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It's Management, People, and Us

spydrlink@... 7th Aug 2007

I agree that some of it IS management. But in my experience it has little less do with they're unappreciation for IT people/services and more about the misunderstanding of what we actually do and how it DOES make a difference. But management's lack of knowledge when it comes to IT related areas is what is frustrating. When they don't understand it, they don't put money toward it. It's always one of those "techie things that just works by itself" which is the typical viewpoint you get from most managers.

With that 50% of the problem is the managers not willing to want to understand it and not wanting to know why they spend 80K/year on a person to do tech stuff, and the other 50% are the tech people themselves (and I'm one of them). By that, I mean, we also have to be willing to take the time and educate management/people on what it is we do...show them a step by step process, show them how much of a pain it is to deal with 100 employees with tech problems that need hand holding and still somehow be expected to concentrate and complete all of our projects by deadline.

The other problem that causes unhappiness for tech people are the actual people that we're trying to serve. Yes, it's a job. Yes, it might pay well. Yes, some of really DO care about what we do. But when you're basically doing customer service all day long and catering to the needs of hunderds/thousands of people on a daily basis who typically have NO idea what they're asking for or what they did wrong then it becomes frustrating. Hand-holding is not easy. Sure, we have to do it...but if people need to be willing to read the "help" before calling and try to understand it themselves. Unfortunately most people don't do that simply b/c they HAVE a tech support department. They can easily pick up the phone and call someone to fix they're problem magically. There's no incentive for them to try and do it themselves.

Essentially everyone is to blame in some fashion. But I think the most important thing is getting management to understand what we do and how hard it is to accomplish. If they could truly see that and understand it...maybe watch us for an entire day...then they would have a greater appreciation for what we do and would understand why we need certain tools/technologies to accomplish our jobs.