I Love IT

Sometimes, I have to laugh at the absurdity of it all. IT management has always been a great source of amusement for me. Unless you work for a technology company, most business have no idea how to run it. The reasons for this are many. First off if you have non-technical people who are put in charge of hiring people for technical leadership they are susceptible to bullshit.

You have some buffoon of a manager who comes in and tells Joe CEO that they can manage IT and do so with a minimal cost to the company. He bores the CEO with pie charts and graphs explaining his bullshit. The thing is though, in the real world of Information Technology, just like anything else you get what you pay for. If you buy a Hyundai you cannot expect it to run like a Lexus.

So, therein lies the problem. Being in IT is like one long merry-go-round. One day I will hear, “We need to provide first class service.” Which means you never turn a client away. You do what ever it takes to get a client up and running. I agree with this thinking. If a client is down, he or she is not productive. That in turn is costing the bank money. Now, you won’t see that loss on an accountant’s ledger but it is there nonetheless.

The problem is that I am expensive. It costs the bank money to pay me to go and fix someone’s problem. I do not generate money for the bank, therefore, I am a liability. So, like any good company the bank will try to reduce that liability. So, they institute a Remote Desktop Team. What they do is try to fix your problem on the phone. Since phone support is cheaper they in turn can save money by eliminating people like me at the bank. I’ve seen this nonsense tried at other companies and it never works. So, now instead of offering that world-class service if a client calls me directly with a problem that might take me all of five minutes to fix, I am to direct them to a 1-800 number so that they can take an hour to fix it for them.

On paper a remote support site looks great. In theory since the morons in management think they are performing the same tasks that we are they look at this as a great savings. Of course eventually the clients that we support, that were used to that great service start to complain and about being on the phone for hours on end. Then the bean counters have to start explaining why the service is not the same. So, then the cycle will begin again, and we will stress that world-class service for a couple of months until the next hair-brained scheme is unearthed.

All of this just angers me to no end. I hate lazy management and nonsense decisions. I’ve been in this field since 1992. One reason I never went into networks is that I like people. I like being able to help them. I don’t like being tied to a desk all day. If you work on the networking side of things the prestige may be greater but inevitability you get bored. My days usually fly by and there is something cool about not knowing what the day has in store for you. Sure, I realize that the IT snobs look down there noses at us desktop folks but that is OK. Unlike most of those geeks I’ve had sex with multiple partners and I stopped playing D and D in 7^th grade.

With that said you will inevitably get two types of managers in IT. The first being some non-technical boob who transferred from accounting who only knows how to cut costs. The problem is that when you try to explain why things are done they way they are they cannot comprehend it. The second manager you get is the Network geeks. Sure they are technical but have zero ability to interact with people.

In all my years in this field I’ve have been managed properly twice. Once at IRI by a lady named Lorene and once at Harris by my old boss Tim. In thirteen years that is an abysmal record. Part of the problem is that IT management has a high turn over rate. As soon as you have one management structure which has mapped out one plan another one comes in and implements there own processes. All of this makes me wonder even more why I stuck with this field. Sometimes I feel like I am on a sinking ship. I’ve always believed that if you work your ass off, do a good job and do what your boss tells you; in America you will always have a job. However in IT there are no guarantees, which is a little scary.