I receive so many eWeek emails that it isn’t funny, and most of the time I have to just delete them because I don’t have time to even open them let alone read them. Recently however a headline What Is the Nature of an IT Worker? caught my eye. The article discusses, very briefly, a few of the common problems for IT workers and the things that cause those issues. For example, overworked, constant interruption, and a perception from others that they don’t understand the business. I can only speak definitively on my own experience, since I don’t want to repeat sentiment I’ve heard on the net, so here are my two cents.

Overworked

IT workers are the most consistently overworked individuals where I work. There are other groups of people who have projects or deadlines where they may work 50 hour weeks, but on average their numbers are much lower. I know of several individuals outside of IT who have claimed to work much more than they actually do, and I know people in IT who claim to work a lot more than they actually do. They are looking for the “sorry me” pitty that accompanies it, often to get out of doing something else. The cold numbers state that IT workers on average consistently work more than any other department. But not by much. So what is the real problem here? I have this posted on my name plate outside my cube:

I have infinite capacity to do more work so long as you don’t mind that my quality approaches zero. –Scott Adams (Get your daily dose: Dilbert: 2009 Day-to-Day Calendar (Dilbert) )

The real problem is that IT workers are not properly validated for their work. When validation comes it comes in the form of more work. The harder an IT worker works, the more tasks and projects are given to him, which up to a point is a great thing and validates his career, but after a certain point causes burnout and a crash. I was in two meetings this past week with groups of individuals who had a specific job function. One was for UNIX administrators and one was for something dealing with security. In both groups I described my activities and breadth of work and was asked who was helping me. “I am the only one here who does this,” was my answer, which is completely true, “and these are only one part of the many things that I do.” I realized that a few of the people on the line had less work to do than I did, had help or a backup for that work, and that for all of them that single focus area was all they were expected to do. This is what I get for being good at the many things I do, and is also pretty much the only thing that validates me at work. That is the problem.

I called a co-worker at another office location this week as well and gave him a problem that I was having with something under his jurisdiction and he thanked me saying something to the effect that he was glad I called him and gave him a challenge. He was feeling like he needed a reason to be there for that day. In effect I validated him by giving him that task. Crazy! Yes, we IT workers are validated when you overwork us, which is probably why you do, but if that is the only thing you do then we will turn into the type of people who take baseball bats to computer equipment. Hint: Money is always good. Occasional comp time when projects are at a low point is also good. Emails to the entire organization about the next problem (keep reading) are also well received and is cheap.

Constant Interruption

IT workers are unique in this, and I don’t mean that no one else gets interrupted, but there is no other group who get less respect than IT. Just yesterday I was having a training meeting with the IT group to bring everyone else up to speed on an encryption project. Half the group got pulled away for “more important things” because apparently IT things aren’t important. While in the hour long meeting I was twice interrupted by an engineer who just had to pop in and have a question answered right that second. The non-work related questions also need to be taken outside of work hours. Just because I can fix your home computer does not mean that I want to, or that I want to hear about it and give you free advice.

I am also constantly doing projects – long term ones that can require a good 15 minutes of focus before becoming efficient. With the cube world being as it is I am constantly interrupted by a person walking up to my cube and stomping or scuffing his feet right at the end to announce his presence. Pretending to not hear the stomping and scuffing does not work. The questions are as often non-work related as they are work related, and rarely are they things that I will help them with immediately anyway. Between Wednesday and Thursday I was interrupted by one individual four times for a petty problem a computer illiterate contractor was having while trying to get on our contractor VLAN. That probably set me back an hour between those two days, and it is nothing that I should be doing – we have a help desk for that sort of thing, but they were out running about doing their jobs, so I got bugged. I won’t even mention the phone calls, or the constant meetings about having other meetings. You know what I’m talking about.

Perception from others as not knowing the business

This one gets IT people frequently although it is probably not as widely understood by those outside the industry. I saw it mentioned in the eWeek article which is why I mention it. IT people, especially ones that graduated with Computer Science degrees, often get artificially devalued for not understanding the business reasons for doing something. The thing is, it is often the exact opposite problem. IT people are forced to live to strict standards in large business IT and to provide a balance between many different forces. We live by Sarbanes-Oxley rules, legal rules, security standards, business needs, efficiency requirements, deadlines, budgets, equipment and software limitations, and quality standards just to name a few. IT people know better than most about the real reasons for doing things the way they are done. It is the non-IT worker who just ran out of hard drive space who wants to run to staples to buy another hard drive for $150 to fix our storage problems. They are the ones that don’t understand the business reasons for doing things. (Hint for those of you not in IT, a SAN is frequently used for anything mission critical, and it costs way more than $150.)

I speak from a biased standpoint since both of my degrees are Business degrees. I felt that it would be a waste of my time and money to focus solely on computer classes when I can just open a book up and figure something out. IT comes naturally to me. The Business is where IT really provides its worth. I do not have contempt for my CS brothers even if they tend to have contempt for me. I do believe that more IT workers should be business trained than CS trained, but most IT workers with Business or Science degrees who work in any decent size business environment figure out the business quickly, and usually know more about that business than most any one else there.

Saw this fire your boss article over on PBS. It looks like it got slashdotted as well and probably has been discussed to death there. One thing I’m quite glad for in my current job is a good chain of command that understands IT – especially my more immediate ones, and I can’t say one way or the other for many of the ones at other locations because I don’t know them well enough.

I remember working for a manager at a previous company that didn’t have any IT experience at all. In fact she was just a plain manager. Their philosophy was that a person didn’t have to know the field to manage it. To some extent I believe that is true. If your manager is really good (she was) they will be able to foster a team environment to make decisions even amidst IT people who can have thick heads when it comes to picking someone else’s decision over their own. Because of this I disagree with the premise that a manager should know how to code. After all, not every IT department codes, and not every coder deals with C, PHP, and MySQL all at the same time, or at all. In fact, having a manager that is technical can be detrimental if that manager feels his ideas are more important than those under him.

My immediate boss had the same position as I did up until a year and a half ago or so. He is senior to me by about a year with the company, really knows his stuff, and is willing to put in whatever amount of time it takes to get the job done. I remember once printing out a timesheet for him when we were on the same level because he just wanted to go home. My memory tells me it was over 90 hours for the week. It was a bad week though as I remember having fewer than 10 hours less than him. While that week might have been a fluke, his average is higher than mine and I’m no slacker, but I do have kids. Back to the story though – he has worked the trenches and knows how things go, and even though we disagree on things, we always seem to work things out the right way in the end.

His boss, who used to be the person I reported to before they created the intermediate position, also rose up from the trenches. In fact, when I first started working there about five years ago he was still working the trenches even though he was my boss. Like the article mentions, he does know coding and SQL and can still write queries. He likes to tell us that he’s become technically dumb since moving into a director position and taking his hands off the trench work, but I know better. He could pick it all back up in a heartbeat if he wanted to or had to.

Now I’m not writing this for them because I’m sure they don’t read this. In fact, I’m almost positive that no one I know reads what I write online except for my wife. I’m writing this for myself because things could be a lot worse somewhere else. I’ve been fortunate to have either excellent managers or qualified technical bosses throughout most of my career. There is a downside to that, however – when the people above you are so qualified, it makes moving up all the more difficult. I finished my MBA a little over a year ago and took the MBA over a technical degree because, as I tell people all the time, the technical stuff comes very naturally to me. I don’t need an instructor telling me how to do something new that is technical when I could just pick up a book or dive into it and learn much more quickly, and I don’t need a degree to prove that I’m qualified technically. On the other hand, management is not quite as natural to me. I believe that I would make a good manager based on my schooling, time in the military, and time managing projects since the beginning of my career. Again, the problem is that when you have such good people above you that you limit your chances to move up.

I get what the article is trying to say, and I believe that a technical manager can lack a good deal of management savvy and still do a good job if they are well qualified technically. However, I disagree with it in that I believe a manager who is not technical, but is an excellent manager, can do a good job leading an IT department. Teamwork is the key to large projects, and if that non-technical manager can get enough technical people working together as a team he or she can accomplish any project regardless of qualifications beyond management.