The General State of the Information Technology Field

[bileduct]

What are people's opinions on working in Information Technology these days?

I've been in the IT field for over 16 years now. I spent most of that time at IBM, and moved on to a middle tier consultancy and services firm a few years ago for a change of scenery. I work in the project delivery space, often as the lead technical consultant on Citrix and Microsoft products.

Everything was going fairly well for the first 18 months. I was thrown in the deep end quite a bit, but that generally doesn't bother me as I enjoy the challenge.

But then starting around early to mid-2013 everything really started to decline, up to now where people have been leaving the company in droves expressing deep resentment about being overworked and underappreciated. I can certainly sympathise with this viewpoint, as in the period of decline I myself have been overloaded with projects (often working on 6-7 "super-critical" projects at one time) with very little support from management. I even work on medium to high level complexity projects that require coordination of several teams - with a disinterested project manager that is "too busy" to do anything except sign off timesheets.

There are people within the organisation that have climbed the ladder based purely on attrition alone and, without getting into the fine details, are woefully incapable of performing their job responsibilities. There are people in my project delivery team that don't even seem to have a basic skillset that makes them useful in any sense, and then use the overloading of work as a means of dodging responsibility for anything because they are always "too busy." Their projects drag on and on and on until they are way beyond being no longer profitable, at which point someone that actually knows what they are doing is instructed to take over (without any handover), immediately assess what needs to be done (usually everything from scratch) and then work around the clock to get it finished.

There is a real finger pointing and palming off mentality where people exert a great amount of energy in trying to have work that is assigned to them get distributed elsewhere. When requested by email to perform a particular piece of work the person will respond straight away saying why he (there is no she) believes it's not his job, and when that doesn't work they then just stop responding in the hope that it all just goes away.

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about moving on, but I am always warned by others that the grass isn't necessarily greener on the other side. And as if to prove that is the case, some of those people who left the company within the last 3-6 months are starting to come back...

I'm genuinely interested to hear the thoughts of others who may be going through something similar right now.

 

[some11]

There are people within the organisation that have climbed the ladder based purely on attrition alone and, without getting into the fine details, are woefully incapable of performing their job responsibilities

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

[youtube]74IhVxcBMu0[/youtube]

 

[bileduct]

While that does apply in some cases, the people I am referring to are generally promoted or put into positions purely as a result of attrition alone because they were never really any good at their previous roles to begin with.

There are too many examples to list where people who have not been especially good at their current roles are just thrown into a completely foreign role to fill a gap. It's a sink or swim situation for them, and it seems to be something my company is willing to do again and again and again and again. The person is completely out of their depth from day one, has no support whatsoever, and then usually spends about 6-9 months in the role before leaving the company with a new skillset on their resume.

The cycle then starts again with whoever the new inexperienced guy is.

It seems to be something that the company I work for is very willing to do, and don't really care about the consequences. When those people fail (which happens often) other overworked people are just called in to work around the clock to fix up the mess.

Then management take the client out to a big fancy lunch or dinner and spend thousands of dollars on alcohol getting them hammered.

 

[some11]

Voice your concerns.. if nobody speaks up nothing changes.

That of course only helps if your manager/boss actually gives a shit about improving workflow efficiency.

 

[Bulldog Force]

I've been in the industry for years, granted now I'm in the IT sector working for a publishing company.

The problem for businesses is that the competition for our dollars to acquire licenses is fierce. The industry will do whatever they have to do to get their fingers in our pockets. Clients of ours want the best of the best in fast-ever-evolving industry, and it's up to us and individual companies to give clients what the want.

Let's take storage for instance.

Say you do daily data backups to physical LTO tapes, and only to LTO tapes. Clients nowadays won't even look at you further regardless of what else you offer or what your track record may be because they all want what's in when it comes to backups - cloud storage.

Basically, if you're not trending, you won't get good business.

What this also means is that businesses have to constantly move with IT which could cost them in the long run hundreds of thousands of dollars minimum - things like modern hardware, training courses for employees and all the other bites and pieces that come with it.

EG - last week I sent 3 employees to go to a training course in North Sydney. It was a 3 day course for a new interface we are using for one of our software packages, and it cost the company $3,300 per person over the 3 days - that's $9,900 - nearly 10 grand for a 3 day course - and that's just a tiny example.

IT has to eventually hit a point where things slow down in order for businesses to prevent themselves from going under, but at the rate it's growing, that's not going to be anytime soon.

 

[age.s]

Bileduct that doesn't sound like a problem across the industry, just a poorly managed company on the slide. The lack of planning in the company's hiring process followed by a dumping of work on a few overworked souls sounds symptomatic of a company severly lacking in leadership. I think the grass may be greener elsewhere and the crowd that have left the company certainly seem to have seen it.

 

[Parra]

It is a dynamic industry. Sounds like the place you work has a culture problem. The No.1 problem for any organisation. Be part of the fix or move.

 

[redvscotty]

I often thought very similar things about my employer (Telecommunications) about 18 months ago. I decided to go for a job in a different area doing provisioning rather than faults and soon realised I was previously in a very cancerous environment that was being run akin to the Nazi Party with Hitler in charge.

It's amazing how low a manager will go when they know they only have X amount of time left in the job and don't want to cause perceived problems with upper management, which ends up being to the detriment of staff, both in a work satisfaction type deal and also in a staff growth situation.

My new job is fast paced and often doesn't have enough resources to cover the entire workload, but it is a far better environment in terms of job satisfaction and enjoyment. I am given the freedom to do what I can and take on any extra stuff as needed.

I guess my whole point is.. you may think it's the whole company (as I did), but have a good look around and see if it is, or just that particular team / division.

 

[kbw]

The It industry and probably others is cyclic in management strategies. At the moment its going through one of the shittiest ones I have seen in my 25+ in IT.

Its back to the focus on upper management bonuses and cutting costs at all expense. My employer is a large IT firm and has offshored a huge number of technical roles to India. Its disgraceful, these people can't do the work. It looks cost effective in there short term but just can't be as it costs you clients.

Then you have to add in all the rubbish that now calls itself IT such as social media and marketing with lovely colours.
Bulldog Force, you would cop alot of this, but the "trendy" buzzwords are screwing the industry as well. Look at the "Cloud", noting more that a marketing term used talking about technology thats been around for 10-20 years. Hey but lets give it a new name and if you don't use that name you are not cool.

 

[Wheeled Warrior]

This is the I.T. game pretty much. Nothing new mentioned here it happens across the whole sector each day. The root of this issue is SLA vs $$$. Companies force themselves to meet their clients needs by quick fixes that usually slow up the overall long term fixes or make even more of a mess. This wont change in fact if will get worse as the money thing is not doing shit well world wide