10.) The pay in IT is good compared to many other professions, but since they pay you well, they often think they own you

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.

9.) It will be your fault when users make silly errors

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?”

8.) You will go from goat to hero and back again multiple times within any given day

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.

7.) Certifications won’t always help you become a better technologist, but they can help you land a better job or a pay raise

Emphasis on CAN. Not really a secret, though.

6.) Your nontechnical co-workers will use you as personal tech support for their home PCs

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.

5.) Vendors and consultants will take all the credit when things work well and will blame you when things go wrong

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.

4.) You’ll spend far more time babysitting old technologies than implementing new ones

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.

3.) Veteran IT professionals are often the biggest roadblock to implementing new technologies

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.

2.) Some IT professionals deploy technologies that do more to consolidate their own power than to help the business

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.

1.) IT pros frequently use jargon to confuse nontechnical business managers and hide the fact that they screwed up

They only get away with it because managers are often so insecure that they are scared to question anything from an “IT pro.”