Re:Hospitals across England hit by large-scale cyber-attack
by anigbrowl on Friday May 12, 2017 @01:16PM
(#14325806)
Have you considered going on strike along with the other IT people? I can well imagine how draining 20 years of management BS is (I grew up with one), but one of the reasons I decided to get out of corporate IT after a decade in it was the realization that the IT were frequently used as a buffer between management and the rest of the workforce.
I certainly don't blame you for making popcorn, but surely part of why poor operating practices and decisions get entrenched if that the people doing the work passively go along with whatever bad idea management is proposing while hoping that either inevitable failure or some higher level of management will intervene to vindicate the initial objections of the technical people and topple a few of the more inept managers from their perches. Because IT people tend not to be organized into a union or professional association, they have little to no political leverage of their own so any personal sense of organizational mission or ethical scruples don't count for much in the event of a conflict with the management people, who may sweep aside objections on the basis that the IT person 'doesn't understand the big picture' or somesuch.
I don't mean to suggest that you should be reiterating old faulty models of social organization like unions or guilds; if anything the lesson of technology is that we should be restructuring our pyramidal structures of control and authority (whether corporate, political or whatever) into more effective network paradigms. But I do think that if you just munch on popcorn and hope to see some bad managers ousted and some technical people finally lifted up to positions of seniority within the existing decision structure, then it will just be more of the same until the system is forced into a state of collapse.
Why leave everything to he management and consulting types 'sweeping up the mess, and creating the next failure-to-be' as you eloquently put it, when you have one of those rare opportunities to force change?
I certainly don't blame you for making popcorn, but surely part of why poor operating practices and decisions get entrenched if that the people doing the work passively go along with whatever bad idea management is proposing while hoping that either inevitable failure or some higher level of management will intervene to vindicate the initial objections of the technical people and topple a few of the more inept managers from their perches. Because IT people tend not to be organized into a union or professional association, they have little to no political leverage of their own so any personal sense of organizational mission or ethical scruples don't count for much in the event of a conflict with the management people, who may sweep aside objections on the basis that the IT person 'doesn't understand the big picture' or somesuch.
I don't mean to suggest that you should be reiterating old faulty models of social organization like unions or guilds; if anything the lesson of technology is that we should be restructuring our pyramidal structures of control and authority (whether corporate, political or whatever) into more effective network paradigms. But I do think that if you just munch on popcorn and hope to see some bad managers ousted and some technical people finally lifted up to positions of seniority within the existing decision structure, then it will just be more of the same until the system is forced into a state of collapse.
Why leave everything to he management and consulting types 'sweeping up the mess, and creating the next failure-to-be' as you eloquently put it, when you have one of those rare opportunities to force change?