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Has the Glory Gone Out of Working In IT?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Sep 28, 2009 01:25 PM
from the good-old-days dept.
from the good-old-days dept.
An anonymous reader writes to wonder if the glory has gone out of IT. One blogger remembered his first impression upon entering a profession in IT that made it seem like the place to be, with a new shiny around every corner. What experiences have others had? Has a more pervasive technical culture forced our IT gurus into obsolescence?
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huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Ain't that the truth. When I first started work here, I thought it'd be really exciting, a way to be part of something big. But every day, it's just the same, "Where's my Death Ray command server?" this, "My patience grows thin!" that, "If I don't have my Death Ray command server up by midnight, I shall unleash my pretties upon you!", and on and on. Well, gee, Mr. Big Shot, perhaps if you didn't build the server room deep inside a freaking ACTIVE VOLCANO, perhaps we wouldn't have so many overheating issues.
There's just no respect in this industry.
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. IT is not a glory field, it's the bastard child of customer service (in the eyes of those who don't understand it). Basically because everyone needs it, nobody understands it, and it's usually undervalued.
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Hell, I'm only here for the money!!
That's the ONLY reason I'm at any job whatsoever, it is nothing more than a means to an end...the end being my being able to live the lifestyle I wish. The job does nothing more than enable to me to do as I please.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd not even bother coming back here to pack anything up.
Work for glory? I can't even fathom the concept...
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you'd find something you like doing, you could end up having fun at your job, and kill 2 birds with one stone, maybe ? At least, that's what the IT field is for me!
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Funny)
If you'd find something you like doing, you could end up having fun at your job...
I tried that but "my" idea of "Condom Test Driver" and the Trojan corporation's version of "Condom Test Driver" didn't synch...now I repair computers
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh don't get me wrong, it isn't like this is a drudge or anything, I like tinkering around with computers and such, I do it some in my free time, but, if I were independently wealthy, no, I'd NEVER work again. I'd do what interests me, it would surely involve some computer geek activities,but, honestly, I found out a year or so ago when I had 7 months off between contracts. My day generally involved, getting up, walking the dog...hitting the gym for a couple hours, then getting on my motorcycle, and riding around New Orleans all day, exploring and finding fun things to do. At the end of the day, I'd meet somewhere with friends getting off work for a few beers, wash, rinse repeat.
I would have no problem doing that for the rest of my life, while, of course, taking vacations off to travel somewhere caribbean to a beach on occasion.
No, I learned there, that I could easily occupy myself with travelling, having fun in NOLA, doing things with friends and chasing women the rest of my days, and NEVER miss a day of work again if I were to get such an opportunity.
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Informative)
According to this article [newscientist.com] the only problem an IT guy should have getting laid is the fact that an 80 hour work week doesn't leave much time for anything but work.
And, women don't go for "glorious" guys, they go for tall, rich, funny men. Usually they'll settle for one of the three.
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Funny)
So you're not rich anymore. FAIL!
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Safe to say that if it took all his money to buy a pair of platform shoes and a handful of rubber chickens, he wasn't rich to begin with....
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Re:huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:huh? (Score:4, Informative)
They seem to be hot on certain girls (actually the "nerdy" look has become something of a in-fashion thing for some girls), but for guys it should be avoided like the plague.
What I've generally found is: dress well. Nice leather shoes and belt, a watch with no LCD's inside, slacks, and a button up shirt. Wash, shave, and use some cologne (and for goodness sakes keep your hair presentable). Not only do the girls act far more receptive, but merely feeling well groomed when you're out will give you a lot more confidence, and that confidence will actually do a lot more towards helping your chances than the look itself will.
Now, I'm certainly not a "playa", but I have had a lot more success since I started actually dressing well when I went out.
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Re:huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
A watch? How quaint! Why would you need a watch when you have a cell phone?
Because the watch is more about actually having a decent looking watch on, and not for telling time (which is why I stated the "no LCD" rule ;)).
Odd, the women I know have convinced me to ditch the slacks and button up shirt, they say it makes me look like Mr. Rogers with a goatee. The only women who seem attracted to me when I dress like that are hookers.
Depends on the atmosphere and crowd. If you're 21, maybe don't do the slacks + button up. If you're close to or past 30 though, it's the way to go.
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
A watch? How quaint! Why would you need a watch when you have a cell phone?
I can glance at a watch in a meeting without looking like a jerk. Also, I like watches.
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Re:huh? (Score:4, Funny)
It's hard for a sane person to spend 30 grand for a watch, too.
Can we say "compensating?"
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:huh? (Score:4, Funny)
... 72 virgins were laid before me ...
So you got promoted as head of IT with 72 of your fellow workers now reporting to you?
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Funny)
No Way! When i pulled that bad drive from the 3140c, and replaced it with the replacement that had arrived this morning, the clouds overhead parted as the Valkyries sang and I rose to my rightful place, occupying the throne of Odin. As the gods before me gasped and awed at my most masterful replacement and saving of the data, 72 virgins were laid before me and I now rule in GLORY!!!!
So, 72 of your coworkers were impressed by your l33t $k!llz. Stop showboating about it, already.
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Re:huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
>There was once a time where being a police man was a title of privilege and respect. Now the government has pushed laws that turn them into fat, power greedy (at the expense of civil liberties),
You are suffering from the fallacy of idealizing the past. Ironically, a modern police officer is more professional, better educated, and better paid than his past peers. Something tells me youve never read about law enforcement in NYC in the 1800's.
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
With IT, the brass has made them into dispensable scapegoats that slave away for meager salaries with the fear of being replaced in a heartbeat.
And who is responsible for that?
Think about it: who has convinced employers that IT people don't need to know anything about computing - they just push buttons.. any monkey could do that! You don't need someone who actually understands what the computer is doing, the three "R"s are all they need to know!
"Brass" hears all this from some marketing idiot, sees that everything is just pushing buttons on a GUI, and decides that all their IT guys are overpaid who are deserve blame when something breaks.
The problem is MS, for making non-IT people think that users should be the same thing as administrators.
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The Glory went out of IT (Score:5, Insightful)
The day we traded the guru individualist programmer doing arcane tweaks inspired by the architecture of the machine, for the team in India writing on spec using no memory or speed optimization whatsoever.
Re:The Glory went out of IT (Score:5, Insightful)
Simpler than that: when we allowed project managers to think they actually were qualified to manage projects.
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Re:The Glory went out of IT (Score:4, Insightful)
A good IT project manager is worth his or her weight in gold.
Because they are about as a rare.
But when you work with them, it makes all the difference.
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Re:those days are not gone (Score:5, Funny)
Those arcane tweaks are still there because the guy left 8 years ago and NOBODY REMEMBERS HOW TO FIX IT.
"Whatever you do, just don't touch that code. It's been working that way since before I got here. We tried to change it once and it took us 6 days to get the wolverine back in the cage."
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Re:The Glory went out of IT (Score:4, Insightful)
the IT staff is undervalued, demoralized and stressed.
Which is exactly the way they like us
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Re:The Glory went out of IT (Score:4, Insightful)
You know the magic has gone out when everything is reduced to a dichotomy between miniscule speed increases and enormous manageability increases. Of course the answer is obvious when it's phrased that way; of course it's a false dichotomy. At the very least, "readability" is in the eye of the beholder; performance, usually a bit more objective.
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Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
To be honest, I don't even understand what question is being asked.
What does he/she mean by "glory"?
And a "new shiny" what? "around every corner"?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
I accidentally the whole new shiny.
Parent
Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Carpenter vs. pre-fab (Score:5, Interesting)
Cabinet Maker Working in Home Depot (Score:5, Insightful)
These days, I feel like a cabinet maker working in home depot. I have a bunch of skills that are not being utilized because the majority of the work happening (at least where I work anyways) has shifted from creating custom solutions to installing, maintaining, and supporting 3rd party applications. My job satisfaction is eroding. While I used to take pride in creating stable, elegant solutions to complicated problems, I now spend most of my time fighting with messy integrations.
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Glory? (Score:5, Insightful)
R&D and MIT media lab aside ( I wouldn't call that sort of thing IT even though there is some overlap)
When I hear IT I think of my corporate support staff.
As far as I am concerned there has never been any glory in that thankless job.
I mean how glorious can a job be where the only recognition you'll get is when you screw something up?
When you are good at your job in IT nobody notices you since the goal of most IT shops is to be transparent to the user....
Glory? (Score:5, Funny)
a long time ago (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe if you were a UNIVAC technician, that was pretty cool. But in my lifetime I can't recall IT ever being a "glorious" occupation. Sure, there are jobs in the broader tech industry that might have that mythologized element. In the 70s and 80s, you've got Woz in a garage as sort of the canonical example. But IT still wasn't glorious in that era. The IT people weren't Woz; they were mainly at places like IBM, servicing thousands of mainframes and minicomputers. There was not an aura of glory around that job, even if it paid well and may have been interesting.
new vs old (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was new, everything seemed new and shiny.
Now that I'm old, everything seems old and dull.
The cool factor has lessend (Score:4, Insightful)
I started programming and repairing computers in the 70s. There was a certain coolness to knowing things that other people didn't know, almost as if you possessed magical powers. Modems? BBSs? Networking? A printer? You can recover a file off my floppy disk? YOU ARE A GOD, SIR, and you just saved my ass.
No longer. Everybody knows this stuff, or at least they pretend to know it, enough to be dangerous. Or else it's been supplanted. E.g. nobody cares that I wired my house for gigabit Ethernet; they just want to know how to jump on my WiFi access point. 802.11b/g/n/w/t/f is really not important. Need to recover a file? Oh yeah, Norton came with my computer.
It's like the photography industry, which barely resembles the industry of 20 years ago because everyone has a fancy digital camera now and can take better pics than they could back then. Or you can hop on iStockPhoto.com or sxc.hu and get cheap/free stock photos that used to be really expensive. Or the graphic design industry: now every "hack with a Mac" (or a PC) can "do" graphic design, no special skills required.
The trick is to be so good at problem solving (or camera angles/lighting/composing, or graphic style) that people still recognize you as a wizard. I mean in the I.T. repair sense, not the 6d+3 sense. This requires creativity, and not everybody has that. If you don't, but you need that feeling of recognition, then you need to either play a lot more WoW or find a new field/niche.
Re:The cool factor has lessend (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd actually take your theory further, to just about any industry that involves creating stuff. One of the realities of life is that just about anything worth doing requires a lot of work. And a lot of that work is dull and repetitive. For every creative superstar, there's usually a small army of grunts doing a whole bunch of groundwork.
For every gravity-defying glass and titanium museum that an architect dreams up, there's a bunch of people sitting at a computer drawing lines all day. Someone does hundreds of calculations to make sure it doesn't fall down. Someone has to pick out all the doorknobs. Someone has to sand all the gyp board walls. Despite all the heavy machinery available, a bunch of guys get stuck digging holes with shovels and then dumping buckets of concrete into them.
Until you nerds start building some awesome robots, the majority of the human race is going to be stuck doing menial tasks instead of creative work, if for no other reason than it has to be done by someone.
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It was fun until... (Score:5, Insightful)
It was fun until...
It really has. (Score:5, Funny)
I've been hard-working member of an IT staff for a while now, and I do sometime feel as though all the glory has been sucked out of a "glory hole" of some sort.
We really should have a staff meeting about it. Firm action is clearly needed.
money (Score:4, Insightful)
We make two to four times as much money as the average American. That's enough to ensure that IT remains a respected and desirable career.
The brief bubble period where we made millions in fake stock options was an anomaly. It was not "normal." Our careers were never really glorious, but they will remain prestigious, like those of scientists, engineers, and other skilled, well-paid professionals.
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
The glory is making something that people *want* to use, or it really honestly makes their life better, and they know it. I've done mostly back-end stuff throughout my career but I have seen email comments from users who have praised the system for making such-and-such job easier, or figuring out this big thing, or saving a lot of time, etc., and I can feel good that I had a hand in that, or I implemented that, etc.
My kids like playing with the apps on the iPhone, especially music making and drawing pictures. I can't say how many times I've been handed the phone with a picture and my daughter beaming and going "I made that!!", with obvious joy on her face. That made me happy, and I'd think the author of the program would be happy to know how much joy s/he brought.
That's glory right there. If you can make someone happy with what you do, honestly and truly, then it makes the TPS reports, status meetings, weekends and late night worth it.
Is IT the new blue-collar? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. They view IT as a cost-centre. Run, don't walk away from companies that view their IT centres as something to be outsourced.
2. They view IT as a necessary evil and spend only as much as necessary to keep their employees from throwing their monitors out the window. These kinds of companies understand IT is a necessary, but they don't like spending money on it. They tend to upgrade software that are SEVERAL versions behind, and your typical office PC is 4-7 years old. No shiny here - IT is dull and so is working here in that role.
3. They view IT as a way to save money. Innovative and highly adaptable companies that change with their operating environment usually view IT as a way to improve on efficiencies, and use it to reduce costs and improve services internally and externally. These are good companies that view IT as shiny and always something to invest in. These companies also tend to be around a long time, or they always seem to make money even when times are bad. It takes money to invest in IT - badly managed companies don't have money to spend on it. These companies, from an IT and a learning perspective, are preferred. More often than nought, they also tend to dabble in Open Source - never a bad thing.
So, when doing an interview at a company, ask the following questions:
1. How old 'typically' are the computers in your office?
2. What version of Microsoft and Office are you using?
3. Does your organization view IT as a cost center or as value-added infrastructure?
Measure these against points 1-3 for their shiny score.
Glory my anus! (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't know that IT was glorious. (Score:4, Interesting)
You are always in the background of any project. It's assumed you can do whatever it is they want you to do, even if it has never been done before. They will want it 6 weeks earlier than you can deliver it and 50% cheaper than you can buy it for. You are supposed to be invisible. No one thinks about how much work you have to put in to something in order to keep it up and running in a production environment. If the service fails at 3 am on a Sunday, every minute of your time will be tracked until the service is restored and you will be told how efficient you aren't and what you should try to do better next time. When the kudos are given at the next company meeting and everyone talks about all of the great things they have accomplished this year, your name is never mentioned unless you count the "Oh, and thanks to IT who.. does what they do!" mention from the CEO.
You're the plumber. You're the TV Repair man. You're the phone guy. They only know your name when something has gone wrong and they think you can fix it. They only think you can fix it because they are fairly sure you, or someone like you, broke it to begin with.
Welcome to I.T.
Re:I didn't know that IT was glorious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually I'd like to be treated like the plumber. Nobody thinks the plumber broke their pipes (well, not unless he installed them in the first place), but they do know that he's the one who can fix them. And they know that if they try and be a cheapskate and not pay him his full rate, or if they stand there haranguing him about how bad a job he's doing, he'll pack up his toolkit and wave good-bye, leaving them standing there ankle-deep in... stuff they'd rather not think about, and their only option will be to call another plumber who'll have just as little tolerance for their games as the first one. Because the plumber knows that, no matter how important you think you are, there's always somebody else with a stopped-up sink who won't be such a pain.
That and both the customer and the plumber know that if the customer takes the plumber into court and complains about how the plumber didn't tell him he shouldn't dump tons of cut hair and congealed grease and crud down the drain and the plumber should've done something to keep that from causing a clog, the judge will fall out of his chair lauging, then dismiss the case with prejudice. And probably order the customer to pay the plumber's legal bills too, just to teach them not to file frivolous complaints.
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Re:Geekdom fini (Score:5, Insightful)
This is somewhat true, though it seems to me that much of the "problem" with IT these days stems from the continued inability for non-technical colleagues and management to understand exactly what the purpose of IT is.
It used to be that IT was much less micromanaged. "They do that computer stuff, and it seems to work most of the time, and when it isn't working we lose money, so it's good they keep it working." Now-a-days with folks being so metric-obsessed, it's harder to "just do your job". You gotta make sure to keep up with all your tickets, make extra tickets for everything from someone stopping by your desk, to peeing, so that the metric-OCDs can account for everything you do.
There's still some places where tech people can be tech people, but with a lot of companies going through the (seemingly) perpetual cycle of: "Our IT doesn't work, get us a dedicated IT staff" to "Man, those IT folks look overworked, they must be hard workers!" to (after the systems have been fixed and streamlined) "Those IT people never seem to be doing anything, let's lay them off and save some money" and back to "our IT doesn't work..." it can be hard to find a position where you *can* be a technology person without having to watch your back all the time.
Though (to continue the rant), I will agree that, in general, technology is in a bit of a boring slump, where "advances" are often simply marketing re-definitions of existing technology that's been "suped up". It's not like the late-80's through the 90's where interesting things were happening all around and there was always something neat coming out. These days tech is about evolution not revolution.
Also keep in mind, though, that the longer you're in IT, the more things will seem "old hat" to you. I think this is what the OP (and I) seem to be experiencing these days.
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