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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?
You may have been living in some sort of fantasy world of siloed functions.
In a large enough organization, there might be specialists in telecom, desktop hardware and server hardware, but usually IT, in general, is charged with all facets of the IT plant... Workstations, servers, networking hardware and telecom (including switching, carrier interconnect and endpoints like conference phones).
If what you want is to JUST develop software, you need to be in a different role.
People believe peple in IT, alt hey di is browse the web and play video games... so they think we're disosable and can beused for any job...
.... pritner doesnt work... open it up and fix it ... .. oh whats that no backups of PC's, they lost their data, now they complain tot heir boss you cant recover their data
Main things are;
- Laptops, PC, Phones (every brand)
- Printers
- Internet issues (yes with phones too)
- Moving anything electrical; PC's, desks, pritners, microwaves, fridges....
- fix anything hardware related; phones dead... fix it
- Security; prevent users from doing dumb shit like open bad emails... oh wait they did, now you have to recover their encrypted data
- cars; their car wont start.. oh your technical, you should know how to fix it...
oh so much more....
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
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.
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.
My role in IT was to stop people buying hardware and software without thinking through how it would be used, how all the bits would integrate together and who would support it. I work in hospitals, and they are the worst so far. Clinical departments think it is a good idea to spend a pile of money on some piece of hardware or software, only to find they either can't use it, it is too complex for their staff to learn, it doesn't fit with anything else, it has a huge dependency on something they didn't buy and so on. Most of it ends up not ever being used - hence shelfware.
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.
You're going to see a lot of negative, bitter posts in here from guys who feel like they've been taken advantage of. I'm definitely one of them, but I won't bore you by parroting.
Are you assertive? If not, that might be the one thing others might not think to advise you one. Find some way of ensuring you are treated fairly for performing beyond your "normal" role. Ask the other employees whether your employer is known for being a tight-ass with money and funds for projects. Ask if they're justly rewarded when they take on extra tasks. What I've learned is don't just "assume" or "hope" that you'll be noticed for being a "team player". If you have more than 2-3 people tell you what you don't want to hear, get out, or at least clear it up with your boss NOW. You're not asking for a raise, you just want to be sure you're not bitter, stressed, and burned out in a year.
I had a sucky sig.
Most of today stuff has some "software" in it and "others" will try desperately to assign the "maintenance" of it to you.
Do not fall for it easily: For every bad equipment you have to "handle" state clearly who bought/authorized it and that you cannot support a defective unit.
Keep repeating it in every conversation/email.
Yes, you will be hated, but really, the alternative is worse.
(Alternative is: Being blamed for all crappy choices made by others)
The problem with employers assuming they can still get away with a jack-of-all-trades "IT guy" position these days is the level of complexity and technical competence required to maintain systems properly. IT has fragmented down quite a bit, and one can make a career out of simply mastering IT security, and not ever even get into managing the other 90% of IT services.
Consider some of the most common services we run today in business. Desktops, servers, printers, switches, routers, email, internet, database, file/print/DNS/DHCP, along with SPAM filters, firewalls, IDS/IPS, A/V and anti-malware to help protect it all. And we haven't even touched virtualization or voice/chat services yet. Think you're gonna hire one IT person to do it all, or even find someone who holds a competent level of knowledge? Do you have only one doctor you see for anything and everything? No. Sure, a lot of those services you could hire the magical "cloud" to run to minimize IT staffing needs, but if you're cloud-adverse (which is becoming more and more of a valid stance), that may not be a viable option. If you run a local data center, now you're talking UPS sizing, generators, fire suppression, and physical security. Should the level-1 junior IT person be in charge ot DR/BCP planning for all IT services? Probably not.
IT should now be compared to the medical industry, where you have many specialists serving a compartmentalized field, due to complexity and skill required in each.. I'm not saying a small company needs to employ a staff of half a dozen specialists every time, but as the requirements list for IT services grows, so does the need for additional staff. Also, redundancy. Companies need to avoid the hit-by-a-bus scenario and ensure for every service the business relies on, you have primary and an alternate person named, and not merely on paper. Again, to compare to the medical industry, ongoing training is critical to maintaining competency.
TL; DR - Even for small business, IT today is not simple or easy. Employers cannot assume to get away with a jack-of-all-trades IT position.
- 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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Whether it is the brand new cabinet of AI or the CIO's daughter's piece of crap bought off eBay. Or, depending on the size of the organisation, any other random piece of electronics owned by any staff member.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
...it is part of the I.T. domain; especially in smaller Mom & Pop operations.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Oh no, they are arguing with a phone vendor, boo hoo.
In the wake of the dot-com burst, the company I had been working at (well as much 'working' as college kids actually did at dot com startups) dissolved, so I found myself with the only job I could find, IT intern at the research site of an industrial equipment manufacturer. It paid barely more than minmum wage and capped my hours to 20 a week.
The first day I was informed that they consider IT a part of facilities, so I would report to their director of facilities, and I was in fact *the* IT department. This seemed ok. They showed me to where I should sit, and it was a rickety table and cheap hard plastic chair in the closet with a rack of servers, a rack of telephony equipment, and bits of the HVAC control system around.
The next day I went to ask for my work assignment and the facilities director wasn't there. A few hours later I was informed that they had fired him, and I was assuming the role of facilities. I asked if I could use his now empty office and was told no, those were only for director level executives, so I went through my tenure in the closet, not even allowed to use any of the empty offices or cubicles. But the fun had not yet begun.
I quickly learned that the company had one rule: never ever ever call a vendor, even if under warranty. My first lesson was when they brought me in to look at some piece of industrial equipment used on factory floors for something or another. There was a computer attached saying that there was a fault in the equipment, and so the equipment would not run. After double checking the computer I said as near as I could tell, that the fault was legitimate, and we should call the manufacturer for guidance. I was informed we shouldn't do that, and I should try to diagnose the equipment myself. So I grabbed an oscilloscope and an ohmmeter and went about effectively trying to reverse engineer the monitoring circuitry of a broken whatever the hell it was. I did actually find an open in a fairly standard component, and said we could buy a new one for a couple dollars and see if that worked, was asked if I could repair it, so broke it's casing open and soldered it and the equipment actually worked.
Another time the HVAC stopped working, and they asked me to dig into that. Fortunately there was some sort of locked down monitoring implementation and we had to call the vendor, who informed us that it would have been against our contract to even *try* to fix it.
The last notable event along those lines came as one day the security system was emitting a little chirp every 5 minutes and had a fault light. They asked me to look at it, but knowing that I had no idea how to approach it and that a mistake could incur a hefty false alarm fine from the city, I refused. Ultimately some VP said 'fine, let me see'. Within 10 minutes of him 'seeing', the full alarm went off, and within 2 minutes two fire trucks and 3 police cars arrived and the company had to pay a large false alarm fine (for residential, there's leeway, but corporate alarm are treated a bit more strictly).
Thankfully it only took about 3 months of working there before I found a better job.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I've done I.T. for everything from "running out of a large garage" type businesses to mid size companies with multiple offices.
I'd have to say the weirdest variety of job expectations were at the smallest places. When you're the only I.T. guy hired full-time at a small business, you're immediately viewed as one of the "smart guys" who surely knows how to do X, Y and Z that people want to do - regardless of if it has much of anything to do with computers.
The weirdest tasks of all had to be when I applied for a job in the local newspaper for a Macintosh tech for a small start-up business that wanted to refurbish older Macs and PCs to resell in daycare settings and secondarily to the public as "great first computers for small kids". I was unemployed at the time and needed to make the house and car payment, so wasn't being too selective. It turned out, the guy running this business came up with the idea because he already owned a number of daycare centers, as well as other rental property. He was a long time fan of Apple Macs, even though he wasn't that great at using them. (He was your typical older guy who attended those monthly users' group meetings held at the local library and knew just enough to be dangerous.) One of the interesting features of his house was this HUGE multi-bay garage built into the back side of a hill. He put about 6 rows of shelving units in part of it, where he collected up old, obsolete Macs that area schools, the local newspaper and others wanted to get rid of. He'd drive his van out to one of these places every so often with a trailer attached, and bring back 25 to 50 of the machines at a time.
The rest of this garage was stuffed full with other odds and ends that looked like a scene from one of those "American Pickers" episodes on TV. He had tool and die equipment (as he said he used to work in that field years back), a huge collection of paint cans of various colors (probably whatever was left when his rentals needed repainting), a lot of miscellaneous hardware like chains, bolts, hooks, and several vehicles including an older car with less than 500 miles on it, sitting under a cover.
Right away, this guy was maddening to work for. He insisted that I punch in and out on this old time clock he had sitting in the back on a desk. It was one of those green metal analog clocks where you had to line up the paper time card just right and press the big steel button on top to stamp your time on it. And as it was as ancient as most other junk in his garage, the clock often stopped -- so you had to make sure it was set right before punching your card. And the time it printed was barely legible either. I was supposed to be refurbishing these old Macs, putting collections of kids' games and learning programs on them, and tagging them with price sheets that told you exactly what the computer's configuration was. In reality, I'd get one or two finished only to find the hard drives were dying and they'd only boot correctly every other time. Then, I had to dig through a collection of used hard drives he kept around to try to find one that worked well enough so it would hold the information in a stable manner. Every so often, he'd come around trying to micro-manage my work and scold me about something or other I should be doing, in his opinion, in order to work faster.
At some point, he figured out I knew how to do things like update web sites, so he'd regularly pull me away from what I was doing to come up to his office in the main part of the house. There, he'd have me update his daycare center web site or upload photos and edit descriptions of his rental homes, or edit listings on his personal .Mac web page trying to sell some of those nuts, bolts and chains he had around.
In the winter months, he had this wood burning furnace contraption he built to heat the garage. So I had the task of tending the fire in it and adding logs to it regularly each day.
Eventually, he decided to try to sell a bunch of these computers at a computer show at an area
I was/am that guy, and while much of what you say has merit there is a bonus; my work ethic has exposed me to virtually every system out there and because I took responsibility for it, I've had to become a passable expert in it. This has tremendously increased my worth in a field where the only way to make the big bucks is to jump ship. Several times.
That obviously doesn't apply to someone who doesn't want to play that game, so take it for what it's worth.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Have you actually thought about where those policies came from?
If a policy is stupid (many are) there is no point blaming the tail and not the dog.
In addition to handling all software and hardware installation and support we are supposedly supposed to know every employee's role so that we can do their jobs for them. It never ceases to amaze me how many people think it's my job to do a vlookup or setup fuel routing solutions. Apparently we don't require our employees to know a damn thing, just push it to the I.T. department to get it done....in a company with 1,000+ employees and an I.T. staff of 5.
Notice I didn't say that we purchase software. No no....that would mean that we're involved in that process. Instead some other department purchases the software and then notifies IT after the fact. It doesn't matter if it will work with existing hardware/software because the software salesman said it will work just fine. And salesmen never lie.
Some days I think I would rather flip burgers for a living.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I was the web/IT guy for an adult photography company. This company used to take test poloroids of in-coming models, to shop them around to the publishers, to determine if any of the publishers wanted the model to be featured in a layout. Now comes the advent of the digital camera, which would allow these test shots to be disseminated faster, and with less complications. So, being the IT guy, I'm tasked with working the digital camera, taking pictures of naked women in various poses, which jump-started a sideline business of being a nude (the girls, not me) photographer.
And fueling a major portion of my sex life.
"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? "
Software engineers should NOT be sysadmins. Full stop.
" Desktops, servers, printers, switches, routers, email, internet, database, file/print/DNS/DHCP, along with SPAM filters, firewalls, IDS/IPS, A/V and anti-malware to help protect it all. And we haven't even touched virtualization or voice/chat services yet. Think you're gonna hire one IT person to do it all, or even find someone who holds a competent level of knowledge?" ...Yes? At least for a small-medium org that isn't in the IT sector itself. I do all those things except voice/chat, and also some development work. By the way, you forgot backup and disaster recovery planning. There is a market for people who are competent generalists. Not necessarily experts in any given niche, but with a well-rounded understanding a many different technologies, how they fit together, and how they fit into the organization.
Ever wonder why we hear of so many insecure systems and security breaches happening across many different levels of business? It likely has something to do with the expired mentality that a one-man-band can maintain that level of complexity with an adequate level of proficiency.
Aside from putting all of it in the proverbial cloud (which has also been proven to be rather horrible when it comes to maintaining security), the level of complexity surrounding the average IT environment these days tends to demand compartmentalized staffing. In the last 25 years, I can count in one hand the number of people I would consider IT "gurus", which none of them would claim they could sustain it all today. The rest I've met who have some jack-of-all-trades experience tend to know just enough to be dangerous.
How much IT training do you think will need to be funded? It ain't cheap, and most organizations too cheap or too small to hire enough IT staff aren't going to be very accepting to budgeting 6-10 weeks of training per year, which is likely what would be needed to sustain proficiency as an IT "generalist".
When it comes to IT security alone, "well-rounded" doesn't cut it anymore, which reinforces my first point. The environment is fast-paced and ever-changing, and there's a valid reason I compared it to the medical industry who also recognizes compartmentalization is necessary to sustain proficiency due to complexity.