Reply to Message

RE: Top five issues your IT staff wants to address but is afraid to tell yo

neimon 22nd Aug 2008

We are actively seeking a new job all the time, because the moment there's a budget bump, you throw us all away like used Kleenex (R). We've all learned that trick. You need our knowledge, then you fail to see the value of institutional memory and jettison us with a "too bad, loser."

Then hiring managers want to know why we've had more than one job in the last 10 years.

Don't blame this on age, or "millennial" laziness. Don't tell me about retiring engineers. The reason they're gone is they got tossed out when they turned 40.

No, actually, the problem is more holistic than all of this. It's that you can't engineer a snowstorm, and that's what the last 50 years of IT has been: Flakes and wind and and promises of no more school. We in the industry have failed our calling.

We rely on size and complexity to somehow bring order to something human-sized and less complex. We believe financial metrics will provide some insight when all it does is allow us to make things more complex than ever, and less understandable.

This isn't among the top five issues. We all know there's something wrong. Not many are willing to ask the question "what if everything we're doing doesn't work?" So far, I've seen little evidence that, avionics, automobile engine management and entertainment aside, computers have done any more than raise expectations beyond the ability of human brains to span the result.

I am not a luddite, but I do know that paper is a technology too.