-of-all-trades position in a small company. Since he switched from software development he probably thought of it as running operations keeping the production servers, clients and the network running, secure and up to date.
As a software engineer who is new to the IT side of things, I have to ask, what else have you learned about IT?
I never worked that position but... forget the I in IT. You're now the "tech guy", expect to deal with everything from conference phones, photocopiers, printers, the coffee machine, the vending machine, phones and tablets, basically everything the janitor won't touch. And even then expect to get roped in if the thermostat or window shutters aren't working properly to see if you have any tech tips. If you become a bigger organization you split out the server/client into ops and leave the rest for an infrastructure guy. If you become really big you split out the network from that again and put that into ops too. But until there's somebody else you can point to - and no, they think of you as the most qualified "tech" person - you're stuck with it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There's some truth in this. In our organization, we get audited for ISO 900x compliance every year, and they have to go through all of our processes and validate that we're following our procedures, etc., but during that audit, if the answer is, "our ERP system does that / enforces that" then the auditor essentially goes, "ok, good" and moves on. The funny thing is that we have a custom-programmed ERP system that we're updating and changing all the time. The auditor certainly never audits our software development process or how we incorporate business processes into the ERP system. Apparently to him it's just "magic." However, people come to me (the ERP programmer) all the time with process problems, and I implement solutions directly in the ERP system to solve those problems, often only with the input of the person doing the job, because in many cases it's just obvious what should be done. I occasionally bring these decisions up to management, but most of the time they just defer to me anyway. So in many ways IT here (or at least the ERP development part) is just a branch of management. I find the whole thing rather silly.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Forgive me in advance, as I've told this story before: Back in the mid 90's, I used to work part-time at Kroger (grocery store) as sacker. That job paid minimum wage, but, we got tips for sacking the groceries, carting them off to the parking lot, and unloading them into the back of the vehicle. I don't see that going on anymore, an in many cases, the person working the till does the bagging (customer still puts the bags into his/her own cart). But I digress...
One day, the janitor was out for a week. I was called out to fill the position in his absence. In fact, just to show how hard of a worker I was, I took extra effort to clean the restrooms and mops the floors more thoroughly. Never did see that guy come back to work. However, I was rewarded via holding the janitor position for the remainder of my employment (which I quit after six months). Why would I stick around?? I worked harder, and made LESS money as it was still minimum wage WITHOUT tips. Yeah, I said to myself "fuck this shit, I'm out of here!".
So what's the point in telling this story?? That no good deed goes unpunished. If you work in IT, don't be "that guy". Being the eager beaver will get you known as the tech guy who's prompt. That's a bonus, but it will hold you back from further advancement. Trust me, I know how that movie played out too.
Oh, what's it like to be young, ignorant, and down right foolish. I wish I could go back in time and slap myself several times, HARD!
Life is not for the lazy.
"you're not allowed to connect hardware to the network without us checking it out first"
What's unreasonable about that? if you bring in hardware and start using it to perform critical work functions, the business now depends on it working. What happens when it breaks? What happens when you leave? Let alone the security implications. Are you storing sensitive information on that computer? How is it secured? Do you work in a regulated industry? I'm sure you're competent enough to manage device security, but do you think that one, extremely non-technical associate, in say, marketing, capable?
Somewhere behind rules like that is an idiot who brought in a device like a wireless router that acted as a DHCP server or similar and kicked a pile of people off a network annoying a manager enough to implement such a policy. Sure, expensive hardware rolled out everywhere can protect against that, but a policy of "ask before you plug it in" is a lot cheaper than replacing a lot of stuff just in case of people doing stupid stuff.
Also some hardware on networks is so fragile that anything sending weird packets to it can take it down (HP and Samsung I'm looking at you).
You are not that idiot the rule is for but in a large enough org there will be a few.
For a job on a fixed wage?
You seem a little bit out of touch so perhaps should not be so critical.