It's amazing how many good things are achieved on daily basis through IT. Perhaps more importantly, through the millions of people that give up their social lives in order to fix software bugs, recover broken servers and do midnight-interventions just to please a customer.
Yet if something goes wrong, which more than often is not our fault _whatsoever_, we’re still the first ones to get blamed. We’re the first ones to get called names if some IT system isn’t working as expected. Yet, if it all works perfectly, there isn’t a soul on earth to congratulate us. We’re the underdog of society.
Just let that sink in for a while. We are the underdog of society.
Everyone expects a computer system to work. Whether this is a server or a desktop, it makes no difference. You only ever hear people when something’s broken, or not doing what the user expected it to do. 99% of the time it’ll work exactly as planned, yet there’s hardly anyone to congratulate us for that.
No one thinks of the programmers that spent countless hours fixing bugs so you can enjoy a smooth software experience. Yet if that piece of software crashes once, you can hear them swearing a mile away.
Same goes to web developers/designers. End-user will always ask for what they call a “small favor".
Oh by the way, I have a small change that needs to happen to the site. Could you re-locate that bit of text, and replace text A with text B?
It’ll probably sound familiar if you’re doing anything related to web development. What the end-user probably doesn’t know, is that to re-locate that small bit of text, the entire layout of the page needs to change. Elements need to shift positions, in order to make room. What was once the left-side, suddenly becomes the right. It’s not just a drag-and-drop thing you know!
You want a bit of text replaced? That sounds easy enough. Oh, your new text is twice the size as the original text? Okay, now it won’t fit in the pre-defined space anymore. So now we have to alter the layout again! What seemed like a 5 minute job, quickly turns into a 30 minute job. Take into account that the customer is hardly ever happy with the first new result, you can add another 20 minutes to change it yet again, so it pleases the client.
And as any network-engineer can tell you, when a client calls you to tell them their server is unavailable, their first guess is always that there’s a problem with the network. It’s never the server. It’s never the windows update that went wrong. Never the firewall they installed that blocked them out. It’s never their fault.
Every branch has its flaws, but it just seems like the IT business has a whole lot more than any other …
I wonder if garbage men have the same amount of frustrations?
Please share your own frustrations, it really helps to just let it all out! :-)