The Dead Sea Effect In the IT Workplace

Alien54 notes a blog posting by old hand Bruce F. Webster on the current state of affairs in hiring in IT, focusing on what he calls the Dead Sea Effect. "Many large IT shops... work like the Dead Sea. New hires are brought in as management deems it necessary. Their qualifications... will tend to vary quite a bit, depending upon current needs, employee departure, the personnel budget, and the general hiring ability of those doing the hiring. All things being equal, the general competency of the IT department should have roughly the same distribution as the incoming hires. Instead, what happens is that the more talented and effective IT engineers are the ones most likely to leave -- to evaporate, if you will. They are the ones least likely to put up with the frequent stupidities and workplace problems that plague large organizations; they are also the ones most likely to have other opportunities that they can readily move to. What tends to remain behind is the 'residue' -- the least talented and effective IT engineers."

Re:Money, money, money

[bfwebster]

There needs to be a better salary distribution. Good network administrators are like world class composers.

Amen to that, Roy. When I was at Pages (as CTO), I had constant fights with the CFO and the CEO over the pay for our network administrator (Sean Church) and told them it would take several people to replace him. I was right, too. Sean left Pages in early 1995, and it took three of us -- myself, the VP of Engineering, and the Director of Quality -- to pick up the slack. ..bruce..

Re:thank you captain obvious

[Antique Geekmeister]

It's called the 'Peter Principle', to quote from Wikipedia: "in a hierarchy members are promoted so long as they work competently." When you reach your level of incompetence, you stop there.

The principle is also known in more colorful terms as "shit floats". Gifted managers find ways to keep staff at their level of *competence*, but it can get very difficult when managers no longer actually know their staff or become involved in turf wars rather than trying to accomplish the work. And it applies to managers, so in a big organization you can get a long, long line of incompetent staff between the actual workers and the people who really make the big decisions.

Re:Assuming there are other better jobs

[Matey-O]

The problem within _our_ management is cronyism. One or two crappy managers gets their job here (state Gov't) and pulls in their friends. They squeak through the time until they're certified than then they effectively can't be fired. (6 months to a year)

We have the shell of a management group who's brilliant idea was to fire everyone and let them compete for their jobs. It's happened in the private sector, within our State Personnel rules, it's illegal.

End result: They lost, the figurehead was replaced, and everybody hates everybody else, because you had to choose sides in the battle, you got to find out who was gunning for you. The bulk of the managerial stupidity is still there, but the talent, the folks that really know the workings of the system, are finding better things to do (and are happier doing them away from the stupidity) it's pretty sad when you've poluted the waters bad enough that the staff doen't care if the department succeeds or not.

This happened to or three years ago, and while things have settled down in the last 6 months or so. I guarantee _everybody_ in the shop has their resumes polished and up to date.

Management doesn't HAVE to have an IT background to run a shop, but it should at least listen to the folks there that know IT.