Our IT guy is an unresponsive jerk
askamanager.org
askamanager.org
and
"He is also curt and dismissive, especially with junior staff—mostly part-timers, moms with kids—who don’t have a lot of experience troubleshooting computer problems."
This is HN, so I may be stating the obvious - but if IT is under-staffed, this guy has work that needs his direct, uninterrupted attention - and people wonder why he might be a jerk or dismissive ?
People tend to forget or not know how IT works. If your a manager, you might have x employees reporting to you. So you are directly responsible for those employees and whoever you report to.
Sales? Same - you need to report to your boss and the customer. Customer Service? The customer and your boss.
But IT generally needs to report to the entire division or company. One of my last jobs, there were 2 of us in IT and the company was 500 employees. And we had our own uninterrupted work we needed to get done. And we did help desk, were off site, etc... And we had to account for any 1 of the 500 employees at any given moment needing support or a server going down or code to be written or a security camera going out, or pulling a backup cause someone clicked "delete" by accident, or etc...
I'm not saying it's acceptable to be a jerk or whatever term people what to use. I'm saying, while (random employee) might be responsible for say 10 people, IT is generally responsible for entire organizations. Slack, is to be cut, sometimes.
> Your company is relying on the same person to do high-concentration projects and to provide help desk support — when those are two very different roles with conflicting needs.
From where we are and the evidence given in the post, we can't distinguish between "legitimately a jerk" and "overstressed by interruptions and lacking the emotional bandwidth to deal with people". And, you know, there's even the possibility that he's dealing with the IT requests completely professionally, and that's being interpreted as being a jerk, because IT interactions seem to be somehow particularly prone to that sort of thing. (Probably the problems of getting an engineering, technically-focused person dealing with more people with very different social interaction protocols.)
but instead employees refuse to read all-employees emails from IT, and upper management does not choose to schedule time for all hands training/meetings. in this scenario the eye roll is directed towards management for not fixing the training issue at a higher level in the company. a once a month hour long training session might fix hundreds of hours of helpdesk backlog. but that would cost money because people wouldnt be working.
or maybe the eye roll is directed at the employee who deleted the bulk-email solution, unread, that was sent out hours,days,weeks,months before they asked the question.
It's like that whole trope of "don't fix the copier, then everyone will constantly come to you to fix the copier".
Being an uncommunicative jerk is considered a more forgivable trait than actually pushing back on the work put on your plate.
In my first job ever, I spent about six months helping anyone who came by my desk for help. As it would turn out, my manager completely hated the fact that I did that because it looked like he couldn't keep me at 100% utilization.
He was much happier after I grew a neckbeard, long hair and turned into someone who'd bite the head off any QE who came by my desk with random questions.
More than a decade later, way out in open-source, I have gone back to being nicer & calmer - because nobody knows your hairstyle on the internet.
Non-technical people have a very strong tendency to treat their co-workers in I.T. as their personal tech support, and managers outside of I.T. don't understand why you can't just make the developer/sysadmin/network engineer/dba/whatever do all the BS helpdesk work at the same time.
Also sounds like this guy is more of a technical specialist/project manager/possibly devops and not just "the IT guy".
And, as you say, one needs an suitable inclination to work with people too.
Edit: some companies have rotating days of desk-support for such personnel, but for that, one needs to have at least 2 of them.
Or that character in 'How I met your mother' who had a suit guy, a Yankees ticket guy, a flower guy and – if new needs arise – a guy guy.
"How I Met Your Mother" was a comedy, and that what a [JOB] Guy title makes the person.
Seriously. The guy's over-worked. Get him some help.
Someone doing big IT projects cannot be expected to also do desktop support at the same time (and shouldn't become the de facto support person simply because they have technical knowledge).
If your employees can push the power switch they become documented as responsible for pushing the power switch and if something bad happens you can always push the blame onto the IT guy for not pushing the power switch for them, and as long as the IT guy isn't one of your direct reports you just "won" that round of office politics. Learned weakness is passive aggressive and very popular and effective as a weapon. A dry cleaner would never tolerate a customer demanding they shouldn't have to know how to zip up their pants or a plumber would never tolerate a customer demanding the plumber flush the toilet for them because they don't understand these pipey things. But IT guys are not known for their social skills and now every problem is their problem because only IT guys should have to know the technical details of putting paper in the printer. Resulting in the IT guy is the only person in the company responsible for the tax documents not being filed on time, or that lost big sale, because due to bad social skills the buck stops with IT instead of passing it like all the other departments do. (and edited to add that getting rid of a scapegoat, like "that bad IT guy" isn't magically going to get the tax forms sent by the deadline, picking a new scapegoat isn't going to fix anything)
There's a side dish of LMFGTFY. Seriously, you're an adult who got themselves dressed and fed and drove to work, you goof off on facebook four hours per workday, you can handle using google. It's just a primate dominance ritual to force you to google something for me. No different than me demanding you wash my car or shine my shoes. Its even worse when its not work related.
There is a difference between responsibilities and skills. An IT guy is responsible for keeping the wifi access point operational and secure. He's got a responsibility. He's not a bucket of skills waiting to be sloshed on anyone too lazy to plug in a power cord. The company made a huge mistake of hiring unskilled employees. If you want to use a centerless grinding machine on a factory floor to earn a profit, you hire machinists who have a clue about centerless grinding machines or you fail and go out of business. You don't yell at the only guy on the floor who knows what he's doing because he's a convenient low caste individual to blame or mumble about how people should be nicer because not everyone knows how to skillfully operate centerless grinder machines so its all somehow the fault of the one guy who knows. Learn or GTFO. If you want to use computers you hire staff who know computers or you go out of business because a competitor is more competent. All activity across all lines of business is a tightrope between applying your skills (which you better have else prepare to suffer or GTFO voluntarily or otherwise) vs respecting someone else area of responsibility, this is not an IT thing or a finance thing or a shipping thing this is a universal balance problem for all business activity. Management is 100% responsible for their mistake although it MIGHT be justified if there are extenuating circumstances. In that case expect complaints about general employee IT incompetence to be blown off by mgmt. "We hired you because you're great at Y, yes we know you're completely inadequate at X despite X being required to do your job, and every time you get involved with X its frustrating for everyone involved, everyone, I assure you, and nothing is going to change as long as you keep high performing in Y and carefully avoid any training or learning about X".
Also, being asked to fix a printer is pretty frustrating, because at best someone either is using past knowledge, or using google to diagnose, which is something pretty much any person could do.
Here is an analogy. Suppose the company had a policy of submitting your timesheet rounded to the nearest half-hour every Friday. Suppose an employee comes to HR in person unannounced on Friday with a list of hours worked every day that week, for example, 7.4, 7.6, 7.7,7.8,7.9. For each of the numbers he asks the HR person (it is a small company so they only have on HR person) what he should enter in his timesheet. The first time, the HR person might tell him the company policy and give the answers (7.5,7.5,7.5,8,8). If the person does this every week (even with slightly different numbers) is the HR person always going to be kind, smiling, and affirming? After a while, there is a high likelihood that the HR person would at least once sigh, roll their eyes, and give curt answers. Would people call the HR person a jerk for this response - after all this is part of their job?
At any company, there are people who want to do their job with the least amount of thought and effort possible. An IT person can be seen as a better Siri. Instead of thinking about a problem or even trying to look it up online, it is faster and easier for them just to dump it off to another person. These types of people can monopolize an IT person's time. Unfortunately, the IT person is often at a level where they cannot formally complain about people abusing their time. Thus, as a self-protection mechanism, they try to change the incentives. Calling the IT person with your problem will save you from having to think about it, but you will pay for it by having to undergo condescension. After a while this type of behavior can become ingrained in IT and be used against everybody, not just bad actors.
How can a company fix this? First, do not tolerate jerky behavior as that can ruin company culture. Second, have a policy in place that abuse of an IT person's time will not be tolerated. As an employee, you are required to be sufficiently knowledgeable about your tools - one of which is a computer. People abusing the IT person will have to undergo mandatory training or face disciplinary action. Have the IT person document each request and who asked for it. Review them periodically, to find people who are abusing the system. A company would not tolerate someone who always asked a coworker to write their reports because they are poor at grammar and spelling. So, they should not tolerate someone always asking IT about routine computer issues.
Doing this can remove the incentive for jerky behavior from IT as they can just quickly document the requests knowing that abuse will be dealt with by management. For your workers, they know that IT is there as a resource that is happy to help them but is not a substitute for Google. I think this would result in an overall win-win situation.