Skip to main content

Ten Dirty Little Secrets You Should Know About Working In IT

Image
By
I like a good "xyz ten" list (where xyz = top, best, worst, ...) as much as the other guy. And though I admit that the notion is, in most cases, rather shallow (oversimplification <> clear and concise delivery of a message) it often makes for an uplifting (funny) read. Here's one:
  1. IT pros frequently use jargon to confuse nontechnical business managers and hide the fact that they screwed up
  2. Some IT professionals deploy technologies that do more to consolidate their own power than to help the business
  3. Veteran IT professionals are often the biggest roadblock to implementing new technologies
  4. You’ll spend far more time babysitting old technologies than implementing new ones
  5. Vendors and consultants will take all the credit when things work well and will blame you when things go wrong
  6. Your nontechnical co-workers will use you as personal tech support for their home PCs
  7. Certifications won’t always help you become a better technologist, but they can help you land a better job or a pay raise
  8. You will go from goat to hero and back again multiple times within any given day
  9. It will be your fault when users make silly errors
  10. The pay in IT is good compared to many other professions, but since they pay you well, they often think they own you

Naturally, I did not come up with it. So, I have to give credit where credit is due - check out the original (and expanded) version here
Labels:

Comments

  1. OhnenamenDecember 21, 2010 at 9:52 PM

    Corollary to #3. Oldsters are always expelled from IT, and Age Discrimination is the law. The statutes are ignored. Watch what has now happened to that team of ours from back-in-the-day on "G" wing: 10% or more of them, cast out in 2010, every single expulsion being over 55 years old. No Federal agency bothers enforcing the written statute; it's quite passé.

    Corollary to #5. IT work is considered worthless. Janet Jackson's "What have you done for me LATELY?" is another de facto LAW. IT folks are like experts who work for years on a car, only to have some idiot drive it into a tree--or more often, in fact, into a pedestrian. There is zero sense of lasting accomplishment.

    Life's a game, in truth. I do like your take on that. See my own considerations at ludamus.blogspot.com . (As I was setting things up, my Russian skills vanished totally--я забыл слово « играть »! So like any geezer, I reverted to my childhood language in the title, к сожалание).

    Keep up the good work! You are far smarter thank you know!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lean Startup

By
"It builds on many previous management and product development ideas, including lean manufacturing, design thinking, customer development, and agile development. It represents a new approach to creating continuous innovation. It’s called the Lean Startup." Overall, I found " The Lean Startup " to be informative and instructive, but while I picked up on many interesting concepts, such as: b uild-measure-learn feedback loops, m inimum viable products (MVP), different  engines of growth,  cohort-based metrics, split-test experiments, etc.; many of those concepts weren't new to me at all (I accidentally discovered that I've been using them for some time; obviously, without having any idea that they were associated with or related to the Lean Startup). Nonetheless, reading about something known (or semi-known) often opens new dimensions, exposes different points of view, and helps with bringing things into focus as well as rationalizing and amalgamatin...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria's Jews

By
We have just returned from a very nice vacation (more about it in a different post), which I have used, among other things, to finish reading a couple of books - " Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) " by none other than Richard P. Feynman himself, and " Beyond Hitler's Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria's Jews " by Michael Bar-Zohar:   Both are (IMHO) great books, but in this post I wanted to cover the latter (more on Mr. Feynman after I finish reading " What Do You Care What Other People Think?: further adventures of a curious character "). First of all, I would like to thank my good friend Al for turning me onto the subject and gifting me the book. I thought I knew quite a bit about the history and the fate of European Jewry during the WWII  and the " Die Endlösung " . After all, I have read extensively on the subject, both in school and later on; watched many documentary and popular movies...
1 comment
Read more

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

By
" In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself. " The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick - t his was not an easy read for me, I spent more time on this book than on two before and two after (all of comparable volume) combined. And I am not exactly sure why. I guess it could be the style, the vocabulary, the depth and the breadth of the subject matter  coverage , or all of these and few other things put together.  But I feel like it was well worth the effort. The story flows smoothly from the talking drums of Africa to the  world of oral culture;  to the invention of scripts and alphabets; to evolution of languages, books, catalogs and dictionaries; to  further developments of abstraction,  symbolic logic,  and mathematics; to  the birth of computer science, communications theory , information theory, quantum theory, ... I don't think I can right a review that will do this book just...
Post a Comment
Read more