Confession time. I'm a serial job hopper. Up until the naughts, I never held a position for more than two years. On the other hand, I was never out of work very long either - typically it was a couple of weeks, tops. I don't really consider being a job hopper a bad thing. I find myself easily bored and I've often found the cultures of the companies I've worked for to be very weird. Jobs are okay to do for a while, like a vacation in another country, but not necessarily someplace you'd care to settle down.
Today's cautionary fable has to do with the massive power that Information Technology workers have, and why you should always treat them with a great deal of respect. Incidentally, if you're an IT major and are reading this post, please bear in mind that this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek - I have the greatest respect for your profession, even if it isn't my cup of meat.
There was this company I did telephone customer service for at the end of the nineties. Our office contained customer service and data entry workers. We were basically at the top of our professional ladders for the area. Nobody paid more for those jobs, or gave better benefits. On the other end of the office and at the opposite extreme were the graphic artists. They were at the bottom of their career ladder. Just about everyplace they could reasonably go would pay them more. This was just a notch on their resume and as a result of this, their side of the room was considerably more free wheeling and took most office rules as suggestions, perhaps even challenges as to how much they could get away with. On our side, better not be even a hint out of dress code and dot your "i"s and cross your "t"s.
Now in this job, we had an ancient, creaking IBM AS400 main frame as the heart of our computer network. Despite the fact that every worker in office had a newer-than-tomorrow Pentium four with gigantic nineteen inch Sony Trinatron monitors, we had to log into this dinosaur every shift and use it for our work. Even the artists used it to view order details, though they did the actual art in Adobe Illustrator. The AS400 runs an odd operating system, it isn't Unix or anything like it and it has this interesting feature called "screen transfer."
What screen transfer did was send a rather blurry picture of your screen, which was pretty much useless for anything as you couldn't read the screen that was being sent, and a short message to another computer on the network. You could do a screen transfer to any machine in the office that was logged on. Think of it as an intranet version of Twitter way before Twitter was a gleam in some developer's eye. Now obviously this was pretty useless for customer service work, though that seems to be its intended purpose. My night shift customer service crew had a more interesting usage. Wait until another rep is in the middle of a call and then send them a weird, funny, odd or gross message and see if you can get them to lose it in the middle of the call. It was a lot of fun. Of course any usage of this system at all was pretty much a "no-no" but it was never blocked by IT. But they could and did monitor it.
One day shift artist supervisor found another more nefarious use for the screen transfer program. The supervisor in question was very slick, oily, he fit the stereotype that most people think of when they say the word "politician." His hair was bullet-proof. He had a very Nice-with-a-capital-"N" wife - I mean that in the sense that she considered housewives from 1950s sitcoms as her role models and a brand new baby at the time of this story. He would parade them around company events as if they were trophies. I suspect that is how he thought of them.
At the same time he was carrying on with one of his artists. It would be incorrect to say that our office culture thrived on gossip. It was more like an office-wide religion, that everyone subscribed to but did not talk about explicitly. However, the gossip net was completely unaware of these events, that went on for at least six months, until they were over. This is because all of their salacious chatting at work was done via screen transfer. But IT knew, and I suspect they knew long before they mentioned it to management.
The boom came down swiftly and without warning. The head of Human Resources was waiting by his desk with a cardboard box. This was one of the most intimidating men I've ever known. He is one of only two people I've known to whom I would apply the adjective "sinister." He was an older man slight of build, and if you knew him outside of work and perhaps viewed him from a distance, you might not give him a second thought. But he projected an aura of menace, and to face him across a desk felt like a meeting with death itself. He calmly collected the supervisor's badge, and carefully watched him collect his personal belongings. After that the art room supervisor walked out of the building and, into office legend.
Moral of the story: Be nice to your IT crew. It could very well save your job. Also, don't play around on your spouse but that should really go without saying.
What started me thinking of all this is my hobby. I'm something of an armchair anthropologist. I suspect that as an anthropologist, I'm a pretty good web developer but I love watching the cultural interactions of different career fields and work environments.
Last night I had my first local area network concepts class, and for the most part it is full of people who are looking at a career in IT, but it's also an elective for my web development certificate. It got me thinking about the different tribes in the technology industry.
IT people really tend to stand apart. They tend to be very conservative - and I mean that in a non-political sense, though in a field known to stray vaguely left I think they tend to be the most conservative politically as well. They are often somewhat dour, almost like a nineteenth century banker - I've listened to people in my own field and others enthuse about some new gee-gaw, gizmo or bit of code. If there is an IT professional in our party their response to this is invariably that this thing will break the network, suck up too much bandwidth, or otherwise bring on the End of Life as We Know It. They almost seem like the grandmother figures of the tech industry, who regard certain artifacts as "too good to use," much as many grandmothers consider a given set of china or a couch.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. It is simply what I've observed. I suspect that this tendency may well be a net benefit, providing a balance to the other sectors of the tech industries Panglossian optimism. It is certainly what I observed last night. In the course of going over the first chapter in our text, we discussed Twitter and social media in general. Which the class seemed to revile unanimously. I suspect that Twitter doesn't have enough of a focus for them, they really haven't sussed what it is good for, and because of that treat it as suspect. Social media in general is still too new for most IT people to consider as a worthwhile idea. I recall that when I first started using the internet, back when the web was still in swaddling clothes and web sites with graphics were a mutant oddity, like a three headed dog, that many IT people had similar feelings towards the web. I will now vigorously shake my cane at you.
One of their chief criticisms of Twitter specifically was that nobody would care if they talked about their day-to-day minutiae. I disagree, and I believe this stance lacks imagination. I think that if you could scrape a social site like Twitter and had enough computing power available, you could create a very interesting and accurate picture of its average user. Which is good for figuring out people in general, I suspect that's a worthwhile endeavor and probably a very profitable one if you work in a field like marketing.
While I'm not very good with people, I do find them endlessly fascinating. I think the "boring details" that these guys complain about are pretty interesting, and that if you watch closely enough, you'll find things that even those people in my class would find interesting. But if you don't pay attention, you'll miss all the interesting details. I guess that would be the meta-moral of this post.
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