10 dirty little secrets you should know about working in IT

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=546
Taken from a mail I got this morning




If you are preparing for a career in IT or are new to IT, many of the “dirty little secrets” listed below may surprise you because we don’t usually talk about them out loud. If you are an IT veteran, you’ve probably encountered most of these issues and have a few of your own to add — and please, by all means, take a moment to add them to the discussion. Most of these secrets are aimed at network administrators, IT managers, and desktop support professionals. This list is not aimed at developers and programmers — they have their own set of additional dirty little secrets — but some of these will apply to them as well.

10.) The pay in IT is good compared to many other professions, but since they pay you well, they often think they own you

Although the pay for IT professionals is not as great as it was before the dot-com flameout and the IT backlash in 2001-2002, IT workers still make very good money compared to many other professions (at least the ones that require only an associate’s or bachelor’s degree). And there is every reason to believe that IT pros will continue to be in demand in the coming decades, as technology continues to play a growing role in business and society. However, because IT professionals can be so expensive, some companies treat IT pros like they own them. If you have to answer a tech call at 9:00 PM because someone is working late, you hear, “That’s just part of the job.” If you need to work six hours on a Saturday to deploy a software update to avoid downtime during business hours, you get, “There’s no comp time for that since you’re on salary. That’s why we pay you the big bucks!”

9.) It will be your fault when users make silly errors

Some users will angrily snap at you when they are frustrated. They will yell, “What’s wrong with this thing?” or “This computer is NOT working!” or (my personal favorite), “What did you do to the computers?” In fact, the problem is that they accidentally deleted the Internet Explorer icon from the desktop, or unplugged the mouse from the back of the computer with their foot, or spilled their coffee on the keyboard.

8.) You will go from goat to hero and back again multiple times within any given day

When you miraculously fix something that had been keeping multiple employees from being able to work for the past 10 minutes — and they don’t realize how simple the fix really was — you will become the hero of the moment and everyone’s favorite employee. But they will conveniently forget about your hero anointment a few hours later when they have trouble printing because of a network slowdown — you will be enemy No. 1 at that moment. But if you show users a handy little Microsoft Outlook trick before the end of the day, you’ll soon return to hero status.

7.) Certifications won’t always help you become a better technologist, but they can help you land a better job or a pay raise

Headhunters and human resources departments love IT certifications. They make it easy to match up job candidates with job openings. They also make it easy for HR to screen candidates. You’ll hear a lot of veteran IT pros whine about techies who were hired based on certifications but who don’t have the experience to effectively do the job. They are often right. That has happened in plenty of places. But the fact is that certifications open up your career options. They show that you are organized and ambitious and have a desire to educate yourself and expand your skills. If you are an experienced IT pro and have certifications to match your experience, you will find yourself to be extremely marketable. Tech certifications are simply a way to prove your baseline knowledge and to market yourself as a professional. However, most of them are not a good indicator of how good you will be at the job.

6.) Your nontechnical co-workers will use you as personal tech support for their home PCs

Your co-workers (in addition to your friends, family, and neighbors) will view you as their personal tech support department for their home PCs and home networks. They will e-mail you, call you, and/or stop by your office to talk about how to deal with the virus that took over their home PC or the wireless router that stopped working after the last power outage and to ask you how to put their photos and videos on the Web so their grandparents in Iowa can view them. Some of them might even ask you if they can bring their home PC to the office for you to fix it. The polite ones will offer to pay you, but some of them will just hope or expect you can help them for free. Helping these folks can be very rewarding, but you have to be careful about where to draw the line and know when to decline. For help, take a look at TechRepublic’s free download “Ten ways to decline a request for free tech support.”

5.) Vendors and consultants will take all the credit when things work well and will blame you when things go wrong

Working with IT consultants is an important part of the job and can be one of the more challenging things to manage. Consultants bring niche expertise to help you deploy specialized systems, and when everything works right, it’s a great partnership. But you have to be careful. When things go wrong, some consultants will try to push the blame off on you by arguing that their solution works great everywhere else so it must be a problem with the local IT infrastructure. Conversely, when a project is wildly successful, there are consultants who will try to take all of the credit and ignore the substantial work you did to customize and implement the solution for your company.

4.) You’ll spend far more time babysitting old technologies than implementing new ones

One of the most attractive things about working in IT is the idea that we’ll get to play with the latest cutting edge technologies. However, that’s not usually the case in most IT jobs. The truth is that IT professionals typically spend far more time maintaining, babysitting, and nursing established technologies than implementing new ones. Even IT consultants, who work with more of the latest and greatest technologies, still tend to work primarily with established, proven solutions rather than the real cutting edge stuff.

3.) Veteran IT professionals are often the biggest roadblock to implementing new technologies

A lot of companies could implement more cutting edge stuff than they do. There are plenty of times when upgrading or replacing software or infrastructure can potentially save money and/or increase productivity and profitability. However, it’s often the case that one of the largest roadblocks to migrating to new technologies is not budget constraints or management objections; it’s the veteran techies in the IT department. Once they have something up and running, they are reluctant to change it. This can be a good thing because their jobs depend on keeping the infrastructure stable, but they also use that as an excuse to not spend the time to learn new things or stretch themselves in new directions. They get lazy, complacent, and self-satisfied.

2.) Some IT professionals deploy technologies that do more to consolidate their own power than to help the business

Another subtle but blameworthy thing that some IT professionals do is select and implement technologies based on how well those technologies make the business dependent on the IT pros to run them, rather than which ones are truly best for the business itself. For example, IT pros might select a solution that requires specialized skills to maintain instead of a more turnkey solution. Or an IT manager might have more of a Linux/UNIX background and so chooses a Linux-based solution over a Windows solution, even though the Windows solution is a better business decision (or, vice versa, a Windows admin might bypass a Linux-based appliance, for example). There are often excuses and justifications given for this type of behavior, but most of them are disingenuous.

1.) IT pros frequently use jargon to confuse nontechnical business managers and hide the fact that they screwed up

All IT pros — even the very best — screw things up once in a while. This is a profession where a lot is at stake and the systems that are being managed are complex and often difficult to integrate. However, not all IT pros are good at admitting when they make a mistake. Many of them take advantage of the fact that business managers (and even some high-level technical managers) don’t have a good understanding of technology, and so the techies will use jargon to confuse them (and cover up the truth) when explaining why a problem or an outage occurred. For example, to tell a business manager why a financial application went down for three hours, the techie might say, “We had a blue screen of death on the SQL Server that runs that app. Damn Microsoft!” What the techie would fail to mention was that the BSOD was caused by a driver update he applied to the server without first testing it on a staging machine.

What are the other dirty little secrets about working in IT that you think should be added to this list?

nice1franko

dirty secret number 11: we just act the maggot on the interweb most of the day.

Agent Smith

nice1franko wrote:

dirty secret number 11: we just act the maggot on the interweb most of the day.

Its Depressingly True!

zAbbo

12.) Admins hog the internet & block your favorite websites, not for any usage policy, but for our own amusement. There's nothing more pleasing than a lowly worker begging for access to a website. Meanwhile you snarf the balls of the internet connection for your own ill gotten wares.

Saruman

Well i find jobs in IT are not what you know, its who you know! If you believe all the recruiters, there are millions of IT jobs out there. I would think most of them are phantom jobs to get you on their books... in the meantime... the actual jobs will be filled by someone who knows someone else etc and not a recruiter to be seen.

Someone dig up the b@stard operator from hell stories! Classic

Saruman

Nevermind... here they are:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/odds/bofh/

feylya

http://www.theregister.co.uk/odds/bofh/

IT productivity is about to drop 50% as half of Ireland spends the day reading those stories.

fatboypee

#12
Non IT people almost always assume we know exactly what we're doing....

#13
the JIT approach to project devilry (delivery). Adopting the ABW stance (ANYTHING but WORK), (this may just be me), but you know you should be working on delivering a project, you know the deadline it's getting ooo so close..., yet anything but work occupies 90% of the time until you simply HAVE to bust yer bolls to get the project out..

FBP.

seamus

14.) Sometimes the IT pros will implement a new system purely because we want to play with it. We think it'll be good for the business, but that's only after we've spent six weeks learning how to use it and treating it as our new toy.

kmick

Most people who work in IT have low level cases of Asbergers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbergers
me included.

"Asperger syndrome was named in honor of Hans Asperger who, in 1944, described children in his practice who appeared to have normal intelligence but lacked nonverbal communication skills, failed to demonstrate empathy with their peers, and were physically clumsy"

fatboypee

Wot about ADD ? Most IT ppl I've met (mostly development) have ABW issues.. I'm horriffic lately... simply cannot get motivated...

AARRRGH

I know it's just a bit of fun, but it's a stupid, inaccurate list.

coolsmileygirl wrote:

10.) The pay in IT is good compared to many other professions, but since they pay you well, they often think they own you

Compared to other non-Arts based careers, the pay in IT is not great.

Nearly any other technical profession (Engineer, Architect, etc.) pays better.

coolsmileygirl wrote:

9.) It will be your fault when users make silly errors

Not true whatsoever.

coolsmileygirl wrote:

8.) You will go from goat to hero and back again multiple times within any given day

Again, not true.

coolsmileygirl wrote:

7.) Certifications won’t always help you become a better technologist, but they can help you land a better job or a pay raise

More nonsense. Certs force you to learn things, so you do become "better". They do help get better money though.

coolsmileygirl wrote:

6.) Your nontechnical co-workers will use you as personal tech support for their home PCs

Maybe once every 5 years. It's normal to ask your friends questions if you are doing something in the area they work in, e.g. I would ask my Doctor friend a question if I was going for surgery.

coolsmileygirl wrote:

5.) Vendors and consultants will take all the credit when things work well and will blame you when things go wrong

True for every job.

coolsmileygirl wrote:

4.) You’ll spend far more time babysitting old technologies than implementing new ones

True.

coolsmileygirl wrote:

3.) Veteran IT professionals are often the biggest roadblock to implementing new technologies

Not true. The problem is implementing new, unproven technologies is very expensive.

coolsmileygirl wrote:

2.) Some IT professionals deploy technologies that do more to consolidate their own power than to help the business

There are career builders in every industry.

coolsmileygirl wrote:

1.) IT pros frequently use jargon to confuse nontechnical business managers and hide the fact that they screwed up

Same for every industry...

Jumpy

IT Operations (rather than Development) requires a particular type of brain.
The ability to problem solve is the absolute key to this. Also the ability to learn from your mistakes quickly.
A lot of people I have worked with over the years have got into IT almost by accident, or because they believed that the pay rate was worth the study.
You will not move up significantly high unless you have the first two abilities. Secondary important abilities are;
Being able to work to a deadline
Knowing the difference between agressiveness and assertiveness.
A basic understanding of human psychology (you mess this up and your career will be a short lived one)
An understanding that not all people are as intelligent as you, and to accept that you may have to explain in a way that you may think is 'dumb'.

Jumpy

Dublindude, 7 is the case with several courses and certs. Microsoft certs are not one of them.
Any decent IT manager worth his salt will pick experience over cert.

Jumpy

Also Dublindude, the pay is good for IT for the level of study it requires.
An engineer or architect has to have the relevant degree. IT requires experience .

Spud83

Sssshhh stop telling everybody our secrets.

AARRRGH

Jumpy wrote:

Also Dublindude, the pay is good for IT for the level of study it requires.
An engineer or architect has to have the relevant degree. IT requires experience .

OK, sorry I should have mentioned I was talking about having a degree in that area.

I would agree IT is great for people who didn't go to college.

CiaranC

dublindude wrote:

OK, sorry I should have mentioned I was talking about having a degree in that area.

I would agree IT is great for people who didn't go to college.

Theres lots of money to be made in the consultancy end, once you get past the support end the OP mentions.

monkey tennis

dublindude wrote:

I would agree IT is great for people who didn't go to college.

I would say IT is great for people who are interested in IT. Not for anyone else.

prospect

I have been involved in Full time IT support for 6 years now, and part-time for 4 years before that.

TBH, I identify with every one of the OP's points, and I am getting sick to death of this kind of work. Unfortunately, I have few qualifications to my name, as my college diploma is in biology and I am mostly self taught in IT.

What to do...???...

Anyway, good thread.

nice1franko

Easiest thing to do is some courses.

If you want to be a java programmer go for the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam, if you want to be a lumber jack, start choppin down trees etc

Jumpy

I should probably add that the time between 3rd Line and Consultantcy is a horribly stressful job.

You are responsible for everything.

Gillie

prospect wrote:

I have been involved in Full time IT support for 6 years now, and part-time for 4 years before that.

TBH, I identify with every one of the OP's points, and I am getting sick to death of this kind of work. Unfortunately, I have few qualifications to my name, as my college diploma is in biology and I am mostly self taught in IT.

Kinda in the same boat!
Working in IT for almost 9 years now. Drank my way through my Cert in Computing!

Then they let me loose on a medium to large sized server room were I turned into a sponge!

I would agree with most of those points that the OP made.

I am 2 and a half years in my current job and dread the day that I may have to leave due to my lack of "papers".

nesf

prospect wrote:

What to do...???...

Go plug a network cable back into the back of a PC!

Jumpy

We have a new guy just started, I am tempted to ask him to go to the storeroom to get me 15m of wireless LAN cable.

far2gud

Jumpy wrote:

We have a new guy just started, I am tempted to ask him to go to the storeroom to get me 15m of wireless LAN cable.

he he he, you cruel bast*rd! :rolleyes:

Nody

Jumpy wrote:

We have a new guy just started, I am tempted to ask him to go to the storeroom to get me 15m of wireless LAN cable.

Nah to easy to spot, ask him to get the key for the network instead or to empty the network on stuck bytes!

Jumpy

Jumpy wrote:

We have a new guy just started, I am tempted to ask him to go to the storeroom to get me 15m of wireless LAN cable.

Mwah a ha ha hahahaha:D
I told my boss about that one thats something I would think about actually doing he's always catching me out

youcancallmeal

Gillie wrote:

I am 2 and a half years in my current job and dread the day that I may have to leave due to my lack of "papers".

I don't get it why would you have to leave your job due to lack of "papers"?

Spud83

youcancallme>al wrote:

I don't get it why would you have to leave your job due to lack of "papers"?

I think he meant he dreads trying to get a new job because of a lack papers.

fasty

kmick wrote:

Most people who work in IT have low level cases of Asbergers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbergers
me included.

"Asperger syndrome was named in honor of Hans Asperger who, in 1944, described children in his practice who appeared to have normal intelligence but lacked nonverbal communication skills, failed to demonstrate empathy with their peers, and were physically clumsy"

I really think this is a myth. I've been working in IT for a good few years now and I've only come across a few people like that.

Zambia

Nice thread especially as we are all on the interweb prior to lunch

Gillie

youcancallme>al wrote:

I don't get it why would you have to leave your job due to lack of "papers"?

Sorry. Just re-read what I typed.
I meant if I did leave my current job I might have difficulty getting another one due to lack of papers!

nesf

fasty wrote:

I really think this is a myth. I've been working in IT for a good few years now and I've only come across a few people like that.

Nah, there are plenty of people with poor social skills in IT. Whether they've Asperger's or not is questionable.

Ginger

Another point..

Development metrics can confuse non development managers..

Manager: What do you mean you fixed 1 bug this morning, you fixed 12 yesterday

You: Well 10 of them were typos and 1 was a reposition of a submit button

Manager: Well get to it, you have to have X number done by the evening.

You: No worries ... twaddles off to fix the remaining typos

12 .. Dev people find it hard to work 9-5 because the job requires somewhat of an artistic approach .. and a motivation

rickybutcher

Personally I don't think the pay in IT is very good when you compare it to what "administrators" get (busy bodies who think they're YOUR boss just because they organise meetings and other things) or HR types get for doing absolutely ****ing nothing. At least at any company I've ever worked for, I haven't exactly worked at the very high end of IT but I know what my bosses and other IT people in the company were on and it wasn't rewarding versus what you could for doing admin work.