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Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

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I dont know about the rest of the world but IT in New Zealand is degenerating into a field where people think anyone can do IT. People dont recognise the skill and training that goes into a degree in IT and would rather trust MCSE which is not even NZQA accredited so in truth is not a qualification.

People seem to trust the advice of idiots these days. No research is done by technicians on the products they sell, they just sell the product they sell cos.
Ask a technician why he/she sells x antivirus and 99% of the time the response is because the x antivirus company is big or because it is good, no research done on the product just go by gut feeling, how utterly and totally pathetic is that. And that is just scraping the surface.
Case in example – true story
Large company in NZ (over 250 pc’s per loc, several locs), uses large IT company in NZ to support its IT infrastructure, relys on this company for advice and providing the neccessary IT infrastructure. When we did our case study on the large company last year they had no network monitoring software for thier LAN, MAN or WAN, poor av, protocols bouncing from one side of thier lan to the other causing it to eat network bandwidth for lunch, Windows servers where Linux/Unix would have done the job better, I dont know about you lot but I have had a real gutsful of IT companies saying they can provide a service but all they do is cost thier clients money and dont do a good job about it.

Topic

Methinks the problem’s worse…

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Here the main problem is not the capability of the individuals in the I.T. department, but the total lack of comprehension of most of Management as to how much money and time it takes to keep everything pulled together.

We’re operating with less than 1% of total Revenue as budget and are expected to not only keep everything running, but implement mass projects like Active Directory as well. If every day wasn’t such a hair-on-fire panic, it would be funny.

If I didn’t know better,

In reply to Methinks the problem’s worse…

I’d swear you were describing our company.

Hair On Fire Panics

In reply to If I didn’t know better,

Yeah … describes us to a “T”. Incidentally – people wonder why I no longer have hair on the top of my head!

-CB 🙂

Actually….

In reply to Hair On Fire Panics

All our companies sail in the same boat….and all off us live the same hair raising (or is the word plucking off???) lives….

and people go about asking…What do techie guys do all day anyway ?? :o)

What do techies do all day, anyway?

In reply to Actually….

If we don’t tell our ‘clients’/’consumers’ (whatever the new _in_ word is) what we do for them, how will they ever know?

We *cannot* rely on management to tell them. This thread is about the cluelessness of most management.

We have to be our own PR agents. I don’t mean bore them senseless with technical details. We need to talk to the people we are working with/for and treat *their* problems just as seriously as we do our own.

I’m not suggesting we don’t already do this, but all too often I walk into a workplace and discover it’s practically ICT v Everyone in a smackdown contest.

If something cannot be done in ten minutes, tell them why – what you have to do and how long it will _probably_ take. Double emphasis if you have to leave something before it’s finished to deal with another problem. Tell them why, make sure they know you consider their problem important, and try to give them an idea of when you’ll be back – or how they can find out.

not the whole story

In reply to What do techies do all day, anyway?

This works with to a small extent and with a very select few users. I make it a point of never to leave without fully testing any changes, and a true attempt to explain what the changes are: rarely every helps!!

ding..ding..ding. We have a winner

In reply to not the whole story

Users and management don’t want explanations. Explanations are viewed as excuses. They don’t want to have to think about anything they believe should be an IT issue – even when it really requires a user decision. They resent having to lower themselves to admit that IT actually understands their business better than they do themselves.

..mine too

In reply to Methinks the problem’s worse…

That’s scary! and I thought I just landed with a “bad” company….

Sure Blame IT for it …

In reply to ..mine too

With the Shoe String Budgets and A$$ on fire work people expect the IT dept (read Techies) to answer the questions like Why do we use this Antivirus and not THAT …
Well we could answer … The reason is that this is cheaper that that one !!!

IT depts generally have to deal with multiple deployments at the same time … eg .. just last week we had to implement Antivirus, Domain .. Internet Domains … etc …

Well all this costs money … (For upgrading as the company needs grow)… which has committies to decide … but a new water cooler would arrive in a day or two once someone says it is needed 🙁

People do not think of all this and expect techies to explain in detail the reason WHY DID WE USE THIS PARTICULAR ANTIVIRUS ????

B.S. and Marketing

In reply to Sure Blame IT for it …

Sadly, it’s not what you know it’s who you know that gets the big account… this is the same as why we techies seem to get all the idiot managers… they might not know much but they do know that to get anywhere they hafta get their noses brown.

We have to market out ideas and ourselves… and be proactive in the workplace. If something isn’t working say so and document it. Be firm… if X antivirus isn’t working, document it and ask for a different brand… if everything is limping along … suggest a better way.. and do it in writing.

Talk is cheap… action commands attention.

Unfortunatly that brown nosing manager will be quick to blame everyone but himself when the proverbial shi*t hits the fan after a major failure or security breach.

So you have to protect yourself… if your having trouble be professional… mention it in a memo… then letter… then by letter with copies to “higher ups” and so on… If your working in a poisoned work environment.. time to get the heck out.. start sending out those resume’s (or CV’s) while your still working.

Richard in Canada

It is the “B.S.” in Marketing fault anyway

In reply to B.S. and Marketing

Why should we have to market our selves?
MS tell us the simplest way to solve the problem is their network software but the cost and infrastructure make life hell for techs and the budget.
Why? So we go out and buy more Intel Products which are “tailored” (Used to be) to MS software. So now we have to spend $1000’s to maintain our competences so we have to attend MS approved training centres to comply with their standards which they changed to ensure more sales and more profits and to make sure the sales statistics make them look good.
Why? So the Decision Makers are blind sided by MARKETING.

WHY CAN?T THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES

I have done the research to tailor systems and their 3-5yr development plans for a number of organisations in SE QLD Aust. The majority took the cheapest option whether mine or not and the rest bought the medias hype at a cost of 3-5 times my most expensive recommendation for the level of implementation they chose, because their IT staff knew they would not have to extend themselves at all. I.e. Buy MS software and Dell gear and the system will chug along and he can blame undocumented upgrades for the slowness and not get called out too often because he has trained the organisation to accept mediocre IT operations, supported by the belief of the Discission Makers that they chose the BEST, because of marketing mistruths.

If a CPU runs
Full duplex data transfers with simultaneous departmentalised operations, centrally managed at twice the byte size
As
A half duplex, serial operation, decentralised management system 20yrs old.

Why would you buy the former when it is cheaper to buy and operate?

Because of MARKETING.

When you discuss the IT Solutions and write the recommendations include a reminder
The big companies do the same things as we a smaller company does when it comes to spending the advertising dollar but only so much more because they are so much bigger. Do you believe your own adverts? So why believe them. You cut out the truths that hurt, so do they. Your wordsmiths turn a phrase so do theirs??.

Ah sorry they?re the facts and we need MARKETING. Like a hole in the head.

(95% of my research time is wasted getting through the marketing and getting to the facts. Even then there are no standards to go by; I have to sort out the data like
Speakers ?A?
98dβ(spl) 1W1M, 10W(mpl) SNR 90dβ ?0.005%@15W

Speakers ?B?
50Watts not documented but this is actually (pmp)

Speakers ?C?
100Watts Max rec o/p
Which would you buy? (spl Sound pressure level, mpl ? mean power level, SNR ? Signal to Noise Ratio, pmp ? Peak music power)

By the way ?A? may = ?C?

Full Duplex vs Half Duplex CPU

In reply to It is the “B.S.” in Marketing fault anyway

Why would I want to keep the half duplex? I have to wait for in/out operations because I only have half duplex.

Now you example says they are the same, but that typically isn’t true when you migrate to a CPU with more horsepower.

Hyperthreading – what a joke

In reply to Full Duplex vs Half Duplex CPU

Could be worse – the other day I found out why my P4 3000 was running a VBA script slower than my Athlon 2000 at home.

The old 3-fingered-salute brought the answer straight to me – urmmm why are there 2 boxes for processor usage – oh s##t – it’s pretending it’s got 2 x 1.5GHz chips and NOT USING ONE OF THEM ! ! !

Okay so VBA isn’t the most efficient language to code in, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to format data in Excel than having to write my own report handler – but if I’m closing everything else down to run it I expect it to use the whole processor.

A BIOS tweak later and I have the processor working properly. My home computer still runs quicker – but having 1.5GB of ram will do that for you.

And then there’s annoying adverts coming up to Crimbo advertising HT as a ‘feature’??? It’s all I can do not to smash my telly in rage. At least I’m in charge of IT purchasing mow and can design some ‘decent’ systems (i.e. no Intel, and only has Windows because we use propreity software that’ll only run under it).

Use Citrix

In reply to Full Duplex vs Half Duplex CPU

If you only use windows because of proprietary soft, set up a Citrix Server and migrate your desktops tou Linux. Citrix has a unix client.

Idiot Managers and their Glee

In reply to B.S. and Marketing

I worked for an Idiot Manager and told him that his knowledge was not good enough to give me a truthful answer to several problems that occurred! When the opportunityy came about I was canned and now (4 years later )the company is in bankruptcy. By the way they sent their help desk to India!!!

managers in IT are stupid

In reply to Idiot Managers and their Glee

managers in the field of IT are mostly stupid school drop outs like bill gates who couldnt get into engneering so they choose IT, which was by that time a worthless faculity

IT managers act kiddish and have no sense of making decision. Heck most of the IT managers i have seen have 50 times less knowledge than me but salaries and fringe benefits 50 times more than me. This has given me such depressing feelings that i have thought many times to start fixing cars for living rather than IT. Atleast in cars u make better money and get respected for your expertise. lets see what happens in future, im still looking forward for ASE certs

Gee where do you work

In reply to managers in IT are stupid

I’d like to apply for an IT managers job there.

I am an IT manager, and its clear by your tenuous grasp on reality (50 times more salaries and benefits than you…) and math, I’m glad you don’t work for me.

Just for fun, lets do the math. If you make 40,000 a year, then if your manager makes 50 times that it would be $2,000,000 a year. And here I thought basic math was a pre-requisite to good computing ability. By the way, because my staff can charge overtime and I can’t, some of my staff will make more money than me this year. And other than the bonus plan, we all get exactly the same benefits.

Your generalizations about IT management are so one sided that no one can take you seriously. You may have a bad manager, but there are bad managers and bad employees in many industries. There are also good manager and good employees in many industries.

By all means, become an auto mechanic. If you aren’t careful you could get a bad boss there too.

James

But R U Smart?

In reply to managers in IT are stupid

Please oh please give me just one day’s income of that stupid school drop out, Bill Gates!

so if u r smart u wont trie 2 command a comp the same way u rite 🙂

< better English > My managers have typically possessed BIS (Business Information Systems) degrees; partly technical and mostly business. It is not the job of a manager to be a technical expert. In fact, it is better if he is not; for if he were, he should be employed in the field of his technical expertise, not merely managing. Many do both — I manage a helpdesk but I am also a server admin and network engineer for a five-state company. Using Cisco systems and self-starting employees produces reliability in hardware and human resources.

Charles Darwin would like you to understand that anything that continues to exist is “fit”, more fit than what one might suppose. From this we can conclude that superior technicians are not particularly useful as managers; either because they cannot manage (frequently the case), or because their talents are needed on the equipment rather than assigning who is “on call” this weekend.

What? Not a Good statement my Friend

In reply to managers in IT are stupid

I have been an IT Manager – I surely wasnt an Idiot or School Drop out. I thought I was a good and decent & fair Manager. Not to mention I knew more than Any/All my employees because I have worked with computers since the mid 1970’s.

I sense that you are upset by your Manager and are taking it out on ALL Managers – this is not a good thing. At any one time thousands of IT Managers are on this board and will most definately take offense – you arent “Winning friends and influencing people for the good”.

The vast Majority of them are probably Top Notch guys/gals. Making blanket statments such as this show that you are NOT ready to be an IT Manager anytime soon.

If you have a beef with your Manager, suck it up, go in and talk with Him/Her and get whats REALLY bugging you off your chest. Then you will at least be happier and hopefully a little more productive.

Jim S.

Thoughts of a young guy in the field…

In reply to managers in IT are stupid

Although I have had the terrible displeasure of working for some very poor managers, I am able to recognize that many managers have reached their current professional level by proving their skills/worth.

However, some of my complaints from experience have been:
– Inability to grasp basic technical details concerning products/services which are being managed. (I.E. Setting a deadline without understanding the amount of time required to complete a project)

– Committing to providing a service/implementing a solution that your staff does not have adequate knowledge. (Unless providing training, or time for Self-Study)

– Failure to consult the staff involved about the merits/drawbacks of any particular implementation.

– Having a “Hair-on-Fire” approach to issue resolution. (It is understood that time is of the essence when dealing with critical outages, but it is better to remain focused and make rational decisions, instead of panicking and creating a larger problem due to hasty decisions.

– The “Are-we-there-yet?” phone calls. (When I am resolving a major issue, it wastes critical time, and disturbs my focus to answer calls from my manager asking for details at 10 minute intervals.)

**This is a non-management peeve**
– Consistently selling/bidding services that we are unable to provide.

Now, I have been in the field for 5 yrs. I have done helpdesk, desktop support, Novell Admin, Linux Admin, and currently handle COTS implementations/support. I get frustrated by low pay, a company who does not wish to invest in me (in terms of education), managers who throw me into an implementation-in-progress without giving me background information, having my vacation requests denied without justification, lack of raises/salary adjustments, etc.

However, IT is my life…this is my career. I know that there will be better days. (Maybe when I move to India…lol) Honestly, though, I’m 23…I talk to my peers. Most do not see IT as a viable career choice. Mechanics are respected…Roofers are respected…Officers are respected…Plumbers are respected…Electricians are respected…IT Geeks are crapped on.

Sorry for ranting…so much that I could say, but never enough time. Just the thoughts of a 23 yr old trying to make the right choices in a very dangerous field.

Dido

In reply to Sure Blame IT for it …

Well said – it is hard enough to stay on top of technology than to try to explain it to someone that can care less anyway.

No better in small companies

In reply to Sure Blame IT for it …

I work supporting a number of small businesses in my area. In one case, the months it has taken to persuade them that they need someothing like arcserve for their backups, instead of the free stuff that came with their tape drive, which doesn’t back up Exchange (I support a lot of SBS). Why do we need to backup Exchange, they ask. We can copy stuff into PST files.

Someone complained that for a large company only 1% of budget went on IT. In some smaller companies, it is higher, but they forget that the costs are mostly for server and infrastructure support, much less per desk support.

At least some are slowly coming to realise that their business actually relies on IT.

Who’s responsible for all this anyway?

In reply to Sure Blame IT for it …

Back when I was doing end-user support, I realised that the best answer for this kind of question was to tell them who was responsible for the decision. As a lowly techie, my job was to fix things and try to keep stuff running. Making decisions was the reason _the boss_tm got paid the extra money.

By *who*, I mean the position. Jake may have made the decision, but he made it as Head of IT or whatever. He might not be in the chair by the time the poor sufferer asks me they’re stuck with something that doesn’t work, or whatever.

The most common question I was asked was actually not about why any particular software, but why they couldn’t change their background, or whatever. I got my answer down to a few dozen words.

They want to understand why they are not allowed, not what we’ve done to prevent it or whatever. Explain the reason for the policy. *Especially* if it’s in their Policies and Procedure Manual – and then tell them where it is in the damn thing.

Good Point

In reply to Sure Blame IT for it …

Over paid and bloated management runs equipment PO?s through the bowels of read tape, while their activities committee has the same size budget. Outsourcing IT is cheaper but when local systems are not working you must pay more to have someone come to the site. I don?t think IT is ?degenerating into a field where idiots rule? but degenerating to where non IT managers make IT decisions.

Because

In reply to Methinks the problem’s worse…

That’s because IT is a cost center. It is what it is and that’s how management views it. They have no clue how much it costs to keep things running, not to mention moving things forward.

They see it as an expense only, a necessary evil.

Cost Center

In reply to Because

That is exactly correct. What’s weird about it is the cost center is what produces the product so they can have a profit center in the first place. Still – I.T. is the last one to get consideration in the operation. Weird but fact-of-life.

-CB

More on track…

In reply to Methinks the problem’s worse…

Actually it seems to be a bit of both. As you note budgets remember the largest expense in most companies is payroll. As such it is likely that the senior IT professional may not be hired as quickly as the newbie just out of college.

Second of course is the infrastructure, and there is a lot to deal with there that upper management does not understand, but can be educated on. In the end it all depends on the understanding and level of commitment of the company.

Isn’t firefighting what we all signed up for?

You can tell how far downhill its going…

In reply to Methinks the problem’s worse…

…by checking out how pretty the average IT geeks’s girlfriend is. If she belongs on the cover of vogue you know its too trendy to be a geek. Time now to find another virgin industry where knowledge wins over LA Law type suits and a copy of Loaded under one arm.

I agree

In reply to Methinks the problem’s worse…

I totally agree with your comment. I am in that situation right now, and to add to that my boss is steady loading my plate with stuff he wants me to learn, remind you I am also the only consultant in the field going to different client sites meaning different networks and user habits that I have to take into consideration. This is really burning me out. I think it is because management do not see us running around like chickens with our heads cut off, so they don’t think that we are doing anything but costing them money; however, if most administrators that I know of including myself was to stop keeping up with their companies network and technology it would cost these companies would have to pay much more than they are paying now, trust me I have seen it happen.

Totally agree

In reply to Methinks the problem’s worse…

Yep ApolloCDR you’re so right!

So often IT management are looking at costs, costs of servers, ditching backup solutions always going for cheap options. It does seem that anyone who has a home PC is fully qualified to not only discuss but to set IT policy for hundreds of users because they used it once at home (or their twelve year old did.

It’s funny how the HR department get shirty if IT people go sick too often but conveniently forget how often they work late unpaid, it’s odd how the Sales guys don’t drive around in Ford Fiestas and don’t like the suggestion that they should… and yet they all know exacly how IT should work, what they should be allowed to do and install and we’re all just killjoys who want to stop the efficient running of the business by evaluating and testing first.

Haha Amen!

In reply to Methinks the problem’s worse…

Same here… 3 guys (well 2 really) to handle 800-900 people spread across 15 locations in a 300 mile radius. We lost count of the computers… who has time to count them?! 🙂 Develop, test, and release this new enterprize tracking app, roll out a domain in that new department, add these 50 email accounts, oh yeah these ones need forwarding but we don’t know where yet, fix the CEOs email again because he doesn’t know how to use a mouse and folders “are gone damnit! Im the CEO, get them back NOW!”, get in the crawlspace and run this cable, we opened 3 more shops so we need VPNs in place until we can get perminant WAN connections set up, 10 computers are dinosaurs and need replacing, why isn’t that massive Xerox printer that we never told you about not set up on the network-we need to print!, uninstall the spyware from the sales teams laptops, reboot the windows servers, patch up the Linux servers, make sure your SUS is up to date, purge the mysql databases, 4 shops need new storage servers as they maxed out now, Hey why can’t I log in? Do you remember my password? Give Joe a new keyboard because he dumped a coke in the last one, did you know our webpage is out of date-go fix it, write us a program that converts any customer supplied file to a GroupIV TIF automatically from our web forms, save that cat stuck in the tree, go help the government auditors…. Oh yeah, can you have this all done by noon, and don’t spend any money!

asdfg eghsdn AAS&>Tqwehy7rhy7quwhehilabnsdfkl

^^^^ Head hits keyboard

At least the paycheck is good and you get to wear the super cape when you pull everything off an hour early 😉

IT Management

In reply to Methinks the problem’s worse…

Actually, much of what is being discussed in this thread is an IT Management issue. The average IT person is too busy to have time to discuss what is being done, why, how, and when it will be complete.

Unfortunately, too often IT management is too busy dealing with projects and budgets to deal with the discussion of what, why, how, and when.

This means that there is nobody in IT telling the rest of the company what IT is doing for them.

On the other side, the average non-IT person believes that, because they know where the power button is on their PC, they must be a power user. When they talk to the IT people and hear the true tech-speak, they have no idea what was said and believe, therefore, that it is jibberish. They see the IT people disappear into rooms that are locked off from the rest of the organization.

All of this leaves them with an information void. So they fill the void with the belief that IT is doing nothing. After all, the IT folks probably only lock the server room door so that the rest of the company doesn’t know what PC games they are using, right?!?!

IT Management, in spite of their schedules, must take the time to inform the rest of the company on what IT does for them. Sure, they know that IT does a file backup every night. Do they know that IT used the backup to manually recover 1000 files last month saving the company tons of money and preventing end users from having to recreate the files (thus saving time)? Do they know that IT updated the corporate AV package and, as a result, prevented the virus breakout that they all heard about in the news last night? Do they know …

No, they don’t know. IT workers don’t have the time or the vehicle to give this information out to the whole organization. IT Management must start informing the organization about what IT does for them behind that locked door. If IT Management doesn’t step up to this plate, IT departments are doomed to outsourcing.

Beyond IT

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I see the problem as one that goes beyond IT which may go back to the head of IT not communicating effectively with upper management and other managers. When the general attitude is one of IT “plays” with technology and is high overhead, the implementation of the solutions that would be best gives way to “make do” with less, quickly.

Till something desasterous happens, or some kind of mandated compliance comes along, the best decisions seems illusive.

Added to that, with the constant changing of the IT landscape, decisions have to be made quickly with acknowledgement of certain risks otherwise projects will go on forever trying to adapt to perfection. Reinforcing the negative view of IT.

Yes, but there’s more to it

In reply to Beyond IT

Communication has never been one of the major weapons in IT’s arsenal…which is really too bad, because it’s the single most important skill anyone in any discipline must master in order to be successful.

The idea that “IT plays with technology” comes from two major sources. There’s a lot of entrenched IT management that proposes solutions which have all kinds of technological bells and whistles and sound really, really cool but in fact have little in common with business strategy. Which is the other problem…IT managers not taking the time to understand business strategy, that there is one and what it is.

On the other hand, IT management isn’t the only culprit. We’ve had enough years of technology ubiquity that anyone of approximately age 30 or less has pretty much grown up with technology. Those in the 30-50+ age group have been bombarded with enough messages that you need to understand technology, at least a little, in order to simply be able to do your job.

It’s a two way street, with a shared responsibility. Both IT management and business leaders need to do a better job communicating, both talking and listening.

Point of clarification …

In reply to Yes, but there’s more to it

“… business strategy, that there is one and what it is.”

How about business strategy, IF there is one, and what it is?

An unfortunate number of business “leaders” have stratigic vision no further than this coming Friday’s earnings guidance.

They claim to do what the shareholders want, but ignore shareholders who want to know why the current CEO is making $10,000 an hour and living in a mansion in the Hamptons while the former head of new product development is now a greeter at WalMart.

(Maybe it’s because of churn in the CxO ranks? Every couple of years, a new company to be CxO of.)

Too old to care anymore

In reply to Point of clarification …

Boy did Too old for IT hit the nail on the head for me. Latest SEC filings declared our new CEO earned 1 mil in wages but the board felt sorry for him and ok’d a 3.5 mil bonus. All the while declaring the IT staff (tech’s) was earning too much and proceeded to reduce salaries 5% across the board. Business strategy seems too be shrink this sob till nothing remains. Wall Mart here I come.

How True

In reply to Yes, but there’s more to it

ONe of the problems we all face is the constant lack of understanding about how to accomplish business goals. As a consultant I have to face this almost daily. Helping the entrenched big iron face the reality that the business needs superceed what they expect. Because of budget constraints and the lack of understanding on both parts I sometimes feel like a referee.

I also object to the statement that they would rather hear from an MCSE. I started with a degree in Business and moved into IT. I obtained my MCSE and MCT and enjoy teaching others. I even recommend Linux and the retention of mainframes if it is cost effective and the staff is able to support it.

One other spin on your point

In reply to Yes, but there’s more to it

Its true that business and IT need to work from the same strategy and playbook. This has to apply to all departments, not just IT and “them”. However there is a additional element that makes working together difficult in most operations I have worked in.

For some reason people feel they know a lot more about computers and IT than they do and are therefore assume they should have a say in how things are done. They make erroneous assumptions about what is involved in implementing strategic goals through technology. I’ve spent far more time trying to talk people out pie-in-the-sky ideas and concepts than actually making them happen. Any project where the stakeholders cannot agree on the nature of the problem and the solution is bound for failure. The arrogance of non-IT people thinking they already know the answers just makes it worse.

No one would every dream of telling a chef how to prepare a lunch for 500 people, a pilot how to fly a plane or mechanic how to remove a tranmission. But why does everyone who has read the “Chip Chat” section of the sunday paper think they have the answers and are more than willing to try and trump the IT guy at the next meeting?

Does this happen in other professions?

Here!! Here!! Author!! Author!!

In reply to One other spin on your point

“No one would every dream of telling a chef how to prepare a lunch for 500 people, a pilot how to fly a plane or mechanic how to remove a tranmission. But why does everyone who has read the “Chip Chat” section of the sunday paper think they have the answers and are more than willing to try and trump the IT guy at the next meeting?”

I’m posting this up in my cube …

Finally someone getting close!

In reply to One other spin on your point

I’m gonna try to stay on point of the initial subject, but let me apologize right now as I’m sure my post will be wordy.

“IS IT DEGENERATING INTO A FIELD WHERE IDIOTS RULE?”

In a word “YES!” or actually I think it’s been a steady decline over the past 5 years, but for several reasons.

IT STAFF:
In any profession, there are good and bad; there are good cops and bad cops, good doctors and bad doctors, good mechanics and bad, etc. OF COURSE the same holds true for IT staff!

For some reason however, in my experience there are waaaaay too many people holding IT positions that have absolutely NO BUSINESS accepting money for touching a computer or network in any way! Whether it is as a consultant or as an employee, the percentage of incompetent IT people is higher than in any other industry, or maybe at least tied with auto mechanics.

Primadonnas to boot —
In addition to being incompetent, there is a huge subset of them that are primadonnas! They are not nearly as good as they think they are, but you can’t convince them of that. They have bad attitudes, i.e. they don’t understand that IT is a SERVICE organization whose responsibility is to HELP the business produce its product whatever product that is (yes sometimes in SPITE of the business)! Not only do they not help their customer/employer/etc. adequately, but they don’t share information with each other, as if they are so insecure of their own ability that if they help their colleague, they will become threatened.

Poor Business Sense —
True also; a lot of IT staffers have poor business sense, and therefore make decisions that are based on other things and not necessarily in the best overall interest of sound business practices.

Communication —
Many but not all IT staffers are poor communicators.

Those are the main reasons that I believe that IT staff has contributed to the decline.

NON IT STAFF …
“No one would every dream of telling a chef how to prepare a lunch for 500 people, a pilot how to fly a plane or mechanic how to remove a tranmission. But why does everyone who has read the “Chip Chat” section of the sunday paper think they have the answers and are more than willing to try and trump the IT guy at the next meeting?”

Hurray! jbartlett for your post above! Indeed for some reason, the rest of the world thinks that they have an insight into good IT practices and feels that they can second guess our recommendations, or even worse, ignore them completely!

“… Good with Computers …”
If I had a dollar for each time I’ve heard someone tell me “my friend (so-and-so) is ‘good with computers,’ and he says …,” I would be island-hopping for the rest of my life because I wouldn’t need to work.

Unfortunately, just like joe-consumer trying to find the right auto mechanic (no I’m not purposely trying to slam the auto mechanic industry, it’s just that I think there are many similarities), anyway, the person making the hiring decisions oftentimes lacks the insight to know which candidate is the tech-wannabe and which is the real deal. Whether it’s the non-qualified person hiring the IT manager, the non-qualified person hiring a tech employee, or the person hiring the outside consultant, if you can’t separate the IT Men from the boyz, then there’s a good chance the wrong selection will be made. After all, based on the law of percentages, if 2/3 of the candidates suck (I think this is a close estimate, and there are subsets of the industry that are worse, approaching 3/4 or even 4/5 incompetent) and the person making the decision is not qualified to make the decision, then there’s a good chance that the wrong candidate will be selected.

It’s simply too easy for the wannabe that’s “good with computers” to talk a good game and BS his way into convincing the poor unsuspecting unqualified decision maker into making the wrong decision.

We good ones, the IT Men as it were, have plenty of work to do with the clients or employers that have the sense (or the luck) to select us; we leave those who make the wrong decisions for the bottom feeder wannabes because there simply aren’t enough of us to go around!

Well said!!!

In reply to Finally someone getting close!

Well stated.

…to tell the difference.

In reply to Finally someone getting close!

What are the differences, in general, between those IT wannabes and the rest of us?

oy

In reply to Finally someone getting close!

I got into computers because I enjoyed them. I did not get into it because I was told they were high paying. That does not mean I want to be low paid though.

My experience started with hands on. It was the 80s. You had to open the box up and dig deep to get them to work.

Then it was a trade school followed by college.

Something happened midway through my college. Certifications. They became a hot ticket. I could not afford them. What pissed me off even more was that those who got laid off due to NAFTA were eligible for voc rehab. Guess where they went? You got it, those cert mills that taught you how to take and pass a test but not retain any practical knowledge.

For those who have them I am not knocking them in their entirety but a condition that happened. So as I was looking for a job I was not being selected. Recruiters did not care for my college courses or degree. Microsoft told them that only an MCSE could work phones and do field support.

I was told by one recruiter who I do not even think could spell computer that an MCSE is like a college degree. I just stared at her. Um, yeah. That is why a lot of them cannot write a memo or know how to use a spellchecker.

So the market got flooded with all these so called techs who had these certs. Others will tell you yeah but they had to perform once they had the job. Sure they did but far too many of them could fake the funk and learned enough to stay afloat while those who had far better practical knowledge could not even get an interview because they could not get past recruiter’s scanning machines who were looking for those industry buzzwords.

Every job where I got the opportunity to talk to the manager I would be working for I have gotten the job. Every job that I did not get that opportunity I have not since I had to go through a recruiter.

The cert thing is not as bad as it used to be but still these schools that are still in the cert mill business are telling people that you can make mad money out the gate. So they honestly believe that with no practical experience they are going to get 65K.

It is extremely annoying to see other techs make as much as you if not more who you can out tech. It is frustrating as well. I have known far too many who line their walls with certs who can’t put most of that if any of it to practical use. That is sad but I am not exaggerating.

I went through a bad experience of one such who walked up my back into management and then supervising me and then blacklisting me. He learned just enough to where he thought he knew everything.

What is worse is that IT is not even governed by IT anymore. It is straight business who think they know IT. I understand IT is a service. It is a CUSTOMER service but they want to increase that bottomline and reduce everything to zero touch but then pay at walmart wages. They have this very SciFi Channel look of things that everything is just a magic button and do not understand the amount of grey matter needed for honest troubleshooting. They think that a monkey could install a hard drive and then go out and hire a monkey. The monkey that is now making 10 an hour that is more than his burger flipping job he used to have literally just sticks the hard drive in. If any troubleshooting is done you are lucky. Data transfer? Ha. Hell was your hard drive even bad in the first place?

I am old school. I am a doctor visit. These blokes forget that is an important part of IT, customer interaction. Instead they want to reduce it down to IT being like the phone company or the cable company and think that is interaction. They think remoting in is as well interaction.

I save this company’s name so much. I put a face on the company that the client can talk to. I build trust. They vent to me. I facilitate their issue into a pleasant experience. And it is not like we do not relay the complaints we here of our helpdesk and remote team. We are 100s of years of combined experience who get sidestepped about our see of things. We get told the client really wants the issue to be taken care of. Well yes but their complaint is that it is not being taken care of on the first call and they know if they can call one of us we can do that for them.

In a year I expect to be outsourced to a magic button machine. 10+ year career down the drain. I have been watching pay scales backslide since most eveyone is going through some contractor agent who then wants to pay bottom dollar but expect maximum knowledge.

What is worse is that I am already working for an outsourcer since our client outsourced most of its IT off to various companies. My company then outsources pieces that it does.

How can you effectively integrate IT into business units to best serve them when you outsource it. That just creates more red tape as now you have these levels of private govts competing for their bottomline.

Everyone is looking for that damn easy button that does not exist. I see far too many of my clients though who still in 2008 do not even know how to use basic functions on a computer.

Well this is depressing. I am going to go something more uplifting.

pssst!!! come ‘ere…

In reply to oy

a little closer… a bit closer…

THIS POST IS 3 YEARS OLD!!! HELLO MCFLY!!!

?:|

LOL

In reply to pssst!!! come ‘ere…

So why did you reply? The info is still pertinent to today’s climate. I did not go hunting for this McFly. I simply opened up the link in my email and there the topic was to click on. I did no searching.

If there is a statute of limitations to what we can reply to then by all means take it up with Tech Republic and tell them to purge their data every 15 minutes.

I would had made the same damn near speech 3 years ago. It would be nice to hear from all those who posted then to post again and tell us what changes have happened since.

Does this happen in other professions? Oh yeah!

In reply to One other spin on your point

But why does everyone who has read the “Chip Chat” section of the sunday paper think they have the answers and are more than willing to try and trump the IT guy at the next meeting?

(In another life) a director of a major manufacturing company told me I didn’t have to explain a complex financial model as he had taken the four-hour course “Finance for Non-Financial Managers.” My MBA in Finance was worthless against his four hour course. The issue came up as he had just totally misinterpreted what the numbers meant.

(In yet another life) I was a US Navy pilot; I often took an F-4 Phantom to civilian airshows for static display. Many citizens at these shows would tell me why the plane really couldn’t fly (it held almost every world record for performance at the time), how it was mis-designed, etc. Seems only the 10 to 12 year-old boys knew anything, and were certainly more fun to talk to than a 50 year-old taxpayer with 32 hours of flight lessons.

(And waaaay back) in a frosh chem course, a bunch of students argued with the prof (PhD) that electrons orbit the nucleus of their atom and that even AEC logo clearly showed orbiting electrons. QED.

So, I guess I would say it happens in other professions. It’s part of the intelligent design, I guess.

Be polite to the fools; encourage the kids.

Phantom II

In reply to Does this happen in other professions? Oh yeah!

We had the Phantom II in the Marines. It wasn’t so much that it wouldn’t fly (it flew extremely well).

It just wouldn’t glide. Everyone from the CO of the Marine Air Wing to the GSE tech knew that when the lights went out, you got outta the way.

It’s more VOCAL in ITY

In reply to Does this happen in other professions? Oh yeah!

“But why does everyone who has read the “Chip Chat” section of the sunday paper think they have the answers and are more than willing to try and trump the IT guy at the next meeting?

(In another life) a director of a major manufacturing company told me I didn’t have to explain a complex financial model as he had taken the four-hour course “Finance for Non-Financial Managers.” My MBA in Finance was worthless against his four hour course. The issue came up as he had just totally misinterpreted what the numbers meant.”

In my relatively short career of being in IT (5+ years)I’ve worked with/under 4 directors/managers. And out of the 4, the current on I have a working relationship with (not directly because I’m not in the IT dept)has the least amount of experience. I’ve taken a look at his resume and his B.S. is in Mathematics and he has an MBA. He got his undergrad degree in the early 80s and his MBA in the early 90s. He got his MBA while at his current joib, which is where I work. In the previous life beofre being the IT “god”, he was a systems analyst.

I say all of that to say with my true life situation. The division I work in (non-IT) just finished a big three year project (I was hired during year 2). I was charge by sheer luck of the responsibity to setup an electronic assesement system to include a database. Needless to say, I accomplished the task. Unfortunately, I needed the assistance (after going through twists and turns for over an year) of the IT director to gain access to much needed data. Little did I know it was going to be the start of something awful.

The database was created in Access XP. I already had a prototype database and a “production” copy running. They both worked well and I was able to incorporate many modifications into the production model; They were in operation for two years. By the time the IT director came onboard, he took the work I did and created a whole new database from it. The probelm was because he was never a part of the original design and didn’t understand the requirements of my division, the database he designed was flawed. Queries that needed to be used could not be used because of the design. I had to use some of the methods in the database I design as a workaround. Even ideas I had to solve the issues with his design, he didn’t even entertain them.

My catch phrase again…I say all of this to say that his background isn’t in IT (even though he was a systems analyst), yet he gives the image to the organization that he knows everything in which clearly he doesn’t. And because of such, when someone whose knowledge maybe more extensive than his, he balks.

Level of actual knowledge vs perceived knowledge

In reply to Does this happen in other professions? Oh yeah!

“But why does everyone who has read the “Chip Chat” section of the sunday paper think they have the answers and are more than willing to try and trump the IT guy at the next meeting?

(In another life) a director of a major manufacturing company told me I didn’t have to explain a complex financial model as he had taken the four-hour course “Finance for Non-Financial Managers.” My MBA in Finance was worthless against his four hour course. The issue came up as he had just totally misinterpreted what the numbers meant.”

In my relatively short career of being in IT (5+ years)I’ve worked with/under 4 directors/managers. And out of the 4, the current on I have a working relationship with (not directly because I’m not in the IT dept)has the least amount of experience. I’ve taken a look at his resume and his B.S. is in Mathematics and he has an MBA. He got his undergrad degree in the early 80s and his MBA in the early 90s. He got his MBA while at his current joib, which is where I work. In the previous life beofre being the IT “god”, he was a systems analyst.

I say all of that to say with my true life situation. The division I work in (non-IT) just finished a big three year project (I was hired during year 2). I was charge by sheer luck of the responsibity to setup an electronic assesement system to include a database. Needless to say, I accomplished the task. Unfortunately, I needed the assistance (after going through twists and turns for over an year) of the IT director to gain access to much needed data. Little did I know it was going to be the start of something awful.

The database was created in Access XP. I already had a prototype database and a “production” copy running. They both worked well and I was able to incorporate many modifications into the production model; They were in operation for two years. By the time the IT director came onboard, he took the work I did and created a whole new database from it. The probelm was because he was never a part of the original design and didn’t understand the requirements of my division, the database he designed was flawed. Queries that needed to be used could not be used because of the design. I had to use some of the methods in the database I design as a workaround. Even ideas I had to solve the issues with his design, he didn’t even entertain them.

My catch phrase again…I say all of this to say that his background isn’t in IT (even though he was a systems analyst), yet he gives the image to the organization that he knows everything in which clearly he doesn’t. And because of such, when someone whose knowledge maybe more extensive than his, he balks. My issue is why should be so afraid of knowledge that others have when he’s the one with the “high up” position of IT director for the entire organization? Why be afraid to share your own knowledge with others?

Communication

In reply to Yes, but there’s more to it

The communication problem is an old one, and there is no excuse for it. Nevertheless, it is a reality.

A while back I noticed a subtle but interesting change, IT is now more commonly referred to as ICT – obstensibly to bundle in the communications technologies that were part of IT all along. Having an ICT manager who can’t communicate is sad, but still not uncommon.

I have worked in a school environement, indeed as a teacher in a ICT rich school. And two thirds of the students are *still* ICT illiterate *despite* having had laptops since they could walk. They are quite ahppy to walk about with a mobile phone attached to their ears (sometimes literally) but getting a grip on the computer is ‘too hard’.

I agree with you regarding communication within businesses. All too often people expect the *other* person to do the explaining.

At the end of the day, the average person is still quite average. And by far the most common.

What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

In reply to Beyond IT

I’m just curious. Does anybody wonder what happened to the smart people that were once in IT? What happened to them? Where did they all go?

They pulled up stakes …

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

… pounded them into a new patch of ground they could call thier own, and formed their own business.

Might be computer repair, might be consulting, might be selling old books or a coffee shop tho.

Still around, looking for better challenges

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

Does the term “burned out” ring a bell?

Does the concept of too many nights spent in the office trying to get the latest directive implemented mean something to you?

If you want to attract top talent, you only get what you pay for. I know plenty of highly skilled IT workers who are frustrated by the compartmentalization of our industry. To demonstrate competence you must have 12 of 12 requirements. This is pathetic. The bright stars in IT were always the ones willing to learn more about their field, not the ones who accumulated certifications and degrees. If you want 12 of 12 requirements, you had better open yourself to a bidding war.

Anyone who has spent time in IT knows that a certification is obsolete within a year of its issue. How about a “certified IT Learner”, that would be a valuable certificate!!!

Steve

An absurd Darwinian process

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

Your reply, I believe, mirrors my thoughts exactly. Allow me to expand on why they left:

IT before it got that name was a lab where things were designed to current and future needs and maintained. This environment attracts bright and creative minds.

IT has degenerated into just another corporate department where the goal is to keep your boss happy at best, screw thy neighbour at worst and your function is an intrusion into office politics. This environment attracts tedious dullards.

Not all professional managers and companies operate so, but the fact that most do puts everyone on an even keel and that is why nobody disintegrates from incompetence since it is the status quo.

What self-respecting intelligent person will work where the ability to think for ones’ self is viewed as dangerous and career-limiting?

The smart fish swam away to other oceans. The benthos remains. They’re schooling organisms, I mean team players after all.

Can’t imagine why you are struggling

In reply to An absurd Darwinian process

in the corporate environment with an attitude like that.

Tell me are you a fellow tedious dullard ?
LOL

swam

In reply to Can’t imagine why you are struggling

I came, I saw, I swam. The luck and the laughs are first-rate, thanks; I have freedom from tedium though I still embrace it at times.

They were outsourced.

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

they made too much money and didn’t really contribute to the short-term bottom line anyway.

*sarcasm off*

Where did they go?

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

Like a lot of other techies I have moved away from front line IT in Australia due to the exact same reasons as the rest of this post.

I can report a few of my TOP IT Guys are now doing the following: Coffee Shop owners, Strata Management, Trainers, Gardening buisness, Mobile Phone retailers, etc.

It seems that some of the best and brightest (I know) are sick of getting zero respect, long hours, no thanks for a decade plus of expert industry knowledge and having to compete with freash foreign candidates willing to work for peanuts.

The work ethic and pride has gone from IT – Particularly in Australia. The value of quality emnployees has degraded to the point that the most valuable staff I used to have working for me are now no longer in IT. One guy who was one of the hottest developers i had ever seen is now more than happy running a small removals business and earning more money shifting refrigerators than he was competing with the offshores for development contracts.

Its a sad state and i cant see the brain drain subsiding….

Depends on waht you mean by smart

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

The main chance, choose your career based on the market people jumped ship just after they scuttled it.
Me I’m still here

Reply To: Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

we’re all still here — we’re just forced to sit on our thumbs and make monkey sounds by management.

well…

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

The face of IT has changed. It used to be the UNIX hacker type fasade ruled IT, with the thick glasses poor hygene and fashion. IT was distant to the average corporate person, a proverbial fog, a scary area, like trying to fix your car or hot water tank.

As Computer use increased, the interface between the systems and the people needed to change and that’s where the MCSE came in. They filled the gap. But the problem is that with that came a lot of people that didn’t have a clue about the actual backend troubleshooting and with that the NT 4 MCSE exam was a simple memorization of facts and procedures. The market is slowly evening out, people with no experience are leaving and the companies are finally starting to realize that certification without experience is not a good hire.

My only beef is that there are numerous individuals with no experience and skill peddling their skills in the market at $20 / hour at the expense of the remainder of us skilled and experienced individuals in the market.

We are still here but in hiding

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

Those of us that are knowledgeable (smart) were forced to go underground because of the young upstarts that believe they know a lot more than they do. They market themselves as knowledgeable and tell employers, customers, clients, etc. many myths and untruths and pass them off as facts. We come along at higher rates and everyone cries because these young people “sell” at a lower rate. The clients, etc. say they can get it for cheaper and I point out that you get what you pay for. They always end up paying them more in the end for having to do things over and over. Also having to “force” us to get certifications when we know what we are doing is ridiculous. It is just a way for Microsoft to make money while really not adding any value to our knowledge. I have been in the computer field for 22 years. Managed to dodge these bullets by starting out as a programmer, moved to IT and networks and now do technical support for a custom written software package. I don’t mind learning but didn’t sign up to go back to school every 2 or 3 years to take tests. You go to college once and are finished. It is up to the individual to keep up with the current trends and information but they should not be forced to do so. Because of this and the job market many smart people have left the field to do something that isn’t so stressful. I am thinking of following suit and am working on building a non-computer related business now so I can also leave this field. It was great until the mid-90s and has now gone by the wayside. Even colleges state that accounting is the new #1 degree being sought.

The were promoted to unsuitable positions

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

This is the main problem with most big companies. They have somebody…for example, IT Admins who are brilliant at their job. So what does the company do?? They see this person who does their job well and decide that they could be moved to another position and make a success of that role too. Unfortunately, what generally happens is that people are moved out of positions they know and understand, to positions where they are uncomfortable and no where near as productive.

So all the smart people got moved and you can’t tell that they are the smart ones anymore because they are sitting in jobs they don’t enjoy and have no motivation for. It’s about time companies starting paying people more for being good at what they do rather than paying people more for doing jobs they know nothing about.

Promoted to unemployment you mean

In reply to The were promoted to unsuitable positions

“So all the smart people got moved and you can’t tell that they are the smart ones anymore because they are sitting in jobs they don’t enjoy and have no motivation for.”

I can’t think of a single instance where this has occurred in any company I’ve worked for. In fact, the inverse has been true where they’ve brought in some brown-noser from another department who knew nothing whatsoever about I.T. who proceeded to cut a swath through the department either through ignorance or because they were put there as a hatchet man to do what the prior manager lacked the skills or balls to do in the first place.

An excellent question

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

J. Burya at the young age of barely 20 was tinkering with the operating system of Control Data mainframe computers. Now he works at a bank. When I was just barely 30 I was writing modules and interacting with the kernel of the Honeywell DPS 8 mainframe — probably a “lost art” since you had exactly 512 words of “program prefix area” to write your interface code — a block of privileged code that interfaced between the kernel and the user program. It required not only assembly language, but a sixth sense to realize highly optimized floating code (code that works no matter where in memory it is placed, and without rewriting addresses via linking loader). Now I manage a helpdesk, sometimes program Cisco routers and I’m pretty good with type 66 and type 110 punchdown tools. I still write programs but I do not try to market them. My helpdesk tracker is 6,000 lines of “C” with MySQL on the back end, Apache web server in the middle and web clients on the front end. Nothing spins, blinks or requires Java or Flash.

So what happened? RAD, mostly (Rapid Application Development). When computers ship with a gigabyte of memory and run at gigahertz speed and programming is “drag and drop”, what need is there for anyone that can squeeze a utility into 1/2 kilobyte? NASA for sure can use such people but that’s about the end of the list.

I still write elegant little programs but it is mostly a hobby. Besides, who wants to go back to the days of staying up all day and all night trying to debug some nasty little function? Borland’s debuggers were awesome. Now, with 99 percent of your code hidden away in libraries, debuggers aren’t terribly useful especially when you realize the bug is in the library.

Don’t Hate the New Era IT Pros.

In reply to An excellent question

I have read quite a lot of these posts and i find a lot of them so spot on. Agreed, a certain level of not-so-smart ppl are dominating the IT sphere. THe reasons have been quite well documented in the posts.
Now, while i agree with the spirit in which the author wrote, i must underscore that it can be an equal hindrance to the IT sphere, allowing the same ‘idiots’ to overrun the profession. The author obviously loves assembly programming. But the reality is that RAD is the future. Using notepad to construct enterprise level web applications is pointless and not-so-smart. I feel where he is coming from, but as IT professionals, we must continually adapt and change, while maintaining a high standard of development.
And as a young aspiring java programmer, i put the same effort into producing optimized and secure code as i would, if using C.
Point is, by refusing or being too slow to adapt to new technologies, IT professionals allow IT Aspirants to flash their qualifications in these new technologies, and gain preference over what may be perceived as obsolete or less productive software tools.
I agree 100% though that RAD has created a new breed of programmers, who have a peripheral knowledge of programming paradigms. This is inevitable. Don’t hate the concept though, embrace it and with your knowledge and experience, take it to a new level and stand head and shoulders above the rest.
As much as core IT pros would despise the “bogus” IT pros, they are doing what they must to survive. Real IT Pros must continually adapt, even in the face of obvious crap. Agendas beyond IT, drive the processes that IT pros work within.
Its a hard hussle.

Smart people in I.T.

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

Some of us are still here plugging away as consultants since most companies laid us off to bring in naifs who don’t know the different between ethernet and token ring and are willing to work for $10 an hour.

They went to…

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

Bangalore.

We retired

In reply to What happened to the smart people that were once in IT?

After working in IT since 1955, I got tired of running in place to try to keep up and retired in 1993, went into teaching computers in elementary school and had a ball.

It does go beyond upper management.

In reply to Beyond IT

Some previous replies have implied that it is who you know not what you know that gives you access to management.

For years, we in IT have been accused of talking ‘geek-speak’ which upper management needs translators. Fred Luthan’s published a white paper indicating that 80% of managers are considered successful by networking their way to the top. Only 30% of all managers were considered effective. (i.e. making time and budget considerations for projects) The ‘idiots’, indicated here, are persons who excel in translating ‘geek’ into ‘manager-speak’.

Luthan’s implies that only 10% of successful managers are both networked and effective.

This implication applies to all management and not just IT. If IT is going to get a ‘place at the table’ with upper management, we need to be better at conveying why what we do in IT and how we benefit the organization on the whole. Not just at the management level, but at every opportunity to explain it to senior management and the people outside of IT.

I’m glad I got that off my chest.

Steve Gawron

Human Resources is the biggest culprit

In reply to It does go beyond upper management.

H.R are the biggest idiots when it comes to hiring good IT personnel. Most H.R people are looking for certain “Keywords” on the resume and could not care less about hiring a “good” IT person.
I recently was in negotiations with a MAJOR computer manufacture (I wont say the name, but it has 4 letters and the last 2 are LL) for both a help desk , and an IT position. The HR person had no Idea what i was talking about when I mentioned their products that I had worked on. I have over 10 years as a consultant in the IT field and have worked on all major networks, built and serviced machines and such, but because I have not “worked” at a company, that they can call the HR department, I have no verifiable experience and am not hirable as a long term employee. They don’t consider the 100 of man hours I do researching the latest hardware and software or the thousands of machines I have built and service for the last 10 years. It just comes down to my papers.

HR is woefully understaffed

In reply to Human Resources is the biggest culprit

Glen,

I agree. I have found that many HR departments are staffed by HR types rather than a technology person with a talent for hiring IT people.

They (HR) are also at the disadvantage of cutting their most senior HR people when G&A cuts are dictated by upper management. Thus removing people who might understand the company’s technology needs in favor of someone who is cheaper. In many cases, ‘re-engineering’ results in ‘de-engineering’ putting that company at a disadvantage.

A friend of mine once told me: “People work, systems don’t”. He explain that even the best systems will fail without the personnel who understand how to use it.

Steve

The problem isn’t the head of IT

In reply to Beyond IT

The problem isn’t the head of IT it’s managment listening and nodding at what’s being said and then ignoring it because effective IT services cost money. And the board, CEO and COO are only concerned with costs when looking at budgets. The only way around this is to make IT services pay for play. In other words, the departments that consume IT resources have to pay the costs of those resources. For instance marketing here has a tendancy to ship big files around they would get charged for managment of those files as well as per incident fees. While it’s something of a shell game it does make the point to the end user departments that IT needs to be adequately funded.

A similar point can be made by tracking and costing out resources for the various departments represented on the commitee then presented to them in the form of a bill (we used that a year ago and the results were very good). It is a sales and marketing issue and we need to sell our services to our customers who happen to be internal but they are still customers. We on the other hand need a customer service attitude which is helping people rather than clearing problems.

It’s not just IT

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

It’s just that IT has more idiot detectors 🙂

hahaha

In reply to It’s not just IT

Can’t agree more, adunlap.

The IT workforce tends to know their job inside and out…and tend to have bigger BS detectors when it comes to decisions made involving their occupation.

If by idiots, you mean management…

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

…then yes, definitely. It’s the managers who hire underqualified IT people. Take me, for instance. A couple of years ago, I made the mistake of letting my boss find out that I’m “good with computers”. I used to just tinker at home, upgrading my PC, tweaking my OS, and suddenly I’m responsible for a 35-user OU of a global AD network.

Thankfully we’ve got a great IT consulting company (the ones who set up our network hardware). I’ve learned as much as I can from books, and from dancing through this fire, but this shop would run a lot more smoothly with a real IT guy in charge.

Of course, they would have to pay a real IT guy a real IT-guy salary. And they will, eventually, when I manage to get myself out of here.

Reply To: Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

In reply to If by idiots, you mean management…

You are right about that. In my case, management manages to
hire competent technicians, they just fail to listen to them. What
is sad is that the technicians have resorted to doing things
behind management’s back in order to make everyone’s life
easier and better.

Tell me about it…

In reply to Reply To: Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Anything that improves security, but doesn’t cost money, I discuss with my external consultant, then implement myself. Management only finds out when they come to me one day and say “I think I broke something…” and I say “No, that’s fine; I’ve already fixed it so you can’t do that.”

Can’t laugh more

In reply to Reply To: Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I am agree with you, I am leaving my job because my managers believe that everything could be done running the software wizards. ????? and we have got 28 servers and 1500 workstations spread on 3 sites.

Dollars behind this

In reply to Reply To: Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

With profit being king, the cheaper the better. Rockets are built to standards, and the lowest price. Software has kickbacks and profit margins to preserve. Corperations dont care as long as they make a Dollar. Gues what, we have the ISO standard. If the software does not adhere to these standards its only management to blame. (If you can make it stick)

Ouch!

In reply to If by idiots, you mean management…

If you look at it that way, my bosses are idiots too…for hiring me.
I probably know half of what many of you IT/Network Admin guys/gals handling large networks do. I’m not certified in anything. But I haven’t ever had anything bad happen on my watch. I’ve managed to learn enough as I go to prevent security problems, and any loss of data. I’ve never fried any phone systems, lost any voicemail boxes, or crashed any networks or workstations. So I’m either smart enough for my jobs, or I’m just lucky.
Tink

Ignorance can be bliss as well

In reply to Ouch!

Either your doing things right or you haven’t found anything terribly bad enough to draw your attention to it. I’m sure we’re talking the former not the latter, here. 😉

Comming from the “long in the tooth” camp. We’ve all had those opportunities to see something go awry, either because we missed something so simple it became difficult or because something we missed was truly enormous enough to fry something out. It happens even when your supposed to be an expert.

– beads

Actually you have an advantage…

In reply to Ouch!

Actually you have a refreshing advantage.

I find that all too many who have pursued a formal degree and certification have had their intellectual skills stunted by the process they go through to get that degree or certification.

In contrast, you can achieve a level of breath-taking demonstrable expertise in your field as long as you pursue self directed studies …learning never ends for the truly gifted.

What?

In reply to Actually you have an advantage…

Formal education has a negative impact on cognition but self study has a positive impact.

Is that your thesis?

Other than observation, which I suggest in your case must have been very limited by definition since what you say makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and is directly opposite my own observations made across decades of interaction with thousands of professionals, do you have any real evidence to offer in support of this ludicrous claim?

Formal education

In reply to What?

Having been in IT management for a while, I have found that experience trumps education in IT.

A person with a degree often feels they deserve to be treated better than someone without one. Persons without degrees have an incentive to prove themselves and tend to be self-motivated.

I have spent 25+ years in IT and have recently completed a Master’s in Management and Organizational Behavior at one of the top schools in the US for that field. I have done several studies in my degree work and have discovered research that supports my supposition.

A degree is no guarantee of success. Only dedication and persistence overcome the obstacles that a career in IT presents.

I would be glad to share my views with you off-line, if you are so inclined.

Steve Gawron
sgawron@bigfoot.com

No need

In reply to Formal education

I don’t do anything offline. Anything worth doing is worth doing in the light of day.

Plus, I agree with most of what you say. My differences with your position are minor…I’ve known just as many people with degrees as without who suffer from diva complex and think, for whatever reason, they’re something special. I also know just as many degreed professionals as self-taught ones who are highly motivated.

While I’m sure there’s statistical evidence correlating degrees with PITA (Pain In The Ass) Syndrome, a condition that often manifests itself in low motivation (I have a degree, therefore I’m great, and since my greatness is self evident even to the casual observer I need not work hard to prove it), I also believe there are other causal correlations that have nothing to do with degrees.

This is a fascinating topic. Why don’t you start a thread about it? We can all learn something.

Format Education

In reply to Formal education

“A person with a degree often feels they deserve to be treated better than someone without one. Persons without degrees have an incentive to prove themselves and tend to be self-motivated.”

Being a non-degreed I.T. person I have to somewhat agree with your assessment. I’ve been in I.T. for 20-21 years now and in the past few years have seen all the kids with their shiny new diplomas whose eyes glaze over when I’ve asked them to do something as simple as change an EIO card out of a network printer, exchange a token ring card for an ethernet card during a cutover (the only tokens any of them had ever heard of was for a bus, the subway or was something they hoped they wouldn’t b e tested for).
I’ve had a couple of these fine young degreed fellows call to ask me how to find the Program ID key on a Win95 or Win98 machine or ask how to get the USB to work on an NT box and other equally stupid things and then bemoan the fact that their “talents” were wasted making a mere $14.00 an hour when most of them should have been sacked and sent back to school to demand a refund of their parent’s hard earned money.

Degree?

In reply to What?

He’s right (mostly). I’ve seen three different people come out with a Bachelor’s degree and knew absolutely nothing about a network or a computer. Then they did not want to learn anything because they assumed that if they had a degree that is all they should need. Those people are bank tellers making $10.00 an hour. Then their are all the net admins I know. None of them have any sort of degree, but they know their s*&t!, and they are borderline genius.

truly “gifted”

In reply to Actually you have an advantage…

If someone was truly gifted, would they not have the ability to earn a degree in their chosen field? Would earning a degree indicate some intelligence and some work ethic?

Two different things

In reply to truly “gifted”

One need not be “gifted” to earn a degree. Slogging through a course of study over a long period of time in pursuit of an academic credential doesn’t require a Mensa level IQ.

Earning a degree does imply a certain level of work ethic in that the chief ingredient in the successful completion of a degree program is, in fact, hard work. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with intelligence, however…there’s little correlation between how smart someone is and their ability to navigate through an academic curriculum.

There may be a correlation between intelligence and being class valedictorian, but for the 99.99% of the rest of us one thing has nothing to do with the other.

Well said amcol

In reply to Two different things

This is why we have degrees, to prove that we can work hard to meet our goals. Simply saying you are talented in a certain subject and beijng able to prove it, does not prove that you have any work ethic to back it up.

I find that questionable…

In reply to Well said amcol

I am almost finished with my degree attending college part time and I have to say that I see alot of people everyday that are working tword a Computer Science degree demonstrate barely any work ethic beyond showing up for class. Alot of the people in my classes are happy to see a B or C by the end of the semester. I have listened to students complain that they have no need to know hex and watched professors time and again attempt to get the students involved in the learning experience. About the only thing these people want is a piece of paper so they can collect a paycheck and I cant help but think that these are the last people in the world I would ever want to have working for or with me.

A degree is a nice badge

In reply to truly “gifted”

Getting a degree does represent intelligence and work ethic, however, not all intelligent people with good work ethics have the means to earn a degree.
I married right out of high school and I have 3 kids. Luckily I had the work experience to land office jobs. Otherwise I’d never be where I am today. Unfortunately, despite my desire to have a degree, it’s hard enough paying for my kids school expenses!
Tink

Point taken

In reply to A degree is a nice badge

However, in many cases you can only rise so high without a degree.

Does your employeer have a tutition repayment program?

A Degree is good, but not necessary

In reply to Point taken

My experience leads me to conclude that one must have either a degree or be very talented to succeed. Even with talent, a degree will definitely help. But, it is possible to succeed without the degree if you have the talent. I am a senior system architect and doing very nicely with out a degree. I also have over 15 years C++ experience. At my current level, a degree would not help me. I can demonstrate my work ethic and experience without one. That being said, I would have dearly loved a degree when trying to move up to my first lead programmer role. Instead, I had to donate many 100 hours weeks to overcome my lack of formal education.

There’s always a way

In reply to A degree is a nice badge

If your willing to put forth the effort.

Indeed

In reply to There’s always a way

I haven’t manged to get fitted for a mortar board either. Worked my ass off at work instead of college. Saying that I wish I did have that bit of paper, then people who were incapable of judging whether I know my stuff would feel that I did. The most disappointing thing to me is the constant devaluation of the qualification itself. Employers in the UK consider anything but a top mark as arse wipe, some of the highly qualified idiots I’ve met they are right as well.

You are not alone

In reply to A degree is a nice badge

Hi Tink,

I would rather hire someone with your qualifications than a half-dozen newly minted B.S. Info. Services degrees.

Steve

So you think they are idiots for hiring you?

In reply to If by idiots, you mean management…

Boy, grateful you are not…

I made my start 20 years ago because someone knew I was good with computers depite little formal training(one half course in programming in University, using mainframes to generate stats, some work experience on mini computers). That was before certs existed. It was expected that I would learn on the job and I did. Some of what I learned didn’t end up being useful elsewhere (Wang sys admin, Banyan net admin).

In my books, a 35 user net is small. And add to that hopefully someone somewhere central put a lot of though into designing the AD network and group policies etc so that it required very little work on your part. In my org, we have one person in an office of 80, and in another regional office of 50, no one – the person from here goes there on occasion.

You’ve been given an opportunity. Use it. And maybe be just a tad grateful instead of insulting the people who hired you. If you have never managed a budget for employees, you might not be aware of the juggling act your boss had to go through. If he had to pay for someone with more qualifications to babysit an admittedly small net, he would have to cut somewhere else.

James

How right you are

In reply to So you think they are idiots for hiring you?

James…outstanding post.

In this era of college degree required, cert programs up the ying yang, and formal training programs as far as the eye can see, we forget that in the previous generation professional business people in most areas were largely self taught via OJT. Perhaps the generation that hired THEM were more adept managers than we are because they were obviously much better at recognizing talent in the absence of a classical education.

You’re dead on right also about the gratitude issue. I’m worn out listening to the chronic complainers who represent that situations less than totally perfect are totally horrible, and since nothing is ever perfect everything must be horrible. How easy it is to complain and blame, and how ultimately valueless an exercise. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you……..

Isn’t it also just amazing that the same people who carp incessantly about their bosses, the moment they themselves become managers all the problems are obviously the fault of the next level of management up? And their staffers, hoo boy…it’s astonishing these people can find their way to work by themselves every morning.

Snap

In reply to How right you are

I need to take some lessons from amcol. I’ve been way too sympathetic to people who really do nothing to deserve it. It seems the more you feed into misguided people, the more they use their malfunction to take advantage of people. Do you want some cheese with that whine?

Apology

In reply to How right you are

I also would like to publicly apologize to amcol for my posts about him in another topic. I’ve been ill and in a bad mood lately, and nothing this person did warranted the way I responded.

Not necessary

In reply to Apology

And I’d like to publicly acknowledge that while I appreciate the sentiment an apology is unnecessary. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, to express it, and to use whatever means they want to do so. I never take anything said in these spaces personally.

“Do you want cheese with that whine”. Great turn of a phrase, I hope you don’t mind if I steal it.

Great post, Amcol!

In reply to How right you are

I have been fortunate in my past, to have very talented and dedicated IT people working in administrator roles– but every once in a bit, you get an employee who thinks that all management is inept, and uses that as an excuse for his own lack of results, or productivity. The first thing I think, when I hear someone blame management for the organization’s problems is, “This person has a MAJOR blame complex- he or she will never own their responsibilities”- and that would be the LAST person I would trust with a new implementation, or a better position!

Well said.

In reply to How right you are

I guess the “Me” syndrome crosses generations. I was also placed in IT because when the office installed our network about 10 years ago I was about the only one who knew how turn a computer on. However,I have progressed into the IT guy. I have worked with folks who have the credentials who I wound up having to go behind them to fix the problem they were supposed to know how to fix. I’ve also worked with a lot of other crendentialled folks who taught me most of what I know.
I’m sure there are others, like me, who have learned OTJ who bluff their way through to look good to the bosses. I’m sure there are also a lot of OJT folks who have a tremendous amount of knowledge, and ability, to keep their networks perking.
Whatever the situation I agree that the chronic complainers usually spend more time griping than working. I just try to do the best job I can. Sometimes that means calling in someone more qualified, who may or may not have the “credentials”.

Heck I’m Grateful!!

In reply to So you think they are idiots for hiring you?

I’m not trying to ACTUALLY insult my employers, I was just responding to geobeck’s comment that management is idiotic for hiring incompetent IT people. In comparison to many of you, I’m sure I could be called incompetent. But does that really make my managers idiots? I personally don’t think so. Like I said before, I’ve prevented damage and disasters and am more than capable of installing and maintaining systems.
If I were to be put up against a certified IT guy/gal tho, I’d probably be whomped. So don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful for my position (mind you I was hired as Admin Asst/Ofce Manager, but just happen to be running their IT since they don’t have anyone else)
Tink

Wasnt you I was criticizing

In reply to Heck I’m Grateful!!

It was geobeck….

I learned on the job. I didn’t take a course to learn how to make cables, or setup Banyan/Lantastic/Novell servers. One of the reasons I left a small consulting partnership was ot go to a big company and learn big networks.

I wouldn’t be so sure about the people who have certs. Certs with no experience – versus someone with on the job – not sure I would agree that you would not look good in comparison. Certs and experience – thats better.

James

Experience versus Certs…

In reply to Wasnt you I was criticizing

I agree with James on this. I’ve been in IT for 10 years now, but I have only one cert. I got the cert basically to get my foot in the door for interviews. Most hiring managers would take a look at my resume, and due to their only knowing the current buzzwords, would say “You have quite a bit of experience in I.T., but do you have any formal certifications?”. (Keep in mind that I have both a BS in Computer Science and an MBA…)

On the flip side of the coin, I’ve worked with people that have multiple certifications who couldn’t do the most basic of tasks. When I taught college IT courses, I prided myself on the fact that my students didn’t just repeat what they learned, but they actually understood the theory and usage behind it. That way, they not only prepared for certification, but also to get an entry-level position which would help them gain more experience and confidence.

In short, take any and all opportunities to learn and improve yourself, whether they be by formal training, self-study, or just asking questions.

This is where certs went badly wrong

In reply to Wasnt you I was criticizing

The original idea behind certification was that by being awarded one you’d achieved an industry recognised standard. This was simply to cope with the multiplicity of qualifications of varying degree that were out ther before. A subtle but extremely lucrative change of emphasis, turned recognition into achievement. The verification itself became more important than what it was meant to be for. Hence , boot camps , on line CDs, the merry-go-round, massive costs for little reward and a generalised contempt for what they are.
If a certification or a degree for that matter is an indicator of excellence then awarding them to everyone who can see lightning and hear thunder makes them an indicator of mediocrity.

I’ve worked with many people who had either or both who were far from mediocre, equally I’ve worked with far too many just as ‘qualified’ who weren’t even that good.

“If he had to pay …

In reply to So you think they are idiots for hiring you?

… for someone with more qualifications to babysit an admittedly small net, he would have to cut somewhere else.”

Like the CEO’s country club dues?

Jealous?

In reply to “If he had to pay …

The work your ass off and maybe you could be a CXO…

I could also add this – you have a hard time attracting experienced ambitious admins to a small net. Great techies thrive on challenges and 35 users generally doesn’t provide many.

I made that kind of decision many years ago. I was an independant, doing consulting and maintenance for a number of clients at an hourly rate. But I worked with small companies – 35 or 40 users at the max. I ended up moving to a lower paying job at a big corporation so I could learn about world wide networks – great career move.

James

Been working my ass off …

In reply to Jealous?

… starting with the Marines right out of high school to an IT contracting firm today.

Jealous? nah …

Bitter at watching frat boys with no skills other than how to schmooze get paid obscene sums to schmooze witht heir peers? yeah.

Let’s see

In reply to So you think they are idiots for hiring you?

1st job lasted 8 years. Worked for my hiring manager for 2 years. Had about 7 different managers after that. Upper management decided to put all their eggs in one basket. The company (with 10,000 employess when I hired on) went out of business after I left.

2nd job lasted five years. I had three different bosses. Went through two reorginizations. My boss had 4 different bosses in that time. Company dropped from 12,000 employess to 4,000 before being bought out, again after I left.

3rd job lasted 1 year. It was a small startup that failed shortly after I left.

4th job lasted two years before I left for more money. Hiring manager left 6 months after I was hired. Company was bought out and closed down after I left.

5th and current job has lasted over 7 years now. My hiring manager left after one year. I’ve reported to six differnt bosses in that time.

Summary – 25 years of experience, 5 jobs and 20 bosses. And only 5 years working for the person that hired me.

Advanced Warning

In reply to Let’s see

Please let us know when you plan to move on to your next employer… and please provide the name of your current and future employers. That will give us a chance to polish up our resumes and begin our search for the new job we will eventually need to have…

🙂

Guess I’m Lucky

In reply to So you think they are idiots for hiring you?

Budget is never an issue where I work. If I need to buy something to get a project rolling, I’m given the money to do so.

Much like you, James, I was hired on with little experience, and have learned 90% of my skills on the job. I’m very grateful to this company for hiring me.

But at the same time, I can’t deny the fact that management is full of people who don’t have a clue.

For example, my NETWORK ADMIN, that is, my direct supervisor, the head of the IT department, had a mouse that died. I told her to go ahead and shut the computer down and I’d connect the new PS/2 mouse. She responded with a question, “well how do I bring up the Start menu without a mouse?”

This is not an isolated example, but its one of the funniest that I have seen.

Bravo

In reply to So you think they are idiots for hiring you?

Like you, I have been in this game a long time. My job as IS/IT Supervisor of an 85 user 5 server AD network came as a direct result of my making myself indispenable and necessary. Having a degree in IT does not make you the expert and not having one doesn’t make you a fraud. It is only through the trial by fire that we endure daily that we grow and perfect our skills. The more we encounter, the sharper we become.

Management and IT will always be at odds because business doesn’t like spending money on something they really don’t understand. At the same time, “He who has the gold makes the rules.” I for one am more than grateful just a have a job doing something I love. Not everyone is this fortunate.

35 user OU and you are complaining?

In reply to If by idiots, you mean management…

At my last job, I was responsible for a mixed Novell eDirectory/Windows 2003 AD tree with over 5000 users spread across 4 international timezones consisting of 23 worldwide offices. Yes, we had regional admins who we delegated control to for their part of the world, such as Asia and Europe, but I still did the bulk of the work in terms of daily administration and system engineering and upgrades. Granted, it was absurd for a company of such a size to have only one Netware CNE on staff, such as myself, but I somehow managed to deal with it for the time being. I am no longer employed with that company and am seeking a company where I won’t be the one man expert for a particular technology.

It’s YOUR opportunity…

In reply to If by idiots, you mean management…

Lots of good comments on this thread.
Agreed, 35 users is tiny. If you feel you want to work in IT, you’ve got a great chance here to get a career started. Give it your best, and doors should open. (No, that’s not guaranteed.)

If you don’t particularly like the work tho, work on whatever other skills you have and enjoy and plan on moving on. IT certainly isn’t for everyone.

If I did hiring, I’d pick OJT and experience over certs any day. I started in a different field and ‘started playing’ with the computer stuff. My last cert was NW4 CNA, but now I help manage ~200 servers, and numerous critical systems for the org.

Good luck in finding a ‘real-IT’ guy in Asia

In reply to If by idiots, you mean management…

Outsourcing has severly depleted entry-level persons with an IT-knowledge. It is cheaper to hire an IT guy in Mumbai than to find a qualified candidate in the country where you are.
The problem is that outsourcing has been oversold to upper management. What good is a PhD in IT, when you do not have the infrastructure to apply a company’s technology and enough knowledgable personnel to staff the project.

Our next great crisis will be that persons like you are no longer in IT. Entry-level requirements will be at a minimum an MCSE or B.S. in Information Technology. Anyone who has gone through the academic route knows that most college IT departments are 10 or more years behind the technology curve. The best way to learn a company’s technology is to wade into the IT pond and role up your sleeves. How will this happen when the pond has moved half way around the world?

I will get off my soap box for now.

Steve

The answer is here….

In reply to Good luck in finding a ‘real-IT’ guy in Asia

I’ve been lucky that through my academic career to have REAL IT jobs while still being in college. I’m sampling a little of everything. It is definately going to help me to be a better student of computer science (the undergrad degree i’m working on).

SO, there are a few of us out there in the U.S. IT world that are getting the experience to go along with academia. it makes for a better IT person because the choices are just that broader and open.

Not true

In reply to Good luck in finding a ‘real-IT’ guy in Asia

It used to be that colleges were years behind current tech but many of them have incorporated classes that prepare for certifications as well.

In fact I went to Cisco Academy at a college and taught by a professor of that college who was certified.

And this was back in 2003.

Degenerating?

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

As far as I can tell it’s always ben that way.

I respectfully disagree

In reply to Degenerating?

When I started IT – oh so many years ago – you were basically in an environment shut off from the rest of the world. IT folks basically respected one anothers abilities and in-fighting was a rare occurance.

We seem to be going downhill as we become both more siloed and decentralized at the same time. Knowledge sharing is all but frowned upon while corporate feudalism regins supreme. We have no firm measure of who actually knows what anymore and hiring has become more of a guessing game than one of presentable skills. Basically, we don’t have much in the way of respect for ourselves – why should management?

– beads

Must be based on your own experiences

In reply to I respectfully disagree

“people think anyone can do IT”

I’ve only been in IT for 10 years, but 25 years ago I graduated from college with people who got jobs as programmers, with degrees in business and phsychology. They happened to have taken one programming course, and that was enough.

I got my first network admin position having never seen a network before. Nor had I had any training relating to networks.

How do you go downhill from there?

Reply To: Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

In reply to I respectfully disagree

Having a degree in anything is not necessarily a precursor to having extensive knowledge in a subject. In fact look at engineers. Not many have an ounce of nous when it comes to making real world decisions. Lack of common sense is a big issue in any field but IT in particular. Any network not running LAN monitoring software is open to invasion and misuse but i have to ask.
Why the hell haven’t we written a virus to take out other viruses???
Why the hell haven’t we written code to take down porn sites???
Not all of the IT world believes in Open Source either. Linux is NOT the be all and end all some would have us believe.

Part of the spiral

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

The bottom lines for management are money and looking good. Managers don’t typically see or care about hidden costs, as long as the expense doesn’t show up on their own bottom lines. In this way, they can justify their jobs to their higher-ups. Expenses are bad, cost savings are good.

Cost cutting always seems to target IT first. One problem is that those IT techs who remain keep things running too well, and management pats itself on the back for cutting unnecessary costs. If things begin to break, management has to respond. Now, they may respond by outsourcing everything. They did at the first company I was with. This brought lots more headaches, but in the short term management looked good for making being decisive. Then they started cutting how many contracted IT people they had, because “everyone knows” that in order to cut costs, start with IT. When complaints about IT began rising, it was ignored as part of the process of change, or alternatively blamed on the contracted company. In this way, management never has to be answerable for its bad decisions regarding IT.

Thus, some companies are left with overworked, underpaid, undertrained geek wannabees instead of highly skilled teams that handle problems quickly and efficiently. It is up to those who control the final bottom line to control the hidden costs of poor IT departments (and poor IT hiring, compensation, strategy, etc). This isn’t rocket science, it just takes wise managment willing to look at things differently than the “everyone knows you cut IT first” crowd.

BRAVO!

In reply to Part of the spiral

This is the most insightful summary of the problem I have ever read. You said everything I have been thinking for the last 20 years in just a few sentences. It is right on the money.

While I am not the writer you are, I would add a few thoughts. Management increasingly buys what Microsoft claims to sell, which is easy, integrated, cheap solutions. While I do not have the expertise to critique all of MS’s solutions, I can tell you that for mission-critical, web-based database applications, SQL Server is neither mission-critical, easy, or cheap. MS’s solution is to scale out. That is expensive and needlessly complex.

MS is proof that the free market is not always right, especially in the short term.

Don’t bother. It’s not your business, nor your profits.

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

It’s whoever owes the business that’s in charge. Profits belong to him, as well as losses. It is therefore only fair, that we unite our forces as a team, and do our best to screw things up his way.

IT is just more complicated than it used to be

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

There are idiots and smart people in every industry. It probably just seems to you like there’s more in IT b/c that’s the industry you work in. IT stuff is a helluva lot more complex than it used to be. And it is a helluva lot more critical to a company’s infrastructure than it used to be. Nowadays we have all these networked systems and distributed applications with large databases. In the not too distant past, we just used sneakernet and floppy disks to haul our data around. DOS was a very simple OS. Windows and Unix and all these network OSes are much more complex. Especially when you consider that they are all talking to each other. Today we have a ton of different apps from different vendors all tied together to run an entire company. One bug in some distant application can send crappy data to your database front-end and could foul it all up. Sometimes the software that a company sells isn’t even developed by that company. It consists of many glued-together libraries and applications from different sources. Ever heard of “DLL hell”? And then the aforementioned data interchange interfaces add another level of complexity.

Dumb Library Link?

In reply to IT is just more complicated than it used to be

Well that is what I used to call it anyway, way on back.

I agree that IT is far more complex an area than in days of yore.

I wonder how many of these younger people can even imagine having to build a JK Flop gate from transistors?

J K vs D

In reply to Dumb Library Link?

J K was simpler, but most of the work was done with D latches.

“I had to build a database out of zeros because ones were too expensive.”

Flip-flops

In reply to J K vs D

Wow! Flip-flops! Does anyone still build stuff out of those things anymore? Oh I used to love the good D-flip flop and it’s cousin the JK (and wasn’t there a SR flip-flop also?).

flip flop

In reply to Flip-flops

a D was 2 JKs in series with 2 sets of data gates and an inverter. the first jk would load when clock was in load state. when the clock went to set, data would be blocked to the first JK and the gates would be enabled to the second JK. a SR had connections to override clocked data to the second stage. returning inverted output data to the input would divide the clock frequency in half with an even duty cycle.

Most fun you can have with a soldering iron

In reply to flip flop

Building your own logic circuits, bit rusty myself, but I got started on programming by literally building my algorithms. Adress decoding, adders, driving segment leds those were the days. EPROMs and PLCs took some of the fun out of it, though those too were interesting in their own way.
Todays professionals are so remote from the real nuts and bolts of how things work they don’t even think of this sort of thing as computing.

PS. I got into digital circuitry because I found the mathematical requirements of analogue way too difficult. Fourier transforms , arrgh.

If you’ve only just noticed this

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

you’ve been damn lucky. This trend started years ago in the UK.
I put it down to two things. Originally IT was almost guaranteed to save you money, because it allowed you to cut very labour intensive manual systems. The other thing was the boom, when IT became fashionable and the career to get into. There was a massive influx of poorly trained badly educated inexperienced non-vocational wannabes, coupled with methodologies such as RAD and the massive personel turn-arounds, the skill level within the trade was diluted enormously. Hence some very expensive failures, rash promises, and poorly thought out attempts at solutions. When it went nipples up, management could point the finger at themselves for not managing as well as they could or they could do anything else.
No surprise really is it.
Now whether you blame the propeller heads for promising more than they could deliver, or the business heads for reading potential as actual will depend on which side of the desk you are sitting.
Bit of both as usual I suspect.

So true

In reply to If you’ve only just noticed this

Tony thats so true of what we saw here in the US as well, it just made me sick to my stomach.

One thing you hinted at was the complete knee-jerk reaction management had regarding IT in general. Used to be that your IT manager came from some other generalist skill only to become the IT manager. Generally, they didn’t have a clue as to what DP/IS/IT even stood for other than personal career advancement. Some of those things are changing with more CIO/CTO types atleast being able to type on a keyboard without outside assistance let alone do anything… well – “technical”.

– beads

Need professional IT leaders

In reply to So true

Spot on – we should all be concerned. I have always felt the rot started to set in with the proliferation of the PC in to business in the late 1980?s. This is when the big end of town mainframe professionalism started to become diluted and management were sold a crock of ?. by overly rewarded sales people. Most of whom had no understanding or experience of how to run an IT shop and how to build and roll-out decent working applications. Then we had an influx of partially or underqualified people in the 1990?s as the IT Industry exploded and we shifted into systems integration and later outsourcing. Those firms expanded to meet demand by hiring anyone they could but at a low price and resorted to contractors rather than by improving the skills base they had. How many times have you heard a big transnational outsourcer or systems integration firm say ?our people are our biggest asset? but how many do you know who actually invest in building the real competence and professionalism of that asset. They certainly won?t invest in training their contractors.

Large IT shops then started to fall into the same hole, i.e. relying on contracting rather than on hiring and ?developing? people. This is what boosted the rise (in Australia anyway) of the contract labour hire firms. The contract labour firms seem to be staffed by enthusiastic people, but most lack a deep experience of our industry and they certainly don?t invest in their ?assets? either. Add to this mix the fact that Universities are 5 years behind the real world and you have one reasons for the current situation. The other reason is a lack of real professional IT leaders who have served an “apprenticeship”. It?s no wonder that so many of the newer, and not so new, folks in our industry are so disillusioned. Its to their credit they stay at all.

The US is WAY ahead of NZ in that power curve

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Man, our IT problems make NZs look trivial. We have credit card companies losing data, “high security” areas getting hacked, and total server outages that need to have high availablity!!

Total mess…but at least MSCEs aren’t thought of as the second coming anymore…it seems education is starting to trump certification (esp with the 100% pass cert or the cert sellers)

I hear ya

In reply to The US is WAY ahead of NZ in that power curve

The largest Network IT companies in NZ found thier IT in MCSE and its coming round to bite companies in the ass very soon I think, One of the other posts up above was quite right in that the flood of wannabes into IT has seriously damaged the industry, people just dont want to believe (here) yet that technicians actually need proper training, they would rather beleive the person telling them what they want to here rather than the plain out and out truth.

In reply to IT budget above ^^^^ yup I can see how IT gets finances cut to shreds and operating on 1% must suck something bad, What mgt fail to realise is that IT was put there in the first place to make them more money by doing things faster, cut the budget, stress out your techs and your network runs like crap, all of a sudden things take longer and projects that could make a company money have to be delayed,
I bet they didnt figure that into thier cost cutting.
Perhaps the first place to start cost cutting is the darn marketing dept, they waste most of thier money on “branding” that actually does not sell anything, or make the company any more money, in fact it just costs them millions, hmm millions more spent on IT, bet you a decent IT team could make a company a whole lot more money than “brand” advertising!!

it v marketing

In reply to I hear ya

The issue is not that marketing is a waste of money.

The issue is whether the company considers its investment in ICT is adequate or productive. That is a matter for ICT management to address with the rest of the management.

Bean counters can see whether marketing has an effect on the bottom line quite quickly. They are often less clear about how ICT infuences profitability. ICT management need to be able to make that clear to those who allocate resources.

ICT is usually considered to be an operational expense, rather than a combination of operational expense and strategic investment. If your management cannot see that, perhaps you need to find a way to do it. Or move to a company where management does.

One of the things I do in my consulting work is show how decisons affecting ICT ultimately affect the _big_picture_tm.

Usually, just drawing attention to the way dollars invested in effective ICT _and_ effective ICT training can produce a tangible return. Not only through improved ‘effiency’ but also as a strategic investment itself. Reducing long term overheads, or spreading costs over longer periods or more efficiently across the whole enterprise can have remarkable effects.

At the end of the day, this is what ‘outsourcing’ and ‘internal markets’ are really about.

Certs?

In reply to The US is WAY ahead of NZ in that power curve

Certifications should never have been a replacement for a four year degree. Not now, not then, not ever. Learning to do more than high-tech line assembly is not an answer, either.

We saw the same thing with the “paper CNEs” of yesteryear as well.

– beads

All Certs Bad?

In reply to Certs?

By your comments I assume that you are implying that someone who has achieved a CCIE certification isn’t as effective as a someone who has gone to school for four years, correct?

Yes

In reply to All Certs Bad?

It’s kind of along the range of would you go to an accountant that had his degree/masters or someone who went to an MYOB course and then offered thier services as an accountant, or having a trained and degree qualified surgeon operate on you or someone who has done a first aid course.

Unless that person who has CCIE achieved it after or before thier degree as part of professional development. What is taught in a degree offers far more than any other course to the client/employer

quite wrong

In reply to Yes

With all due respect, I don’t think that NZBN knows how much work goes into obtaining a CCIE. I believe that there are only about 15,000 world wide.

I worked with someone who worked up to taking the 2 part CCIE exam. He missed passing the first part by only 3-4 questions. His experience? 15 years working as a network enigeer on networks that most people would envy. This also requires them to work with teams of individuals spanning geographically diverse locations.

Most people live/work in an IP world. The CCIE is still tested on IPX, AppleTalk, and most of the other protocols that aren’t used any more.

possibly

In reply to quite wrong

I can see your point that the CCIE is quite demanding on a person, A degree can be also very demanding (There are 3 out of a class of 30 left from mine)
Yup the IP world is pretty much it for 99% of people, and well appletalk I’m just not going to go there (They can keep coming our way 🙂 )

I dont know whether I see the point in training in protocols that are no longer in use, IPX is good to have a working knowledge in because there are still older Novell systems around but older protocols that are no longer in use are this way for a reason.
Although it is good to know about older protocols that are no longer in use so we can counsel people away from them 🙂

What is also missed from alot of these types of certs is the business side of it, information systems, project management, system analysis and design methadologies, IT people often hate this part but it is essential to round your knowledge and make you more effective in a business environment which is where your skills will be utilised

The main thing thats left out of a

In reply to possibly

cert is why. From a degree it’s usually when.
A generalisation true, but neither one is really a problem as long as the person who got it is interested enough in the subject to continue learning, and aware enough to know they will have to keep on learning.

Quite right

In reply to quite wrong

Passing the written portion of the CCIE is considered the easy part of the exam not the hard part. The hard part is passing the two day hands on test in your area of specialization. Most tell me that the first time was the worst – pass or fail and usually has some sort of “bucket story” to tell afterwards. People so made so upset that they needed a bucket or flight bag. Generally, after the second session.

According to Cisco there are little less than 10,000 ACTIVE CCIEs in the field. Since it requires you to recertify every three years its still an arduous process to keep your skills up.

I have to take a couple Cisco exams nearly every year just to maintain my CCNP (in Routing) certification. It seems like there is always a new one comming out or replaced, etc.

Hats completely off to the super-geeks that have the patience to keep up with everything. I have also personally spoken to a couple of folks who are working on MULTIPLE CCIEs. The record, last checked was five concurrent CCIEs! No one that I have heard has all seven. So its not that insurmountable of a goal to achieve. Difficult. Very, very difficult.

I have the utmost respect for those folks who choose to be the very best at Cisco networking they can be – really!

And tell your friend to take the CCIE review with GlobalKnowledge, et. al. Definitely makes a huge difference than trying to do everything on your own. No matter how bright you are.

– beads

CCIE

In reply to All Certs Bad?

Not hardly. If you can get through the CCIE without the basis in math, philosphy or CS then your a much more logical thinker than, myself.

Most of the CCIEs I have meet have a degree in CS or IT.

Don’t forget that the CCIE is the third tier of the Cisco cert program. CCNA, CCNP (various as I lost count past the first dozen or so) and finally the CCIE. Of which there are what seven separate tracks, now?

Is it a replacement? No. Its a certification that is good for 3 years, now. Used to be only two. Guess which one lasts longer?

– beads

Ahhh..the paper certs..seen my share of them

In reply to Certs?

Not so much paper CNEs’, but paper MCSEs’. Novell had a much more rigorous and tougher certification process that required really knowing the stuff and having hands on experience to pass the tests. Simply cramming for the test and memorizing Q&A would not do you much good. I recall being in a job early on in my career where I had already had my CNE and I was working with a so called “MCSE”. We had a crashed server that needed to be rebuilt within 4 hours according to the SLA. The cause of the crash was that the partition table got corrupted on an NT4 server and the thing simply would not boot because the drive array was shot. So anyhow, this guy gets out his trusty NT4 CD and attempts to reinstall the OS from scratch. He wastes an entire hour trying to install the OS, but he fails because the drive array is shot and there is no logical disk configured on the RAID controller. Anyhow, I take over this machine, blow away the old corrupted array and recreate a new array and logical drive from scratch. I then take the CD and reinstall NT4 all over again, followed by a restore from tape. Mind you, I was not an MCSE at the time and had very little knowledge of domains and all that NT crap. The other guy was MCSE certified and had no god damned clue what a RAID array was or how to even troubleshoot it. Like I said, certs don’t mean squat. If you don’t know your stuff, you may as well find another line of work.

Mark/Tony

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I disagree… I.T. as a whole is MUCH less complicated than it was 25 years ago… I worked at DARPA then on the Arpanet project… we had networked several thousand mainframes and RNPs (remote network processors for you young pups) across the us and 87 other countries at military installations around the world…

This was accomplished using assembler to write communications drivers to manage the physical comm ports (and every machine was different)… it didn’t save any money, it cost a LOT of money…

…AND… Management didn’t know ANYTHING about what we were doing… for the most part, once you got above the 2nd tier manager, they had ABSOLUTELY NO EXPERIENCE with technology… Our biggest challenge was trying to find analogies they could understand to get our point across so they could make decisions that weren’t stupid…

(My first division chief was a retired B52 pilot, but he was a real nice guy) :^O

Surfer, I wholeheartedly disagree

In reply to Mark/Tony

How can you say IT is MUCH less complicated today? Do you think that we don’t have DARPA-like networks today? Heck, almost every large company today has their very own network that squashes DARPANET in horsepower. And have you ever heard of Al Gore’s Internet? Didn’t the Internet grow from DARPANET?

Where companies used to have one or two mainframes connected to a bunch of dumb terminals, we now have dozens of Intel-based PCs on steroids connected to hundreds or thousands of plain old desktop PCs, remote laptops, PDAs, etc. Every large company that I know of has been transformed this way. It doesn’t matter what computer language these things are written in. I used to do some assembly coding and there is no comparions between that and the stuff I develop now using C++ and .NET. Not even close.

Compare the IT budget as a percentage of overall expenses between 1980 and 2005. Compare the overall size of IT departments. Companies now are totally (yes, TOTALLY) reliant on IT. In 1980, if IT suddenly went away in a day, it would only have been a nuisance. Now it would be catastrophic. In 1980, most employees’ only interaction with IT-anything was the TV or telephone.

Yes, technology is more sophisticated, but

In reply to Surfer, I wholeheartedly disagree

I dont think the tasks are more complicated…

debugging an abend dump in octal and/or hex is not for the faint of heart… I think the school for the step trace tool on the H6000 was 3 or 4 weeks long, and more than half the students failed it (it was a BEOTCH of a class)…

what I was really referring to was that management in those days usually came out of finance (or some other LOB) and had no experience or understanding of what those on their staff did for a living (nor did most of them care to know)… and that IT has not deteriorated to that state, it has always been in that state as far as I have seen…

But to your point, regular businesses did not even have IT in those days, so for the rank and file business, I guess that could be said

Maybe

In reply to Yes, technology is more sophisticated, but

Surfer, you raised some interesting points. I suppose the real answer is “It depends”.

We might have the same tasks these days in general, but now we just have many, many more of them. And we expect more from them. We’re a victim of our success. Sure the tools are more powerful now. But that is with everything. VCRs, programmable thermostats, electronic ignition, electronic banking… all do the same tasks as 20+ years ago but are much improved at what they do. And all are intended to make life easier. You remove the human element to make things easier and easier to control but it does complicate matters precisely b/c humans have less direct control. Twenty years ago I could change my own spark plugs. Now I can’t even find the damn things. I don’t know about this H6000 trace tool but in comparing my experience now to then, I’d have to say that development tools take longer to learn to fully utilize now. Compare Visual Studio.NET to Borland Turbo C. Turbo C took absolutely no training time. I didn’t even know C yet when I started using it and I was productive in a few weeks. Look at the number of classes your local community colleges offer on all the different aspects of .NET (or Java or Oracle or … (take your pick)). Actually those ancient archaic debuggers were right for the job at the time. Now we have multi-threaded this, multi-process that, multi-platfrom something else all going on in the same application. That old H6000 trace tool wouldn’t get us very far.

As you said, we didn’t have much in the way of an “IT department” but there were a few specialists running around trying to keep all those mainframes humming along. I’ve always been in R&D and my management always rose through the engineering rank and file. Many of our corporate executives came from engineering. We rank and file engineers used to b!tch about the idiot engineer executives running our company into the ground. In the old days (like the early days of Texas Instruments), a company could get by without having a clue how to manage a company’s strategy and finances. Not anymore. Ahh… memories of my youth…

Exactly, I may not have put it quite as

In reply to Maybe

eloquently as I would have liked, but I think you got what I was trying to get at… and absoultely (should that be in another post? :-))… the conceptual complexity of .net and some of the other “panaceas” of IT (there have been many over the decades) can be daunting at the very least… I had the good fortune (or misfortune) to be sent to months and months of schools in the early days to learn the intimate details of mainframe and RNP operating systems, which, when you dug dowm to the hardware level, were UNGODLY complex for the day…

…like you, I picked up turboC, turbo pascal, Ada, and other OOD stuff in days… it took YEARS to become proficient in the OS level assembler…

and you are absolutely correct (there’s that word again :-))… today there is just so much MORE stuff you have to know… the long and the short of it is, it’s probably not much more or less difficult… it’s just different…

(sheer profundity, eh? :^O)

One other point…

In reply to Maybe

I did some work for DEC several years back… They were run by engineers… They developed the most reliable operating system ever designed (most of the big UNIX vendors are still trying to develop the capabilities that VAX clusters had in the 80’s)…

and look where that got them… you’re quite right about having too many engineers in upper management :^O

The VAX!

In reply to One other point…

Their OS was called VMS, right? Brings back memories. Those things hung around until at least the early 90s. I didn’t have to use it veyr often. Thank goodness. Yeah, I prefer Windows’ GUI.

Here’s a trivia question: What does “VAX” stand for?

Why, Virtual Address Extension, of course

In reply to The VAX!

doesn’t EVERYONE know that ? :^O

Virtual Address eXtension

In reply to The VAX!

I can asure you VMS is still around and still going. It’s not state of the art anymore, very clunky compared to modern stuff and a dying niche. DEC kit coupled with the OS, has an extremely high reliability factor though and a gratifying minimum of maintenance. I used it 92 – 99 and then 2002 – 2004. The only time it got rebooted, aside from installation of new software, was to check if it still would.

Virtual know-it-alls

In reply to The VAX!

There’s a wise guy in every crowd 😀

I’d say in our crowd, there’s quite a few

In reply to The VAX!

:^O

Nah a know it all

In reply to The VAX!

would have got it wrong.
Must have answered too quick, deprived myself of the opportunity to burn someone trying to be clever.

VAX

In reply to One other point…

DEC died becase they had a simple architecture, and someone put uVAX on a chip. It was faster and cost 1/40 of their 8800 8900 frames. Third party resellers dropped DEC when they would not release their new 8xxx bus structure, and had to use DEC’s interface chipset. They choked the speed of uVAX 1, but everyone found out. VAX 3 was faster than anything. SPARC and MIPS were ruling speed tests with RISC, so DEC developed alpha and ported it to UNIX. Microsoft announced it would develop to alpha and had compiled NT on alpha. The head of VAX read that DEC was dropping VAX and VMS for Alpha UNIX and went to Microsoft and integrated the registry from VMS to WNT. VAX/VMS died about 1988.

That’s a hard one

In reply to Mark/Tony

Early in my career , I knew a great deal about technology, but much less about business and how to apply it effectively. My boss was not as gifted as I but he did know how to get the best out of what he did know and showed me how to do the same.

I’ve never had a manager who was as good a programmer as I, in fact I think the attributes are mutually exclusive. All I require from a manager is recognition where my strengths and weaknesses are, can’t ever get that if I don’t recognise where their’s are though.
To say my manager is a failure because he’s not as good a programmer as I, is as daft as him saying he’s a better programmer because I’m not as good a a manager.
I have met the latter attitude, I’ve also been a tad tactless on occasion in correcting it as well.
LOL

IT WORLD

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I assume that the man writing the article is from New Zealand. I’m sure that he would think of the IT in another County the same way if He were from another World. It is not the IT people who are Idiots. It is the Business world, as cited in the article, that is totally stupid. They get carried away by the sales Pitch of the Salesmen. Any business has to employ a salesman that can sell. If he can’t sell he’ll be fired. First of all why would a Large Company need the support of another large Company to support its infrastructure. Why can’t they have the inhouse support. I can understand if the company was small. It would certainly need to retain outsiders to support it. But I believe the support means security. And the security is hardly improved no matter what large company is hired to support it. It is a misguided thinking.

The news feeds are full of news items regarding the newely discovered security flaws. These companies make a living covering security failures. These companies will go out of business if the security failures are rooted out.

The only way to defeat the security flaws is to develop a new method of surfing the web as discussed at
http://www.newerawisp.blogspot.com/

But this article is very discuraging. If the people at large companies are idiots there’s no hope for the development of the alternate method of surfing the web.

Outsourcing is cheaper

In reply to IT WORLD

Outsourcing vs In-house CBA found that outsourcing was cheaper than hiring thier own internal network anlalysts.
Through proper security and requirements analysis the network could have been designed and supported properly, But the crunch of it comes when alot of managers believe that they are getting the best service from supposed big IT companies so trust thier advice. – security problems dont just come from the web, employees can be the worst even when they dont mean to!
A big problem is the corperate smoozing that goes on, x IT company takes x manager out to lunch, x manager thinks great he bought me lunch must be a good IT company. hmm

WHAT ??????????? Outsourcing

In reply to Outsourcing is cheaper

is NEVER cheaper… show me the numbers to make that case…

Case by case

In reply to WHAT ??????????? Outsourcing

Yup it doesnt always end up cheaper, Im not privvy to thier accounts details but the cba was done by a guy who knew how to do the figures. Only the network was outsourced not the Oracle, or Jade developers

here’s how it is cheaper

In reply to WHAT ??????????? Outsourcing

The outsourcing agency hires unqualified people at very low pay. People you would never hire to do the job. Then they hire one well paid and well qualified person. They sell you the job based on that one persons talents. Then they pull him off the job, giving you the unqualified people. That way they can resell the qualified person to the next unsuspecting company.

exactly

In reply to here’s how it is cheaper

exactly

this post is a response to JDmercha on “here’s how it cheaper”

…for some reason, my replys are not attaching to the thread where I respond, theyre all going to the root of the discussion… this just started about an hour ago…

CEO’s at companies that outsource …

In reply to Outsourcing is cheaper

… NEVER take their trophy wife and Muffy the mall-rat daughter over to Bangalore to live.

Get back at the CEO…sleep with his wife and/or daughter

In reply to CEO’s at companies that outsource …

A lot of these CEOs’ have very desparate wives and horny little sluts for daughters. Best way to get back at the bastard CEO is to shag both of the women in his life.

I live for the day …

In reply to Get back at the CEO…sleep with his wife and/or daughter

… when some CEO’s snot-nosed teenaged daughter flounces out of the house in her prototypical Western mall-rat attire (I’m thinking ultra-ultra-low rider jeans, showing off her all-over tan and contrasting thong, cropped spaghetti-strap top with some http://www.tshirthell.com/ saying on it, sunglasses parked on top of her bleach-blonde head in lieu of a hat) in some Taliban-inspired villiage.

Not gonna happen, because Mr. CxO is never gonna leave Grosse Pointe (or wherever).

Up to your old tricks again. Rzan?

In reply to Get back at the CEO…sleep with his wife and/or daughter

You’ve been making some good posts recently in other threads. Why the backslide? I was hoping you’d learned your lesson.

I see you lost your sense of humor

In reply to Up to your old tricks again. Rzan?

chill out and laugh a little

Ironically it’s because of the PC revolution

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Anyone over forty can remember when we all joked about the fact that the clerks and secretaries kept the place running smoothly. It was no joke. The workstation revolution squeezed those people out of the corporate pyramid.

Now you can watch a manager using his “time-saving” computer spend half an hour trying to center the heading on a report.

The people who actually knew what was going on and what to do about it are gone. Some of them mastered their computers and are still around but doing different jobs. They’re easy to find, they’re the ones everybody goes to when they can’t solve their own problems. They just don’t have the power they used to so they can’t save us from our own ineptitude.

Good observation DC

In reply to Ironically it’s because of the PC revolution

I’ve hired several “ex” admins as line managers and project managers, and it has been remarkably successful… several have moved on up and made outstanding executives…

its true

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

AT TAFE NSW- Australia, some eople who do IT courses don’t what they are doing and have done it over the last 6 years, eg Diploma in Sys Admin

Managers

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

The scourge of IT is the managers, they are all
based in life on increasing income or production
and decresing cost and overhead. This results is he NUMBERS game and no one wins that waY.
The head manager puts the pressure on their
underlyings and the buck rolls to the bottom
and as a result you wind up with a department
that is filled with certified heads and very
few real experienced workers who do do all
the work. Window dressing.

Busines IS a numbers game

In reply to Managers

It is the job of the manager to make sure that what is happening is good for the business. That is what it is ALL about.

Installing technology for technology’s sake is NOT good business.

IT is about doing things cheaper, faster, more reliably, safer and generally better.

As manager (former technologist) it is my job to make sure I am moving the company in the right direction.

Please do not assume that means cutting salaries or over working people till they are ready to quit. It means keeping a competent workforce happy, productive and focused on the goal.

It bothers me that so many IT technologists see the world in black and white (binary?) when the world operates very much in the grays.

And yes I might engage a firm because they took me out to lunch and at that lunch explained that
‘If you have any problems — you can call me and I will make sure it gets resolved’. That is called networking and just like T1 lines it is the way important information gets to where it needs to go.

P.S. In a ‘for profit’ business the goal they should be focused on is making money.

When nontechnical managers control the IT dept

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

It takes one half-assed moron in the executive dept of a company to bring in one non-technical bonehead to lead the IT dept. This spells for a disaster as this new CTO or CIO is completely clueless and has no concept of how systems work or why one is better than another. Many times I see these idiots becoming IT managers or directors and making decisions based on hearsay and reports they read in IT publications like “Gartner” and “Technology Week”, which are highly biased against anything non-Microsoft. I’ve been in this situation twice in my career where we had a mature and stable network running for decades, and in comes some new hotshot IT manager who has his own ideas of what is “good” and decided to rip out the current system in favor of his own crap that he thinks will be “better for the company”. The company spends an absurd amount of money to go forward with this half-ass idea and then realizes that they did not foresee the problem involved with a system conversion project of this scale. The new IT manager gets his ass fired, but the IT guys like myself are stuck tyring to fix a half working system and clean up the aftermath of the mess that some clueless moron shoved down our throats. My policy is: “If it aint broke, don’t fix it” and I don’t give a flying f**k if Gartner or Bill Gates says you need to convert to something else.

It all goes in the working hours.

In reply to When nontechnical managers control the IT dept

> The new IT manager gets his ass fired, but the IT guys like myself are stuck tyring to fix a half working system and clean up the aftermath of the mess that some clueless moron shoved down our throats.

That’s why you still have a job. Had everything run smoothly, you’d be downsized a long time ago.

Idiots don’t make our jobs harder. They keep our jobs.

Stupid comment on your part!

In reply to It all goes in the working hours.

So to justify our jobs, all things must be broken and require round the clock maintenance?

Just so

In reply to Stupid comment on your part!

> So to justify our jobs, all things must be broken and require round the clock maintenance?

Exactly. Every mature industry does that. Your car, for example, is designed to last exacty 5 or 10 years (depends on warranty). Many vital parts are prestressed, so that they virtually break after certain period of time. Many millions of R&D dollars were spent to achieve such precision. Making a perfect product is the dead sure way of making yourself obsolete.

All big software players, Microsoft & such, employ similar phylosophy. They change versions, and “rock the standards”, and so on.

Things like maintainability, roboustness, reliability & such must also be taken into account when designing software, as well as your own time & effort you are about to put in it. If customer wants it quick & dirty, true professional makes it quick & dirty.

So you would purposely sabotage a system to justify your job?

In reply to Just so

I’ve heard of such scumbags in the workplace and it simply is unprofessional and disgusting. As IT professionals, we are paid to keep a system running and well maintained without having to constantly be rebooting servers around the clock. If breaking things and purposely making yourself busy to give the appearance that you are doing your job is what you call job security, then I suggest you find a new line of work, like a crooked auto-mechanic. IT would fare well with less people who are looking to justify their jobs by looking for excuses to break things.

See what I mean?

In reply to So you would purposely sabotage a system to justify your job?

Could have been expressed a little less colorfully, but you’re on target with your thoughts. You’re obviously a bright guy who’s capable of making a valuable contribution. Why sabotage yourself with vulgarities, epithets, scatalogy, and silly violent fantasies? You’re better than that.

I sabotage only if I’m told& paid to sabotage.

In reply to So you would purposely sabotage a system to justify your job?

Following your logic, you should consider your car sabotaged because it’s designed to fall apart after 5-10 years. If this is the case, the whole car industry is crooked, not just some auto mechanics.

You could also consider your clothes sabotaged, because they will be out of fashion in a year or so. Namely, the purpose of fashion is to keep textile industry busy.

But, we could also look things the other way around- the purpose of textile industry is to satisfy fashion plate’s need of ostentation. Similarily, the purpose of IT is to satisfy the moron’s need of stupid software. It’s the economy man, supply&demand, and all that. No sabotage is necessary here. You just do what you are paid to do, that’s all. And then, you are paid to fix the stupid things you were paid to do before. As simple as that. You are supposed to do theese things for money, not to make the world a better, smarter place.

Besides, who needs sabotage anyway? The way it is, it’s hard enough to keep things going as it is.

You might also consider this. Suppose, that you work in the ideal workplace, with all the time & resources at your disposal, no abhorrent bosses, no distractions, not deadlines, nothing. Even the operationg systems & tools you use casue no problems. And so, you build an ideal IT system for your employer. 100% reliable, stable, easy to administer and maintain. And, once it’s finished- what are you going to do? Put your legs on the table and happily observe it flawlessly humming along? No way! Sooner or later, someone will come by, and ask himself “Now, why do we need this guy for? He’s doing nothing, just happily observing our excellent IT system. Let’s downsize him!”

Never ideal and never finished

In reply to I sabotage only if I’m told& paid to sabotage.

I’ve done a software project where there wasn’t a list of items for the “next” project before the finishing touches are complete.

If you build the perfect system, no doubt the user’s needs wants and desires will change the moment you put your feet up.

The challenge is approaching the users and asking the right questions.

If you think your users are morons you might not be the right person to ask those questions, and you might be a couple of steps closer to the unemployment line.

James

Re: Never ideal and never finished

In reply to I sabotage only if I’m told& paid to sabotage.

What you told is true if you are self employed, or work for a small company. In this case, customer satisfaction matters.

If you work in IT department, paid by the hour, it’s different story. “Customer”, your employer that is, may never be so unsatisfied with you, that he’ll bother to look for, and hire somebody else. But, he may not be entirely satisfied either, because he’ll increase your workload.

If you are self employed, you bear the responsibity for your actions. In a huge IT department, some (usually moronic) CxO is in charge, and he/she bears the responsibility. It’s therefore only fair to screw things up his/hers way. If that leads to some calamity, it’s not your problem. It’s not your business, nor your profits.

Disagree

In reply to I sabotage only if I’m told& paid to sabotage.

I worked for one company that had 80,000 employees, 5,000 of who were in IT. I’ve also worked for myself and in small consulting firms for small business clients.

In the huge firm, customer satisfaction mattered to everyone in IT. All management got their bonuses based on customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. The CIO couldn’t be everywhere. He set the general direction and tone and let people get on with it. We were big enough to organize programming groups around specific needs. I spent time in the HR group and Finance group (very different cultures). We developed long term relations with these customer groups and worked with them to understand their needs and objectives. We implemented time tracking so they could see what we were spending our time doing and to improve our ability to plan and forecast.

James

Re: Disagree

In reply to I sabotage only if I’m told& paid to sabotage.

Looks fine. That’s how it should be, I guess, but as far as I can tell, it usually isn’t. Workplaces like the one you described are pretty hard to come by theese days. One has to get along with what he’s got, and as long as salary is OK, crappy corporate culture doesn’t bother me.

Complete Garbage

In reply to I sabotage only if I’m told& paid to sabotage.

Whilst I understand the sentiments of some of the posters on this thread.

I get annoyed when people constantly bash management. By definition they cant do your job. Lets not carry on this shameless “my manager is crap” approach. I know the feeling, my manager isnt great, but then neither is his … etc
I work in a quite large manged service environment, and often have to deal with techies from other companies (Hospitals in our case). Some of them arnt very well qualified and just muddle along. Does this mean they are bad? Does it mean that there manager shouldnt have hired them. Or is someone somewhere saying, A) we dont need the best b) we couldnt pay them anyway. So the cloth gets cut accordingly. Even in a utopian environment where nothing is failing. They do exist. There are other things an IT department needs to concern itself with. Change management is one, Testing of new software / hardware to provide better service to the business. Changes will be constantly requested by higher powers, understanding how to do them and manage them so that there is no impact on production systems is a key part of the job.
If you are sat around doing genuinly doing nothing then expect to be downsized, as the business will have seen not value from you. Always keep in the back of your mind, how can I show business benefit , either to the bottom line (always a winner) or to productivity (good one, although subjective and difficult to demonstrate often).

There are a lot of people posting, that are obviously not happy with there employer. Please dont just rant though, it gives a very unprofessional appearance to our profession. There are cowboys, and they exist in every industry. Just make sure you can show you arent one of them.
Certifications are good, they show the candidate could demonstrate knowledge. The CCIE that was mentioned earlier is considered equivalent to a Masters degree in the UK as its content is difficult, wide ranging and requires good demonstratable experience in the field.
Degrees are good, they show a good academic ability and often give a good rounded skill set.
If you have a combination you are laughing (I know I am ) As you can not only show that you are able academically but that you can fit roles defined by certifications.

Plenty of people bash certs out of envy, they wish their employer would pay for them, or they wish they had them so that they could move to another job etc etc. Those people stand out a mile off.

Certs are also getting harder, particularly Ciscos, Microsoft are committed to preventing braindump passers, and now many employers are looking for the experience to backup the certs, and are happy to quiz a candidate at interview. I know I have been grilled at interview serveral times. It also helps to rule out the blaggers.

Lets not constantly put a downer on our industry, we work hard, and there is the potential to earn good money if you put the time and effort in. It could be worse, you could be shovelling dirt in some other job.
IT has been infested with Politics, there is an answer.. ignore them, or deal with them. Either way, just get on with your job to the best of your ability.

my 2p

Re: Complete Garbage

In reply to I sabotage only if I’m told& paid to sabotage.

You completely missed the point here.

Years ago, European car industry put the money together, and financed & built this entire synchrotron lab

http://www.elettra.trieste.it/index.php

for one sole purpose: to precisely explore the properties of materials in order to insure, that cars fail in predictable manner. Car industry managers, who started the projects are not idiots, researchers who work there are not idiots. They are just adapting themselves to the market demands, that’s all.

The “predictable failure” logic is applied for software & other IT solutions as well by Microsoft and other vendors, as well as anyone trying to make a living off IT.

I beg to differ

In reply to Just so

Planned obsolesance is a byproduct of competition. Sure the auto manufactures can build better cars. The problem is nobody would go out and buy a $500,000 honda civic that would last 40 years.

Yea, and…

In reply to I beg to differ

… nobody would buy a perfect IT solution either.

Your Lucky

In reply to When nontechnical managers control the IT dept

“The new IT manager gets his ass fired”

I’ve usually seen the manager keep his job, place the blame on the IT staff, and then outsorce the project.

AMEN!!!

In reply to When nontechnical managers control the IT dept

Enough said…

mmm

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

yes?

http://www.techseller.co.uk

Humans Involved Basics

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I’ve been operating computers since DOS, IBM/360 DOS 22. Many things remain the same. There are professionals that need computers to help them make decisions, and computer professionals that help computers make decisions. IT professionals learn IT in school, or fall back on management and accounting training when IT gets hard and complex. Why does it take 4 years to get a degree in something that lasts only 3 years? People with management aping skills get noticed and accepted by management apes. IT professionals are the boiler stokers for a company; nobody wants to see them or their dirty mess, they just want to water ski behind the ship. Computers still only access memory, set, clear, or invert bits, add, negate, shift, test results, and change instruction sequence. Everything else is a combination of that, or understanding the philosophy and thought process of the interface’s organization. C is not machine instructions, it is a philosophy of library calls and interfaces and code organization.
This was all documented in the 50’s – 70’s with these basic laws and corollaries:
Murphy’s Law. Failure will happen in a most profound and unexpected way to cause the most damage possible on several fronts. I.e. A branch cut from a tree will sweep the ladder out from under you so that you land first, then the branch, ladder, and chain saw add injury to insult.
Parkinson’s Law. With growth comes expansion. Expansion creates complexity. Complexity creates decay. Companies and concepts become so big and complex that small minds can’t see the whole big picture or add enough energy to prevent entropy.
The Peter Principle. People are promoted to their level of incompetence where they remain until promoted to the side. Ever wonder how such an important manager, with no staff, became available to take over your group?
Cole’s law. Finely chopped cabbage, carrots, and mayo.

Outsourcing

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

A large company had to outsource because domains became terratorial over their data. No one group owned all of the data to be able to form complex data summaries and pricing lists to generate full contracts from any one location. They shut down the individual division’s IT and farmed it all out to a neutral party that hired the KEY programmers for much more money under one overall neutral organization.

Not Iidiots, just simpletons

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Let me add more – IT personnel is forced to study private companies’ views, principles and products instead of being educated in Informatics, Computer Science, etc. Science and scientific knowledge are expelled from our sphere of activities. Salesmen dictate anything and they call this “being aggressive on the market”, and what a paradox – aggressive persons are widely recognised as simpletons – by any reason and culture, aggressive merchants are highly respected!

Technical ignorance in management

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I’m very fortunate in that the Managing Director of the company I now work for is a competent electronics engineer and very knowledgeable about IT (and my immediate boss). My experience of many other companies’ IT departments is not good. Very simple programming tasks seem to be beyond them. Security is lax in reality yet they seem paranoid about security in other areas. Only today I received an attachment which contained personal credit card details which were irrelevant as far as the information I needed was concerned. I assume that the employers pay them peanuts and end up with monkeys because they haven’t a clue about what IT involves. Another problem is IT personnel get fired without any thought as to the experience and knowledge of the business that is being lost. My main complaint in every IT job I’ve ever done is unrealistic deadlines. I was once asked at a job interview whether I had ever finished writing a program and my reply was, “Yes, once!”.

WHY WHY WHY???

In reply to Technical ignorance in management

Is is this always the case? When will the hiring folks grow a REAL brain and have competent knowledge of IT so to hire competent people?Q??@?@???!??!@#?!@#?
@#?%@|?#%?@#$?%#?^$?@#^?#@?

Mr KnowITall

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I rather use an MCSE with 2 – 5 years practical experience than one of those Gods gift to mainkind college or university graduates. (meaning u Mr KnowITall)

Fully Agree

In reply to Mr KnowITall

Well said basie.venter……

The original posting is one of those usual offerings which states people with certs have no idea. A very negative posting i must admit!

Everybody has a learning curve, just because someone has a BSc/mcse/cne or whatever does not mean they know it all, these qualifications are generally only used to get a foot in the door. This is where the real learning starts, on the job. Experience is the most important thing. I agree, many mcse’s are c##p, but some use an mcse (or whatever cert) to get a start in user support so that they can get there IT career moving. What is so bad about this? The same goes for the BSc great to have but only to get started in the IT field where the real learning starts.

If there is something you are unhappy with, change it! Complaining about all the IT people you politely refer to as “idiots” will get you nowhere fast.

MCSE?

In reply to Mr KnowITall

This could be another whole topic and I believe it has been covered here before? certs.
I have a co-worker with MCSE certification. Doesn’t mean a darn thing.
He has no real comprehension of even the most basic workings of an OS and can never answer the simplest of questions from our end users.
Calls to him are forwarded to someone else on the helpdesk quite often because he can?t help them.
He studied for the test and passed. Big deal…
The frustrating part is that on paper he looks more “qualified” than the rest of us, when in fact he should be flipping burgers.

Its quite simple,

In reply to Mr KnowITall

I have never claimed to know it all nor will I ever put claim to that,
What I will say is what do you think you have to have to get a tech job at microsoft or ibm? It sure as hang aint MCSE no matter how much experience you have. Every successful large company has used people with degrees to get them ahead.

A degree is far more than a foot in the door it teaches you far more than just experience or experience + MCSE, People with MCSE know about the features that some of microsofts products offer, people with a degree can evaluate each vendor on thier merits and fitness to the organisation and provide a workable solution that is both cost-effective and non biased because this forms a part of thier extensive training.

I started mine with 30 people and there are only 3 left I dont know anyone who has failed MCSE! I’m not saying hire them just because they have a degree because there are other qualities that must be included in the package as well.

Still don,t agree

In reply to Its quite simple,

Sorry, still don,t agree.

I have a BSc in computing, I have an mcse, ccna,cna & security+. I have benefitted from all of them. With regard to my degree, although I learned many fundamental items, I have still learned far more from my work experience (with regards to getting the job done).

I would recommend to anyone that a degree is definately worth completing and is more important than certification. It is however still only a starting point (as are many certifications). Without on the job work experience one is definatley not qualified to manage a network (and any company who hires a graduate without experience to run their network is asking for trouble in my opinion).

With regards to an mcse not being a real qualification. Your assumption is based on what? Your bad experience with certain mcse qualified technicians I presume? I agree that many mcse’s are not worth the paper they are written on, there are however very many who are good! Furthermore, i have seen many job positions in NZ where the employers are looking for an mcse. And if the mcse is that easy (without all the cheatsheets, etc) then have a go. You will find the exams actually are very difficult if you don,t cheat your way through them.

fair enough

In reply to Still don,t agree

You have obviously done all that you can to further your education which is great and should be applauded as there are many that do not.

True one does need experience before they can effectively manage a network by themselves once they have completed thier degree, I dont see MCSE or other certs as a no go but too many people use them like they are degrees.

From last count MCSE here is only 22 days in total training for the course so it would be good to attend in that you can learn about more MS stuff, but I think for someone to use it to say “Im a system engineer” because they just have MCSE is a bit of a joke.

Yes there are no doubt many people who have just MCSE that are talented people but imagine what value they could bring to themselves and an organisation if they but gave themselves the highest possible training!!

I myself have good friends who are not degree qualified that do programming for local govt etc. They are extremely bright intelligent guys but if they furthered themselves through proper education thier talent could truly be let forth.

Yep, you are correct there

In reply to fair enough

I agree, these mcse bootcamps (get yout mcse in 2weeks or your money back) are definatley what is giving the mcse a bad rep. Even somebody who works full time in IT (and is well experienced)should take their time when studying for a certification. Simply passing as quickly as possible to earn more cash (but not actually knowing anything) can only end negatively. I took a year to pass my mcse.

By the way, my better half and I are heading to NZ for 4 weeks in December on holiday:-)Should be fun!!

Nice

In reply to Yep, you are correct there

Are you visiting Mount Maunganui? Best place to be in summer – smokin hot 🙂

Yep

In reply to Nice

Yep, thats on our itinery (as a LOR fan I am also looking forward to Hobbiton even if there isn’t much left of it to see).

“What I will say is what do you think you have to have to get a tech job at

In reply to Its quite simple,

Actually, I work for one of these companies so to answer your question, NOT a degree. From what I have observed, apptitude and passion for technology will serve you much better than a degree in IT/CS. In fact, when I first started (less than ten years ago)I had neither degree nor cert and I did just fine. Having seen other people both with and without degrees come in the door, I have found that there is very rarly much to choose between the two (so long as the person without the degree WANTS to learn). If a person demonstrates reliability, commitment, apptitude and a passion for technology, it’s not that hard to get alot of employers to pay for your education while you gain valueable experience.

Infant logic….

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

My CEO knows more about IT than IT-staff.
Why is that. Well he bought a computer from a coupon magazine.
He managed to plug all cables in the right places, and it seems to work.
So he managed to do what IT-staff cant – he made it work in less than a day!
So why can’t we get Novell, MS, *nix and what ever is in demand work as well…
Well, complexity might be a factor – but what do I know.

Reply To: Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I remember a saying which went something like “a consultant is someone who borrows your watch, charges you to tell you the time and then keeps the watch”.

We outsource very little IT contracts in my company mainly because anyone who has tried to sell us these services have always been found wanting. i.e. They cannot provide reasonable turnaround, have a very narrow range of skills (in one highly amusing case one company would only support Cisco kit and they were hoping to get our network maintenance contract) and were slow to adopt new technologies which meant our growth would have been stunted as we tend to be very leading edge with new technology.

Outsourcing IT can never hope to compete with having trained people onsite readily available. These people are up to speed on all the companies equipment and configuration, are aware of quirks within the system and don’t have to spend an entire morning doing “familiarisation” before tackling a problem.

Yup

In reply to Reply To: Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

people in the org know it better than anyone outside the org especially the lowly workers sweating on the floor they know more about the company than the CEO

Huge problem in South Africa

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

The problem we have in South Africa is that companies employ A+ techs as field engineers, and expect one or two so called experts to support them, and because of our past most of these techs grew up without basic knowledge of electricity and general DIY skills so they end up as board swappers and can not repair anything. People think that IT is the only place where you can make a reasonable living without having to study to hard, and that cause youngsters to enter IT with no skills or aptitude. Gone are the days when techs read every piece of info regarding IT to try and better themselves, these days they read music, car and bike mags instead, no passion for IT anymore

“Idiots” cost less

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Whoever “you” are, you may have replaced someone who was “more qualified” than yourself but, after “downsizing” and “right-sizing”, you got the job. Many are made to believe “our company could not get along without a super candidate” at hiring. If YOU are the one hired you tend to think everyone else was an “idiot”.

I’ve known plenty of “experts” who are “the smartest technicians in the world” who spend weeks researching a $25 product with NO consideration of the total cost of ownership or correlation to the CIO perspective. Their only concern is if Product A (for $95) is “better” than Product B (from a big company) or Product C that runs on Linux so It MUST be better than Product D that only costs $25.

Idiots costs less…………….today

In reply to “Idiots” cost less

I agree that so much software is bought because it is cheap in terms of acquisition and the TCO is…not understood by the “idiot” signing the cheques. One of the main reasons why IT departments spend their lives chasing their tails is because of this short-sighted attitude. If the IT dept. were allowed the resources to perform a proper PoC, before any purchase was made, they would spend far less time, in the long run, plugging leaks to the keep the whole setup afloat and far more time on proactive management and performance enhancement – for far less outlay to the company, certainly over the entire life-cycle of the application.
The problem with that attitude is that PoC costs are visible as are acquisition costs. The cost of maintaining one application within the framework of the company’s overall IT landscape is far easier to hide.

Really?

In reply to “Idiots” cost less

Lets look at the big picture,

There may in your opinion only $10.00 difference between two say AV’s per licence so your ROI is right then and there why research it take the cheaper one, BUT if you make the wrong choice here say hello to viruses, spyware, malware, downtime then work out how much that is going to cost you, if its a large org you could easily be looking at millions,

IT needs to be researched because the cost is not now its in the future when the s**t hits the fan where well researched products save thousands if not millions.

I know those fellas

In reply to “Idiots” cost less

I also know who bunch of proper business people who despite all information to the contrary from the IT professionals they hired, went ahead and bought a pile of crap because it was ‘cheaper’, to watch it turn into an outright disaster for all the reasons they were warned of in the first place. Still what do propeller heads know anyway, if they were clever they’d be managing business’ ?

Not really

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Management decide what to spend, and what to spend it on.

If this company has outsourced to the cheapest quote then guess what, they’re not training their staff on the best solutions for each situation.

They use windows because you can pretty much jump into a windows server, read a book, and have it running in a few days. Unix would be much harder, you’d need to know what your are doing for a start!

I’m not saying this windows server is running well – its probably full of security holes and as you said the design of the network – well it wasn’t designed was it? But it works, they paid nothing on training and don’t need experienced staff – and guess what – they still get paid!

Same goes for AV – yes the professional approach would be to design a testing methodology and compare several popular AV suites on these common factors then pick the best one a cost / performance base.

BUT…

Do you have a few weeks to do this properly? I doubt it. My choice of AV comes from the fact that 1) it works and 2) I’ve used the personal edition myself at home.

Where idiots and consultants rule

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Finally someone that might be more in touch with IT than others realise. I have been in IT for 28 years, working in a management role in later years, and have seen the cycles of IT come and go; from before the days of PCs, from the glass house, to distributed systems, from the demise of great companies that deserverd to survive (CDC, DG, DEC), from SNA, RS232 to IP, to the manical ramblings of so called university qualified “professionals” that have proved themselves worthy of reading text books and passing exams, to the over paid, and over rated consultants that are in truth, only IT hobbyists in between proper jobs.

Yes the IT world is ruled by idiots and consultants, and now I am paying for IT by relying on inexperienced staff that have no idea of what they are doing, but are good at quoting the sales manuals, and incapable of looking outside the 9 dots. In the 3rd world country which I now call home, appropriate technolgy is not applied to appropriate skills, but is a reflection of the selling skills of the engaged consulting specialists from a well developed nation that has the specialist’s contact cell numbers at their beck and call.

What am I doing about IT? Just sit back guys, have fun, enjoy life, dont get stressed out about IT, and pay off the mortgage. Your hourly rate is better than Doctors, so just take it easy.

g

The same in southamerica

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I think that after the buble a lot of wanna be tech entrepeneurs wanted to make a living on tech. There are a lot of people with no technical skills giving support, or are presented like tech experts.

Also we, IT professional are guilty, because we don’t protect our profession. People don’t understand technology, and we talk in technolang, so when some one explain in simple terms something probably him could sell better. We IT Pros must learn more about how to sell, explain how we add value to our costumers bussines.

Today is not enough to be certified and technically skilled, we also have to learn some marketing skills.

Users don’t want to do investigation, they want solutions, in a well done brochure solutions looks like silver bullets. We can do good brochures too, but telling the truth, explaining why things have the cost they have, and always add an analisys of how your solution could add value to the user’s business.

We can fight idiots, just we must change our speech, listen to the users, and show them our value, and the value we add.

Like you say.

In reply to The same in southamerica

But the problem is worse where I am, in that IT has become a control tool. I have encountered that companies hire their friends/family/political buddies in order to control

1. The gains derived from contracting IT consultants/workers.
2. The information availability/restriction control.

Technical abilities, qualifications or expertise is of no worth against this evil.

Bunch of Johnny-Come-Lately’s

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

What is a true sign of idiots is that you all are just realizing that this is a problem in IT. The real pros have been advocating professionalism and how stupid vendor certifications like MCSE’s are for over a decade. Welcome to the party. If you guys would have had a clue 10 years ago, we wouldn’t all be in the mess we are in now. Thanks for nothing.

The problem is largely of perception

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

…by ‘outsiders’

IT is still perceived by many as an easy way to make a lot of money.

In the UK we are bombarded by TV advertising that offers self-paced IT training – ‘train for IT qualifications that employers really want’ the theory being that anyone can come along and be taught to pass IT certification exams.

Now this may be true. To be honest, when I took my MCP and MCSE exams, it was perfectly possible to pass without ever having worked in IT if you had the type of mind that can relentlessly hoover up and regurgitate information the MS way.

This makes the quality of the certification hugely questionable.

I’ve been in IT nearly 10 years. I started off doing it on a part-time basis along with other duties because I was the person in the office who ‘knew about PCs’. As the company grew it became a full-time job and eventually I managed to persuade my employer to put me through my MCSE – although largely for my own benefit. So I am largely self-taught, and pretty proud of it.

I work with a guy who has a burning desire to get into IT. He has tried to get posted into my department on numerous occasions, but I have blocked this on the grounds that he does not have the necessary temperament or mindset to work in this environment.

If you give him a numbered list of steps in order to complete a necessary task then he will follow it to the letter. However, as soon as there is some out-of-the-box thinking required – for instance to solve a never-before-seen issue, he does not have the ability to do the analysis to at least have a starting point for problem solving.

Some of that comes with experience, I will not deny, but it is the thought processes and analysis that are at least as important to doing the job. Now he wants to get his MCSE, which I am sure he can get, but it doesn’t make him suitable to support even a small network.

There will always be a problem with ‘bad’ IT people. IT is more about approach and experience than certification in my opinion, but while IT is perceived as being an ‘easy’ option and certification is still easy to achieve there is nothing to stop them.

You have no idea

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

If all said is true, it isn’t even the tip of the iceberg.
No only are techies highly ignorant of the solutions they recommend, but foremost, usually those “solutions” are based on personal likeness and a corrupt culture of gifts and bribes, at least out here in South America.
I wouldn’t agree that technology certificates are a waste, but they certainly don’t hold water unless accompanied by a proper background based on experience and even better, formal academic degrees.
Nonetheless, we are in the midst of being overrun by idiots whose lip technique surpasses their real knowledge of the stuff they push.

Idiots for Idiots

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Idiot firms will buy services from Idiots and in turn deliver Idiot quality products for Idiots.

Fifty Fifty

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Hey, All fingers are not of the same size but definitely your comment represents a major group of IT Managers. Some funny facts about these ‘I’ community.

– Many times they dont know what they are saying.
– If they found experienced person in interview, they will protect their future by saying that u r more experienced.
– If they are getting old then they will say that they want more young candidates to work with them..
– They will always say that ‘Don’t make a fool by saying that it is not possible. Every thing is possible’
– They will try to explain some ‘Great logic’ for software programming or future planning in IT dept.

And many other but still I feel that it will be injustice to comment like this, based upon your experience with ‘Single’ instance.

Nothing New Here!

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I have been in IT since the late 1950’s and I honestly don’t see anything new about your comments or complaints. People have been saying for years, if only we could educate “Management” on how IT complexity, skills, difficulty etc. then our jobs would be a lot easier.

Give it up. That is part of the territory of IT and the management is not about to get into all those details of IT Technology. If you want to manage IT and have probably more support than you desire, then work in Engineering or Research IT. However, these folks think they understand all technologies, so be prepared for all types of advise, most of which will be wrong.

Enjoy yourself, you are in a unique field and people do respect you more than you can realize.

Life is short, smell the roses. This is coming from a guy who has done many all nighters working on networks, servers etc. As recently as this August.

Like I say, enjoy yourself and quit complaining before you give the IT Profession a worse reputation than it has all ready.

Midnite…..

Is this post an example?

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

NZ,
This post is actually posed as a question but is actually a self serving question. You ask a question and then attempt to answer it anecdotally, but in truth your answer speaks more volumes than you know…lets take a look at several of your statements…

You said, “People dont recognise the skill and training that goes into a degree in IT and would rather trust MCSE which is not even NZQA accredited so in truth is not a qualification.”

Ummm – Sure they do. Employers ALWAYS respect a degree. Certification however, indicates proficiency with a particular product. You then go on to say that MCSE is not even a qualification because it is not “NZQA” (New Zealand Quality Assurance?)Rated. Guess what? An employer sets the qualifications for the position! If the Company says an MCSE is a req, then thats just the way it is…tough luck! It sounds like you have a degree in IT but dont have a cert…sour grapes? passed over for promotion?

Why do sales people sell a product? Simple, because they work for the company/distributor that handles the product…If I worked for Ford, would I be selling Chevys?? Your complaint there is simply ridiculous.

Finally, I have a difficult time considering the syntax and spelling of your post, that you even possess a higher degree. When you get right down to it your complaint is nothing but a Microsoft bashing session disguised as a valid complaint. Nice try, but you would be better advised to get off your duff and get the MCSE – that after all, seems to be the crux of the issue here….

As MCSE I disagree with your post.

In reply to Is this post an example?

I am an MCSE and have the same gripe regarding non MS products. Take the latest craze, freeware.

Wake up people you dont even get trouble for free.

I find that IT staff both with degrees and product certifications alike face the same problem.

It is middle and top management who have to cover their butts. They need to perform from a financial point of view and will do so short term. Once they take the next rung on the ladder the buck is passed to the new individual to fight the fires.

We in IT need to, perhaps spend more time getting sales and management training in order to better manage our bosses than we do our systems, pc’s, mainframes or pda’s.

NO other job/work/career in the world is less defined, structured or established than IT.

I still believe, when door to door sales went out of fashion, most of those salespeople turned to IT.

Reply To: Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

In reply to As MCSE I disagree with your post.

Good point,

All too often I find myself as a,

jack of all trades
master of none.

Anything even remotely electronic(not even IT) and I am being put to task to take care of it. I have even done work on the Air Condition system at work.

so I find myself being put to task on things that I have little experience in just because I am IT.

I notice that people see IT in one of two ways;

Either

a: It is relatively easy and anyone can do it
b: as an IT person you are a genious and can do anything at all in the IT field.

just because I can build out a well running efficient network does not mean I know anything more than basic SQL language, or reprogram our websites and applications to Flash and ColdFusion.

Excellent reply

In reply to Is this post an example?

well said, no more needs saying!

It has an example in it

In reply to Is this post an example?

NZQA is the New Zealand Qualification Authority which is the legal body that decides what constitutes a qualification and what does not.

I have met many MCSE’s and the like that know Jack about Microsoft products and how they work so I dont see how your statement of “proficiency with a particular product” stands up.

Sour grapes? LOL only when they arn’t ripe.

He who trusts soley a salesmans tounge is welcome to the trouble it brings.

Since when did spelling have anything to do with what this topic is about? Nice try at discrediting but stick to the facts here! Whats right fi or endif – it depends

This is no MS bashing statement and why should it be that? Its about people and incompetence , and I think I will continue on with a masters rather than MCSE next, thanks for the sales pitch though.

Sure its MCSE Bashing…

In reply to It has an example in it

I didnt see where you said you have met many qualified MCSE’s, whose skills and knowledge you respect…Yes you mentioned certification in a broad statement, then you focused on MCSE’s as an example…

Sure its MCSE Bashing…

In reply to It has an example in it

I didn’t see where you said that you have met many qualified MCSE’s, whose skills and knowledge you respect…Yes you mentioned certification in a broad statement, then you focused on MCSE’s as an example…

You are trying to juxtapose having a degree versus having a cert…It is not an “either/or” proposition.

Let me ask you, if you manufactured a product, who would you want to employ to service and rep the product…since I mentioned Cars before, lets use the same analogy….

Lets say I own a Ford Dealership, In the US, mechanics are ASE Certified. Does that mean the mechanic is automatically qualified to work on Fords? BMW’s? How about Land Rovers? Maseratis?

The ASE certification is analogous to your higher degree….

Of course the answer is that these manufacturers have special training seminars, manuals, certifications and tools that are particular to their product. The mechanics who work on these products are REQUIRED (by the dealership, ie, the employer) to successfully complete the product certification in order to remain employed. Why do you seem to have such a hard time with this concept?

Instead, you seem to go after the very people who have achieved their product certification saying that they are “Idiots” who rule IT.

I say in response that YOU are NOT qualified to make that assessment. These are people who completed the manufacturers requirements for DEMONSTRATING proficiency in the product to the MANUFACTURER or the TESTING AUTHORITY – No one had to prove anything to YOU nor are you in a position to judge the skills of others, in the vacuum of making the same acheivement (note by the way the simple rule employed…”i before e except after c.” thus making me appear to be literate.)

The final note to this sad complaint of yours is that I have no sympathy for whiners and complainers, You are simply part of the solution or part of the problem and judging by the negative energy, derision and condecension that was literally dripping off of your original post, I have a hard time believing (there’s that i,e thing again, holy cow it works!)that you are a positive contributor to your IT dept.

Too bad

No actually its not

In reply to Sure its MCSE Bashing…

I have no problem with extra training ie MCSE what I have a problem with is idiots that don?t have a clue, don?t do research, don?t further themselves, and generally make an absolute c@@k up of everything.

Note also these mechanics must already have their highest level of qualification before being allowed on these courses so I fail to see how this lends any credit to your argument.

In NZ these precious people who make out they are so great because they have MCSE, and NOTHING ELSE by the way, are tearing companies to pieces, costing schools and non-profits thousands more than they need to and generally not providing anything decent in the way of IT support because they are so caught up in only giving what Microsoft or any other large vendor for that matter tells them to give.

I once had some fool (Who ran an IT company) tell me that Linux/Unix was an amateur?s operating system… This guy obviously has no clue as to what runs some of the world?s most high powered super computers… Every OS has its place, every PD course has its place but it?s a matter of perspective and how you use and further your skills that counts.

But as one person above pointed out they are the reason myself and many others make allot of money so hay.

In Addition:
1. Imagine the potential that many IT pros could climb to if they got the proper training and used it appropriately, but sadly many are happy to sit in their own world hoping no-one will ask them to further themselves. – Perhaps this pertains to you?

2. By the way before you criticize my spelling take a look at your own Mr. “condecension” the correct spelling is “condescension” – Like I said find something a little more substantial to argue your point with next time, your wasting my time with trivial arguments.

3. And… Your precious I before the e except after c rule does not always work in NZ, not every country spells everything the same in the English language. Not to mention a pathetic point to try and pick up on – try something a little better next time

The Situation in Germany is worse

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

IT in Germany started out with punch cards.
The people in the organisition who were considered to be the least valuable were relegated to this job.
This attitude has not changed even today. 95 % of the IT Managers in Germany are not IT Educated, but are people who are qualified in other walks of life( such as finance or law. I have not met a single IT Manager in my 30 Years of IT experience who is can write a program or who can give a qualified opinion on Hardware. They all have their ‘specialists’ who do their technical thinking for them.
Therefore it is no wonder that they are ready to accept shoddy practice from Vendors.
Firms such as SAP, IBM and Microsoft don’t have a problem in siphoning large amounts of revenue from Firms who are their customers, since such managers who are basically insecure look for security in numbers and buy from large vendors.( Lemmings do the same, plunging in the sea.)

..2nded

In reply to The Situation in Germany is worse

I work for the UK arm of a German company and this is soooo true.

All too often the decision is in favour of ‘big’ names without any real thought being given to the fact that often the solution presented is too complex and either:
a)doesn’t really address the issue in the 1st place, or
b)requires consultancy support for the rest of the lifetime of the software

The general perception in the UK is that it is safer to make the ‘easy’ decision in favour of a well-known product as there is perceived to be a smaller chance of the outright failure of the project.

It has been asserted that this is due to an inherent sense of CYA-syndrome, and coming from a company where rank and power is measured in 1/2mm increments on the org chart, I have some sympathy with that.

moderating that thought…

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

It’s a fact that like techs, most doctors fall prey to the same kind of marketing and reaction to questions of what to “prescribe” for given conditions. It’s up to dedicated IT service professionals to be informed and make choices. And let’s not kid ourselves. In any field providing services, there’s going to be someone who does the same thing, whether medical, IT, auto service, etc.

Instead of being frustrated by it, which solves nothing, inform yourself. Have at the ready not just what product you’d use in a given situation, but why you’d use it too. You might score points at an interview or with a customer by giving a lucid reason why brand A is better than brand b in a given situation, instead of “because they’re the best”.

As it was once said by Mark Twain, “Let us be thankful for fools; but for them, the rest of us could not succeed.”

idiocy is almost universal

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I am not an IT professional, just a retired mathematician never employed in academia. Three out of four companies I worked at were sick in the sense that a disturbing proportion of managers was interested primarily in expanding their own empires. Competency becomes a secondary matter and the result is idiotic professional behavior. My worst experience was with my last employer. A project manager wanted an improvement to a standard statistical test for acceptance of a classified system, because the customer didn’t like the one proposed. He wouldn’t tell me what it was that the customer didn’t like nor let me talk to any customer’s representative who did know what the objection was. I eventualy found out, long after the fact, that it was a simple matter of customer dissatisfaction with the balance between the probabilities of a good system failing and a bad system being accepted. It should have been maybe a week’s work writing a report with a simple explanation and some simple examples. It dragged on for a couple of months with me trying to guess what the customer might conceivably be objecting to about a standard hypothesis test. I am convinced that the project manager didn’t have even the remotest idea of what the customer actually wanted. The company – Norden Systems – no longer exists. Another of the sick companies disappeared years ago. The third still exists, but no longer receives contracts of much importance.

There is also, of course, the instance of the top U. S executive office.

idiots

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I wouldn’t take advise from some of the village idiots,It seems that it is easy to put anything on your resume (but can you do the work, BIG IF!!!). My boss who doesn’t know anything about computers.(Token.) She doesn’t have a clue and keeps hiring idiots. the last one stole $1200 worth of stuff, said he was a college grad, (bull hockey)and she wouldn’t do anything(she is doing the same thing) The next one says he is a Network Engineer, (bull again) he doesn’t even know where to go to change network settings. They both expect me to train them, but I am the one going to school not them.They go home and put PJ’s on. I have documented the network and everything for them, but my boss thinks I should tell her how I fix things how I troubleshoot. What do you think? I don’t feel I should be doing all the work in figuring out the problem then tell my boss how to do it. There has to be a law? I could go on. I think it is time to move on..

sounds like you are working too hard

In reply to idiots

teach and troubleshoot? thats two entirely different fields and your pay should be doubled accordingly 🙂

She would probably never understand anyway, use lots of TLA’s and watch it all wash over her vacant expression, she will eventually give up pestering you and let you get on with your job.

Get stuck into those lazy bulls and if they want you to teach them make them work 3 times as hard as you are

IT Departments are Zoo Keepers

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

As IT consultants we have become increasingly frustrated with an apparent increase in the lack of knowledge in customer IT departments. Without giving chapter and verse, if it’s not rows in a database table they don’t understand it. It seems they get certified in a tool, e.g., Microsoft, Oracle or whatever, and then all they know is the care and feeding of that beastie. We work mostly with business units, and it is the kiss of death if the IT department gets stuck in.

A techie isn’t always a techie

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I think there are two big problems in IT (not the only two, but two that pertain to this discussion)
First: There are people in IT that have gotten there by dumb luck. They happened to do something or be involved with something that happened and some Manager/Director said “you should be in IT” so they went into IT. And through knowing the politics of the company have remained there for years without really knowing IT. This also applies to people who got their IT positions through attrition.

Second: People who got into IT because they thought they could make a lot of money in IT. And since they could keep their computer running they figured they could do that with everyone elses. Most of these people don’t last long but you do find those that catch that niche market of people that believe they are the best thing since sliced bread. Until they happen accross a “real” techie and are blown away by what can be done.

We should all quit.

In reply to A techie isn’t always a techie

We could teach them all very fast by organizing a walkout…LOL.
Let’s see who gets the 3.5mil bonus and a new house.

IT is respectively a new practice.

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

In the scheme of things IT has not been around for that long. It will take many years for the professionals in our field to know everything that is going on all of the time. The constantly changing tools that are used in the field also make it difficult to stay current with accurate information. 50 years down the road, there will be lot more good IT professionals in the field and training will be more accurate and efficient. Patients everyone, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

The same in southamerica

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I think that after the buble a lot of wanna be tech entrepeneurs wanted to make a living on tech. There are a lot of people with no technical skills giving support, or are presented like tech experts.

Also we, IT professional are guilty, because we don’t protect our profession. People don’t understand technology, and we talk in technolang, so when some one explain in simple terms something probably him could sell better. We IT Pros must learn more about how to sell, explain how we add value to our costumers bussines.

Today is not enough to be certified and technically skilled, we also have to learn some marketing skills.

Users don’t want to do investigation, they want solutions, in a well done brochure solutions looks like silver bullets. We can do good brochures too, but telling the truth, explaining why things have the cost they have, and always add an analisys of how your solution could add value to the user’s business.

We can fight idiots, just we must change our speech, listen to the users, and show them our value, and the value we add.

Well you are right The idiots rule our lives

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

It seems that common sense has lost its significance and The word creativity has disappeared from the face of the earth leading to Believe The IT men are gods resulting in degenerating of life itself.

Muralidhar

Thanks to the cert craze

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

People who were truck drivers five years ago and never owned a computer bought into the whole “Certify and make a fortune” pitch. Fortunately hard times have shook some of them out of the tree, but enough got into management to make it hard to survive for someone who knows what they are doing. The business users listen to managers, because they don’t understand those of us that understand the technology. They feel more comfortable with others that don’t understand.

Case in point, my old boss. Was a real estate agent (The last easy money boom) before getting into IT. Didn’t have a lick of technical ability. Once unplugged a switch to give to another location before bothering to check if anyone was connected to it. His response to the 132 users he put offline? “Figure it out, I already promised so and so they could have this.”

This was two weeks after he decided to assign our gateway address a network printer he was installing for an executive. Then he told us to just change the Gateway, because he didn’t want this exec to lose his printer for even a second.

Never mind that the exec lost his email, database access, financial reports access, etc. At least he had his printer. Which, oh yeah, DIDN’T WORK EITHER.

I bet you had fun

In reply to Thanks to the cert craze

when you had that exec breathing down your neck wanting to know where all of his other stuff went

vendors Rule supreme

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

The idiots do not but on the contrary very savvy marketers rule it. They by pass the IT and its CIO and approach the CEO with promises to save millions and backed by Ivy league studies. Now we only want to please-survival of the fittest. Who will tell the emperor that he has no clothes?

Well, yeah…

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Of course idiots rule. People who have technical skills can’t be promoted into management — they’re needed where they are.
As for the professional manager class, the pointy-haired technical and ethical moron of the Dilbert comic strip is based on a stereotype that has roots in reality.
Yes, there are some competent managers out there, but sadly a significant plurality (if not a majority) are utterly clueless, flying by the seat of their pants because they have no actual connection with reality. All they have is a completely arbitrary GANTT chart, and equally arbitrary budget based on articles in trade rags and unrealistic assumptions.

Sorry, but a significant number of “managers” are just people who have learned how to game the system to advance their own position whose only real skills are self-promotion, butt kissing, squelching the voice of conscience and office intrigue.

Sorry to be so cynical, but down here in the trenches we have to live in the real world, unlike so many who are in management.

TBG

The Delusion of Intelligence subtracts from the Quest for Excellence

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

From the outside, at this institution, a medium size hospital in a city, it appears that we have a bunch of Netasaurius Dictasauriases. It’s our system, and we’ll help when we’re darn ready. Being the pharmacy computer contact, it has been very frustrating to watch projects remain unresolved for up to 6 months, even with 2 month lead time. I have taken the view that my IS department is made up of pompous jerks. I believe that the knowledge level here intimidates them, so they fight back by stonewalling. I checked with the fellow who had my position before, and he said this has been going on for 10 years.

On the bright side, it means I don’t have to work as hard. My excuse: I’m waiting on IS. Since they don’t function any better for my boss, I can get away with slacking, and they carry the blame. Haha. Then, I only have to assuage my own desire for excellence, with the fact that I’m living slower.

Idiots Rule????

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I know that in my field, if I didn’t research a product that I recommended to a client, I would not be in business very long.
You have to give every client 100% or you are out!!
Research is a must, but competition drives the need for research.

No Question About IT

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

IT uses the lowest skilled of tech workers, those working in the HelpDesk are even lower skilled than those in the back room. Are you surprised IT is viewed as a pain in the rear?

True

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

It all those 30something year olds who run IT shops and do not have a clue about management or what technology can do for an organization. They just know technology but they do not have the experience to manage technology. They have no idea how to make a business case for technology. Sad but true.

How it all came to be……

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Sometime around the late 1980’s or early 1900’s, in an obcure MBA class, an idea was floated that “Why can’t an SBA do the job of a System Administrator?”. One large IT support company caught on to this idea (name left out intentionally). They sold the idea to their customers to save money. The idea caught on Globally.

Now read about all the problems in IT, all over the world, and you will understand how this field came to rely on none Technical Personnel to run their IT Departments.

You will also understand why there is a perceived shortage of good IT Tech’s coming into this field.

Too True

In reply to How it all came to be……

There have been several discussions on the topic of non-IT managers in IT departments. Managers seem to think that there’s nothing technical about managing technical staff. My response as an IT staff person has always been, “Would you hire an English major to head the accounting department?”

so true

In reply to Too True

🙂

Paying the price

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

My local school district recently underwent a major IT upgrade. As a volunteer member of the district Technology Infrastructure Committee, my advice was sought for proper hardware, software, etc., to meet current (and future) network demands. Not only did the superintendent completely ignore my recommendations, but also ignored expert in-house talent during the upgrade planning process. The superintendent instead chose to use the services of a non-responsive company (Tek Connect) to install equipment (at a much higher cost) that not only did not meet the need of current demands, but had no room for future expansion. The superintendent quit (before the project was complete) to work for a much larger district (more $$$$$). The district now is looking at having to purchase another server to safeguard administrative information, because the (new) current equipment is not capable of any additional tasking. My small rural town is forgiving, but asking to forgive blatant arrogance is a pretty tall order.

All boils down to “pay me now or pay me later”. In this case, both exist in the time tick.

‘Dilbert’ comes to life!

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Sadly, the majority of these posts could have been taken straight from the pages of any ONE of Scott Adam’s infamous ‘Dilbert’ cartoons! The bottom line is that IT projects/support are predominately driven by middle management possessing little – if any – actual ‘real world’ technical expertise. Until this situation is changed you will always have a world where mission critical IT decisions are driven by faulty budgets and slick marketing – NOT by solid, tested technical research.

Always the same

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

It has always been this way, not just in the IT field.

I have watched companies who had no staff or equipment place a bid to provide services and after winning the contract they went into a hiring frenzy following the advice of the new hires for what was needed to comply with the contract.

These new hires didn’t have a clue about their fellow workers or customers and pushed for what they wanted, not what would work best for the customers. And, these ad-hoc Service Companies were bragged about by their customers, who had no idea of what was really going on, for the fantastic job thay were doing.

It didn’t matter what they were actually capable of other than making the customers believe they were receiving outstanding services for the price.

Welcome to the World of Capitalism.

Whaaa…?

In reply to Always the same

Are you retarted? Capitalism caused this? Keep on sucking down that genius juice and explain to me which *ism would have stopped this from happening.

…Here’s your sign…

Hey, it’s good for you!!!

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Hey NZBN,

I come across with these “idiots” often and when they mess up, they come back crying to me for help.
Think about it this way, if those guys are really smart, they would not need us to fix their issues.
Just check and hope that they have money left to pay you after they blew the funds on the previous vendors and strip clubs!!! 😛

– AJ

lol

In reply to Hey, it’s good for you!!!

I spose it is in a way, 🙂

Cheers 🙂

Applying Home Mentality To Office

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

My biggest problem isn’t the argument that “anyone’ can do it – it’s getting people in small biz networks, (3-15 computers with a server) where your are NOT onsite everyday, to stop thinking their office computers are their OWN. The IT guy or gal is just there to fix their breaktime escapades…after all, how dare you put security/road blocks in place??

Same Old Sh*t, Different Thread

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I get so tired of reading these posts that bash this IT cert or that degree or this experience level.

The simple truth is this: Some people can have no degree and no cert but have the opportunity with the right job (and the natural ability) to allow them to learn and experience a tremendous amount in a year or two. Some folks, on the other hand, could have 3 degrees, multiple IT certifications and be clueless (though it is, of course, unlikely). Degrees are earned through hard-work and dedication to following through on a goal and certs are not that different. Neither teaches that much about practical on-the-job IT skills or how the IT world relates to an organization’s larger business goals (and how to get the two to cooperate). Anyone who can’t understand this last point or work towards figuring out the reality that in today’s business world those two things are mutually inclusive, is doomed to be at the help-desk or in their unhappy positions forever.

The best IT people in the world, in my experience, (12 years in IT, MCSA, MCSE, A+, N+, S+, CCNA, BSc, IT Manager experience and now working in another field), are the ones who don’t waste time complaining about who has what qualifications and how unfair this or that situation is. The best people work hard to gain experience, understand that certifications are often very helpful (even if not a true indicator of ability) and sometimes even go after the degree to further their career opportunities. You won’t find that many people complaining about all of the pros and cons of one approach over another because they either pursue all of them or understand that it is pointless to bitch about something that you are too lazy or otherwise unable to work toward.

Those that have VALID complaints about management or co-workers and have half a brain usually know that the little IT guy isn’t going to change their big company. These professionals either take the steps to affect change (i.e., get a degree to get into management) or go somewhere else. After all, there are plenty of people in IT (as well as in management) who LIKE their jobs (though you wouldn’t know it from a lot of these posts). The best all-around people usually find themselves in these positions or are working towards getting there.

My point? If you are concerned about your career, your managers, your qualifications, etc., quit wasting time jealously sniping at the different types of IT qualifications. Start working towards what will help you and try hard to gain every shred of experience possible. All of it helps!! If you don’t like your company or your managers, make yourself attractive and get another job!

I Agree

In reply to Same Old Sh*t, Different Thread

I’m graduating this Dec. AS/CNS (tech school)
I’m going for my A+ soon & studying for my CCNA.
1 year ago I got my first job in tech support in a outsourcing co. for a major ISP. What a valuable lesson! The main problem I saw was the people they hired to “train” didn’t have a clue how basic networks work, let alone how to get customers PC’s to connect & stay connected. And they didn’t care! All they wanted was a job. These new so called “techs” created more work for the real techs, along with tension.I just kept plugging along, kept my mouth shut, taking callbacks, sometimes a customer was calling for the fourth/fifth time, and resolving problems. I get satisfaction from problem solving and my supervisor saw that. W/I 6 months I was put in a special queue.
My point is if you like what you do, get really good at it(it takes time). Then go to the next level. I want to make more money and work at a place that I can gain more experience, and now am,but I also realize that patience, studying to gain new skills, and focusing on MY job performance will eventually lead to that. Stay positive, learn new skills and it’ll come!

Not exactly

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Well,@ my location it’s more like the bench guys are maybe 19-21 years old,and us network guys are 40+,a really good balance and we get along great.The bench like it when I discuss techniques with a deep electronics background,something they haven’t had time to develop-especially importatnt when we live in Florida with its’ lightning dangers.Everyone here is allowed to stand or fall on their merits and idiots would have a hyper-short tenure.

I AGREE, but

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I experience the idiocy of some IT people daily. I am currently a laid off Probation Officer in Illinois and attend Net Admin classes at a local college. I frequently have contact with IT people who can’t tell me what the acronym SMTP means, etc. These guys have 45-50K/year jobs and I can’t get anyone to hire me when I admit I know little and would flourish with some on the job training and real world scenarios. I have a college education in another disipline and am willing to pay my dues to learn, but mgmt. would rather have someone who claims they can do the stuff while they cram over the info every night before going to work. I’m not willing to lie about my competencies so it leaves me in the dust even though I have a very strong interest.

Rant?

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

This seems to me to be merely a rant, and unworthy of this forum as I have come to know it.

There are good eggs and bad eggs everywhere you go. I think the members have taken this in a good direction by pointing out the underlying flaw in coorporate IT strategy, that flaw being the lack of funding that is so often found.

Another good point is the problems with the NZQA, which according to research seems to be doing a pretty good job of running off qualified professionals by failing to recognize (pay for) credentials that individuals obtained elsewhere other than NZ. However, I don’t live there so I am not directly effected.

However, you can’t just say “IT in such-and-such a place (country) are idiots!” Generalizations such as this serve to discredit the IT industry as a whole.

-John

Idiots don’t rule IT….

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

just IT-related discussion boards.

proof in the pudding

In reply to Idiots don’t rule IT….

caught one of the idiots 😉

NZQA Accredited

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Sorry to interupt the rants but since NZQA accreditation appears to be New Zealand specific does someone want to enlighten the rest of the world with the details?

I Googled NZQA

In reply to NZQA Accredited

And discovered that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority doesn’t appear to recognise an MA from Oxford University. I gave up reading about them after that – life’s too short.

Still, NZ’s got nice scenerey. Shame there’s no more Lord of the Rings films to make so we’ll probably forget all about NZ again.

NZQA

In reply to I Googled NZQA

Does not recognise other countries degrees and the likes mainly because there are too many differing degrees and methods world wide to validate them all, the other is legal, can you imagine an accountant trained in one side of the world looking after the accounts of a company in another country – CHAOS unless trained in NZ many professional fields lack the knowledge they need to practice in the NZ market just as an accountant from here would lack the working knowledge of American accountancy, — different laws.

Thankfully IT is pretty cross boundary in this sense so you would be pretty much safe in the knowledge that your quals will be recognised in the industry as they should be.

My point is

In reply to NZQA

You have an organisation which exists in order to rationalise standards between NZ and the rest of the world – a worthwhile cause. However, if this is the case then I would at least expect them to be cognisant of the standard of degrees issued by the most prestigious university in Britain (sorry, Cambridge). If they can’t manage that then what use are they?

Answer: None!

Neil 🙂

ps. I like Kiwis. You are [b]not[//b] Australian and that counts for a lot! Though, being Welsh, I’m a bit p:ssed at the hammering your guys gave mine at Rugby.

It probably comes down to budget again :)

In reply to My point is

for thier reason of not doing everything, budgets, management and time, They serve thier purpose here but I definitly agree there needs to be a body that is capable of corrolating degrees for countries into a equivelant standard so that we can all cross borders and have our qualifications recognised.

I think we all got p:ssed that night 🙂
We have a common pet hate, the aussies 🙂 I could go on for days with sheep harrassing jokes directed at those decendants of criminals but thats another topic all together 🙂 Ruggers is our national sport so I would hope we were good at it 🙂

LOTR

In reply to I Googled NZQA

Pity Lord of the rings made more sales, money and fame than that American movie The Matrix aye 😛

Look out for KING KONG yet another NZ made movie, or perhaps HalfLife another Peter Jackson (New Zealander) piece of brilliance! 🙂 😛

???

In reply to LOTR

Lord of the Rings as well as King Kong are American films. New Line (formerly Time Warner) is Lord of the Rings and King Kong is Universal. They are born American Film Studio companies.

A lot of American film studios have directors and producers from all over the world. I saw an American film recently that was directed by a chinese director. Does that mean that is a chinese movie now?

The latter two Matrix movies sucked balls.

in the States

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Well here in the states, about 7 to 8 years ago if you knew how to turn on your computer you could get an position in IT.

The market exploded and there was a vast need to fill positions. There definetly seemed to be an incredible demand and a small supply. Which is why I am sure that so many people went into IT.

I remember interviews for jobs, and being asked the most rudimentry of questions such as “How would you search for a file if you only knew the name of it?”. After I answered the question the interviewer tells me I would be surprised at how many applicants did not know the answer.

I guess what I am getting at is that it seems to be just a phase the market is going through. Once cut backs start happening in IT, hopefully the incompetent people, will find themselves needing to look for something else to do. Unfortuneatly politics also plays a role.

The Simple Reason…

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

…Isn’t money directly, or laziness, but one or both often are deeply involved. Many people in charge or making buying decisions don’t know enough to make a good judgement, and they don’t want to learn. So they start with the assumption that all solutions are probably equal, or the assumption that the Big Names got to be where they are because of their quality.

If all solutions are equal, then there’s no reason to buy any but the cheapest.

If the Big Names got to where they are becauswe their quality exceeds all others, then as long as their price is tolerable, they are the best solution.

Either approach requires exceptionally little thought or learning, making the ‘zecutive’s rough life a little less complex.

NZQA!!!

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I agree with what you are saying but I cannot agree that NZQA is a valid qualification. I am a self taught techie. And I consider mself to be as good as someone with a degree. I am just a young guy with 2 years Active director, Linux, MS Server 2k3. And a small amount of novell know how. But NZQA is a laugh. I think the only way to learn computers is to do computers. Not study NZQA papers..

exactly right!

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Idiots rule? You got that right! Of idiots, by idiots, and for idiots and it ain’t just in IT. I haven’t read all the posts but I’ve read enough of them to get a good idea. ApolloCDR said it good, that most management thinks this stuff is all magic and it just “works” and that “anybody can do it”. We are a service company and I can’t even tell you how many times I have heard “so and so’s high school kid can do this” or “I have a degree in computer science and I know a lot about computers” from people that think that anybody that can install a modem or MS Office can setup and run a network. We see this every day, we fight it every day and I for one am about at the point that I’d just say to hell with it and let them all fend for themselves but the sad thing is they are all connected to the internet and what they do effects us all in one way or another. The sad fact is that most of them want something for nothing, real life doesn’t work that way, it never has, you get what you pay for (sometimes). If you want to go out and hire know nothings with half the alphabet after their name well then that is what you get and when your e-mail doesn’t work, you just lost all your company files, and half the world is using your server to operate their porn site from well that’s what you deserve. And you know the worst thing about the above worst case scenario? The “victim” will defend their “expert” to the death no matter how many ways you show them what they did was not only wrong but completely incompetent!! Are our company’s engineers and technicians experts? No, and we don’t claim to be!! Are we good at what we do? Damn right! Anybody that claims to be an expert makes me suspicious right off the bat because I know better than that, ain’t nobody an expert at this stuff and anybody that says they are is lying and the more letters in the alphabet they have after their name makes me that much more suspicious of their competence.

Jackie McCracken
President and CEO
JackTel, Inc.

What Are They Being Taught?

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I teach IT at a major private university, and I can tell you that the students are not being taught the foundational skills needed for successful performance within the IT professions. Some students want to learn, but the curriculum is so bad that they can’t learn. Some students just want a degree, and don’t care how they get it. Most of them wind up employed in the IT field, many as “idiot” managers. We should no longer be surprised at the inanity we see all around us.

nail on the head

In reply to What Are They Being Taught?

Boy did you hit the nail on the head!!! We’ve been trying to hire a tech for the past three months and had just about given up until one just “fell in our lap” about a week ago. I can not tell you how many “degreed” types we talked to that didn’t know anything and I do mean anything, basic things like what DNS or DHCP are much less the purpose of them and then to find somebody that knew what a Windows Server looked like or what Group Policy is…

The schools need to start teaching the basics, that we can work with. I know from experience that the schools can’t teach you everything and a lot of training is still required and I accept that because every real life situation is different but a good foundation in the basics would be extremely helpful from our perspective.

Jackie McCracken
President and CEO
JackTel, Inc.

It just didn’t start lately…..

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Back in 1997 I watched a “new IT manager” destroy an R&D organization. He was from the parent company that had just purchased our R&D outfit. He told all the scienists and engineers that the VAX 8800 and FPS 164 were too expensive to maintain and that they would be replaced with networked IBM PCs.

Well all new work or research came to a dead halt while everyone re-wrote Fortran and C code that would run on the new array…. After a year, while most codes were still being de-bugged – the IT manager pulled the plug on the big-iron. The result was a total distaster, we lost contracts right and left as “trusted outputs” no longer were there, manufacturing was making products that could not meet spec because of math or logic errors still in the material properties specification and design optiumizing routines. It was all downhill from there as management backed him up…. saying this was the wave of the future and we were going to be on it….. right…. the company ended up very downsized and moved out of state. So, in this case both the IT manager and upper management…. all got themselves “laid-off” as the company downsided as the parent company replaced almost all of them as a result. Now that takes a real set of idiots, to do that to yourself. But, hey, he played Golf with the rest of the Upper Hallway Guys…. So, his opinion carried the most weight….. right!

Do you really think things are different

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I’m an old codger from the States, but I still remember the old rule of thumb for IT back in the 60’s and 70’s, “No one every got fired for buying IBM”. In other words, many IT people are so afraid of their upper management, that they will go with the big boy on the block or whoever upper management thinks is best, no matter what they really believe or know to be true.

Let’s Not Confuse The Issues

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Idiots come with lots of variations:
Salespeople who sell products and services they don’t have the capacity to understand to your management who doesn’t understand either….. Also, there are other dynamics at work which make the “best” result subject to interpretation, i.e. a best result might be: “it uses hardware and software we understand”, or “we’re buying the solution from a friend of mine”, or, your I.T. managment having “religion” about what a best solution results from. (for example, who the hell would choose Siebel over ANY other database solution, including flat file). See what I mean? If you aren’t prepared to bite it and play along, then you need to look for another sandbox.
You’ll sleep better when you do, and you can be someone else’s idiot. “-)

Welcome to HELL

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

This sounds so familiar… like eating my lunch after throwing it up several times. Sorry for being so crude; but after 17 years in the IT business and working in many different countries, in many different environments –> from the Director of IT all the way down to the lowliest BOFH graveyard shift tech, I have experienced numerous examples of vendors and sales persons outright LYING to management of the company I was employed at about the service or software of that particular salesperson?s intent to sell us, hyping my bosses up with all that flashy sales pitch crap, or offering amazing pricing on T-1?s, only to find out that you cant use the product between the hours of? and try calling customer service about it to complain? HA! RTFM (and the fine print of the LSA?)

?IT? seems as though a person?s (or companies) word these days can be bought and sold like a used car. After the sale? all is forgotten. What ever happened to the days when a man?s (or woman?s for that matter!) word was his or her reputation and was the foundation upon which was built business relationships and a successful enterprise? Is it really all about the $$$? After successfully building a thriving consulting business (working 20 hours a day) where if I gave my word, the customer could be damn sure that they would be delivered what I promised ? OR I WOULD NOT ACCEPT PAYMENT!

I recently accepted a position at a non-profit org so I would have time for a family, and am definitely seeing the business from a different light, not to mention a different stress level! Sure the money is not enough to pay for the new baby?s doctor?s bills, but I can still rest easy to know that I am not working for a company that is screwing anyone over and I still get to sharpen my vendor accountability skills, not to mention my fine-print mumbo-jumbo legal ease translations! Remember, you have the option, no you have the RIGHT to decent business practices ESPECIALLY as the client. Do your homework first, ask too many questions, go ahead? piss people off if you have to! YOU ARE THE CUSTOMER! Don?t get mad. Get even! The answer you seek might very well be right there in the small print.

VENT | dev\null

Wow, that felt good.

IT Support

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I own a small computer business in New Jersey. I never recommend a product that hasn’t been tested and that I wouldn’t use on any of my own machines. I see however, a lot in the way of political plays in the IT field, related to using a certain product or products, instead of using what really works.

I used to be part of AT&T’s IT support team until a few years back, when I was laid off. While I was there I would test antivirus and other products and make recommendations on my findings. Even though most of the software I tested was must better than what AT&T was using, they would not use it because it wasn’t on their recommended or corporate list. So when a virus outbreak would occur, the other IT folks would run around like crazy to try and figure out what to do because what they were using didn’t work. I was able to obliterate the problem on some of these machines on my own, by using what I had previously tested and found to be a better solution.

I don’t agree with your remark about MCSEs however. I was on AT&T’s server team while I was there. I can’t tell you how much I went through to get my MCSE and it came down to both practical on the job experience and multiple books and training materials. I worked very hard to achieve MCSE status. I did it all myself and I’m proud to call myself an MCSE. I am not a “Paper MCSE”. I’m the real thing.

fast586

On The Job Cert vs Bookie Degree

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Although I had the choice of University Degree, I chose to take a 2 Year Trainee Position on Cert 4 Network Management. I am now the head of IT for my workplace of 260+ PC’s and 10 Servers, growing rapidly.
My workplace is in a way a subnet of a bigger organisation, say like a School within Education Department. The Education Department decided to take on a IT Uni graduate who had adequate industry experience or so we all thought.
Turned out first day on the job I had to explain what a Patch Panel was, then how it connects to a switch, then what a switch was and how it relates to the backbone of the network and then the rest of the world… He still didn’t get it. I was scared, very scared. This guy earns almost twice what I do, is in a higher position with more authority all because of a Uni Degree.. but what does he know… Nothing… he even took the time to write down EVERYTHING “I” ever TAUGHT him.
He resigned a few months later after a review of his knowledge and understanding, and numberous complaints about his personal skills from the other ‘Schools’ within the ‘Department’.
University may be good for some but for the majority of people I see come out with Uni Degrees, they know far less about the real world after being stuck in text books and programing for three or more years.
After all, I live with an IT Uni Graduate and clearly remember him asking when he finished “Is it hard to install a CD-Rom”.. and I thought he was kidding.
Uni graduates seem to like the long hard and complicated solution which no other profesional will be able to understand when they leave. It’s like “Lets make it in Java C” when I would say “few line Batch file will be adequate enough”.
– Simple yet Effective

management bring problems

In reply to On The Job Cert vs Bookie Degree

A number of years ago I was shortlisted for a techie job with another tech type and someone who had a uni degree in Egyptian Mythology. He got the job because he proved, by his qualifications, he could understand things better than us tech types!

Little facts in your post to support your theory

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

Just because you disagree with a choice of any solution, doesn’t say it’s an uneducated one. (Or, is this an underlying Unix vs. Windows issue?) Bad solutions don’t necessarily point to idiotic IT people. IT is a fast-paced environment – that’s an issue. Many problems (i.e., Antivirus, network monitoring, etc.) you have addressed, are more related to policies and understanding business requirements first. Here is where a well-working team is crucial. I think that’s more often the problem.

This is a global phenomenon and very much in India

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I wud attribute this trend to IT not being passion (which was earlier) but becoming another earning medium. With wizards ruling the day in all software development IDEs or Application packages the logic development takes a back seat. The boys and gurls get a pay package for being street smart than being more logical.

degenerating due to idiots!

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I think this would apply to our company where the manager himself doesn’t have any knowledge on how our software works. We bought an expensive database and application software without consulting the professionals before implementation. He has recommended to the management to invest on wireless comm overlooking the amount for this kind of setup. He neglegted a good investment on IT guys to manage the work and as a result, the database software is running on 1 region only, the rest of the regions are paying the communication expenses for the wireless connectivity and no one to manage the other regions’ requirements if they would start implementing the same software. IT Dept. expenses for this year is 3x the expeses last year. You may be asking how did he do that? Simple, he was just hired by the general manager of the company from other country and it would be shameful if he will be terminated just like the previous one who did the same thing.

What a complete shame!

Another result –

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

I have been in the IT field for over 20 years.

I have witnessed the IT profession rise from a ‘geeky eccentric interest’ to professionals making significant contributions to the ‘bottom line’ to just another budget line item that needs to be trimmed.

Some of my peers that have fallen victim to ‘rifs’ and other cost cutting activities ended up in other professions. Generally, they are happier in those occupations (retail/medical/construction) although not compensated as well intially, some of them are coming back and some of them have surpassed me.

They have shed the page and cell phone calls at 2:00 AM on a Saturday morning because some senior executive can’t get to his email account because the server is down because it got infected by a virus because the A/V license expired because the invoice was not paid because the bean counter told management the IT department didn’t state that this was mission critical and therefore wasn’t going to be paid until the company really, really, really needed it. (I am joking of course, no one has ever seen anything like this happen, huh?)

Seriously, though, IT is so inexorably woven within our business and personal lives the distinction between where it begins and ends has become vague. As professionals, I believe it is encumbant upon us to communicate to the best of our ability to those ‘IT challenged’ decision makers just how important technology is to their success (as well as our own).

In the end, it really doesn’t matter who made a bad decision that impacts a company negatively…the whole company gets the black eye.

The problem starts higher up

In reply to Is IT degenerating into a field where idiots rule?

The problem starts in the boardrooms and executive suites where often uninformed/disinterested management makes decisions based on what will make them look good for the next quarter, next review etc and to hell with the long term implications.

In the 90s the BIG THING was massive cuts in staff and somehow everthing will be fine. Now it is cut internal functions and outsource it.

When will these twits realize that there is no one size fit all solution.

To turn this around the entire food chain from stockholders on down needs to rid itself of the short term mentality and think about long term, planning, growth and sustainability.

If you take the narrowing of focus that some companies are practicing to an extreme they could become so dependent on a small set of customers for their narrow range of products and services that they could vanish overnight when a competitor one ups their product/service.

Selling off a profit making product line/division is a short term solution to a long term problem, once that bump in profit is gone so is the revenue stream that the sold off asset provided.

As to what the techs sell/promote, they are told what the company is pushing, which may not be the best choice for the customer.

In closing the idiocy rolls downhill, the IT shop it near the bottom and gets the full impact.

(sorry for the long rant)