Management Toolkit

Ten secrets about working in IT

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Jason Hiner Tech Republic

Published: 05 Sep 2007 13:04 BST

...after the last power outage, or how to put their photos and videos on the web. 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 people can be very rewarding, but you have to be careful about where to draw the line and know when to decline.

6. Vendors and consultants will take all the credit when things work well, and 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 specialised 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 put the blame 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 customise and implement the solution for your company.

7. 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 rarely 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.

8. 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.

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9. Some IT professionals deploy technologies that do more to consolidate their own power than 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 specialised 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 behaviour, but most of them are disingenuous.

10. IT pros frequently use jargon to confuse non-technical 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 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.

Are there any other secrets about working in IT that you think should be added to this list? Post a comment at the bottom of this page to let us know.