The Unspoken Truth About Managing Geeks

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Boy, do I have an article for all you egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business-challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring geeks out there. :D

Geeks are smart and creative, but they are also egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business-challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring.
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that's MISTER egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business-challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring geek to you!
 
In my experience if you are using any kind of “tactics” to manage anyone it is going to end up in failure. People in general hate to be managed, not just IT dudes. I think IT dudes are more dicks about it because we all watch too much House.
 
This article is WRONG I know what I'm talking about, everyone who disagrees is a worthless moron. My boss doesn't know a server form his own iPhone and it's always his fault things go wrong and I won't take it anymore. All the small improvements to our systems are only because of the techniques I approved to work around his imbecile policies. :D
 
Sure your workstation can work as long as yourr LAN and WAN connections are down along with email and ticket system.
 
GORANKAR is not worthy of a real box poor fella someone upgrade him STAT
 
Sure, I could regale you with all the problems in that article.. but I'm tired of repeating myself.
 
GORANKAR said:
I use a thin client, it all has to be working or I got nothing.
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Don't you remember nobody is allowed to say "thin client" anymore? Everyone will think you are old, like you have been around a while and might know what you are talking about. Instead say it's a "virtual desktop", then everyone will know how young and cool you must be.

I gotta go now there is a pep rally outside the printer room.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1447072
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2009/tc20090824_902851_page_2.htm
 
I can honestly say that I've never had a real manager before. At work I show up, do my thing, and leave. While I have always reported to someone, I've never really been "managed" and I'm not sure if that is a tribute to my work ethic or if they just hate talking to me because I'm such an asshole... ;)
 
Excellent article. While I generally disagree with broad generalizations, I found the bulk of this article to be right on target, particularly in parts about IT Professionals focusing on logic and disliking people that generate more work for them. If only I could get the rest of the company to understand this, or god forbid my Director.
 
That was actually one of the best written technical management articles I've read in a long time.
 
That article was enlightening... Simply amazing. I've passed it to several IT people I know. Ok that's like 90% of everyone I know hahahaha
 
That article was spot on for our dept.

Our CIO and everyone else knows to not micromanage and they give us all projects to work on and we get it done.

But HR is our bane...they micromanage and make changes to our organization not understanding specific skillsets and training. Having someone who knows how to troubleshoot networks working on outlook client issues... what a waste of a resource.
 
Freakishly accurate article!

I especially liked the point...
Unlike in many industries, the fight in most IT groups is in how to get things done, not how to avoid work. IT pros will self-organize, disrupt and subvert in the name of accomplishing work.
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I think that's because in general most IT people love what they do. Even if we didn't have a job, we'd still be doing many of the same things... But we get to do it with much more fun and expensive toys in a workplace.
 
I recall the executives hiring on a person that was going to be working closely with IT. So they had their two candidates through a few interviews, the last of each I sat in on. One of them I thought was perfect, and the other I thought I had to be being punked, he knew how to schmooze executives, but that was about it.

I gave my opinion, and it was ignored. I can tell you this, the schmoozer never gained an OUNCE of IT respect (we didn't even allow him in our room), and was promptly laid off.

They replaced him internally with somebody we liked, and who turned out, while not technical, understood many of the ideas in this article and quickly gained our respect (and access to our IT lair).
 
DrVal said:
I think that's because in general most IT people love what they do. Even if we didn't have a job, we'd still be doing many of the same things... But we get to do it with much more fun and expensive toys in a workplace.
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He came close with his quote,

"Unlike in many industries, the fight in most IT groups is in how to get things done, not how to avoid work. IT pros will self-organize, disrupt and subvert in the name of accomplishing work."

It should have read.

"As in many industries, the fight in most IT groups is in how to get time to avoid work. In the case of IT, the most effecient way to get time to avoid work is to deliver superior solutions that are very reliable and meet the needs of the client. If forced to deliver an inferior solution that doesn't truly meet client needs, IT pros must work constantly and at very high stress levels. IT pros will self-organize, disrupt and subvert in the name of standing up superior sytems, so they can then try to avoid work.

The team members most effective in reducing the workload of the rest of the team (typically because of reliable and or creative solutions to difficult prolbems which allow the rest of the team to avoid more work succesfully) earn a lot of respect."
 
Unfortunately when you set up superior systems, you tend to work yourself out of a job...

Happened to me a few weeks ago. Set up a new system that was elegant, time saving, and very perfect...
Was laid off 4 weeks later... YAY!
 
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