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.
Then again, I was only an intern so my time there was limited.
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?'.
Your opening paragraph says it all though. When developers talk about how difficult programming is, I always explain IT like this:
"Imagine you have N sections of code you have to support that someone else has written. They may/may not be documented, whatever documentation you have may not even be accurate, you can't change the, and somehow they have to work together even though they probably weren't designed to do that. Oh and there's a good chance there's no one to call for integration help, but you're responsible for tactfully explaining this all to executives & end users without ticking them off, even though they'll only call you when it's broken."
It's too bad that the perception around IT's role has only gotten worse now with the cloud.
"You know the 30-60 minute spin-up time it takes to get your head into coding? Well imagine someone interrupting you every 15 minutes to ask you how to insert a table into MS Word (I'm sorry, didn't your fucking CV say you had MS Office experience?). Now imagine how long your replies would remain welcoming and friendly."
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.
It frustrates me to no end reading these potentially influential articles written by ignoramuses and self described tech gurus.
> 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? ;-)
1. Anyone who is sufficiently skilled to be good at his or her job in the IT department is almost certainly overqualified so the system self-selects out good people; and
2. Like any other support role people only tend to notice you when things go wrong; and
3. 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. The cliche of the bearded UNIX purist exists for a reason.
At Google, I've generally been very impressed with our support people, both the field techs and the SREs. I would hesitate at calling Google's recipe a success for running IT because it may simply be that we're picking the cream of the crop, which obviously not everyone can do.
It is worth noting that field techs do have a career path in operations (possibly management) as well as being an ex tech (a field tech assigned to a particular executive). If Alan Eustace's computer stops working his ex tech basically needs to drop everything and get it fixed. Such people not only need to be technically good but they need to exert their (considerable) influence. It's amazing how quickly things can change when it's "for Larry" or "for Alan", etc.