I do not hate my IT dept. They're very prompt.
Why everyone hates the IT department
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: Why everyone hates the IT department
#62Although there are some insanities with the IT situation at work, I have to say that I'm pretty pleased with one aspect: You can install your own OS, have admin, install whatever software you want, just fill out the appropriate exception form online. They just won't support it--and for computer scientists and computer engineers like the people in my group, that's perfect . Other groups, with other types of scientists…
> just fill out the appropriate exception form online.
Do you also have to agree to pay the fines / go to court / appear in news when anything serious goes wrong?
RSA (pretty much the definition of a clueful security company) got hacked because someone opened a malicious email attachment. Imagine how much harder that is to prevent when people are using a bunch of different softwares.
Re: Why everyone hates the IT department
#63There are three big problems with IT departments (IMHO): 1. Anyone who is sufficiently skilled to be good at his or her job in the IT department is almost certainly overqualified so the system self-selects out good people; and 2. Like any other support role people only tend to notice you when things go wrong; and 3. My general experience with DBAs, sysadmins, techs and the like is that they generally resent you for a…
I agree 100% with this statement, but as someone that's lived in IT all of my career, I believe there is one more point: education. The most successful organizations have an executive team that embraces IT as a necessary component of success (rather than evil) and communicates that to the organization. It's the purpose & perception of IT that causes bitterness and wrong expectations in the workplace, on both sides.
Just look at the fact that no one ever calls up IT thanking them for dial tone 364 days in a row without incident, but many will complain incredibly that ONE DAY it occurs for 10 minutes, it's no wonder there is such a disconnect.
While you might be able to link this situation/behavior to any support role, I would respectively disagree. Most support personnel are clearly disconnected from the activity requiring support, but with IT you often are interacting within 0-2 degrees of THE person responsible for your issue. This dramatically changes the dynamic of conversations.
IT people (just like anyone else) want to be appreciated for their work, in part because they typically sacrifice more personal time than any other department due to the nature of their job, without a reflection in compensation.
Assuming the IT staff are competent at their job, once people begin to embrace that department, and not talk to them like Dell tech support, then perhaps the stereotypes will start to change.
Incidentally, the reason that the IT staff may be so pleasant to deal with at Google may have less to do with IT, and more to do with the attitude & intellectual level of the user base.
Re: Why everyone hates the IT department
#64I tell you a secret: Everyone hates every department beside from his own. It's kind of normal, because different departments rely on each other, but don't really know or care about the problems of the other departments.
Re: Why everyone hates the IT department
#65There are three big problems with IT departments (IMHO): 1. Anyone who is sufficiently skilled to be good at his or her job in the IT department is almost certainly overqualified so the system self-selects out good people; and 2. Like any other support role people only tend to notice you when things go wrong; and 3. My general experience with DBAs, sysadmins, techs and the like is that they generally resent you for a…
Let's see.... The skills you need to do IT aren't something you can really learn in school in any way shape or form. These include customer service skills, understanding the needs of a business intimately and learning how real business are run. The people that are passionate about doing IT in that context are far and few between. Since it's seen as a service job, it forces a lot of people into other disciplines after…
Some excellent points I hadn't mentioned in my reply in this thread. People often forget that keeping things up is a constant battle.
Your opening paragraph says it all though. When developers talk about how difficult programming is, I always explain IT like this:
"Imagine you have N sections of code you have to support that someone else has written. They may/may not be documented, whatever documentation you have may not even be accurate, you can't change the, and somehow they have to work together even though they probably weren't designed to do that. Oh and there's a good chance there's no one to call for integration help, but you're responsible for tactfully explaining this all to executives & end users without ticking them off, even though they'll only call you when it's broken."
It's too bad that the perception around IT's role has only gotten worse now with the cloud.
Re: Why everyone hates the IT department
#66I hate to reinforce stereotypes. But in every Agency I've worked in, most of the IT staff have been under-skilled computer enthusiasts with inflated self worth. This in my opinion is what creates a schism. Many IT staff sell themselves as being much more knowledgeable than they actually are. So when presented with a problem that goes over their head they tend to get defensive and shitty. I've found the nicer the IT s…
There are terrible IT people out there, that's for sure. Many don't go beyond the knowledge of someone from the Geek Squad. But then again, that goes for every profession.
Many times the nicest IT staff are those that are the most clueless and have to make up for their lack of knowledge with personality. The cranky IT people generally have too much to do, not enough time to do it, and are stuck dealing with trivial issues that stop them from getting to the critical ones their jobs (or the company's uptime) depend on.
I think your experience has been very unique (and fortunate) to come to the nice = smart conclusion.
Re: Why everyone hates the IT department
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a sysadmin for a financial services firm, and then for a Big-4 accounting firm, so I may have some perspective: 1. "For starters, I was not allowed to use my own equipment. They rattled off some gibberish about security and support even though my mail client supports SMTP and I can read Office files just fine. Also, for an agency focused on security their insistence on using Windows XP was baffling." The first…
Even large corps give their programmers admin on their own computers. No average or above programmer would work for a company where they had to request permission to install a text editor. That's simply unacceptable.
I think you would find that to be simply not true depending on the nature of the organization. Work for the government, or any security conscious organization, and you'll see how little control you have (for good reason).
Re: Why everyone hates the IT department
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a sysadmin for a financial services firm, and then for a Big-4 accounting firm, so I may have some perspective: 1. "For starters, I was not allowed to use my own equipment. They rattled off some gibberish about security and support even though my mail client supports SMTP and I can read Office files just fine. Also, for an agency focused on security their insistence on using Windows XP was baffling." The first…
This attitude might be ok for managing the average office worker's machine but when it comes to jobs like programming that are not highly regimented, it's just not good enough. Get out of my way and let me do my job. I'm glad I'm at a company that lets us do whatever we want to our machines (we use a VM for the few things that require IE).
As someone that programs as well, giving admin access to programmers generally makes sense. In a perfect world however, I'd rather give you your own sandbox to mess up and not your desktop so that when the next wave of patches get pushed out, I don't have to worry about your box not being like everyone else's because you altered the 'expected' state of the desktop the patches / configs were designed for.
Sans perfect world, as long as set ground rules are in place, any reasonable IT person should be ok with this request.
Re: Why everyone hates the IT department
#69Because IT is viewed as a department that is staffed by sub-par engineers, and a discipline that is less demanding than, say, software development. This then feeds into hiring standards and compensation levels and voila it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Re: Why everyone hates the IT department
#70A lot of my problems with IT departments would be solved if the IT folks recognized that people with degrees in computer engineering and computer science tend to be able to take care of their own machines. Also, if they would quit telling me that I can't run VLC because it's not secure, when they have 3 year old versions of the Java Runtime Environment installed on everyone's PC.
CS/CE offer no discernable value to the IT scene, unfortunately. Define 'take care'. Not install spyware knowingly? Ok great. How about making sure that software you install don't conflict with regular updates that are made to all systems every month? Or what about making sure that you're not introducing problems in the areas of authentication or monitoring, by changing specific settings or services that are running for a purpose. Unless you have ever worked in IT, you likely have very little knowledge on the havoc you could cause for seemingly simple changes.
As for JRE vs. VLC, how do you JRE's status isn't simply a false negative? How many applications in your organization actually utilize the JRE? Is it a non-issue? Are you aware if there are any measures already taken to mitigate known JRE exploits? There is quite a large difference between exploits that exist in an environment vs. those that exist in an application that you actively execute.
Granted I'm not defending the specifics, I personally think VLC is likely fine. But that doesn't change the points made above. In IT, it's always better to go with the devil you know, than the devil you don't.