6 ms·

Real talk? There is nothing wrong with being in IT. Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan". Yo

Real talk? There is nothing wrong with being in IT. Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan". You're a carpenter. You nail boards together to serve the business interests of the company. Even if the boards are SQL queries or ReactJS or whatever. Companies need tech. You can bring value by making everyone's jobs better with your technology - sand off those rough edges on everyone's workflows. Demonstrate your value.

retbull 8y ago
IT fixes peoples computers. Software Developers don't do that. We aren't Network Admins, we don't know how to set up or fix AD and we don't manage hardware. IT is a different field. I write software to process data and mostly I don't interact with hardware or troubleshooting arbitrary software directly. If I am offering support I am a level above IT. I understand that IT needs to be done but it is a very different job and should be treated that way.
- Clubber 8y ago
  That definition morphs by time and company. At the last place I worked the IT department was the devs, dbas, net admins, and help desk.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    This is the case at every non-tech company I've worked at. It's (mostly) the tech companies that segregate IT as a lower-status function.
    - Viliam1234 8y ago
      It can happen either way. I worked in a tech startup, where everyone did everything, and where doing everything was considered high-status: it meant you were competent at everything. Or perhaps the other way round: trying to avoid any computer-related task, for whatever reason, was perceived as an admission of incompetence, therefore low-status. (I didn't agree with that philosophy. I am humble enough to admit that I am not an expert at something, e.g. setting up printers; and lazy enough that I want to avoid such work if I can.) I also worked in a non-tech company with sufficiently large internal software development department, where as a programmer I focused on developing software; and if any part of the technical infrastructure stopped working, I just called the internal tech support.
      - dvtv75 8y ago
        > where everyone did everything, and where doing everything was considered high-status: it meant you were competent at everything. In my current (non-IT/software dev) workplace, the CEO and the manager pride themselves on how all our staff can do everything. We're all sold on it with the line that "..all your future employers will be amazed at how much you can do!" Unfortunately, everything we produce is second rate junk as a result of this, as we are "all responsible for quality control," and the customers pay appropriately. It's not that it doesn't work, clearly it does for some businesses, it's just that someone has to be responsible for making sure that the product is fit to be presented to the customer, and if everyone's running around doing everything, nobody's really doing anything.
        Viliam1234 8y ago
        I feel your pain. That is exactly where this kind of reasoning goes. There is always something you don't know, no matter how "senior full-stack" whatever you are. And when that happens, and the company culture does not allow you to admit it, the only solution is to use google, stack exchange, download a book or two, and perhaps ask a friend -- but neither of that makes you an expert overnight (and sometimes "overnight" is literally as much time as the agile process used in your company will give you; just because someone else, who actually is an expert in that stuff, could do that in a day). The more I know about the things I specialize at, the more I am aware that you can't reach that depth of knowledge and experience by giving three smart questions to the search engine, and reading the three resulting articles. And by analogy, I assume the same is true about some of the things I don't specialize at. But I have kids to feed, so sometimes I just bite my tongue and produce whatever is possible within given constraints. This company culture also leads to playing games where everyone claims to believe that of course anyone can easily do anything -- but there are tasks that everyone is trying very hard to avoid: "It's not that I couldn't do that, I am just very busy now working on some other high-priority stuff that only I can do. Perhaps John would like to take this nice and simple task?" "Uhm, I am also in the middle of, uhm, something. Perhaps Joe could do this?" Joe doesn't have a plausible excuse ready (or is not present at the moment), so he is assigned the task. The meeting ends. If anything goes wrong, it's all Joe's fault. In long term this reinforces the status ladder within the company, because the high-status guys are in the best position to refuse the tasks outside of their field of competence (by claiming they have more important stuff to do); the low-status guys get stuck with the tasks, produce mediocre results, and that is taken as a proof that they really deserved the low status. (If they are inexperienced 20-somethings, they will quite often buy it, and feel guilty about their incompetence. Then some moment later they change job, and realize it was all actually about the company culture.)
    - Symbiote 8y ago
      I'm at a "tech" place, but we're very small (8 developers). Laptops, printers, email, document storage and so on is part of the software development team's responsibility -- so we outsource all of it, and spend a little time on it roughly every 6 months for a new system or similar. "Hey, I can't print". "Here's the helpdesk number for the people we pay for printers". (Some people were annoyed at first, but understood when they saw the developers' salaries compared to what we paid for the "boring" services.)
- modbait 8y ago
  In my experience, Software Developers that can't configure/diagnose/fix hardware/networking issues are usually pretty mediocre at development as well. And vice versa for "IT" guys that can't program. Specialization is for insects.
  - sammoorhouse 8y ago
    > specialisation is for insects And, like, literally everyone since Adam Smith and his pins. Assessing how good people are at skill A by trying to determine how good they are at ever-so-slightly-related skill B is what led google and the rest of the valley down the ridiculous problem solving interview quest of the aughts. Take your manhole covers and suck on them! Abstraction is a skill, one that’s difficult to assess in an hour-long interview, but one which allows me to say “I’m great at C# but I’ll call someone when the printer is broken” - because there are only so many hours in the day.
- _o_ 8y ago
  ... and that is wrong with the software development today. Our generations of developers started with playing games, using computer, reinstalling, configuring computers, then we started to mess with computers, os, hardware, network, routers, programing came in somewhere in the middle (we wanted to make a game, demo scene, ), cleaning malware, then we started automating the computer tasks, learned multiple programing languages with a clear vision - "I want to learn C, coz then I can do anything" :D, switches multiple computers, security started to become an issue (winnuke (tm) :D), riding the irc splits, taking over irc channels for fun, started to study networks at low level, got first data loss, learned to rescue data, switching controllers on hard disk, studying prolog as it was hilarious, got first job, ... when we started to develop commercial software we had accumulated decade of knowledge from multiple platforms and OSs (I have wrote my first program in simons basic on c64 at age of 11, put together my first 386 from components). We have tinkered with anything coming under our hands, software development was just another skill and we use our knowledge from IT in development and vice versa. Today? At 20... "what will I be doing for a living? Hm, I did some html and copy pasted js, I WILL BE A DEVELOPER and be RICH". Went to college, learned to develop. But I don't have any foundation, web and sql is all I know, and I am sleeping with Programming patterns book under my pillow and looking at latest programming hype (silently laughing at year of nosql databases and year of blockchain, now AI, and eagerly waiting for the next silver bullet that will solve ALL our problems :D) IT is not a different field, but the level of today knowledge IS, also the attitude. A friend of mine is having a successful software company and he said to me once: "If I get a guy with the attitude and background we had, I will hire him even if I wont be hiring at that moment. They became so rare, that it is worth having him on a bench, just to be there when you need him".
  - magic_beans 8y ago
    Hop off your high horse, gatekeeper.
    - _o_ 8y ago
      Why, I have a good view from here :) And I can take great photos of scenery, now I do understand what the photos are showing is not something that everyone would love but still, those are photos, you can shoot the one making them but the scenery is not going to change by that, or we would just shoot all war journalists and there would be no more wars. But joke aside, what is the issue, do you disagree?
- tremon 8y ago
  IT fixes peoples computers. Rather, we manage peoples computers, and the environment that allows them to function. The misconception that IT is only there to fix, is because we're invisible to you when everything works as expected.
teachrdan 8y ago
I think I've made myself misunderstood. I'm not intending to put down IT work or the people who do it. But from a career perspective, if I want job security and a higher salary, I think it'd be a mistake, in the long term, to be seen as IT. IT is seen as a cost center, which leads to corner-cutting and outsourcing--even when it ends up costing way more in the long run.[0] 0. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2017/05/29/british-airways-flights-and-it-failure-cue-furious-debate-around-outsourcing/#5c4e78837839 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2017/05/29/british-airway...
- matchagaucho 8y ago
  Tell that to $250 hr SAP and Salesforce Architects/Developers, or to Baby Boomer COBOL programmers who are given ever increasing incentives to post-pone retirement. IT is by far more lucrative in the long run. It's just the structure of RSUs and stock options that gives start-ups the illusion of relatively larger comp gains.
  - melq 8y ago
    No idea what a 'salesforce architect or developer' is, but how would a COBOL programmer be considered IT staff? (In the context of this thread where IT staff == support staff)
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  I think where the IT/development issues meet is that software development departments can also be outsourced, just like IT admin and support.
enraged_camel 8y ago
Many non-tech employees view IT people as basically “computer janitors with bad attitudes”. Heck, I’ve worked in tech for a decade and I can count the number of people who have a positive view of their IT department in one hand.
- hulahoof 8y ago
  To be fair, In my (admittedly limited) experience contracting at BigCorp - the IT department's procedures are often a bottleneck in a workflow or solutions. We all know they are following business procedure, but there will always be some unconcious tension with departments that hinder a solution (I see marketing and legal butt heads all day).
  - regularfry 8y ago
    In my experience they're also critically understaffed.
    - hulahoof 8y ago
      Right, but putting a face to a blocker in a project is hard to remove mentally. In an ideal world, IT and Devs would be on the same page - after all who will be first contact when an end user encounters an issue? The separation of development and support makes sense from a budgeting point of view, but operationally should be intertwined (IMO).
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  Doing ops at megacorp meant that we got treated like code janitors by our own management.
nikanj 8y ago
Relevant: http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa6506e2f35eaac http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...
s2g 8y ago
> Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan". It's entirely reasonable for a carpenter not to want a job where they just nail pieces of wood together. Not really building anything, not really using skill. Just nailing a few boards together all day.
- rrix2 8y ago
  Nailing boards together is building something. Carpenters aren't pissed off that they didn't grow the trees themselves and and chop them and haul them and plane them.
- dvtv75 8y ago
  I think that sort of work is actually given to a "hammer hand" or a "builder" in New Zealand. I think a carpenter is a step above those.
- regularfry 8y ago
  Framers and cabinet-makers are both carpenters, but they're very different jobs.
- notyourday 8y ago
  For $350k/year i would change a light bulb
exDM69 8y ago
> Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan". Carpenters build houses, woodworkers build furniture. IT people reinstall operating systems, fix printers and networking issues and software engineers write software. They have a different education, different job description and different pay scales. A woodworker wouldn't make a good carpenter nor a software engineer a good IT person or vice versa. There is absolutely nothing wrong in being an IT person or a carpenter, they're reputable jobs that put food on the table. But if your trade is being a woodworker or a software engineer you should be slightly worried if you end up being put in a carpentry or IT. Or vice versa. Disclaimer: I'm biased because I'm a software engineer and a woodworker. I'm good at my job but I can't fix networking issues or build houses.
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  Unless you're George Lucas, and then you hire a team of cabinet makers to build your deck.
- freehunter 8y ago
  At any decently sized company, there is no overlap between IT (helpdesk and desktop support) and engineering jobs. I worked at a regional company with six people on the security/compliance team and not once was I ever asked to fix a printer or troubleshoot a laptop. We had dedicated people for that. It's actually at the smaller companies (like startups) where you'll be expected to do that. I worked at a company with <20 people total in the entire "IT department" (encompassing all computer-related things). Even though my job title was security analyst, I was in Active Directory, I was configuring Cisco gear, I had the on-call phone for the entire department, my phone was in the helpdesk rotation, I'd be dispatched to satellite locations to troubleshoot their wireless. In my current job as a consultant, I've worked with startups where their engineers are answering support emails and replacing their own hard drives because they don't have a helpdesk or a desktop support team. 'exDM69, I'm not arguing with/against you, just piggybacking off your distinctions to help the conversation. If you're afraid that moving from a tech company to any other enterprise will have you putting on many different hats, it's probably not true. Unless you move to a tiny company, which is true for tech companies as well. Any real enterprise company will have dedicated IT support teams and you will be reprimanded for trying to perform your own IT maintenance since that's not your job.

retbull 8y ago

IT fixes peoples computers. Software Developers don't do that. We aren't Network Admins, we don't know how to set up or fix AD and we don't manage hardware. IT is a different field. I write software to process data and mostly I don't interact with hardware or troubleshooting arbitrary software directly. If I am offering support I am a level above IT. I understand that IT needs to be done but it is a very different job and should be treated that way.

Clubber 8y ago
That definition morphs by time and company. At the last place I worked the IT department was the devs, dbas, net admins, and help desk.
- ams6110 8y ago
  This is the case at every non-tech company I've worked at. It's (mostly) the tech companies that segregate IT as a lower-status function.
  - Viliam1234 8y ago
    It can happen either way. I worked in a tech startup, where everyone did everything, and where doing everything was considered high-status: it meant you were competent at everything. Or perhaps the other way round: trying to avoid any computer-related task, for whatever reason, was perceived as an admission of incompetence, therefore low-status. (I didn't agree with that philosophy. I am humble enough to admit that I am not an expert at something, e.g. setting up printers; and lazy enough that I want to avoid such work if I can.) I also worked in a non-tech company with sufficiently large internal software development department, where as a programmer I focused on developing software; and if any part of the technical infrastructure stopped working, I just called the internal tech support.
    - dvtv75 8y ago
      > where everyone did everything, and where doing everything was considered high-status: it meant you were competent at everything. In my current (non-IT/software dev) workplace, the CEO and the manager pride themselves on how all our staff can do everything. We're all sold on it with the line that "..all your future employers will be amazed at how much you can do!" Unfortunately, everything we produce is second rate junk as a result of this, as we are "all responsible for quality control," and the customers pay appropriately. It's not that it doesn't work, clearly it does for some businesses, it's just that someone has to be responsible for making sure that the product is fit to be presented to the customer, and if everyone's running around doing everything, nobody's really doing anything.
      - Viliam1234 8y ago
        I feel your pain. That is exactly where this kind of reasoning goes. There is always something you don't know, no matter how "senior full-stack" whatever you are. And when that happens, and the company culture does not allow you to admit it, the only solution is to use google, stack exchange, download a book or two, and perhaps ask a friend -- but neither of that makes you an expert overnight (and sometimes "overnight" is literally as much time as the agile process used in your company will give you; just because someone else, who actually is an expert in that stuff, could do that in a day). The more I know about the things I specialize at, the more I am aware that you can't reach that depth of knowledge and experience by giving three smart questions to the search engine, and reading the three resulting articles. And by analogy, I assume the same is true about some of the things I don't specialize at. But I have kids to feed, so sometimes I just bite my tongue and produce whatever is possible within given constraints. This company culture also leads to playing games where everyone claims to believe that of course anyone can easily do anything -- but there are tasks that everyone is trying very hard to avoid: "It's not that I couldn't do that, I am just very busy now working on some other high-priority stuff that only I can do. Perhaps John would like to take this nice and simple task?" "Uhm, I am also in the middle of, uhm, something. Perhaps Joe could do this?" Joe doesn't have a plausible excuse ready (or is not present at the moment), so he is assigned the task. The meeting ends. If anything goes wrong, it's all Joe's fault. In long term this reinforces the status ladder within the company, because the high-status guys are in the best position to refuse the tasks outside of their field of competence (by claiming they have more important stuff to do); the low-status guys get stuck with the tasks, produce mediocre results, and that is taken as a proof that they really deserved the low status. (If they are inexperienced 20-somethings, they will quite often buy it, and feel guilty about their incompetence. Then some moment later they change job, and realize it was all actually about the company culture.)
  - Symbiote 8y ago
    I'm at a "tech" place, but we're very small (8 developers). Laptops, printers, email, document storage and so on is part of the software development team's responsibility -- so we outsource all of it, and spend a little time on it roughly every 6 months for a new system or similar. "Hey, I can't print". "Here's the helpdesk number for the people we pay for printers". (Some people were annoyed at first, but understood when they saw the developers' salaries compared to what we paid for the "boring" services.)
modbait 8y ago
In my experience, Software Developers that can't configure/diagnose/fix hardware/networking issues are usually pretty mediocre at development as well. And vice versa for "IT" guys that can't program. Specialization is for insects.
- sammoorhouse 8y ago
  > specialisation is for insects And, like, literally everyone since Adam Smith and his pins. Assessing how good people are at skill A by trying to determine how good they are at ever-so-slightly-related skill B is what led google and the rest of the valley down the ridiculous problem solving interview quest of the aughts. Take your manhole covers and suck on them! Abstraction is a skill, one that’s difficult to assess in an hour-long interview, but one which allows me to say “I’m great at C# but I’ll call someone when the printer is broken” - because there are only so many hours in the day.
_o_ 8y ago
... and that is wrong with the software development today. Our generations of developers started with playing games, using computer, reinstalling, configuring computers, then we started to mess with computers, os, hardware, network, routers, programing came in somewhere in the middle (we wanted to make a game, demo scene, ), cleaning malware, then we started automating the computer tasks, learned multiple programing languages with a clear vision - "I want to learn C, coz then I can do anything" :D, switches multiple computers, security started to become an issue (winnuke (tm) :D), riding the irc splits, taking over irc channels for fun, started to study networks at low level, got first data loss, learned to rescue data, switching controllers on hard disk, studying prolog as it was hilarious, got first job, ... when we started to develop commercial software we had accumulated decade of knowledge from multiple platforms and OSs (I have wrote my first program in simons basic on c64 at age of 11, put together my first 386 from components). We have tinkered with anything coming under our hands, software development was just another skill and we use our knowledge from IT in development and vice versa. Today? At 20... "what will I be doing for a living? Hm, I did some html and copy pasted js, I WILL BE A DEVELOPER and be RICH". Went to college, learned to develop. But I don't have any foundation, web and sql is all I know, and I am sleeping with Programming patterns book under my pillow and looking at latest programming hype (silently laughing at year of nosql databases and year of blockchain, now AI, and eagerly waiting for the next silver bullet that will solve ALL our problems :D) IT is not a different field, but the level of today knowledge IS, also the attitude. A friend of mine is having a successful software company and he said to me once: "If I get a guy with the attitude and background we had, I will hire him even if I wont be hiring at that moment. They became so rare, that it is worth having him on a bench, just to be there when you need him".
- magic_beans 8y ago
  Hop off your high horse, gatekeeper.
  - _o_ 8y ago
    Why, I have a good view from here :) And I can take great photos of scenery, now I do understand what the photos are showing is not something that everyone would love but still, those are photos, you can shoot the one making them but the scenery is not going to change by that, or we would just shoot all war journalists and there would be no more wars. But joke aside, what is the issue, do you disagree?
tremon 8y ago
IT fixes peoples computers. Rather, we manage peoples computers, and the environment that allows them to function. The misconception that IT is only there to fix, is because we're invisible to you when everything works as expected.

teachrdan 8y ago

I think I've made myself misunderstood. I'm not intending to put down IT work or the people who do it. But from a career perspective, if I want job security and a higher salary, I think it'd be a mistake, in the long term, to be seen as IT. IT is seen as a cost center, which leads to corner-cutting and outsourcing--even when it ends up costing way more in the long run.[0] 0. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2017/05/29/british-airways-flights-and-it-failure-cue-furious-debate-around-outsourcing/#5c4e78837839 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2017/05/29/british-airway...

matchagaucho 8y ago
Tell that to $250 hr SAP and Salesforce Architects/Developers, or to Baby Boomer COBOL programmers who are given ever increasing incentives to post-pone retirement. IT is by far more lucrative in the long run. It's just the structure of RSUs and stock options that gives start-ups the illusion of relatively larger comp gains.
- melq 8y ago
  No idea what a 'salesforce architect or developer' is, but how would a COBOL programmer be considered IT staff? (In the context of this thread where IT staff == support staff)
jonhendry18 8y ago
I think where the IT/development issues meet is that software development departments can also be outsourced, just like IT admin and support.

enraged_camel 8y ago

Many non-tech employees view IT people as basically “computer janitors with bad attitudes”. Heck, I’ve worked in tech for a decade and I can count the number of people who have a positive view of their IT department in one hand.

hulahoof 8y ago
To be fair, In my (admittedly limited) experience contracting at BigCorp - the IT department's procedures are often a bottleneck in a workflow or solutions. We all know they are following business procedure, but there will always be some unconcious tension with departments that hinder a solution (I see marketing and legal butt heads all day).
- regularfry 8y ago
  In my experience they're also critically understaffed.
  - hulahoof 8y ago
    Right, but putting a face to a blocker in a project is hard to remove mentally. In an ideal world, IT and Devs would be on the same page - after all who will be first contact when an end user encounters an issue? The separation of development and support makes sense from a budgeting point of view, but operationally should be intertwined (IMO).
inferiorhuman 8y ago
Doing ops at megacorp meant that we got treated like code janitors by our own management.

nikanj 8y ago

Relevant: http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa6506e2f35eaac http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...

s2g 8y ago

> Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan". It's entirely reasonable for a carpenter not to want a job where they just nail pieces of wood together. Not really building anything, not really using skill. Just nailing a few boards together all day.

rrix2 8y ago
Nailing boards together is building something. Carpenters aren't pissed off that they didn't grow the trees themselves and and chop them and haul them and plane them.
dvtv75 8y ago
I think that sort of work is actually given to a "hammer hand" or a "builder" in New Zealand. I think a carpenter is a step above those.
regularfry 8y ago
Framers and cabinet-makers are both carpenters, but they're very different jobs.
notyourday 8y ago
For $350k/year i would change a light bulb

exDM69 8y ago

> Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan". Carpenters build houses, woodworkers build furniture. IT people reinstall operating systems, fix printers and networking issues and software engineers write software. They have a different education, different job description and different pay scales. A woodworker wouldn't make a good carpenter nor a software engineer a good IT person or vice versa. There is absolutely nothing wrong in being an IT person or a carpenter, they're reputable jobs that put food on the table. But if your trade is being a woodworker or a software engineer you should be slightly worried if you end up being put in a carpentry or IT. Or vice versa. Disclaimer: I'm biased because I'm a software engineer and a woodworker. I'm good at my job but I can't fix networking issues or build houses.

inferiorhuman 8y ago
Unless you're George Lucas, and then you hire a team of cabinet makers to build your deck.
freehunter 8y ago
At any decently sized company, there is no overlap between IT (helpdesk and desktop support) and engineering jobs. I worked at a regional company with six people on the security/compliance team and not once was I ever asked to fix a printer or troubleshoot a laptop. We had dedicated people for that. It's actually at the smaller companies (like startups) where you'll be expected to do that. I worked at a company with <20 people total in the entire "IT department" (encompassing all computer-related things). Even though my job title was security analyst, I was in Active Directory, I was configuring Cisco gear, I had the on-call phone for the entire department, my phone was in the helpdesk rotation, I'd be dispatched to satellite locations to troubleshoot their wireless. In my current job as a consultant, I've worked with startups where their engineers are answering support emails and replacing their own hard drives because they don't have a helpdesk or a desktop support team. 'exDM69, I'm not arguing with/against you, just piggybacking off your distinctions to help the conversation. If you're afraid that moving from a tech company to any other enterprise will have you putting on many different hats, it's probably not true. Unless you move to a tiny company, which is true for tech companies as well. Any real enterprise company will have dedicated IT support teams and you will be reprimanded for trying to perform your own IT maintenance since that's not your job.