It comes down to this: Frivolities are unaffordable in lean times. That’s a good thing.

Yes, I’m still interested in what the project managers are doing — because what they’re doing, is what our businesses are doing. We should all be watching them.

…security-wise, that is.

Hat tip: Boortz.

This really made my day. The subject is an article in CIO Insight about the record high number of jobs in Information Technology. I.T. has just exploded, there’s jobs everywhere, in fact there’s a glaring skills shortage.

And people with big stacks of references and certifications and job histories, with glowing recommendations, out of work.

Both. How is that possible? That’s the “disconnect.”

This is one of those deals where the article itself tells you practically nothing, but the comment thread is loaded with fresh, red meat.

Mary revealed herself to be part of the problem, I think. Let’s set it up. An anonymous poster writes in, in response to the “if you have the right skills you still aren’t getting the job if your personality isn’t a good fit” canard:

Personality
By: Anonymous Reader
at: 07-11-08 @ 4:08 am EST

Personality “fit” is the equivalent of does the interviewer have a relative he’d prefer to hire. It is plain BS. I have worked for alot [sic] of companies where I was assured I was a great asset. Until one of their relatives needed a job. Then I am out. Personality “fit” is how companies avoid hiring full time employess [sic] with good credentials – In order to get Off-shore people for a dime a dozen relatively.

And “Mary” chooses to educate him.

Personality
By: Mary
at: 07-11-08 @ 8:55 am EST

Personality is very important for an organization. When I interview I not only look at skills but determine if the person will a be a fit within my team. Skills can be taught, but a good personality fit and being a member of a team is difficult to teach and is important. The team needs to be working as one for the best productivity and outcomes.

I was fortunate to come up through the ranks and understand the importance of each level IT functionality. If the organization culture includes teamwork then any candidate must fit the bill. In an interview if I see any hint of a “rogue” IT person, I will continue with the interview but will not select that person. Standardization is necessary for large organizations to function and you cannot go into a company thinking you are the “IT God” and begin to make changes to your way of thinking. I have had people tell me what they think is the best way to run an IT department. Guess what….that was a no sale. I could see that person messing up things that others would need to fix.

So for all of you who are “whining” take a deeper look at yourselves. See what you are doing and saying in interviews that eliminates you as a candidate.

My thoughts on this:
 • This has the whiff of a kernel of truth mixed in with bushels of nonsense. Yes, if my computer is busted I’m going to prefer someone with a decent personality to Nick Burns the Company Computer Guy. Who won’t? But…the same is true of my auto mechanic, no? The cashier at the grocery store? The guy in the toll booth? The clerk at the DMV? Someone want to explain to me why these individuals with talent and skill are left out of work for years, and it’s just the market’s way of letting them know they have to get their personalities polished to a mirror-finish now…but the “market” doesn’t have that effect on other industries?
 • Should we start discussing what I saw in my twenty years in I.T.? Yes, I did meet my share of jerks. Are you waiting for me to tell you where I saw them go? Want me to say I saw them pitched out on their ears? Hitting the unemployment line the minute they forgot to say “please” or “thank you”? Is that what I’m supposed to say I saw? Eh…sorry to disappoint…I saw them promoted, if anything. They were lauded for their “strong personalities.” And that is the only good thing I ever saw anyone say about their personalities. That they were “strong.” And it was said by their superiors, never by anybody who actually had to work with ’em. Never. Ever. Not once. Mary’s method strives to eliminate “rogues,” and what it ultimately ends up doing is befriending, and even elevating, jackasses. It metastasizes into exactly what it was trying to obliterate.
 • Let’s not forget the language barrier. It isn’t racist to point it out. Sorry, it simply isn’t. Mary is the one who brought up the issue — she says “[t]he team needs to be working as one for the best productivity and outcomes.” When you’re asking a guy to repeat himself over and over again, and he’s making the same demand out of you, that’s not working as one. Does Mary think we should be tolerating that? If not, let’s call her what she is; a bigot. But on the other hand, if she does think we should tolerate language differences but not personality differences — her argument becomes a lumbering contradiction because she’s arguing people should be spared the everyday inconvenience of working with others who come from dissimilar backgrounds and mindsets…(uh…they’re called, “people”)…but at the same time, linguistic disconnects, even paralyzing ones, are meaningless. So no, this is not the way we do things…if it really is a priority for the team to work “as one,” it takes a back seat to other things. Like the opportunity for people to work, for example, if it’s felt that over the long term they can make a positive contribution.
 • Mary craves orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, I would have to argue, is the exact opposite of technology. I.T. is about finding ways to do more this year than you did last year, with less this year than you had last year. That is the mission. You can’t get an atmosphere of “that’s the way people behave around here and that’s just the way it is”…without also getting an atmosphere of “that’s the way things are done around here and that’s the way it is.” That’s the opposite of technology; so if I.T. is there to find new ways to do things but it does this by always doing things the same way, then it ultimately becomes useless. And then people get laid off by the hundreds. Which is exactly what’s happening.
 • There is something else that concerns me: Nowhere does Mary comment on the quality of a personality type, even though the whole point to what she has written is the importance of evaluating what that personality type is. I’m concerned about maturity of people who actually make it through. Can they work with other folks who aren’t like them? I mean think about it; with Mary in charge, they wouldn’t have to, would they? Part of what made my colleagues capable of deep-thinking and problem-solving, was the necessity of working with others of different backgrounds. Perhaps you can remove that necessity and somehow retain that superior problem-solving capability. But I’m left with no reason to think so. A cloister filled with clones of oneself, has always been the happy playground of the immature mind. So who’s really “whining,” Mary?

That’s how I go about evaluating what Mary said. But I’m a nice guy. “John Reid,” on the other hand, is not.

Part of the problem or the solution?
By: John Reid
at: 07-11-08 @ 9:55 am EST

When the ax falls on your neck, please call the Suicide Prevention Hotline. It is obvious to me, Sister, that adversity has never crossed your path. When it does, someone who is so totally self-involved and accepting of the corporate mind-set, often falls into a deepeer than deep despair. I do not believe that you will be capable of surviving the blow. Get ready for it. By the tone of your note, I suspect that your are a born-to-the-breed type, full of self-entitlement. Fools like you make for great ridicule stories around the water cooler for those with REAL power, which you do not have. And remember, blood trumps “team players” every time. Or are you a relative?

He cuts to the chase. I do not like his defeatist attitude, but he’s got a point: Mary’s worldview is presented as one of extremism; one of “this is how everything should work, everywhere, with no exceptions.” And he’s right, this works as long as there’s no adversity.

And that’s precisely my objection to Mary’s mindset. I.T. is the tread of the business tank. It is the place where the road is met. And roads have potholes. There simply is no room there for just one personality type. Quite to the contrary: You swipe your badge and walk into a data center, you have to be ready to work shoulder-to-shoulder with the people you find in there. If you’re going to whine away that this guy or that guy has a different background from yours, and we need to change hiring practices so everyone there is all the same — you are the problem. And I.T. can only meet your demands…which, I would argue, is exactly what it’s trying to do…by ultimately rejecting its primary mission.

TrueIT was a tiny bit more tactful. But zeroed in on Mary’s hunger for stultifying orthodoxy.

Get real!
By: TrueIT
at: 07-23-08 @ 2:42 pm EST

What you really mean is that you can’t deal with hiring anyone that may be beter qualified and may have a different insight than you. You feel more comfortable with a person you can control and who “fits” your idea of what is right. So you impose your personality and your personal preferences into the hiring decision, letting company goals and directives take a back seat! And you are so intoxicated by your own Kool-Aid that you don’t even see that you have become part of the problem! If you really did read – and actually understand – the words that other IT managers are posting here, you would have an idea of what is going on out here. But instead, you mold your thoughts into conformity with the corporate bosses who pay your salary. Very typical of the kind of hiring manager being discussed in these postings. Get a clue. You’re next on the layoff list!

The issue is accountability. In any endeavor, you’ve got to have a lot of things for real accountability.

You need measurement, because if the accomplishment of a goal is a subjective thing, “accountability” will just be twisted around into an entirely political endeavor. You need individuality, because if meeting goals is purely a “team” effort, nobody’s really going to feel personally motivated to give it their all. You need scope, because if one guy does his job right, but is going to have to hand it off to someone else who will screw things up, this ultimately gives rise to a defeatist attitude that permeates the environment. You need leadership, because someone needs to make sure that the team will succeed, once all the individuals have done their jobs; also, people outside the organization need to understand failure was possible, and yet due to the diligent efforts of that organization, success was realized. You need regular post-mortem exercises, because you can succeed over the short term and fail over the long term, if weaknesses in your process aren’t fixed just because smaller failures were somehow prevented by happy accidents and fail-safe devices from becoming major disasters. Most of all, you have to have vision, because success isn’t always going to be easy, and people need to be reminded that it’s important.

It takes a lot of moving parts to bring accountability to any process. Especially, to a process that is acted-upon by teams of people, rather than by individuals.

I’ve seen a lot of I.T. initiatives that were lacking just one, or more, of these critical component parts to real accountability. The failure of just any one of those, is incredibly damaging. They can make up for it when one or two are missing. If any more than that are gone, it’s nearly irrecoverable.

And where do I see the I.T. disconnect? I think in the layer above I.T., where the hiring actually takes place — all of these ingredients are missing. Each and every single one.

Because let’s face it. Everyone who consumes I.T. products, even if they’re happy with them, they can always express disappointment. It usually comes down to — if the business requirements were met, they were met with a lower threshold of certainty than we would’ve liked, looking back on it. Too many “oopsies.” This is business, dammit! We want it running like a well-oiled machine!

Or, the automated apparatus does exactly what we want it to do, but it runs too slowly.

The irony is this: “Oopsies” are in the nature of I.T. This is where new products are acquired (or built) and new things are tried. That’s what makes I.T., ultimately, a rather thankless gig. Business sees I.T. as a wonderful new car; but business is everlastingly confused about how to drive it. It wants to open the throttle on that bad boy, see what those ten cylinders can do. On winding, rocky backroads never before traveled. BUT — while this is going on, it wants to put an egg on the dashboard, or maybe a ball bearing, and delight in seeing it not roll off. Performance. Stability. Business demands both.

When these objectives fail, and one or more of them always do, there is no accountability matrix that traces the failure to the design, the implementation…or…well, tracing it to the hiring process would be just unseemly, of course.

And so hiring managers like Mary, I think, work in a vacuum. They can afford to fill all these positions with a certain microscopically-validated personality type, even if that makes the resulting organization less capable. And if she defines “rogue” as anybody who doesn’t think the same way, that’s exactly what will have to happen. It’s quite unavoidable. But there’s no accountability involved. I.T. could fail one effort after another effort after another…and deep down, I think consumers of I.T. understand it’s self-defeating to drive a car like a Lamborghini and a Rolls Royce at the same time, so on some level failure is expected. That’s the vision thing.

And so even though Mary’s cookie-cutter hiring practice is counterproductive to I.T.’s goal, it isn’t going to be corrected. Except in forums like this one, in which people feel they finally have the access, and the latitude, to sound off.

This is a great article that makes some great points. The thread that opens up underneath it, started out laughably foolish, but afterward rose to the occasion and some great points were made there as well.

The article itself is a response to an indictment that appeared last month. And the response is just a bunch of bullets — why IT, in general, is dissolving into a puddle of bureaucratic goo when the challenges it is built to confront, demand anything but a bureaucracy. Interestingly, it has no preamble; just a two-liner from the editor and then launches right in.

Six is my fave, and when I look back on my career I see I’ve been guilty of this:

IT doesn’t ask why. They respond to the same problems over and over without implementing permanent fixes. They operate and support redundant applications even though no one uses them. They do not question business priorities and complain when all requests are listed as high priority by the business.

The last of the eight bullets is denial. IT doesn’t want to admit it’s becoming a bureaucracy, when it’s in the stages of becoming one. And then the first dozen or so comments in the thread pop in and essentially prove it.

I will need to allocate some time to sit down with this and figure out who’s pointing out more substantial stuff…the author of the article, or some of the commenters who came in later and have contributed some items I wouldn’t want to miss. Looks like a close call. But in my own twenty years, I have noticed that if there is one big problem that acts as a stumbling block against the endeavors of IT sub-organizations everywhere, it is human nature. I have yet to see an IT executive confront it directly.

The mission of Information Technology is to do more with less, and to deliver it as close to Right Now as possible, without disrupting production. Keep it working, and in the meantime go look for a cheaper way to do more quicker. This demands an awkward juxtaposition of creative-individualist and harmonious-collectivist thinking. This means the best and brightest should be promoted into positions where they can find out exactly what has to be done, and go shopping for ways to accomplish it, with all the less-creative folks standing behind them and lending support. Once the product is installed, information needs to be shared down to a substantially technical level, so that if there is a disruption in service someone will be around to make sure business is resumed as seamlessly as possible.

I have not yet seen this happen in my career. Anywhere. I don’t think I’ll see it.

Self-interest always gets in the way. Once you’re the “(blank)” guy, and you replace “(blank)” with whatever it is the company needs that is your specialty, you want to hoard the information. And why shouldn’t you? If you train someone else how to do the same thing, they’re probably going to start brown-nosing the boss, pretending that they’re the ones who got trained first and you’re the Johnny-come-lately…and if your boss is a dimwit, he might believe them and they’ll get all your plumb assignments. The boss, meanwhile, will pick out the guy who does things in a manner that most closely resembles the way he’d do things if he were they. And that guy will get all the “yummy” training…the expensive training…the training on all the yummy new products that are going to be in demand next year, or the year after. And so all the hoarding of information will be for nothing. But year after year people will continue to do it anyway.

It’s gotta be that way, if there are layers of management looking at IT trying to find ways to pare it down. And that ingredient will never be missing, of course. IT is in the business of delivering, among other things, economy.

So jealousy will have something to do with what motivates IT; therefore, elitism will drift in, sooner or later. I have yet to see any exceptions to it. An IT department staffed with, say for example, fifty highly energetic, skilled, experienced and resourceful engineers, will draw on the creative juices of………..four or five of those. At the most. The other ninety percent will be called upon to support that “Big Five.” …or not. Will that Big Five come up with the creative, resourceful, Indiana Jones “out of the box” types of solutions that will keep the department from drifting into a bureaucracy? Perhaps. Maybe. Probably not…the highest part of any mountain is it’s center.

Are all IT organizations neck deep in this problem? I would have to say no, since they’re disconnected entities functioning within private enterprises, with good specimens as well as bad ones. But I think it’s safe to say all the IT organizations that aren’t yet bureaucracies, are in danger of becoming those, since they’re staffed by ordinary people.

Ordinary people don’t really work that well together. Not once the advancement of one man’s career, is seen as a detriment to the career of his colleague.

And so I would reserve my most scathing criticism for the folks who skim over the Spanos article, and snear something to the effect of “not in my citadel.” Those may be bright people, but they’re engaged in a somewhat foolish thing.

Interesting.