Dirty secrets about working in IT
Those in the IT field know that it isn’t all roses. There can be many ups and downs but we trudge through in order to make it (computers, networks, etc.) work. TechRepublic has a list of the Top 10 dirty secrets people should know about working in IT.
Sanity check: 10 dirty little secrets you should know about working in IT
A couple of the “secrets” are humorous. It was interesting to see how many I’ve learned first hand in the last 11 years. My favorite is number 7.
Certifications won’t always help you become a better technologist, but they can help you land a better job or a pay raise
Headhunters and human resources departments love IT certifications. They make it easy to match up job candidates with job openings. They also make it easy for HR to screen candidates. You’ll hear a lot of veteran IT pros whine about techies who were hired based on certifications but who don’t have the experience to effectively do the job. They are often right. That has happened in plenty of places. But the fact is that certifications open up your career options. They show that you are organized and ambitious and have a desire to educate yourself and expand your skills. If you are an experienced IT pro and have certifications to match your experience, you will find yourself to be extremely marketable. Tech certifications are simply a way to prove your baseline knowledge and to market yourself as a professional. However, most of them are not a good indicator of how good you will be at the job.
I’ve seen many people go through tech courses given by places like New Horizons, get their certification and then think that makes them great technicians or administrators. Those classes do give people a great base of knowledge but that doesn’t mean a great deal until you get into a real world work environment. What they don’t realize is that everything learned was in a controlled lab environment that doesn’t take into account many factors (i.e. non-standard network set up, older/newer software revisions, etc.). The arrogant ones, the “Of course I know what I’m talking about! I have X certification!” types, are the hardest to work with because they have to be shown in excruciating detail that the by-the-book way won’t work right. Moving outside their comfort zone is hard to do.
Of course, there are those that go through those courses and understand that they are just starting to really learn how everything works. They are the ones that watch and learn how to work with different technologies. They also pose the right questions and discuss whether or not a different procedure would work better.
The third secret on the list is one I hope to avoid. I’m not old enough to block new technology implementations and I hope I never am. In IT, everything changes. Maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow but it will change so you either keep up or get pushed out of the way.
Be sure to read the comments for user submitted secrets like 15, 16 & 17 and 18.
Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong. – Peter T. Mcintyre
07.Sep.07 
Technology
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I typically loath the general whininess among the IT crowd, but in this case these are fairly accurate. These are really the kinds of things I try to tell people before they go into this line of work.
Exactly why I don’t think I would EVER take a salary position for IT. It would have to be big money and VERY clearly defined in scope. Of course, the flip side of that coin is a lot of salaried IT positions involve a lot of doing nothing/researching/BS meetings time.
However, if you are a consultant, the money is hard to beat. It’s probably about as much as you can make without a law or medical degree. Kind of in the range of an accountant. But consulting isn’t for everyone, either.
Not just users, either. Other IT staff and consultants are always suspicious. But overall, I don’t hate that nearly as much as working hard to squeeze everything out of available equipment and yet hearing, “why are these things so slow?”
I’ve said that and experienced it many times. My best example of this is when a client got hit by a bad 0-day virus. The only indication was a Cisco router that was dying. All external connections would drop, requiring a restart, which would cut off all the phones too for a few minutes. Everyone was convinced the router was bad and it would be a couple days to get a new one.
So I took it down, disassembled and reassembled it, and connected to it off the network. It was fine. Having seen this before on smaller cheaper routers, I set up a packet sniffer and hooked the router back up. I found that it was fine for about 30 seconds, then a few infected machines were taking orders from an IRC botnet and overloading the router with traffic (trying to attack someone else). On those machines, I was able to use netstat to find the offending programs and remove them. So I was the big hero then, saving several days of downtime and the cost and fees of installing a new router.
It turned out that as I fixed the few infected machines, it had spread randomly all over the network. And by “network,” I mean several offices in 3 counties. So I had to take down the network again for a few hours while I wrote my own “antivirus” to fix this specific problem. I ended up being a major goat at that time because I kept getting calls about this or that not working, Outlook not working, or “The Internet” now working; that one always cracks me up since it’s funny which employees only notice the Web isn’t working but not all the stuff they are supposed to be working on.
By the time I had everything fixed, there was an antivirus update released about an hour later that stopped this particular meany. So in a way, I might as well have just not been available.
Emphasis on CAN. Not really a secret, though.
Unless you are a consultant.
Run around with invoices and they’ll think twice because they know they are going to pay for it.
The only time it gets tricky is when they have a problem with a VPN, Terminal Services, Citrix, or something else from home. The client isn’t going to pay and the employee doesn’t feel he or she should, so that’s a tough one.
Well yeah.
In my case, most clients don’t have internal IT people for me to blame. But usually I’m the one the other consultants and vendors will blame since I’m involved in the most “stuff” for most of my clients.
Generally, yes. That’s not all bad, either. But the more you get into Linux and BSD, the more cutting-edge you can become while using current and old hardware. For me, that’s a happy medium.
Not just veterans but anyone that people listen to. For me, this is one of the benefits of working mostly alone. But on the flipside, the roadblock ends up being people who don’t know anything about IT.
This is something every business needs to know, and is one reason why business really shouldn’t be giving consultants free-reign (like they tend to do with me, although I try not to be that way). I tend to do all that I can with Linux, MySQL, Apache, PHP, Samba, etc. which saves money but very tightly marries me to clients (for better or worse). There’s a lot of this with in-house developers, too… if you develop software using a language or framework where you have a lot of expertiese, the odds of someone else being able to pick it up are slim.
They only get away with it because managers are often so insecure that they are scared to question anything from an “IT pro.”