Comment by moron4hire
11 hours ago
> I don't work in corp IT, but I am convinced that people there are not stupid...
No, not stupid, per se. I generally don't like to blame people for the situations in which they find themselves. But there is something else going on.
I find the folks in such IT departments are generally not very good at their jobs. One potential reading of this is that it is not the people working in the jobs' fault, it's the design of the corporate leadership by not paying well enough for the job to get better people.
But the knock-on effect would be, if corporate paid better, at least my IT department would look completely different. The people we have now would be replaced by much more competent people. These more competent people would also generally be folks who shower and wear clothes that fit, that they don't let one corner of their shirts hang out the waist of their pants, that didn't show up to a service call wreaking of cigarette smoke. I'm not expecting people to spend more money on nicer clothes, I already established they don't have that money. I am expecting people to take care of their basic hygiene and present themselves as best they can. That they don't is a signal they don't really care about their own professional development. If corporate paid better, IT wouldn't be staffed by a bunch of literal slobs.
Though they are in a bad situation, I don't have a lot of respect for the folks in my IT department, because the only job they have, the one they have been sticking to for some time, they are only doing the bare minimum. I've been poor. I've been in jobs I hated. The only way out was to suck it up, present myself well, get better at my job, and go somewhere better. I have a hard time respecting anyone who just gives up.
(To be fair, there actually are a few who do appear to be doing this, but they are few and far between. They also don't last long, because again, they go on to something better. I'm talking about the kind of people who don't put in the effort and then complain they never get anywhere.)
>I find the folks in such IT departments are generally not very good at their jobs.
Because their job is keeping their job, not making the 50 developers in the 5000 person org happy, as those are not their bosses.
You judge their competency from the perspective of a dev in the trenches, but the way management judges their performance is vastly different: keeping IT cost center spending as low as possible(hence a lot of IT offshoring) and security as tight as possible (hence MFA, EDMs and MDMs shoved everywhere that don't led you run anything besides notepad and Edge). Whether this hampers the devs or not is irrelevant for them or for management (outside of purely tech companies) since this is the devs' problem to deal with, not IT's problem. The moral is as long as it's seen as a cost center and not a profit center, there will never be right incentives to have a competent IT department staffed by competent people.
And keep in mind that a lot of the hidden champion engineering companies that make the world go round still function on excel sheets with VBA scripts as their "tech stack", and as long as that runs, management is happy. If you tell them you want to run linux, python, node, docker on your notebook, they'll probably laugh in your face thinking it's some hacker alien gobbledygook.
Having a dress code would help filter out those who don't fit in.
It’s been blocked at companies I have worked at. In one case it briefly worked but thereafter WSL lost network access.
Why on earth are you devoting more attention to their clothes and smoking habits than their IT skills? I can believe those are bad too, but come on.
Frankly, based on the description above, it's very hard to separate the two. If someone is that unkempt in their day to day life it's very hard to believe they'll have their shit together at work for years and years. It's fine to wear the wrong type of clothes, but clothes that don't fit right and not showering are really bad signals.