IT Managers Are Aloof Says Psychologist and Your Co-Workers 378
dcblogs writes "IT managers see themselves as 'reigning supreme,' in an organization, and are seen by non-IT workers as difficult to get along with, says organizational psychologist Billie Blair. If IT managers changed their ways, they could have a major impact in an organization. 'So much of their life is hidden under a bushel because they don't discuss things, they don't divulge what they know, and the innovation that comes from that process doesn't happen, therefore, in the organization,' says Blair."
Flip Side (Score:5, Interesting)
Flip Side -- we need to be proactive about communicating with the retards who break our system. How many times have you pushed a patch that breaks something, intentionally? Usually a security threat. You've got the power, send an email to all that explains why you're fixing something, and what liability the company has if it's not fixed. This is called propoganda, and it's good. Also, send out good propaganda when you can. The fucking marketing drones didn't sell anything. Your website sold $300M of product. Make IT look like a profit center, and you look like a god. Make it look like a bunch of dick-bags and you'll be an easy cost center to target.
Wrong People Always Get Promoted (Score:5, Interesting)
IT Managers Are Aloof Says Psychologist and Your Co-Workers
The wrong people always get promoted. This is not news for nerds. This is reality.
Give me a story where somebody intelligent and thoughtful gets into management and this would be news. Even on Slashdot, you've got a lot of Managers getting up-moderated [slashdot.org] for basically telling people that they only promote hard working people [slashdot.org] (I think we all know this is a lie). Of course Managers and supervisors think of themselves as fair and intelligent, and as rational as Adam Smith's invisible hand. If only they knew!
References:
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/12/28/0058250/ask-slashdot-handing-over-personal-work-without-compensation [slashdot.org]
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2593454&cid=38510268 [slashdot.org]
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2593454&cid=38510098 [slashdot.org]
Re:Or perhaps... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me explain the opposite... (Score:5, Interesting)
It might help to understand where the "typical IT manager" goes wrong by seeing how it can be done right.
One of the first IT jobs I ever had was working for an IT manager of a ~150 user organisation. He was relatively new himself, which wasn't unusual because all of his predecessors were fired one after another. They just couldn't get along with management, couldn't make their needs understood, etc...
This new guy is still there, over a decade later. Why? Because he talked to managers in their own language. Instead of turning up to monthly board meetings in jeans and saying some buzzword-laden crap, he'd turn up in an expensive suit, put on a gorgeous powerpoint presentation which very clearly showed simple charts and graphs of things like "this is going to hit zero in a month, and that's bad because it'll stop our business". Half the time, he didn't even explain that it was disk-space he was talking about, or put numbers on the graph axes. Every month, he'd turn up with nice consistent reports full of simple charts printed in colour onto glossy paper, ending with a simple multiple-choice business decisions with dollar figures and pros and cons.
In the eyes of senior management, he turned IT from a dark pit where money is burned into a clearly separated set of projects and ongoing expenses that made sense to them. Yes, we have twice as many people now, so we're going to need twice as much storage. Obvious if stated right, not so obvious to someone who doesn't even know what "storage" really represents, why it runs out, and who uses it for what.
Here's the thing though: He couldn't solve a computer problem to save his life. That didn't matter, because he just hired competent underlings to do that work.
Re:and you wonder.. (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a flip side to that coin.
I walk around a good portion of my day talking to users and seeing how things are going. I am the opposite of aloof and quite approachable. However, I have been told on many occasions, "Why do you have to make things so complicated?". Drives me nuts.
They literally cannot tell the difference between bullshit and the truth. Both makes their eyes gloss over and they stop listening.
Do you think doctors are bullshitting you? Do you expect them to explain things to you in technical terms as if they were talking to another doctor?
So why IT?
That's the problem. Everyone expects computers to not be that complicated and that we are just overrated janitors. They have no idea just how complicated it can be, and no real appreciation either.
We are damned if we do, and damned if we don't as far as explanations go, and nobody wants to take any responsibility.
How about the famous line, "But you touched it last?!"
Re:and you wonder.. (Score:5, Interesting)
the only other profession that comes close to IT in its ability to baffle the common folk would be the various fields of professional engineering, with all their respective hodge-podge of numbers and symbols.
Re:It's difficult to discuss things (Score:4, Interesting)
This is as close to an accurate yet concise description of the problem as I've heard. It just misses one important point, the willful ignorance of non-IT folks.
Across multiple companies the one immutable truth to IT is that the majority of non-IT folks expect the handful of IT folks to do 90% of their job for them, because a computer happens to be involved. Any attempt to teach them even the most basic technical issues directly related to their jobs results in an arrogant dismissive "You're IT, you fix it, I don't do computers." attitiude, or worse an "I don't care how hard it is to make happen, I put in the request yesterday, so you need to have a new eCommerce site up and running for tomorrow's launch."
In those cases, being unresponsive is one of the few possible ways to force them to become less incompetent, because then they risk failing at their own job. IT always working like mad to pull rabbits out of hats just gets the pressure turned-up that much more as insane expectations become creeping normalcy.
And while it may get you off the hook the first time around, blaming IT as you consistently fail is hit-or-miss at best. Of course those that do make a lot of noise complaining about IT may get an all-too-responsive IT team, detailing what a time-sink you've been, how utterly unable to perform your job function you are, and perhaps finally, a not-so subtle hint about the fact that the IT team may very well have a higher salary than you, which you are wasting on trivialites.
Re:Ha - "aloof" (Score:4, Interesting)
Absolutely, I've seen this directly a number of times, it's in fact a major factor in deciding to leave my old job.
I worked for an engineering firm, and it's background was that it had split in two about 10 years ago, with it's IT staff going to the other section, leaving no one in IT in the section I was working at. As a result they chose one of the engineers who had a "passing interest in IT" to become the IT manager. Over the next 10 years by paying enough consultants he'd managed to cobbled together something that roughly resembled a network.
I joined the firm as a software developer, with the aim of starting out their software development section from the ground up, but as I had an IT support background I found myself rapidly becoming relied upon for IT support help because I was the first person who had entered the organisation in 10 years who actually had a proper idea of how IT should really be done.
The problems weren't just technical though, the IT manager held grudges, if someone had asked for some last minute help before they went on a business trip, he wouldn't like that, he'd hold it against them and do his best not to help them, sometimes outright maliciously moving their network file share without telling them and waiting until they'd spent some time figuring out why they couldn't connect before fixing it for them. He was socially inept to a massive degree such that when our phone lines went down he dissapeared to another site because he was too scared of the concept of picking up the phone and talking to someone at the other end to get it sorted such that our company was without phones for 2 solid weeks. For the same reason he wouldn't get quotes from other IT suppliers such that the supplier he'd been using all this time was charging him £800 for £450 laptops with the same kind of markup on everything from software to printer cartridges- the fact the supplier had a brand new £50k car, and took him to lunch every christmas didn't act as a clue that his supplier had far too much spare money. I offered to train him on IT security so he could get a policy written and in place pointing out that if we got hacked and data covered by the data protection act stolen, he could be held personally responsible and at the end of the training he said "Right, so can you write the policy then?" as if nothing I'd spent the last couple of days teaching him had actually entered his inept mind - his excuse was that he was too busy, but then as he also had never bothered with IT support issue tracking software and did everything ad hoc, ignoring those users he didn't like's issues then how could anyone ever know what his workload was? Laughably when I'd already made the decision to leave, he managed to lose the entire intranet due to hard drive failure because well, setting up a backup on a Linux box would require some actual effort on his behalf. Lucky I'd taken a copy of the database for local dev work on it. He'd avoid sharing anything with me because he saw me as a threat, knowing full well I could do his job AND mine, but it didn't really work, because I understood his systems better than he did anyway so the only stuff he was hiding was stuff I could figure out myself anyway. Oh, and he didn't believe in UPS' on servers because he had one on a server once and it made it crash, apparently.
I raised it with HR a number of times when it reached a point where it was an outright danger to the business, and whilst they recognised my concerns the attitude was "Well, we've got to give him a chance...", as if the last 10 years of utter ineptitude wasn't bad enough, but the problem is that they'd never known any better - to them, this was a good IT manager, they had no idea how it was supposed to be. Our company was taken over and as part of that our UK operations expanded, lo and behold, they'd been taken over by someone with IT even shitter than they had so he was promoted to head of UK IT, when in reality what they should've done at that point was bring someone wh