Letters: Readers respond to an article about quitting the rat race, with some saying their generation was handed an untenable position and others saying the struggle is nothing new
And the mentality you’ve described is extra bullshit in an IT or support role, as I’m sure you’re aware.
This is paraphrased in the “Doom talk” I had to have with my boss back when I was working in systems maintenance. As in, he’d come into my office and complain, “Every time I come in here you’re just playing Doom. You need to justify your salary or otherwise maybe we don’t need to pay you.”
What MBA’s and PHB’s don’t realize is that IT and systems maintenance is not a production-oriented operation. You’re not making widgets. The metric is not how many tickets do we generate and how fast are they solved. The metric is, how can we have as few tickets as possible? Because by and large what you’re doing in support and IT is fixing stuff that’s broken. The ideal state for the business to be in is not to have anything that’s broken at all, on a minute-to-minute basis.
Boss, you want to see me in my office playing Doom. Because that means none of your millions and millions of dollars of mission critical infrastructure which your engineers rely upon to generate billable hours is on fire. If any of it catches fire today, I am on site to put it out. If anyone has a problem or a question, I am on call to solve it. If there is maintenance to be performed or new equipment to be rolled out, I’ll be doing that. But otherwise I’m not going to invent busywork just to placate middle management which, as a whole, can’t reliably remember which of the two mouse buttons to click.
That said, as someone in software development, wouldn’t there be some optimization work you could do?
Keeping up with the technology?
Preparing training material?
Figuring out the next steps for the next improvements to be done to the system?
Looking at solutions to better monitor what is going on? Scripts to automate tasks?
I find it hard to believe that things are so static.
Absolutely! Those things are known to management as, variously, “wasting time,” “spending all day surfing the internet,” “submitting frivolous RFQ’s,” and heaven forbid if you want to attend training or a trade show, “accruing unnecessary travel expenses.”
And the mentality you’ve described is extra bullshit in an IT or support role, as I’m sure you’re aware.
This is paraphrased in the “Doom talk” I had to have with my boss back when I was working in systems maintenance. As in, he’d come into my office and complain, “Every time I come in here you’re just playing Doom. You need to justify your salary or otherwise maybe we don’t need to pay you.”
What MBA’s and PHB’s don’t realize is that IT and systems maintenance is not a production-oriented operation. You’re not making widgets. The metric is not how many tickets do we generate and how fast are they solved. The metric is, how can we have as few tickets as possible? Because by and large what you’re doing in support and IT is fixing stuff that’s broken. The ideal state for the business to be in is not to have anything that’s broken at all, on a minute-to-minute basis.
Boss, you want to see me in my office playing Doom. Because that means none of your millions and millions of dollars of mission critical infrastructure which your engineers rely upon to generate billable hours is on fire. If any of it catches fire today, I am on site to put it out. If anyone has a problem or a question, I am on call to solve it. If there is maintenance to be performed or new equipment to be rolled out, I’ll be doing that. But otherwise I’m not going to invent busywork just to placate middle management which, as a whole, can’t reliably remember which of the two mouse buttons to click.
Yeah, firefighter mentalities are terrible.
That said, as someone in software development, wouldn’t there be some optimization work you could do? Keeping up with the technology? Preparing training material? Figuring out the next steps for the next improvements to be done to the system? Looking at solutions to better monitor what is going on? Scripts to automate tasks?
I find it hard to believe that things are so static.
Improvements/Maintenance is no ones KPI. I’m kind of baffled by this.
Absolutely! Those things are known to management as, variously, “wasting time,” “spending all day surfing the internet,” “submitting frivolous RFQ’s,” and heaven forbid if you want to attend training or a trade show, “accruing unnecessary travel expenses.”