Why Everyone Hates the IT Department 960
Barence writes "Why are IT staff treated with near universal contempt? This article discusses why everyone hates the IT department. From cultivating a culture of 'them and us,' to unrealistic demands from end users and senior management, to the inevitable tension created when employees try and bring their own equipment into the office, there are a variety of reasons for the lack of respect for IT."
My users love me (Score:4, Informative)
I figure that out of every hundred users there is going to be at least one hater. I have three haters. If you are IT and feel disrespected it is probably by the few selfish and self-centered people. Just ignore their phobia and treat them like adults. One day they will grow up or get pushed aside.
Personal experience (Score:5, Informative)
In my experience, doing IT support is inherently a thankless job. Lots of people who do it are bad at their jobs, but the people receiving the support are rarely in a position to evaluate the competency of their support personnel, which makes things difficult. Even if you've done a really good job, the person you're supporting might not think so. If you're doing a crappy job, they might not know that either.
And a big part of the problem is that, by the nature of the job, if someone is calling you, they're probably already frustrated. They're trying to do something and their computer broke. They've probably already made a few attempts to fix things themselves. Often enough, they've put off asking for help for a little while already, and they're only contacting you now because the problem has hit the point of crisis. So now, then they're completely frustrated and pissed off, they call you, and they're looking for someone to be angry at. Guess what? That someone is you.
And often enough, you have to tell people that they can't have what they want. It's part of the job. Some employee wants Microsoft Publisher installed, but their boss has said not to buy them a license. "I have a disc. Can't you just install it? My son downloaded it for my home computer, so why can't you do that? If my son can do it, surely you can figure it out?!" Nope. Sorry, I'm not allowed to pirate. I'm not allowed to give you access to this file or that file without some manager's approval. I can't just buy you a new computer-- not unless your boss has budgeted for it.
The job requires dealing with people when they're at the end of the rope, and even then telling them "no". They're not going to like you most of the time. But they need you, and if you do a good job, they'll like you more than the alternative. It's what you need to settle for.
It really depends on people (Score:5, Informative)
I usually need a lot of tools because I have a versatile job. As a researcher in a university in a close R&D department, I often have to test tools and analyse data that come a little bit from everywhere.
Often I have root access on my machines. Once I did not have root privilege on my desktop because of "security policy". I ended up asking IT to install software frequently. For some reason the IT guy believed he could do my job better than me and knew which tools I need better than me. Every time, the IT asked me stupid question, like ... it went like that for about 20 minutes ... It went like that for 30 minutes.
"why do you need an installation of pdflatex? you have latex already!!"
"well, the journal we are submitting to uses pdflatex and our article does not compile."
"In my experience, journal use latex"
"!? well, this one doesn't"
"I see. Why don't you install it on your home directory?"
"I could, but installing a latex distribution manually is a nightmare. As root, it only requires installing one package and let the package manager do its job. In 10 minutes it is installed, properly configured and will update automatically with the system."
"Latex is not updated very often, so the automatic updates are not very useful. You could install it based on a chroot in your home directory"
Two days later:
"Could you install ruby on our computing nodes?"
"Why do you need ruby? It is not a very good programming language and it is significantly less efficient than alternatives like python."
"Because I need tool-foo which is written in ruby."
"Oh I see. Instead of tool-foo, you could use tool-bar which is written in java and does almost the same thing."
"Well, I need tool-foo because tool-bar does not have a feature I need."
"Which feature? In my experience users ask for many different tools without wondering if another tool happen to have the proper features."
the week after
"Could you install git on my machine and on our computing nodes?"
"Why do you need git?"
"To have versioning of my code and experiement"
"We have an svn server, why don't you use that?"
"because the svn server has a limited capacity and it relies on accessing the network, which is not accessible on our computing nodes. But git is point to point and works great over ssh."
"I see. I guess we could set up a git server to synchronize the machine..."
"Well, I don't need a git server. I just need the git package to be installed"
"... so I need to install a new virtual machine. But I will need to connect it to the LDAP. Oh yes the problem of accessing from the computing nodes, so I could modify the settings of the firewall..."
"I don't need a git server I just need git. I'll synchronize on the file system"
"... but if I change the setting of the firewall, you could access the SVN server. So why don't you use SVN?"
"because the SVN server will never support the load I am going to push to the repository"
"I see. In my experience, people in university use git mainly to contribute to open source software and not for actually working."
"... *sigh*"
I let you imagine the day I requested a kernel update...
Re:Reflections (Score:3, Informative)
If the end users knew better, they would be doing IT.
That right there is the exact attitude the OP was talking about ;)
No offense, but I'm pretty sure more surgeons could learn how to troubleshoot a computer than system administrators could learn to remove an appendix. And they get paid accordingly.
Re:Reflections (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Reflections (Score:4, Informative)
1) Hire more people to support all the new calls that will come in and deal with researching the new problems and how to integrate with the existing system.
2) Get existing staff training on the new applications and services so they can support calls which will happen that such and such isn't working.
3) Have staffing levels so that they can have people be able to strategically study, design, plan, and implement the rollout of new software.
4) Have the budget to keep existing staff that are knowledgeable about the internal setup, designs, and functioning of the hardware/software/configuration/backup/security at the company.
Those are the problems that you are dealing with. Quite frankly, it costs money. You want to put in linux on several systems, fine, get the money to pay for training existing IT staff on linux (assuming you have staff that are not simply from paper/cert mills, and actually have a brain), or the money to hire said personnel. Also plan on having the money to up the pay of the existing staff who get trained, as they are now more valuable, and can gladly take a 10-20% pay increase leaving your company, which will set back your IT department months of time in investment in training a new hire on policies, configuration, and detailed personal knowledge that just walked out the door when the IT department didn't have the budget to compete on salary.
New software is expensive to support. I am sorry to be the one to tell you that. Things don't "just work", they always require tweaking, and they will always be a problem that comes up. IT is placed in the role of protecting the data. Sure, I know you want to install the latest version of this application, but did you test it to see if it is even compatible with your existing software? Did you scan it to verify there is no "backdoor", "reverse terminal", or "call home" functionality built into it leaving your internal documents, intellectual property, and business secrets open for your competitors to see? Did you have your legal department screen the EULA and licensing agreements to verify that by using the software you are not opening your company to lawsuits, exposing you to possible patent infringements, or conflicting with other binding legal agreements your company has already made? These are just a few of the things. Then there are the questions of how does this system store data? How is it backed up? Does this software have a support contract that the local IT can call if there is a problem with the software? How much does it cost to keep that support contract over the expected lifetime that we need to continue using this software? How much does the software license cost, and how long does that license last? Are there different licensing costs based on the type of hardware it will be deployed onto, and if there are, who will be paying the cost down the road in 3-4 years when the existing hardware platform that it is installed on is at its end of life and the software needs to be moved onto a new hardware platform which happens to fall under a different licensing category and will cost another $500,0000 to work on that platform (that one just happened to us, so don't say that is unrealistic)?
That is just some of the stuff that has to happen ahead of time for a new piece of software. And it all costs time, and time costs money.