The nature of work in the I.T industry

As some of you know, I work for an Insurance Company in the IT department. I was having a chat to one of my work buddies who had to rock up to work at 5:00 AM this morning to do a change to a mail server before the support hours of 7 to 7. I was thinking…bloody hell; no one in the technical realm of I.T works 9 to 5 any more.

I mean, I.T was never going to banker’s hours (the old 10 to 4), but I think it has become a little extreme in the last few years. The business (everyone who doesn’t work in I.T) seem to believe that we long suffering Admins have nothing better to do than to patch servers at obscene times in the morning.

Having been in the industry for around 9 years, I remember the good old days of pre 2000 when the business just signed the exuberant cheques for that new CRM and didn’t have any great expectations of 24/7 uptime. Those days are long gone. Now to get anything done, you have to sign in blood that the bloody thing will work; otherwise you are out the door. And god help you if performance isn’t as quick as the Sales guy from the vendor has demonstrated (of a cut down version of the app on a high-end laptop)

This accountability factor is good in one way. The people in the industry now are as dedicated and as knowledgable as at anytime in the history of I.T. The whole "dot bomb" crash and its after effects seems to have shaken out the pretenders from the industry so that the people left really know their stuff and want to be part of it. (Well, everyone apart from myself. That is why I have started this blog :-)

If only the Business recognised this, I.T would be a gun career for the bright and motivated. It still pays very well, and you get to work with some decent technology. Unfortunately I.T has become one of those careers which is one step up from undertaker in the realm of "jobs I don’t want to have when I go out to impress people". People look at you with disdain, give you a throwaway comment on how bad the I.T people are at their work, or how slow their mail application is, and then move off to find someone more interesting.

So when your I.T mate downs his beer and says he has to piss off from the Pub on a Saturday night, be sympathetic. No, he doesn’t have another engagement. He has a hot date with that dodgy mail server in Adelaide