The A-Team of IT — and How To Assemble One 246
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan offers insights into building a crack special ops team ready to tackle the toughest IT assignments. From Air Support (think: the guy who shares a cigarette break with the CFO), to Infrastructure Sherpas, to Über Hackers (Mohawk optional), each of the seven essential members of your IT A-Team must bring his or her special blend of expertise, connections, and temperament to ensure the success of mission-critical assignments. 'Remember, there is no Plan B.'"
How about ditching the silly names (Score:2, Insightful)
If you take someone on your team because he's an "uber hacker" or a "Sherpa" then you are spending too much time diddling and playing WoW. Get a good team of professionals with complimentary skills, but don't give them stupid handles.
The guys in sneakers are more like a real team to (Score:4, Insightful)
The guys in sneakers are more like a real team to base things off of.
Prefer to be like Batman (Score:5, Insightful)
Always have a backup plan.
Ugh.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's a joke. (Score:4, Insightful)
You made it to the third page? The article lost me when they tried to get advice from effective team leads on someone from TCS. It would be so funny if I didn't have such sad vivid memories of the ineffective team leadership displayed every time a Morgan Stanley employee cuckolded any of the management / leads.
This is how they see you, IT grunts (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why you should read this. Not because it provides useful information to people on the tech team, but because people in the business of managing IT departments really take this stuff seriously. They will try to shoehorn the people they have into the stereotypes, archetypes, and roles they know about, and once they've assigned you to a part, you're going to be doing that part until you leave or the show ends. And if you don't fit one of the parts, they're going to consider you useless.
This sort of thing is especially true for managers who didn't work their way up through the ranks, so they're now faced with a bunch of geeks who are exacting, relentlessly uncovering BS, demand facts and figures, and speak in a jargon they can't understand. It can also be a big issue for the CTO, because even if the CTO is someone who does understand the geeks, the CEO doesn't and often demands that the CTO make the geeks follow a plan they can understand.
ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
you know this entire article is ridiculous because it's full of stupid shit like this:
You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job."
.
The entire article is written as if by somebody who just watched 'Charlies Angels', 'Swordfish', 'True Lies' and 'The Core' and decided to write about this subject as if those movies actually represent reality.
I quit reading (Score:3, Insightful)
I quit reading as soon as I ran into the comments by the VP of Tata Consulting. The article pretty much lost any sort of credibility right at that point.
Re:It's a joke. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah it was a load of crap, I skimmed it and saw this
Here the challenge is to find someone who mixes the requisite coding chops with a measure of humility, says Minco's Adriana Zona.
"You want the genius guys who aren't arrogant," she says. "They want to impress you, so they do in an hour what would take standard developers a week. But the most important thing is they don't challenge you. You don't even have to explain what you want or provide a document. They just complete the job."
Though extremely rare, the humble coding genius can be found via word of mouth, says Zona. She also weeds out the arrogant ones by asking prospective employees to rate their skills on a scale from 1 to 10.
"A good developer will never say 10," she says. "Technology changes so rapidly no one can possibly know everything. But the arrogant ones will. And a nonhumble developer will destroy your department."
A good developer doesn't need to "know everything", they just need to know how to use a reference manual and be able to adapt and learn. Sounds more like she just prefers people with no self confidence who are desperate to impress others to feel validated - people that she can order around.
Good developers will require specs and explanations otherwise they will probably waste a lot of time barking up the wrong tree. I certainly have made incorrect assumptions in the past about the direction a project will be heading or how the end user will be wanting to use things, so now I make sure to discuss issues where there is any doubt.
It's also great to have a specs document to refer back to if someone comes to you and says "where is [feature]" or "we need this feature!". I try to be accommodating, but it's really not a great idea to be adding features in halfway through the first implementation of a project. Any new features can be added into version two. Or if the "new feature" turns out to be an essential oversight, you may have to rethink the whole project from scratch.. but if they didn't put it in the original specs, it's their own fault.
Very unrealistic (Score:5, Insightful)
In my understanding, an "A-Team" isn't something that gets created by management, it's a group of people who happen to work together so well that they keep sticking together, because it works great for them. I don't think that's something you can build to a formula. At most you can try to find such a group in a large organization.
And of course, they have the most unrealistic requirements for the developer:
Just how is something supposed to get coded, if nobody explains what should it be? That kind of thing only works for independent coders who already know what they want to do, and community open source projects where nobody tells you what to do, you just do it, and if it's good it gets merged. But that's a very un-business-like development model.
Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts (Score:2, Insightful)
The other thing is if you don't fit into those pidgeon holes, they won't even hire you and just say "you don't have the skills" or "you don't fit in" and then bitch and moan as to why they can't get "qualified" people.
Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts (Score:2, Insightful)
Challenge: Spin this into a useful observation, if you can.
It's one thing to say 'management sucks, I need my blankie', but it's quite another to scout the lay of the land and pick your way safely through it.
Which are you, former or latter? Which are you encouraging with the tone of your post?
Think about it. Particularly in an economy where being disgruntled isn't exactly an advantage... :)
Intrinsically unstable (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally, people with bleeding edge skills need to continually push the limits in order to keep those skills sharp. Does your organisation have enough crises happening frequently enough to stop these people getting bored? (If so, please tell me the organisation's name - I'll sell my stock immediately, at any price). Shorthand secretaries used to often leave jobs where they felt their abilities weren't being used - in the fear that they'd get rusty and their speeds would drop. Real geeks tend to be attracted by the next sparkly, shiny opportunity much more than staying put in one single job for long periods of time.
I cant see this sort of team being a practical proposition - except in the movies.
Re:This is how they see you, IT grunts (Score:3, Insightful)
The observation is easy: If you want to change your professional role significantly, expect to change companies.
And it's not simply "management sucks", it's that management doesn't understand you, so they're doing their best to muddle through, and they seize on information like this because it's all they have, and once they think they understand you they're probably going to keep that understanding of you. They don't have a lot of time to spend understanding each employee, so once they think they've figured you out they aren't going to try to repeat the effort.
Re:Prefer to be like Batman (Score:3, Insightful)
Trained Monkeys (Score:3, Insightful)
Notice that each position called for people with very explicit experience.
This illustrates very nicely what I am finding in the job market: No one seems to want people with lots of diverse experience who are flexible and adaptable. Instead, they want trained monkeys that have years and years of experience in one thing.
Thinking for yourself is verboten. Just take the specs and churn out code, or diagrams, etc.
I think this is just asking for trouble, especially in smaller companies. How many trained monkeys can also install and configure a database, then design and create the tables? Not many. So you need to bring in a DBA trained monkey. And monkeys that can actually talk to the users are exceedingly rare.
While trained monkeys have their place, I think they need too much supervision. If they get out of their monkey experience, they are lost and grind to a halt.
But it makes perfect sense to them. (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't want to have to explain because they don't KNOW what they want.
They only know the end result that they want. Success and fame and more money.
Translating that into real-world products is beyond them. So they want people who can do that for them. They want magic. They want people who can read their minds, predict the future and turn out world changing products ... and then give all the credit to their "manager".
Why would someone like that work for a manager like that?
Everyone would like to have Superman working for them. Or a whole team of Superman.
But why would Superman need YOU?
At a certain point, everyone else is an idiot. (Score:3, Insightful)
Think back to your school years. You progress through 12 years of school or whatever. Now compare yourself to someone who's repeated the 3rd grade over and over while you've been moving on.
In most of the sciences (yes, we're talking about computer science) there are a few people who know a LOT and LOT of people know very little.
If you keep learning, you WILL leave more and more people behind you.
Now, how do you feel when you're working extra weekends because those people who decided NOT to continue learning have broken something and YOU are the only one with the knowledge to fix it?
Re:Ugh.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes these dramatic measures generally are a symptom of bad IT.
If you have an administrator that's always saving the day, 9 out of 10 times you should fire them. You'll find out that most of the looming disasters that were happening will stop happening. A white knight can't justify their existance if there is no peril.
Re:Ugh.. (Score:3, Insightful)