I’ve found that the way around it is to go with small startups (15-50 people) or academic spinoff companies for the first bits of your IT career.
You’re generally the ONLY IT guy…
…in a company that knows exactly how much it sucks to not have ANY IT support…
…that, if it’s a startup, is going to bill you as “The CTO/CIO/IT Director” because marketing has to put out a press release about EVERYTHING.
Thus you can get fast-tracked pretty fast into being a C-level or Director-level title very very early, and the occasional pains (griped about upthread where other Directors don’t really consider you on the same level, because you’re also wearing a “IT Tech” hat) can be mitigated.
Ten years later, especially if you worked for successful startups or ones with heavy IT expenditures, you’re getting job offers that leapfrog the salaries of the other middle management dudes to go do cluster design/admin for a Korean MMO that’s expanding it’s US presence.
If you want to go into IT and NOT get into that kind of fast track, but also avoid the problems China Guy mentioned, get into an industry where IT is key to the business model. I recommend software or analysis firms that use a lot of heavy data processing (as opposed to complex but mathematically easy modeling) to get what they want: meteorology or engineering simulation firms are great for this. Also, though they’re thinner on the ground these days, anything with a 24/7 web presence that’s a core part of the business. This latter job, though, WILL get you a pager, and it WILL knock you out of the dream with Cindy Crawford and her hotter twin sister at 3AM on a regular basis.
China Guy is correct. The business world is made up of “finders”, “minders” and “grinders”. If you aren’t a finder (sales, trading, business development or the founder of a company) then you are a grinder. Grinder’s who show promise can get promoted to minders (middle management), but to truly achieve the next level, you need to become a source of revenue.
High tech is not the same as IT though. I chose management consulting as a career path as opposed to IT because consulting is very client focused. You have value as an revenue generating asset. Unfortunately, unlike being a trader, you can only generate revenue through your labor (ie “billable hours”) until you reach a point in your career where you are bringing in additional business.
I suppose if she is annoying you that much and does jack shit all day, get her fired. You don’t owe her shit.
I mean her personality isn’t that great if she is stealing credit for your work and sneaking around not doing any work. Maybe you meant to say she has a great ass?
Generally people only change from unproductive to productive when they have the desire to be productive but just need some direction and guidance. When people are lazy or willfully stupid, you can’t make them become productive.
I’ve found that the wisest companies (representing less than a third of my employers in my lifetime) have accounting methods for assessing the true cost-benefit ratios, in terms of revenue, of every department. Support departments need to make sure that they’re working towards being treated as finders and not grinders, to use your analogy. To stick with the IT example: it’s not enough that the computers work well. You had better have a plan to show how much of consulting’s revenue increase is due to having better simulation hardware, or how much you can reduce cost-of-sales per sale by improving the tech that the sales team takes on the road and to training sessions.
There is something to be said, admittedly, for not being a cost center, but on the other hand, those cost centers exist only if they are more efficient than outsourcing if the company is smart, and if the company is dumb you don’t want to work there anyway.
Also: we creative IT directors, by the simple expedient of buying the hardware and then charging notational rent to the consulting division, can easily show how much expert IT can increase profits over not having expert IT. Similarly, I’ve brought our yearly cost-of-sales down by a significant chunk by helping sales re-architect how they set up computer labs for our quarterly mass training/demo sessions. The point is that no matter what you’re doing, you need to make sure that you’re doing your best to make your department a net revenue source, or get specific on-the-budget credit for the revenue benefits your department is helping other departments achieve.
It does really boil down to “it’s a game, play it”. The one constant is this: if you go in expecting to work a day and go home, and not push to bring revenue to the table while you’re there, you are not going to advance on your merits in the current way business is operated.
I would even go further and say raises and promotions and even keeping your job is not a reward for showing up to work every day. Wise companies realize that it is everyone’s job to constantly look for new ways to do things better, because ultimately everyone’s economic future is tied to that of the company.
Although practical people realize that the best and brightest and most wise don’t always get put into positions of leadership. People will actively work to put their own needs ahead of others or even the company’s.
Tough position to be in. I think, for future reference, you need to nip things like this in the bud or at least within 6 months. It reflects poorly on you as a manager as one of the unwritten rules in a corporation is fix it or shut up about it.
My experience says that if someone is fixable, you know that in the first month on the job. This person has been working the system and you to her advantage for 2 years. About the only time I’ce seen people change from unproductive to productive is when they change roles/groups within a company. Very very rare to go from crappy work ethic to a strong work ethic in the same position and you’re not her boss anyway.
I would not give her a chance as a) she will probably try to undermine you (and probably is already) and b) about 99% chance it’s a wasted effort.
This is a convenient toss-off way to frame things, but condemns you to a cynical approach to a career. You don’t take any nuance into account - for example, if the Company is an entrepreneurial company, IT can be instrumental in framing the infrastructure required to scale up the business model. If you are a Company with Operational Excellence as a core competence, IT is the enabling workflow/process control backbone enabling real-time management of your business model.
It is within those creases and strategic overlaps that opportunity is made - the question is whether a person is paying attention to identify and/or create those opportunities. Smaller, entrepreneurial companies require a different perspective. Given your experience in consulting and big companies, msmith, I understand your perspective - but it is not the only one.
You spend a lot of time in this post laying out the fact that you’re the senior person on the team/in the office. It all leads to a conclusion (which you never state) that it would be beneficial to have that power in actuality. You need the title of manager over those you supervise. I agree with your unwritten assumption that this would be the best solution to your problems and to the office’s workflow issues.
With one catch.
This woman you work with needs to be fired. But you can’t even report it to your boss who will then fire her. You’re afraid to “pull the trigger.” OK, that’s fine. Remember though that with great power comes great responsibility and part of that responsibility is looking out for the wellbeing of your office. If you can’t get someone else to fire somebody ask yourself if you’d be able to look her in the eye and hand her a cardboard box to clean out her desk. If you can’t, you have no business being given that power because the end result will be no better than the status quo.
Perhaps. I see a lot of IT tech workers end up as “microserfs” toiling away 18 hour days to “enable workflow/process control backbone enabling real-time management of your business model”.
I would really love to know (aside from the startup mentality never really going away) what made IT (specifically, programming–the sysadmin side doesn’t have this problem as much in my experience) be the one field that I’m aware of that has accepted truly insane workloads in terms of hours in conjunction with five-figure salaries.
I see a lot of management consultants who end up as empty suits with sales quotas who pimp the Next Big Idea regardless of its relevance and value to the potential sucker, er, client. My point being: ANY job can be reduced to its drone equivalent and, yes, a majority of folks within that job type will likely drift into some flavor of that. Isn’t that just the human condition?
The sense I get from you, msmith, is that you figured out, within your job type, how to break out of becoming a drone and to be one of the successes. Cool. All I am saying is that someone with that mindset can target the Breakout roles within their profession to also become one of the exceptions - and that to cite IT as an example, there are tons of ways to find those Breakout roles…IF you are so inclined.
**Zeriel **- there are tons of jobs in healthcare, professional services and manufacturing work that also translate huge commitments to low pay. Ever work in a coal mine?
Medical residents and to a lesser degree Big Law associates spring to mind as people who work truly insane hours; in both those cases, however, if you get through the heavy-workload hazing, you end up with slightly less crazy hours later in your career. (Or else you burn out and are cast aside).
You’re absolutely correct that it is possible. However, not sure on the probability. I called out IT because many people are familiar with it. I could have just as easily have called out the Big Banks, and I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that 100% of the top managers all came from the front office (and not from the middle or back office). Goldman Sachs Blankfein didn’t come up through the IT ranks. You can start as a receptionist or an IT guy. You just don’t get to be CxO level in a bank without being a successful trader or salesman along the way.
All fair - you need to demonstrate an ability to grow the business in a directly bottom-line way. Within the context of an Admin function, yes, it can be hard to be anything but a drone in IT. But Technology can and should be essential to driving Operational value. A technologist would be well-served to focus on positions from that perspective.
[Churchill]
We’ve already established what you are, madam; now we are negotiating on price.
Ah, yeah, misread your original point. SOME nonprofit workers end up doing shit-tons of work, basically the ones with consciences, work ethics, and either (a) martyr complexes or (b) an inability to draw boundaries.
