Tech Vs. Business? 607
An anonymous reader writes "I've recently found a spot in a large company, and I'm noticing that here a lot of people on the technology side are very anti-business. Tech makes up about 40% of the total line of business staff, but the whole LOB is only a tiny percentage of the larger company in the financial industry. I personally haven't seen this before in prior jobs, but I'm told that this animosity is commonplace. So I come to Slashdot to find out if others have experienced this adversarial relationship between business and tech, and if so, what was the effect on the overall success of the business?"
Re:common place (Score:5, Insightful)
I've often considered tech to be like plumbing. The users of both have no idea how it works, basic knowledge of how to use it, and only care when it stops working. Users expect it to work like magic all the time, and the tech/plumber always has to put up with the disgruntled user's shit. Both are looked down upon by most people in society, yet both are absolutely essential to today's way of life.
I work for a large financial firm too (Score:5, Insightful)
With that being said, I know that certain departments within this massive company have a very different relationship and there is a lot of animosity between the business and the tech side. Incidentally, those are the departments which are currently being outsourced to India (not saying that I can't be next).
IMHO after years on both the tech side AND the banking side, I can say that the two cultures really aren't compatible. After all, our range is stoned hippie/crazy genius and there's is buttoned down tightwad/midwestern church going Republican. There's not a whole lot of overlap there - there will always be culture clash.
However, this is not an excuse to treat your business people badly. They are the ones writing the checks, they are the ones to whom you must explain what is possible and what is not, and they are the ones that are ultimately doing the work that is paying your salary (yeah, they couldn't work without us - but we definitely couldn't work w/o them).
If you are working in a polluted atmosphere where people talk terribly about the business, I'd suggest you change it. And if you're not in a position to change the culture, I'd find another job. Not only is it soul-crushing to work in a hostile environment, but your department's days may be numbered anyway.
One thing I have noticed (Score:5, Insightful)
You could at least explain what you mean (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you mean they are "anti-giant-corporate-monopolistic-practices"??
Do you mean they don't want to see your company make a profit?
Do you mean they take a stand against certain business practices engaged in by this corporation?
There are many, many more. So: WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN? Your post was about as clear as mud.
Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since it's the financial industry you probably won't be working there long :P
My experience -Illogical ADD business boss (Score:3, Insightful)
My business boss is not good at connecting the dots between cause and effect. He is not a logical thinker yet thinks he is.
Therefore both blame and praise (to a tech team member) are given incorrectly, and seemingly based on level of financial pressure and mood swings.
We on the tech side are seen as slow-delivering and obstructive. The boss has no understanding of the process of producing good, maintainable and well-fitting software, so he thinks we're wasting his time and money. He basically thinks we are laying out a website and why the hell does it take so long?
Needless to say, projects and priorities are interrupted and re-jigged on a bizarrely counterproductively frequent basis,
Why does someone like that try to manage a business a large part of which is predicated on software development?
Presentation versus inside guts (Score:5, Insightful)
Business tends to be "presentation oriented". It's controlled by sales, and the sales culture permeates the entire building for good or bad such that perception is everything. Techies tend to distrust salemanship as too superficial, and like to instead focus on building a better mousetrap. The thing is, paying more attention to presentation gets one promoted and recognized more. Thus, techies are forced to choose between focusing on a better mousetrap or "playing the game" to advance.
A compromise is to find better ways to communicate technology to non-techies. Find analogies to common items, such as say laundry when talking about the difference between sorting and filtering. And don't talk down to people: respect their specialty. Show interest in their specialty when you can; or at least aspects of it that interest you. The more you learn about their job, the better you can help them.
Also, even if you can't outright fix something, find a decent compromise or alternative. Don't tell them "no", but rather "I'll have to ponder that one". Show that you are not ignoring them, but putting your Sherlock Techie cap on."
And for every "that's too hard" or "takes too long", throw in enough, "oh, that change is easy, it'll be right up". If you always delay, you'll lose trust.
Re:What do you mean, Anti-business? (Score:5, Insightful)
Prior Experience.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a consultant, so I get to see many different businesses. I have also worked for many prior to consulting.
I can say that those that do not understand business fare poorly. On the flip side, those that understand business, but not the technology that they are supposedly in have problems as well. I have seen both.
Both of those businesses are neither failing not advancing. They are just sort of hanging on. The businesses that understand both do quite well of course.
Re:What do you mean, Anti-business? (Score:5, Insightful)
And will often be quite condescending about it as well; after all, they're the wizards. Users are just muggles.
Re:What do you mean, Anti-business? (Score:2, Insightful)
I've found that the majority of engineers who complain that marketing requests violate the laws of physics are just too lazy and/or argumentative to find an approximation that doesn't.
It's your company, too... find a way to help it out.
And you were expecting what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, tech and business really are two different worlds.
The techies want to learn, deploy, do "cool things", etc. Whereas the business people want to make assloads of money. The problem comes in when these two worlds collide. The business people don't understand that when they change there mind with a complex (software) project, that it really isn't as simple as altering a pie chart on a presentation and takes some (if not a lot) of time. This makes them mad and then they come down on the IT people like they're just being lazy.
The IT people know why things are the way they are, but the typical business person doesn't listen to explanations because in the business world explanations tend to be excuses and CYA. They don't understand that things are different in the IT field nor do they care. Nor do they realise that throwing money at a problem doesn't make it go away. As in, a bug doesn't care how much you're paid, it'll hide as long as it wants to.
But, most of these problems occur because of poor project management. Back in the day, project managers were there to protect the people that they were managing. They were there so the IT people didn't get screwed. But, more and more over time, the project manager has become an extension of the client.
No-one really seems to care that changing there minds constantly (sometimes back and forth) costs a profound amount of time and money. After all, why plan something out when it will waste someone (or someone else's company's) money and not yours.
Polish up your resume and look for a tech company (Score:5, Insightful)
First, if you work for a company in the financial industry, polish up your resume. Stock up on office supplies as well. You might be in for a tough ride, and be ready to jump ship.
Secondly, if you do IT, work for an IT company. Forget about adversaries, and other BS. Have you ever seen the IT manager promoted to run a financial institution or a hospital, or a become partner in a law firm?
NO.
But try out a tech company, and you will find that your bosses boss is a tech guy and that there is no ceiling for promotions.
The whole culture at a tech company will also be much more to your liking. Go have lunch at Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo or many other, and you will probably know what I mean.
Re:common place (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't know about you, but when I go to someone to fix their computer, I'm hardly looked down upon. In fact, I've been kissed and hugged for solving their problems, taken out to lunch and dinner, and even offered a place to live once!
Re:common place (Score:5, Insightful)
tech workers are looked down upon, because people only ever come to us when things go badly
If I had a nickel for every time I've heard of an IT guy being [sacked|not replaced after leaving] because some ass in a suit reasoned thusly:
"What do we need an IT guy for? We never have any computer problems!"
tech vs. business (Score:2, Insightful)
I've found this to be true in large companies as well. But I think it's healthy. One of the reasons why I like to work for a large company is so I can focus on tech issues and ignore the rest. I don't want to know what marketing is doing!
Re:common place (Score:3, Insightful)
Both are looked down upon by most people in society, yet both are absolutely essential to today's way of life.
No one looks down on me for working with technology, I'm sorry you lost the metaphor right about there.
Re:One thing I have noticed (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you need to sit down and explain your perspective and try to understand what you are being compared to. You may have to agree to write up a progress report/log that shows all the activity you do and what kinds of things it prevents. If you keep people informed, they are more likely to trust you. Whether that's "fair" or not is another thing. Life isn't always fair, but communication can go a long way. Most managers hate being in the dark.
Re:Presentation versus inside guts (Score:5, Insightful)
Techies tend to distrust salemanship as too superficial, and like to instead focus on building a better mousetrap
I tend to distrust sales people because they badly oversell the product. Without proper knowledge of the extent of the technical problem, they will often tell a potential client that a required feature will takes days/weeks when the developer has already told them it's more like weeks/months.
I've seen this problem for the past 8 years, and this animosity between techies and marketroids won't go away until the latter are reigned in. I think I estimate my projects better than the sales people, but the salesperson is only interested in their commission, which is usually paid prior to any support or maintenance contracts.
The net result is that salespeople get paid without any accountability for the actual project. All problems from this point forward are viewed as a deficiency in technical resources rather than a poorly planned sales pitch. I'm not fond of being the scapegoat when I've very carefully explained why the project will take longer than the sales guy thinks it will.
Quantitative techniques in business (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience the biggest driver of tech's disdain for business is the farcical nature of some managers' attempts at quantifying certain aspects of their business.
All businesses manage to quantify a few things extremely well -- payroll, revenue, taxes, and so forth. There are many other things that can be quantified in a useful way. However, many business types engage in persistent fantasies about quantifying things like programmer productivity, ROI on buying software tools, and the effect of different business methodologies. Quantifying things is an excellent idea, but it's so overwhelmingly difficult to measure things like management productivity and (God help us all) "project velocity" that 98.6% of all attempts to do so are essentially fraudulent -- just as dishonest as if I pretended that number I just read off my rectal thermometer had any meaning more precise than "most."
Engineers are likely to feel a little twitchy just looking at the number "98.6" because they associate it with the classic overprecise and somewhat incorrect statement that normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees fahrenheit. If that number annoys us, what do you think we feel like when some business type says we should use Scrum because 87% of all enterprise-scale software projects come in 50% over budget, while only 63% of Scrum projects come in 50% over budget? Whenever engineers and business types speak in a common language (mathematics, logic, statistics, controlled studies) it turns out that the business types come off as STUPID, GULLIBLE, OVERCONFIDENT, AND FULL OF SHIT.
Which is not to say that business types are stupid. There are honest and intelligent managers who aspire to quantitative precision and may work very hard at it, but they don't go around waving numbers and graphs because they know the results are extremely difficult to interpret -- more "food for thought" than "results." The guys who make a big deal out of numbers like the ones in the last paragraph are either con artists or victims of con artists. They think that making quantitatively precise comparisons of programming methodologies is a strategic managerial decision that you implement by repeating numbers you read in [blog summaries of] management journals, just like creativity is a lifestyle choice that you implement by your choice of haircut, clothing, and a certain brand of digital accessories. It never crosses their mind that it might be something intrinsically difficult that you can work really hard at without ever producing anything worth sharing -- that's how poorly they understand it.
But it always seems like it's the guys who make up bullshit numbers who write the papers, run the consultancies, get the attention of upper management, and get put in charge of things they don't understand. Business types may have enough patience and faith in management to sit back and watch the pretenders rise meteorically and flame out, but engineers are used to calling bullshit on bullshit when numbers are involved.
Anyway, I could go on, but you get the picture. Engineers accept that not everything can be quantified, and every business decision must, of necessity, rely heavily on guesswork, folklore, and intuition in addition to hard numbers. We can't accept that the business world is full of people who pretend otherwise, without any reasonable justification, and somehow escape being laughed at by their supervisors and peers.
Re:I'm on the finance side (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm willing to say they're doing their job damn well. Stuff simply works.
The age-old struggle (Score:5, Insightful)
The business guys want it fast, cheap, first.
Engineering want it correct, perfect, however long it takes.
There's the struggle.
Any good business needs to strike a balance between the two. The tension is inevitable, and healthy.
Re:Presentation versus inside guts (Score:3, Insightful)
Without proper knowledge of the extent of the technical problem, they will often tell a potential client that a required feature will takes days/weeks when the developer has already told them it's more like weeks/months.
Two approaches:
Document, document, document. You have what you said in email, and get the sales guy to turn up documents to whoever wants to scapegoat you. I mean, in that case, its so easy. You said it would take X, you told him, he said to the client Y. If the client is upset, you should have a recourse. If you don't, you're in the wrong job. Too many engineers try and make this an issue between them and the sales guy. I don't know where you work, but if I was on the phone with the client, I would feel very comfortable telling him or her directly that you told the sales department X, and they told him Y. Clients arn't nearly as rigid as some techies believe. As long as they have something to take to THEIR boss, then you should be fine (well, pass it by your manager first, of course, but if they don't wanna hear it, it's better to have a client who is sympathetic to you than nobody at all.) Clients really just wanna hear the straight shit because it helps them make better business decisions. If that doesn't involve your company because your sales department outright distorts the truth, well ..
You know what clients love? They fucking love to hear from the guys actually DOING the shit, not selling the shit. Sometimes that's a bit of a chip you can play. A few times I've been stright up with the client on the phone with my manager on the call, and it's not like he's going to contradict the people doing the work in front of the client. If they're an asshole, maybe you might catch flak for it, but I've been in some situations where the client thanks my manager for having an engineer give them the straight dope and it catches managers off guard. If people fault you for being honest or for being straight forward with a client, for the love of god, find something else. The trick many engineers lack is how to be honest and straight forward without being condescending or too apologist with a client. The reality is, that guy on the other end of the phone has the same job as you have - pass along time or cost estimates that don't end up being patently false.
I would really hope that if you call salespeople who do this often on it more than a few times, your management will resolve it by correcting their behavior or not retaining his or her employment contract.
Re:common place (Score:5, Insightful)
computers are still relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of IT gurus to keep a network up and running
I like the rest of your argument but this I have to slap you for. The amount of people I come across in my day to day work (I'm a contract network administrator) who run "MS SBS" or "Red Hat ES" and think they can "network" and be a helldesk is phenomenal. There will always be a need for IT, just like there is always a need for plumbers. The whole concept of making the systems easier to manage is what is killing us properly - home users think they can do it because they hooked their TV up to their laptop just fine, so why should it be hard when they're at the office.
That rant, however, is for another time.
Re:The age-old struggle (Score:1, Insightful)
Old (but true) joke:
For any project, the reality is that you can only have two of the following three: Good, Fast, Cheap.
Re:What do you mean, Anti-business? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't be serious! That's not a 'technical issue', that's simple fricking primary school arithmetic! What line of work was this client in?
O_o
Re:common place (Score:1, Insightful)
Sometimes a '6, Funny' is appropriate. This is one of those times.
Re:common place (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:common place (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, how much would you really have? 5 or 10 cents? Nothing? Be honest with us please.
LS
Re:One thing I have noticed (Score:5, Insightful)
This delusion is typical of engineering majors in general, and EEs especially. EE is regarded by nearly everyone as the hardest discipline offered at the undergrad level. It goes to the EE majors' heads, and they get to thinking they can do anything, and that CS problems are trivial. You will be amazed at how they will be struggle with a fairly simple problem such as the elevator problem, and then upon figuring it out (or being told the answer), will forget how it stumped them and think that it was actually very simple (it's not especially difficult, but it isn't entirely trivial), and dismiss all of CS as similarly simple. They are constantly underestimating the difficulty of CS, and fail to grasp that algorithms are not just another kind of mathematical formula. You can't apply a Fourier transform or a Laplace transform or any other sort of mathematical transform, or a series expansion, or a linear or quadratic or whatever approximation to a CS problem and expect a solvable formula to pop out. But EEs think that way, and persist in applying that sort of thinking to CS problems. What programming they have done is all short assembler programs to run controllers. The programming is not seen as much, it is just a small unimportant part of the "real" work of creating devices. In such work, they might never encounter a situation where they actually have to know something about algorithms.
I first ran into this decades ago. I thought perhaps the EEs had expanded their viewpoint over the years, but from an encounter about 5 years ago, I'd say not. The EEs have an astonishing amount of trouble appreciating the difficulties of CS. If the EEs have trouble, just think how bad it is for the poor business major.
Re:You could at least explain what you mean (Score:5, Insightful)
The Business are "supposed to be" experts in deriavitives, swaps, banking, finance or whatever and they ellucidate requirements to the IT folks who concentrate on building the systems. In smaller firms, or tech based companies, this distinction rarely exists.
There is always a degree of tension between the two departments because the IT folk think the business are stupid (because the IT folks generally become more expert at the financial business than The Business) and The Business believe the IT crowd to be slow, expensive and pedantic.
its because IT folks do not communicate the degree of difficulty that non-functional requirements are to deliver - because we think that The business are too stupid to understand.
also, in finance, it is The Business that get the big bonuses and on more than one occasion, I have heard business units say "They built the systems" when all they did is deliver a sub-standard list of untested requirements and manage some ill thought out user acceptance testing.
sensitive information, open to random guy (Score:1, Insightful)
dont want joe blow walking in and having access to the bank accounts and cc#s of 100,000 people.
Re:common place (Score:5, Insightful)
The power company supplies exactly the same product to every one of their customers. And the product never changes. And they only concern themselves with delivering it to your meter, past which they have no concern. You have to hire separate support to deal with every change of your building layout, usage patterns, equipment, or anything else that might change where and how much electricity you need.
Or think phones. Essentially any business with more than a handful of employees buys some form of site connectivity and a bunch of DIDs from the phone company, and then pays someone else to manage the internal phones as a separate system.
You could easily do the same thing with IT -- hire someone to make changes and then leave. In fact, I sell that very service. I charge an hourly rate to come in and make changes to your computer systems. When I'm done I leave and don't charge you again until you want to make another change. Just like an electrician I guarantee my work and will fix mistakes, but I'll charge you for any changes that weren't part of our original agreement.
Re:IT workers think of plumbers.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:common place (Score:1, Insightful)
The reason a lot of IT people in businesses are looked down upon is due to their failure to understand they belong to a cost centre.
Knowing what you talk about..... (Score:3, Insightful)
This more often than not leads to delays (sometimes years!) which the business person then tries to blame the technical people.
Essentially, most business people tries to put limits on all of these in projects: Resources, Features, Time, Quality Where technical people knows you can only limit 3 of the 4.
So, in general the reason for the animosity from us techies is pretty simple. Most business people don't know what they're talking about, but pretend to know our area better than us (when they don't).
Anti-business ? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think anyone is "anti-business" then you probably have a flawed idea of what "business" means.
It is not a single cohesive thing, you can't look at a something and say "that's business" or something else and say "that's not business". It pervades and influences everything, a bit like the force, except not always good.
Ask these techies "Do you like getting paid?" They will say "Yes" and that is part of "business"
Ask them "Do you want to produce good products?" They will say "Yes" and that is part of "business"
On the other hand ask them to follow some half-arsed "business" process that you've read about in a book and they may well tell you where to go.
The fact that they are disagreeing with you doesn't mean they are anti-business, it means they are anti-you.
Common, but doesn't have to be (Score:2, Insightful)
It is a very common phenomenon, in my experience; in most companies management seem to fawn upon the sales staff and the technical staff are just workers that can be replaced at a moment's notice. Which is of course nonsense; it would venture to say that despite appearances, the production staff are the one part that a company can't do without. And in the case of technical staff - it certainly takes something like up to a year before a developer is fully up to speed and delivers their full potential.
The problem is one of respect - which is really a two-fold problem. One thing is the attitude of management - they need to fully realise how important the techies are and work towards integrating them in the decision processes of the company. They need to learn not just respect, but also how to show respect. As an example from a company I've been in: Management decided to introduce a reward scheme - your colleagues could nominate you to be a "Star" and the reward was... a horrible, star-shaped perspex sculpture. The sales and admin people loved it, but as I think you can guess, the techies did anything to avoid getting one of those. Now if the reqard had been something like the latest gadget, a technical manual or a TTY concole from the sixties with a built-in tape punch, that would have been great. Management hadn't learned how to communicate their respect to the technical staff, so they ended up feeling left out - again.
But perhaps the more important thing is self-respect. Technically minded people are very often introverts, who easily feel left outside. Social skills don't come as easy to us, so we will often end up expecting failure in situations that are not withing our professional area. We need to learn to respect ourselves and realise that we are immensely valuable, not just for our technical skills, but also on a more personal level. The thing about being introverted is that you think about things. A lot. We are the kind of people that are willing and able to think about what people bring to us; you wouldn't believe how rare that actually is - we have a lot to give to people around us, if only we believe in ourselves. It takes a lot of courage, though - I know, because I have been through that process. I don't know how many times I have felt like I had put not only my foot in my mouth, but thick socks, slalom-boots and skis as well; you just pick yourself up, say never mind and laugh with people when they laugh at you.
Sales guys like to over-sell (Score:4, Insightful)
At one place I worked, there was enormous animosity between IT and Sales/Business Dev. It stemmed from them selling services and guaranteeing delivery dates on software that hadn't been created yet.
So... it was a constant treadmill trying to play catchup to meet those ridiculous deadlines, which caused a lot of animosity from developers to sales.
Re:What do you mean, Anti-business? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, exactly the reverse is true.
Most techies (because our curiosity is one of the reasons we ended up techies) take a lively interest in how their business works even if they don't need to. If you're an in-house software developer, you *need* to understand how the business works in order to be able to write software for it.
But the business folk have no clue how IT works, and no desire to ever find out. As others have said, it's like plumbing to them.
Part of the animosity I've experienced is caused by this very problem. IT people understand how the business works (and all the business, not just one department), and also understand how the tech works, so actually have probably the clearest understanding of the business in the entire organisation. They then have to deal with morons in suits who don't understand anything past their next departmental meeting, and the morons resent being treated like morons.
The Dilbert Principle (Score:4, Insightful)
(I see the tag already there for Dilbert).
Originally you had the Peter principle: that everyone is promoted until they can't do the job - and that's where they stop. And then the Dilbert principal (which I present here as a serious conjecture) that everyone is promoted to the position where they can do the least damage.
They're similar, obviously, but without a doubt my experience is that the Dilbert principal is the more correct - certainly in Dilbert like organizations.
It leads to a problem of a "ruling" class of idiots - and the worst thing is that they equate "success" with ability. Hence, you have a manager, who, at best, knows the buzzwords within the technical group - but has no idea what he's talking about (I'm actually thinking of real people). They will generally then impose their will on the technical group, believing their own press, and make really terrible commitments. Now they have been promoted to the position where they can do least damage - so the tech group can ignore these commitments, and clients will equally treat them with contempt once they realize that the PHB has no power to deliver on them - however, there is a lot of goodwill lost in the meantime.
Occasionally, you come across those who are governed by the Peter principal, and those guys (and gals) are really good. They also know when to shut up. But the larger the company, the more likely it is to be a Dilbert organization.
If you need to know if you work for a Dilbert organization, just read some - it's absolutely terrifying how accurate it is sometimes.
Bitter? Me? Naaaah!
Why is more important than If.... (Score:1, Insightful)
I think often this si run over and over, with no effective discussion on Why it occurs...
Most of the posts here are on People becoming undervalued due to diligent work, and of examples of Business staff being unable to appreciate the work of Technical staff.
The important factor here is that Business staff aren't technical staff. As such, they don't understand what you are doing, or why what you do is important.
Instead of bleating about it, become constructive, provide some metrics that can be used by business staff to judge your performance on. Develop KPI's, develop a reporting scheme, even as little as a giant whiteboard with a list of things you are doing, and crossing off what is done.
People don't want to have to understand tech to use it, most people don't understand how cars work, but can see the direct result of a mechanics work by driving their car to work with a greater than 95% success rate. They can see and appreciate it because there is a metric: Walk to work in the rain, or not walk to work in the rain...
Re:What do you mean, Anti-business? (Score:3, Insightful)
Amen to that. Some of the biggest jerks I've ever come across in business have been network administrators. Immature selfish idiots with little idea of how business actually works. They would be quickly out of a job if they worked in any other department.
Try the music biz as a tech (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone should try the other side (Score:4, Insightful)
I have been a tech, developer in a software house, and the internal fight with the sale dept were daily occurrence. Some promises to a customer or some awful technical wording made it so we (tech) had to step up to the plate and "fix" something or implement some dumb feature overnight bypassing QA and all other SOP.
I hated those guys.. can't they have their fact straights?
Then I ended up in pre-sale and sale. I started with perfect technical speak, and it failed, message didn't register with the customers, so I dumbed it down, focused on the great colors, business efficiency, ROI, all that crap. It worked. And if you've done sale you know that every customer has a wish of x features your product can not do, so you try to explain to him how he could do otherwise with what's already there. Sometime the customer will be dead set and you know the concurrent can do xyz, and it's a 5 million dollar project and crap the profit will still be good even if you factor in tasking a dev for ten days to implements it. So you say yes. The company needs money and if it means annoying a guy in the dev team, well
As an IT admin, there is nothing more annoying that a user who thinks that opening port xyz because he wants to use so and so application or doesn't understand why he cannot bittorent the latest whatever. As a non-IT admin, I don't really care what's your problem, if it gets in the way of me making money, you're a problem, not a solution.
Having been on both side, I think it's all a matter of misunderstanding of how a company work and what makes it proficient. I think everyone should try to assess the question in term of "Is it good for the company" (efficiency and risk).
And for their sake techies needs to take business classes and be able to lay down their analysis in terms someone from management can care about and cut on the tech speak.
Re:The effects here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One thing I have noticed (Score:2, Insightful)
I wish I had mod points to give you.
Your company is not alone in that thought process. I've been contracted out to several places who run on that sole thought, and it's not uncommon to be reprimanded for fixing something that "wasn't broken."
I usually get around that by creating trouble tickets myself, and detailing exactly what's wrong and why it will affect the system. If I'm in an environment where I can't do that, I'll talk to QA (if there is one...) and see if they can reproduce the scenario. That way, I'm covered when things go wrong and the project manager wants to go blaming me, the contractor.
Re:common place (Score:4, Insightful)
So if they understood they were a cost center, they would not be looked down upon? I assume you are implying that management is justified in looking down upon them because they are a "cost center". It may be the reason, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.
This attitude sometimes leads to real disaster.
The company I worked for for many years was suddenly seriously strapped for cash. It seems that customer payments had simply dried up. The cause? The clerk that prepared the invoices had been laid off, and no one had bothered to perform that function. She was hired back immediately, and finally found a little respect. We are talking a company with sales of over $100 million here.
In another instance, the woman that entered engineering bills into the computer left to take a job at another company. I told the manager of engineering that I personally knew her work and that he would need to hire two data entry people to replace her. A month went by, and they didn't hire anyone to perform her function. After all, she was just "overhead". End result: Entire company's production delayed by six weeks.
Re:What do you mean, Anti-business? (Score:4, Insightful)
perhaps you should pick up the phone or go and see him and not just send emails.
Re:common place (Score:4, Insightful)
I got my current girlfriend (of 18 months now) after writing a little java app to help her do her thesis. I offered to help her out when she mentioned she'd spent the day trying to use word or excel or something to make an app for the data gathering aspect of her thesis.
it was just a simple "display item 1, display item 2, take input, output right/wrong, answer and time taken to a log" apparently her professor liked it and asked me if I'd mind doing a slightly altered version for another psychology student who was doing a similar project.
So worth the half hour or so messing around coding.
What took longer was finding out what she actually needed it to do, she kept assuming that certain parts would be a lot of trouble when really it was all pretty simple.
Re:What do you mean, Anti-business? (Score:3, Insightful)
Phone ? I've used one of those before and it always ends up with me having to do some work. I'm no falling for that again. Besides which cutting and pasting the text from the previous e-mail is easier than spending 10mins explaining the situation again and again every 3 weeks.
Re:Everyone should try the other side (Score:1, Insightful)
And for their sake techies needs to take business classes and be able to lay down their analysis in terms someone from management can care about and cut on the tech speak.
And that's exactly the root cause of all the problems discussed here -- the arrogant attitude that the lowly, though well-trained in their craft and otherwise professional, techies have to learn to "present a business case in terms management can understand", whereas management should never have to sully their well-manicured fingertips with flipping the pages of a book on the technical issues required to fulfill their fantasies.
It would be like an old-time railroad executive telling engineering to build a steam boiler out of aluminum "because I understand it's lighter than steel and therefore uses less fuel to move.
Despise me and I will despise you.
Re:common place (Score:5, Insightful)
...computers are still relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of IT gurus to keep a network up and running,... thus less IT workers needed...large websites and databases will get easier to manage, eventually, the only thing that won't go away is the need for real security...so security is where real IT growth is, computers will get more reliable and software easier to manage...
Let me just say, after 26 years in this business, of hearing this every year, the systems just keep getting more complex and harder to maintain, rather than less and easier.
Windows NT was supposed to make it so anyone who could use Windows could manage a server.
How many MILLION MSCEs do we have in the world now?
Storage systems with Petabytes of data are complex things. Cloud computing is a complex thing. Supercomputing clusters are complex things. World-spanning networks are complex things.
No offense intended, but the only people who think things are getting easier are people who don't know how they work in the first place.
big telco (Score:2, Insightful)
I did some work for a big Australian telco (yes, you know who) for six months and noticed significant demarcation issues between the software department and the customer service divisions. It was so bad that the customer service divisions were writing their own programs on the side, because it was too difficult to deal with the software people. And the software people were caught up in their own infrastructure projects.
I suspect it is common in large businesses because each department becomes a little community, with an 'us and them' attitude to other departments.
Personally I don't think software/IT should be a separate department; it would be better if IT people were assigned to work on particular projects within the department that was running the project. Not only would that help software people to understand better the business implications of what they are doing, but it would help reduce the competing priorities which IT people are subjected to.
Obviously there are some IT roles that have to be centralized (especially if there are large server systems or the like). But I think we place too much emphasis on the efficiency of centralization at the expense of company morale.
Re:common place (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, that's absolutely correct. Except to equate IT to plumbing is not quite right. Nothing against our plumbing brethren, this is actually a relatively difficult profession (they make more than many technologists as a result), but I think IT personnel are more like mechanics and machinists who work on those monster automatic assembly systems.
A plumbing job can be done once and not need attention for many years. A machinist can produce a new mass production system, but still be needed to sort out minor timing issues or locations of unexpected wear. Eventually if there are no new features to be added, the machinist's job is done and all that's left is maintenance (diagnosing and repairing or replacing worn or broken parts).
But to further extend this model to the IT environment, the reason that IT staffers don't get to just get a good system set up and running once then only be around on contract for periodic maintenance is that companies are always demanding more newer and faster features. What this machine produces changes from month to month. New features are added, old features are removed. Every time you change the features of this behemoth, you end up having little niggles that have to be followed up on.
In addition, the workers at the different manufacturing stations like to play around with their part of the machine by seeing what happens when you paint this cog pink, or put a nice potted plant in front of that greasy wheel. Plus that gear - well, I think it would look better sitting over here.
Now take 400 of those machines, some feature stable, some always changing, some machines are used simultaneously by hundreds of people (HVAC system), some machines hundreds of people each have one to themselves (golf carts). This is the physical world equivalent of an IT environment.
Two polar opposites, if simplified (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the situation is quite natural. Business is about reality, tech is about perfection. The two groups have quite different interests and goals. The art is to unite the two for a good result.
Businessmen everywhere are about as close you can get to jungle law, they live to maximize profit, seek out new enterprises (to maximize profit), and their gadgets are mediocre at best, because frankly they could not care less as long as GSM works, and it looks presentable. Presentability is very important for them, so they wear expensive effective wristwatches.
Tech people sacrifice pretty much anything to perfect the technology they work on. They look like their mother dresses them, do not pay as much attention (as others) to their appearance and most of their energy is spent on the thought process and its application.
Of course the described above is extreme examples, but such polarization between the two groups is quite common, and that is what IMO gives rise to the perception.
When you put the two together, if the two must cooperate for common good, like a chemical reaction they start productive fighting over the balance between the real delivered product sacrificing anything else but sell-value (which the businessman decides alone what is) and a pure concept and its development as the tech person sees fit. Since business is what seemingly runs the company, since it is all kinds of businessmen, project managers included, who run and shake hands at meetings, tech people are ignored most of the time as labour ants, however in all my experience this is the most common and gravest mistake the suits ever make. They take themselves far too serious and important to understand that the very platform they are trying to sell is made by anyone else but themselves. Businessman without a developer is like a conman on the street that sells you all kinds of promises and service you do not immediately see, only they do it with flashy and impressive Powerpoint presentations (albeit really lame). A developer without a seller (businessman) is equally useless, however inspiring it may seem, because with all the bright ideas and started development, unless he has some financial support elsewhere and is backed up, needs such financial interest and investing from someone, otherwise it all ends up like helicopters Leonardo Da Vinci drafted in his sketchbooks (albeit pretty well drafted).
Re:common place (Score:3, Insightful)
If your companies business is tech support, the accountants would be looked down upon. If your companies business is accounting, then tech workers are looked down upon.
You'll never hear anyone praising the janitorial staff at a company unless you work at Jani-King.
Re:common place (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:common place (Score:5, Insightful)
also Most everyone in IT intimidates the rest of the employees very hard. What we do in IT is looked at as "magic" to the other 98% of the employees and executives. People are intimidated when they are around someone that is massively better at something than they are. If your IT people are lacking in social or interpersonal skills this increases the intimidation factor.
You can stand your ground and be polite and warm. I have said many times NO to an executive and they were happy about me saying NO to them. It's all how you word it along with your demeanor and candor.
Plus if you can say, "Sorry but NO, the CTO signed a rule banning that. IF you get him to give you a waiver I'll gladly set that up for you!" Pass that buck hard. Make the overpaid management earn their salary by sending all executive requests to go against police directly to his desk.
Finally, any IT manager or Director worth a damn will buy out of HIS /HER own pocket doughnuts or bagles every friday morning and feed his staff and then have the staff each take a small platter of them to a different department each week as a "thank you for being our customer" and put that on the platter that it's from the IT guys. Give your guys credit for that.
That goes a HUGE way to fix the problems in the workplace.
My experience: Sales vs. Tech (Score:1, Insightful)
My general experience is that companies tend either to be sales driven or technology driven. If they are sales driven (which ultimately most companies seem to become), then there is resentment on the tech side. This is because technology is the thing that enables the sales - but the sales side of companies tend to be populated with... well ... technical buffoons filled with buzzwords. The sales people are often paid much more - this is often perceived as unjust.
Re:Presentation versus inside guts (Score:3, Insightful)
This viewpoint is why China, India, and everyone else that is not blindly copying the USA is going to eat your lunch.
We've had an entire generation of fad driven management that believe they don't need to have the slightest clue about what they are managing and that they have a right to prance about like Medieval Merchant Princes without having to have done anything get there apart from knowing the right people.
Tech Vs Business (Score:3, Insightful)
My take is this;
I work for an HMO and service diverse departments. I deal with Finance, Claims, Call Center, and even other IS groups.
The better the the group can describe their problems and their solutions to the problem the better I can work with them- it gives me a baseline to build my solution from. Even if I agree with their solution, I usually tweak it for the idea that in the future something is going to change.
The worst group that I deal with is sadly the one that does not understand their own processes at all. And sadly I have to deal with them everyday because they need a huge amount of hand holding to get their business done on a timely basis. The most interesting fact of this group is that they've organically grown their solutions to their problems, thus it's a hogepog of intertwined Excel and Access data sets with data going back 14 years. They have no idea on where to even begin to understand their own business or even how to improve their efforts. It's a complete nightmare everytime, and honestly I don't want to deal with it anymore. Well at least the Sr. VPs are involved this time, so perhaps a few heads will roll in that group and some change will happen.
Re:common place (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Computers aren't that new. The first ones appeared in the 1930's and 1940's. Argueably people like Babbage ( and Lovelace ) and Leonardo DaVinci could have "built" mechanical computers - if they had the resources.
2. Cars have been around for more than 100 years, and we still need mechanics.
3. Working parts has very little to do with it, outside of the fans and harddrives, computers don't have any moving parts. Most of the "headaches" I think are around designing, building, maintaining, and supporting software.
4. Having been in IT for 16 years, I would have to say that things are actually more complex now than ever. There are more software tools, programming lanugages, databases, report writers, operating systems, networking protocols, etc than ever before. And all these tools have a lot more features than they used to. Its getting increasely harder to know "some" of them well. Gone are the days when just knowing DOS, UNIX, MVS, VMS, and OS/400 would bascially give you knowledge of 90% of the hardware running. Or knowing just Assembly/C/Cobol/C++ would allow you to read and maintain most of the source code being used. So I would argue that the need for IT staff is going to continue to increase.
5. True Hackers are hard to find. Most people that consider themselves "Hackers" are just downloading and using the tools other people wrote to crack systems. I'm not a hacker, but I would say that a true "Hacker" would have intimate knowledge of the internals of the Unix kernal, Linux, Windows, be a "decent" C/C++ programmer, know script programming, understand Firewall rules and configuration, and have an in depth knowledge of TCP/IP networking protocols and routing, and the "social" skills necesssary to call and poke around to get information about logins and passwords. 80-90 percent of the people I know in IT don't even have these skills... Hacking is much harder than it used to be. It used to be you just called a "number" using your 1200/2400 baud modem and poked around.
6. Security is just a small sub-set of the big picture. Its important, but I would say that software engineeers, database admins, sys admins, and network engineers are all important and going to continue to be important...
I think you have missed this point. As the speed of microprocessors has increased ( per Moores law ), I think we have seen an increase in the complexity of operating systems and software. Which is requiring more and more IT knowledge and resources.
I think the "disconnect" between IT and Business has a lot more to do with the fact that business "knows" they depend on IT, but they are frustrated that IT can't seem to deliever what they want when they want it. On the other side, IT has to deal with more and more tools and IT staff has to learn more and more skills. And to increase frustration in IT, business users frequently don't deliever clear requirements or they "change" their mind in the middle of projects....
I think moving forward, the disconnect is just going to get worse, not better and the requirement for IT workers is going to continue to increase....
Re:common place (Score:3, Insightful)
Good point. Just because we have power companies doesn't mean we don't need electricians.
Matter of fact, you want to make decent money and have a steady supply of work, look into becoming an electrician.
Re:common place (Score:2, Insightful)
Tell me about it. I got hired into a job where the goal is to reduce outside consulting to zero. I'm one guy, supporting close to 50 users and I have to know everything about everything. The phone system, the security system, the servers, and all applications.
I doubt if there is one guy who "knows it all" because I've seen just how complicated these things really are.
Is it reasonable to even hope that one guy could do it all?
Re:They also apply different standards (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, excuse me? This is a financial institution director making a statement like this? I work in the financial industry, too. Ever heard of GLBA? SarBox? Does does this sitting member of the board realize he just put himself in line to be fitted for an orange jumpsuit?
Not that way for me (Score:2, Insightful)
I've generally found that people on the business side of stuff respect me for my competence in an area where they are weak. The only time I can think of that this wasn't so was in my first tech job -- an on-site contracted help desk job -- twenty-some years ago. The non-IT staff had had several years of poor support from the previous contractor, and they expected more of the same when I started. I learned that actually solving people's problems and treating them with respect goes a long way. Even the most flaming, arrogant ***hole in the organization respected me after a year or so, and this was the same guy who cussed me out on the phone in my first week. The thing is to not get wrapped up in office politics. Everyone brings some value to the organization, or he wouldn't be there. Someone found enough merit in each staff member to offer the job.
I think the bottom line is that we need to deliver two things:
Re:What do you mean, Anti-business? (Score:2, Insightful)
Perverse security requirements, upgrades that remove functionality, ridiculous delays to get the simplest things done because users aren't permitted to do anything to their pc...
You've got it wrong. These things are not done by Techies because they choose to, they are done because they are mandated by policy.
More often than not, it is policy mandated by suits who don't understand the ramifications. I've never worked anywhere where a ridiculous security policy was chosen by the IT guys, it normally comes down from way up top where some director has decided to make it his personal crusade against "hackers" by telling the IT shop that from now on, all computer access will be done by face recognition like he saw in the Hollywood blockbuster he took his kids to see on the weekend. Oh, and laser tripwires would be nice too.
Upgrades that remove functionality? No techie would do that on purpose either, but again, upgrades are usually mandated by policy/business guys who have made some kind of deal with the vendor and thus the upgrades are forced. All the techies do is implement someone else's poorly thought out decision (usually because they don't have the tech skills to make the decision in the first place - but business guys don't like giving such decision making power to "techies").
The problems you have pointed out are not examples of IT folks obstructing business folks, but rather the other way around. They are examples of how suits obstruct IT staff and massively impede everyone's productivity.
Re:Business as usual (Score:3, Insightful)
This is an example of one of the many ways that "business" seems evil, to some of us.
Finding out they can make more money reselling electricity is 'evil'?
It's evil for the company to make a profit?
It's evil for them to earn money and make a profit that helps the people with retirement plans invested in their industry?
It's evil for them to make a profit and use their new profit to employ additional workers--to give the jobless jobs?
It's evil for the company to make more money which usually means more taxes which help pay for things like roads, schools, welfare, and all the BS welfare programs the liberals love?
Wow--I can totally see why companies are evil. We should just do away with them entirely.
Of course I don't know how I'll get food for my family. I know nothing of farming, and my food is provided by various companies.
Maybe the farmer that lives a few miles away will let me exchange some sort of good or service for some of the food that he gr--oh shit! That makes him a company. We'll have to kill him.
</sarcasm>
f*cking hippies.
It's a clash in perceptions of the world (Score:3, Insightful)
People here have been using the term "culture clash", but IMHO it goes even deeper.
Here's the thing -- as techies, we have a great respect for facts. Facts are facts, and our opinion about them doesn't really matter. So we look to the world for objective information, and put that objective information on a pedestal.
For folks on the business side, almost everything is *subjective*, not *objective*. In the Sales world, for example, it's all about the customer's *perception* of the product, rather than the actual objective facts about the product.
Remember that the salesperson's entire goal in life is to overcome the objections of the customer and persuade them to sign the deal. For the salesperson, both by nature and by training, all statements are *subjective* -- they're personal *opinions* and are subject to change.
(As the old joke goes: when asked what is the sum of 2+2, the lawyer asks 'How much do you want it to be?'. I've seen this held up as a *positive* example by published business types.)
So when the techie says to the sales guy "it will take a year to implement"; the sales guy sees this as (a) a subjective statement; (b) a negotiating position; and (c) the *start* of the conversation, rather than the end of it.
Clashes are inevitable.