Why everyone hates the IT department

It frustrates me to no end reading these potentially influential articles written by ignoramuses and self described tech gurus.

Then again, I was only an intern so my time there was limited.

Companies that give strategical priority to software usually end up having less problems with it. The other companies buy crap (cheap IT personnel, managers that don't understand technology) and only get crap. And we should expect it to get even worse, as outsourcing creeps in.

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 a couple of years behind the helldesk.

Many IT shops also fail at communication. There is a lot that we do behind the scenes and no IT shop i've been at is doing a decent job constantly reminding everyone why they are there. Organisations need to know what improvements IT is working on and how it will better serve their needs, and they need to get excited by it. People get excited when Apple introduces new technology, but they get less excited when suddenly they can log in everywhere with the same password. Market that better.

IT, Operations, DB and Co. will resent you for asking for things when they are already busy putting out fires, fulfilling all your other requests and being the whipping boys and girls of your organisation. Google is a notable exception because their IT department is far better managed than most. Make sure all your technical service departments are tightly aligned with the mission critical things in your org and make sure management is shielding them from requests that get in the way. The more focus the techs have on core things, the faster they get done and suddenly the more spare time they have to help you get your project done on time too. Time management and business planning is key here.

Finally quit this 'for the CEO' or 'for Alan' mentality. If someone's computer fails, it should be replaceable within a couple of hours. This special person who's making a larger salary than you should understand better than any one else, never be dependent on a single point of failure to run a business. This doesn't mean a CEO has to be a tech genius or your star programmer an IT genius. They should just be smart enough to ask their IT department ahead of time 'what do i do when my computer fails?'.

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.

> My general experience with DBAs, sysadmins, techs and the like is that they generally resent you for asking them to do things, making the entire experience unpleasant. I'm not sure if such people are attracted to such positions or such positions end up making such people but whatever the case, "surly" is a commonly appropriate adjective to use.

I've spent 15 years working in a variety of positions in IT, from tech support, to developer, to sysadmin, to supervisor, to architect/design engineer. My experience with DBAs and sysadmins is that they rarely resent you for asking them to do things. However, they may very well resent the way you ask them to do things.

Much of modern society is very me-focused, impatient, and with short attention spans. This goes double for the corporate business world. When many people run into a technical problem, they tend to want an immediate response and an immediate resolution to their problem, expecting everyone else to drop everything and attend to them. Their problem affects them, therefore it is the most important problem around right now.

What they fail to appreciate and understand, is that many DBAs and SysAdmins are supporting systems and infrastructure that has importance much greater than you. Yes, you have a problem, and yes, they want to help you. But they have visibility into things with potentially much greater impact than you, and those things may have a higher priority and importance than your problem.

An example I saw just a few weeks ago. I had a problem that needed attention from a sysadmin. I went to the guy who could fix it, and there was someone already at his desk. I waited outside his cube, and listened to the guy already there bitch at him. Apparently the guy had an application that was having issues, and he couldn't work on his report until the application was fixed. He wanted the sysadmin to drop everything to fix it, and he wasn't happy at being told that the sysadmin was busy with something else, and couldn't help him until it was fixed.

After yelling guy finally left, I ducked my head in and asked him if something was blowing up. He nodded distractedly and said that the server a PostgreSQL database ran on was misbehaving, and that the DB was utilized by an application used by 3 different business units and dozens of people. I offered my sympathy, told him I needed his help, but it could obviously wait until he fixed this problem, and said I'd e-mail him the details.

He thanked me for being understanding (twice), and called me as soon as he'd fixed the server issue to help me out.

> The cliche of the bearded UNIX purist exists for a reason.

I'm afraid you're going to have to explain the reason for this one. The bitchiest guy I know at work is clean shaven, and the nicest guy I know has a full beard. Exactly what reason is there behind your negative beard perception? ;-)

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.

The $150/hr techs you will rarely see are super nice, and would absolutely love a problem they haven't seen before. Your best bet is to try and shorten the path to them.

2. I doubt it was for security. Most likely they don't have the resources to support multiple browsers/versions for business applications and settled on a single one. It sounds like the "failure" to block USB devices is more for user convenience. Blocking USB devices, while much more secure, is extremely difficult to justify nowadays.

3. Sounds like a State issue, not an IT issue. It is probably as much of a pain in the ass to them as it is to you.

4. Such a minor issue probably sat in a queue as other higher priority items were being dealt with. Approving a text-editor for a single user does not usually end-up on the plate of the CIO for consideration.

I'm not trying to defend all IT policies and practices. Some of them are less justifiable then others, and some are outright stupid, but a mantra I repeat over and over is that:

"Given unlimited time and budget, anything is possible. Anything else is compromise."

You are a "super-user". Recognize that you are not the majority in a large organization and limited resources are, by necessity, focused on the largest impact. Often, these priorities are not even determined by the IT organization and staff and left in the hands of committees, meetings and third-party vendors/consultants.

It is not ideal. It is a pain in the ass. There is a lot of room for improvement.

On both sides.

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 rule of System Administration [0] is to start every host in a known state. The reason for this is predictability - as the sysadmin, you know what to expect - certain software is installed, certain settings are configured, etc. You simply CANNOT manage systems at scale without this approach. Without it, testing, upgrades etc. are a shots in the dark.

Another issue is ownership. Let's say you get company email on your personal BlackBerry. You're mugged, and the device is stolen. A competent administrator will immediately issue a WIPE command from the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, so that all data is erased. But wait! Those picture of your daughter's recital were on the phone. They're gone, and you're gonna be pissed. With a company-owned device, the expectations are different.

A friend of mine once had to re-image the laptop of a senior executive. Turns out, the only pictures of her daughter's high-school graduation were on it. A year later, he's still having to feed her stories about ongoing efforts to retrieve the data...

Regarding Windows XP, OS upgrades are not to be done lightly. It requires very extensive regression testing for all Line-of-Business apps. Believe me, there isn't an IT guy there who doesn't want the upgrade to Win 7, but after a time in this business, you learn to tread carefully, as information systems can break in all sorts of subtle ways and management doesn't want to hear it.

2. "Secondly, I was told I could only use a certain browser because of another incoherent argument relying on "security." Interestingly, nothing was done to keep me from putting a pocket version of Firefox on a flash drive and connect to my own secure proxy. This is because the IT guys had no idea such wizardry was even possible."

Again, standards. When their enterprise web-based ERP system that's been tested in IE6 and works fine breaks when you're using Chrome 15.0.874.121 m, who's gonna get the call? Oh that's right. IT. Multiply that by a few hundred machines, and your network is unmanageable.

There exists technology to control USB drives, but in most organizations, it won't fly - they're simply too convenient. Besides, how do you expect the VP of Sales to load his iPod? Definitely shame on your IT guys for not blocking outbound connections to your own proxy at the firewall.

3. "Thirdly, for some reason print jobs were routed out of the office to a data center in San Angelo and then routed back to the printer down the hall. Printing a single page was non-deterministic and painful, never mind my final reports. This was a result of some state mandate about consolidating IT."

This sounds like the state's fault. They were probably sold a solution that promised centralized tracking / routing of print jobs, based on parameters such as job submitter, color vs monochrome, time of day, printer availability etc. Not IT's fault.

4. "And then there was the time I tried to install Notepad++ to do some minor dev work (they hired a CS undergrad to do financial work so I thought I'd do more than estimate results). 2 weeks later I was approved to use a similar text editor on the grounds that I already have a task bar to manage multiple documents - a tab bar is completely unnecessary and Notepad++ requires further scrutiny. 3 weeks later I had a Perl interpreter."

I was a sysadmin, and I had to get written and signed approval from my Manager, the Security Manager and the CIO to install any non-standard application. Pleasant? No. Necessary? Yes - everything needs to documented; otherwise these things spiral out of control quickly.

5. "At my current job they forced me to let them change the root password on my issued machine to something they knew and I didn't. I get why you do this: because you cannot fully trust people and I dealt with sensitive data; fine. Afterward I re-installed my OS and set my root password back. I don't understand why they don't think these things through."

Don't take this personally, but sysadmins hate people like you - you make unauthorized changes and make our lives difficult. Your IT guys sound incompetent though - why weren't BIOS passwords in place to prevent booting from CD? And since you say root password, sounds like you were in a UNIX / Linux shop. If you were in an AD environment, after reinstalling, you wouldn't have been able to join your computer to the domain without domain administrator credentials.

I understand that the situation sucks, but there are good (at least for a particular meaning of good) reasons why it is so. There is room for improvement on both sides.

Whew. Felt good to get all that off my chest. No hard feelings?

[0] Tom Limoncelli - The Practice of System & Network Administration.

In most law firms, government, and big finance you will likely encounter a lot of these sort of policies. Some of these policies make sense, even though the reasoning is not obvious. The policies are created because of constraints around laws and auditing and they can result in some nasty solutions. Other policies probably just don't make any sense, but that is just life.

Making IT's life hard by trying to get around the policies likely doesn't really help anyone -- it is just being an ass. Assuming a policy doesn't make sense because you can't see the reason for it is arrogant - even if you are right 95% of the time. Same goes for assuming you could come up with a better solution without knowing the constraints the IT department faces.

The solution for programmers that hate this sort of thing seems straight forward -- don't work in these sorts of businesses -- develop your chops so you can land a job in a hot startup (or a business that has that atmosphere) where you get the best gear and can do whatever you want. Or maybe start your own business or freelance. Until you get there, don't take out your frustrations on your coworkers by trying to bypass them -- that is just childish.

For people in IT, they should be aware if they are not in a business that requires these sort of frustrating policies, they should not be trying to implement them unless they really have to. Those are the IT guys people have the right to dislike. They try to turn a small fun start up into some sort of draconian government institution because of some personal insecurities or they think that is just how it is done.

In short, be aware of the sort of industry you working in, or might work in, and what to expect there.

In a medium to large company, IT's job isn't to make you happy. This is typically impossible thanks to a combination of understaffing and budget issues. Their job isn't to debate you on software choices or provide coherent explanations of corporate IT policy. It isn't even keep you productive. It's to make sure the cube dwelling luddites (and if you aren't in IT you are one, regardless of how much you know about computers) don't break critical infrastructure.

Spend 32 hours over a weekend quarantining and disinfecting an entire network because some dickhead decided he needed to bring in his malware-infected laptop to work and the standard company policy banning private equipment comes into focus pretty quickly.

I use to do IT consulting and bounced in and out of dozens of companies. Some had no IT support, others had us augment their IT team. The best IT department was at a company where there was about one IT worker for every three employees. A ratio typically unheard of, this company spent greatly on IT as everything had to run smoothly. IT was at an employees desk within a minute if any trouble arouse. They were very profitable of course.

The worst companies spent as little as they could on IT. One literally asked me if I could setup their Windows NT 4 box because their Windows 2000 Server was having issues. This was only a few years ago, and they didn't want to buy a new Win 2008 box. Eventually they did, but it was months of pain and plenty of downtime before it happened. Everything else in the company smelled of cheapness too, all in a bad way; Penny wise, dollar foolish.

Also, if the IT-to-employee ratio is really low, like 1 per 200 employees, and systems aren't locked-down super tight, IT HelpDesk can constantly be in a position of stress with more requests than it can handle. This is typically the reason for long delays.

It's like any service center, really. If you want good service, you have to pay for it. Call up Apple's tech support, and then call up Lenovo's. Both do the same thing. But one is really really good, and the other terrible. Guess who views their tech support as a cost center and who doesn't? (Hint: You can tell if you don't see a tech support phone number on the front of their tech support webpage.)

Moral of the story. Don't work at an IT department, work at software companies.

But that's not true. I work as a developer or an admin depending on my mood and the money, I would not consider one able to do the job of the other even though I have done each with the same degree in hand.

The discipline of designing stable, maintainable systems & networks or writing code to requirements precisely and accessibly are distinct and often wildly different. Little of it comes with your degree.

That said, my current gig is quite good in that regard: "We support A, B and C. If you want to use X and Z you're on your own. Here are the guidelines on security and patching."

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.

Disagreed, IT should not be given a pass to resent people just because they don't understand and have as much time and training with computers. Nor do I agree that the IT person will be the smartest person in the room. Everyone has their own set of skills that they are good at. Put the IT guy in sales, if he fails miserably what good are his technical smarts?

If it's the role of the IT department to support users, they should be helpful and courteous, no matter how "stupid" they think of the request. Should I ever have an IT worker who has the stereotypical "better than you attitude", he will be gone in a second.

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.

Using IE6 as an example, in my case at least, for that isn't accurate.

In 2002 I installed a brand-new shiny system to replace our then paper-bound order system. Required IE6.

Fast-forward to 2011 - the version I installed is still in use. IE and Firefox latest work 'ok' for the client, but the administrators must maintain a copy of IE6 [1] for their functions. [2]

We didn't upgrade in 2004 because the costs were prohibitive. We dropped support in 2006 because the cost to support our obsolete version went through the roof, and we were going to implement those functions in JDE 'real soon'.

I stopped supporting the system in 2007, and it went to another team, but we're still using the thing, same version, in 2011. IE6 is still required, of course, for the admin stuff.

All of the decisions that force a handful of people to use IE6 were made above the IT level.

In this case, at least, ain't us man.

[1] Or Safari with UA set to IE 7. [2] It's a shiny pop-up java thing that looked real slick back in 2001.