How To Succeed In IT Without Really Trying 283
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia discusses the two ways to succeed in IT: through proficiency and hard work, a road that often leads to unending servitude, or the other way; with little effort or proficiency at all. 'I hate to say this, but a number of people in IT positions work harder to make it seem like they're busy as beavers than doing actual work. Quite often this dysfunction starts at the top: When an IT manager doesn't know the technology very well, he or she may hire folks who have no idea what their job is other than to show up every day and answer the occasional email, passing questions along to others with more technical abilities, or to their contacts at the various hardware and software vendors. People like these populate many consulting companies. They rely almost completely on contractors to perform the actual work, serving as remote hands in a real crisis and as part of a phone tree for less pressing issues.'"
Re:contractor / consultant (Score:5, Informative)
As a consultant doing contract work, I must disagree with you. I don't receive kickbacks, and I care. I treat all customers as though their systems are my own... After all, if they have a big technical issue, it's me who has to work though the night fixing it!
Consultants and contractors have their place. Small IT shops don't often get the chance to build up the depth of skill and experience required for things like infrastructure upgrades (e.g. SAN Storage upgrades, VMware migrations, Database upgrades...).
Maybe you just a very poor judge of which people bring in to help you with things outside of your core business / skill set?
Re:Not limited to IT (Score:5, Informative)
You have that backwards. Express isn't union. Ground is. Mainly because of the Federal Railway Labor Act.