[Kosh]

I recently read an article about some manager complaining about how the 20 something IT people are "so hard to manage", citing such things as high expectations, disallusionment, and high turnover rates.

After reading many of the comments about this, it comes as no surprise that this is happening. Some of my favorites:

Most kids 18 – 30 grew up in a time of Government guaranteed Student Loan Programs.
A kid with a shiny new tech degree has a $ 90,000 dollar loan or more to pay off.
The school loan programs promise you jobs that pay.
Kids with student loans are not able to afford to be servants or drones.

You want to keep a young IT player, you figure a way to help pay down that elephant in the bill box. The oversized outstanding student loan.

My first job in IT, was during the 'oh noes, millenium bug" era. It was an internship. Company I worked for was switching from mainframes to NT(accounting). Soon as everything was complete, they laid off the entire IT dept except... for me. I was helpdesk. I had buit friendly relationships with all the old timers and to me, this was a bunch of crap. I had a whole one year of experience. In protest, I quit and went back to school full time. They ended up being forced to hire the admin back.

This story was amazing, it's like they expect an NT machine to manage itself. 


There are many others like that, but it just looks most corperations have little to no respect for their IT departments and treat them like low-skill janitors. Does anyone here have any stories about this kind of thing?

[Rictor]

Of course - the IT are nerds and managements are suits. At this point, though, all of corporate America would grind to a halt if the IT guys decided to **** with the system even for a few hours. If I was working IT at a corporation, I'd get together with like-minded nerds and make it clear that there had better be cake and BSG DVDs come SysAdmin Day, or else the company Intranet might accidentally go down and stay that way.

[WMCoolmon]

The impression I get is that business management is primarily about people. Your employees, your customers, and how you're going to keep both happy and productive or paying. If you're in a big company, you can afford to leave the number-crunching to the accountants and the technical details to the project leaders. Leaving the managers free to deal with potential partners, irate customers, and dissatisfied employees.

So in that environment, the people who are most suited to working with people are going to be the ones that rise to the top and become the managers.

And naturally, in that environment, the people that the managers will find the hardest to connect with will be the IT people. They'll be the ones more likely to go home and watch Battlestar Galactica on a friday night than to go out to a party with co-workers. So when a manager has to choose between an IT guy, who is well-liked by everybody but not really friends with anybody, or some goof-off salesman, who does have friends who might cause trouble if he got laid off, and the manager himself doesn't like the IT guy as much as the other guy...and the other guy, being social, is somebody that the manager sees more of himself in and so believes that the other guy might even be able to get the manager's job someday...

...well, it doesn't look too good for the IT guy. So even though he might be harder-working and in general a better asset to the company than the other guy, he might get laid off purely due to people's perception of him.

But that is totally conjecture, I really have no firsthand experience with corporate IT. So I'm curious as well.

[karajorma]

As Rictor says it's a very dangerous game to play though. few people can do more damage to your company than an admin with a grudge.

[Kosh]

As Rictor says it's a very dangerous game to play though. few people can do more damage to your company than an admin with a grudge.

From many of these horror stories, the impression I get is that the company just doesn't see how much good (or worst case scenario, bad) an IT admin/tech can do. I don't have any first hand experience, unfortunately.

[Mefustae]

So, let's have it then. Do we have any IT workers on HLP that have raged against The Man?

[Kosh]

Both for and against stories are welcome.

[Mika]

The impression I get is that business management is primarily about people. Your employees, your customers, and how you're going to keep both happy and productive or paying. If you're in a big company, you can afford to leave the number-crunching to the accountants and the technical details to the project leaders. Leaving the managers free to deal with potential partners, irate customers, and dissatisfied employees.

So in that environment, the people who are most suited to working with people are going to be the ones that rise to the top and become the managers.

Hahahahaa! That would be the ideal world!

The real world is much more like Dilbert comics.

Mika

[Nuke]

back when i got out of school and started looking for a job, it quickly became apparent that corporations did not give a **** about it guys. i actually found that the janitors got paid more than the entry level it guys in various companies. so i did what any sane degree holder would do, i tried to join the marine corps. but since i am not totally sane i couldnt get into the corps and ended up with a bunch of jobs not even remotely tech related. funny thing is they pay more.

[vyper]

When you go to university and study CompSci you quickly realise that it's not a cliché or brag when people say computers run the world today. You know you're worth something. You work hard. You sit coding coursework while business management undergraduates are out getting pissed and vomiting in club urinals.

Then you graduate. You're on a high.

Then you start finding out that many companies don't want you unless you can magically gain five years experience in a development environment. The ones who do want you offer you wages you can get working in a call centre.

We don't have unrealistic expectations - we have ones based on how valuable we know we are.

I spent four years learning not only technical knowledge, but gaining a sense of professionalism as well - that's what BMs don't get. That's why they think it's acceptable to outsource to India.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Well this isn't about IT vs corporate it's even worse.  IT vs local government.

I started out as summer help.  Came back the second year the same way.  Got a job offer before I graduated.  Since jobs were hard to find in 90-91 time period I figured I would take it and do the night class thing.  Well the first few years were great under the boss that hired me.  When he decided to take an appointed EPA position and not run for re-election he hand selected his replacement.  Man did he make a mistake.  He was OK for the first year or 2.  Had some really crazy ideas but was easily talked out of them.  After getting elected he started making changes.  I was the only hardware / networking / programming / whatever needed done guy.  Everyone else was just a programmer or word processing / help desk person.   It a brilliant move I was taken off flex hours because I could get more done working 5 7 hour days then 4 9 hour days.  Yea right.  Oh by the way did I mention this guy is the county Auditor and a CPA?  I always started work early at 7:45 and left at 3:00 only taking 15 minutes of my lunch hour when I had the time.  Normal work hours were 8:30 to 4:30.  They decided that I didn't need to be at work early because most of the time everything is OK.  Yea first time everyone arrives at work an the system crashed overnight. Well you get the idea.  Of course the 3:00 finish time was when I was supposed to be done.  Again being the only hardware / networking guy I usually worked over.  So now that I didn't have Friday off I started accumulating comp time as they didn't want to pay overtime.   So I get a hundred or so hours built up and they yell at me for having comp time.  Apparently it's not really legal for them to not pay overtime.  So I start taking days off.  Get yelled at for using the comp time.  They cut out everything.  Start work at 8:15.  Forced 1 hour lunch and done at 4:15.  That worked for about 2 days.  First time I'm at lunch and say I can't take a support call straight to the manager's office.  So I have to be at lunch but still take calls.  So I start leaving the building for lunch until they put in security at the courthouse.  Getting through the metal detector once a day is bad enough.  On a side note I did get a lot of FREDing done at lunch.  Then came OS patches not getting installed, servers not being updated, etc.  Well when did they expect me to do it?  Take the whole county down during the day?  Judges really would love that.  So it was back to getting comp time.  Repeat as necessary.  Then comes the icing on the cake.  He hires his future son in law to shred papers.  No problems nepotism is rampant around here.  He hides him in our department so no one will notice.  Yea right.  still no problem.  He gets married and boom doubles his salary overnight.  Now making more then everyone in IT for a part time paper shredding job while using county vehicles for his lawn mowing side job.  If your going to hide someone in the payroll system and do that don't put them in IT.  When your programming what department do you use for test data?  Yours of course.  Well that was pretty much the start of the end for me.  I tore up my ankle and had to take some sick leave so they brought in help AKA a future replacement for me to train.  The final straw was when they threatened me for talking to my parents about what was going on at work.  Took me into a room and actually told me that if I talked to anyone about work I would be fired.  They did this 15 minutes before I was leaving on vacation.  Was in there for almost an hour.  Filled out my time sheet and wrote it down as overtime.  Handed in the time sheet and left.  Went to the doctor and my blood pressure was sky high.  He put me on mandatory medical leave.  They loved that.  Called in and told them I would be off for 3 weeks and wasn't allowed any contact with the office.  Never did go back.  Used up 3 months of sick time and 3 weeks of comp time then quit.  Got unemployment due to the quitting being medically backed up.  Long story short due to the threats, stress, and a good lawyer I am now receiving 80% of my pension for the rest of my life.  Good riddens to that place.  It was good to retire at 35 though.  Got enough to pay the bills and buy my beer with a new PC every year or so thrown in.  Oh and I still have all that payroll data on my HD and on backup tape (part of my job was to take the off site backups home) just in case. 

[Kosh]

back when i got out of school and started looking for a job, it quickly became apparent that corporations did not give a **** about it guys. i actually found that the janitors got paid more than the entry level it guys in various companies. so i did what any sane degree holder would do, i tried to join the marine corps. but since i am not totally sane i couldnt get into the corps and ended up with a bunch of jobs not even remotely tech related. funny thing is they pay more.

So why do they require degrees if they aren't willing to pony up for them? If the janitors make more than the IT guys, shouldn't the education requirement be adjusted to fit the payscale?

[Stealth]

yeah it's a vicious game that you've got to play in the IT world.
management doesn't understand some of it... it's not something that's been around for a long period of time.  Accounting, Purchasing, Shipping, Payroll, all the 'tried and true' departments they can understand, but IT they can't.  and that's because they can't fix a price tag to IT.  IT's mainly about "soft cost". 

We need to purchase a new SQL server, and hire two new database administrators.  Total cost: $60,000 for the server, and $120,000 for the two administrators. 
Well how much will it save the company?
...we can't give them that cost.  it's a necessary evil, but you can't attach a cost to it.

you've just got to learn to play that game. 

[SadisticSid]

IT staff are rarely eager enough to explain to management (preferably as far up the corporate ladder as possible) exactly what will happen to a business if their requirements aren't met. For example

No data replication = loss of all data since the last backup when a disk dies (at least once every few months even for SMEs)
No spare parts = servers with critical data take ages to repair when requisitioning a part
Inadequate onsite backup = something critical is bound to get lost or deleted sooner or later
No offsite backup = company goes bust when there's a fire in the server room
Not enough [qualified] personnel = countless man hours in other departments lost due to failures and mistakes

The value of a working, reliable, well-performing, redundant IT system for most larger companies is now the sum total of the business' value itself. So vast and critical is the quantity of data stored about every aspect of a business that yes, far too little is usually invested in staff and equipment. This is, however, at least partly a consequence of the IT industry constantly undercutting itself.

[karajorma]

Not to mention that management never seem to realise that an admin staff who appear to do nothing but web surf and play freecell all day if often an indication of a well run IT department rather than a lazy unproductive one and start hacking away at what they think is dead weight.

[Mika]

I think the IT department budget and effect can be estimated for reasonable accuracy, and even better so if some statistics are available. It is only a matter of will and calculation. Just churn out the latest known number of computer related problems and estimate the time loss of a worker using the computer while he attempts to solve it himself and multiply that by the average wage.

Then compare that cost with the IT personnel solving the problem, assuming that the worker is smart enough to call after half an hour struggle against the computer. Note that now the worker who faced the problem is actually released from solving it and can do the relevant stuff with a back-up computer so that there is no work-time loss from his side any more.

Ok, now estimate the time spent doing some network related problems by considering how many people those will effect and multiply those hours by the average wage of the company. Then estimate how many people you need to monitor the network by necessary amount of time that such problems cannot or are extremely unlikely to occur. Etc. etc. Take statistics of computer failure times and and compare that to the number of personnel in IT department and so on. I'm sure you can figure it out yourselves.

Simple calculations like that govern the business in other departments. It is a matter of will for the IT department to provide such estimates. The thing is that no-other department will exactly know their budgets, but they can estimate them (usually slightly more than they need to be sure) and I don't see any reason why the IT-department couldn't do so.

Mika