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Not everyone will admit it, but there are aspects to a career in technology that irk the average worker day in and day out.
There is a spectrum of annoyances, but here is a list put together by the folks at Tech Republic that they have dubbed 10 Dirty Little Secrets of IT.
They are:
- The pay in IT is good compared to many other professions, but since they pay you well, they often think they own you
- It will be your fault when users make silly errors
- You will go from goat to hero and back again multiple times within any given day
- Certifications won’t always help you become a better technologist, but they can help you land a better job or a pay raise
- Your nontechnical co-workers will use you as personal tech support for their home PCs
- Vendors and consultants will take all the credit when things work well and will blame you when things go wrong
- You’ll spend far more time babysitting old technologies than implementing new ones
- Veteran IT professionals are often the biggest roadblock to implementing new technologies
- Some IT professionals deploy technologies that do more to consolidate their own power than to help the business
- IT pros frequently use jargon to confuse nontechnical business managers and hide the fact that they screwed up
I would add a few to this list:
- Power struggles between technology and business managers can make projects take a lot longer than they should; competition for control is a detriment to results
- Sales people will ask you for technical advice for closing business deals, but will not listen to the risks and dependencies outlined–many sales people will tell a client anything to make their number
- No one in technology has the same exact experience, and so there are those who think they know everything, those who are self-righteous and those who will behave childishly to prove a point; essentially, the notion of teamwork can be undermined between tech workers themselves
- People exaggerate and lie about their job experience with technology on their resumes
- Testing in live production environments is usually cut short and technology products are often launched poorly, have more bugs than they should and potentially disappoint users.
What is missing from this list?