Things I Have to Learned to Accept
Wed, 2009/02/04 - 12:40pm
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...or reasons to get out of IT - depending on how attached I'm feeling to that "regular pay-cheque" thing at the moment.
- No matter how complicated the job, users will always think a day's notice is enough.
- A "day's notice" means telling you at 4:58 p.m. and expecting it done by 6:00 a.m. the next morning.
- If you understand computers it also means you can fix typewriters, televisions, photocopiers, mail meters, telephones, radios, electrical wiring, furniture, coffee machines, dishwashers, outboard motors, nuclear reactors, spy satellites, and whatever else that the magically-minded lump into the "technology" bucket.
- When interviewing HR people will assume you know nothing if the particuar acronym they've been instructed to look for is not on your résumé, but once hired these same people will be the worst offenders in assuming you know everything regardless of your experience and asking you for assistance with the most inanne things regardless of what your job description (which they wrote) actually entails.
- With users, habit and rote trump common sense and logic.
- Better = Change and Change = Scary, Bad, Evil, OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!!
- If you know something is going to break, you will be a Cassandra until it actually breaks.
- Important stuff always breaks at 2:00 a.m. Saturday night when you are out having fun.
- When something is broken, it's your fault; when everything works, you don't exist.
- Any call to any large vendor's tech support will take two hours to get past the script-reading monkey who doesn't understand the problem, another hour to get past the person who tells you to try all the things you've already tried that didn't work (which is why you are calling them!), at which point you will finally get the person who can actually accomplish something.
- When you call in help from a contractor you will almost always spend more time and effort digging out of the FUBAR'd mess made by said contractor than what it would have taken to do it yourself in the first place.
- Every person thinks their problem is much more important than everyone else's problems, so no matter what you are working on most people will think your priorities are completely fucked up.
- A salesweasel's ego and self-perceived technical competence have a direct correlation.
- A salesweasel's self-perceived technical competence is inversely related to their actual technical competence.
- If a salesweasel knows just one thing you don't, they will forever think they know more than you.
- The salesweasels and suits who can't live without their BlackBerries for thirty seconds are the same people who thought (or would have thought, if they aren't old enough) you were a geek just for having an e-mail address before 1995.
- The more influence a person has over our continued employement, the more likely it is that they will have bizarre problems that you can't immediately fix.
- When non-technical people are allowed in make or influence technology decisions beyond defining requirements, it always goes badly.
- Users will always prefer the program that is an administrative nightmare and doesn't work worth a damn, but has a pretty user interface over the rock-solid and functional program that lacks glitz.
- Being helpful will get you stressed out and overworked; being recalcitrant will get you fired; trying to find a balance will drive you mad.
(N.B. While it would be too good to be true to say that none of this applies to my current employer, not all of this applies to my current employer -- these are just recurring themes across the past 15 years I've been in IT. At the moment I am still rather attached to getting paid regularly.)
Oringinal post: http://mbarrick.livejournal.com/872900.html
