House of Eratosthenes

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.

There’s a lot here and while I don’t have 20 years in IT I am going on 15. I think people are talking past each other here. “Fit” is not unimportant. I’ve been side by side with some A holes who know everything and you can’t tell them anything. THOSE are the people that I too, screen out almost immediately. I don’t care how good you are, if you have a “my way or the highway” attitude you are not going to be productive and are not going to help my team at all. Yes, I’ve worked with people like this and yes they frequently get promoted. Why? Putting people like this in Senior management positions makes a twisted sort of sense in that, the higher up the ladder you go, the less you have to collaborate. Consider the CIO or CTO. How much collaboration/teamwork is required vs. simply telling people to get shit done?
- Duffy | 08/06/2008 @ 13:54
But remember the accountability angle. Can you come up with some hard data that these “rogue-free” I.T. organizations are getting more work done, and doing it more reliably, than the organizations that have the rogues in ’em?

Because like I said, I don’t see how the tools are even left in there that would produce this data. You have aggregates of cumulative down-time, maybe, that are produced on month-end or year-end reports. But absolutely nothing like — for example — that little feedback card the waiter has to leave you at a restaurant.

So these adorable “everyone has to be like me” pinheads like Mary are free to mold I.T. into the shape she likes, and no one is put into a position of evaluating whether that supports the I.T. mission or not.
- mkfreeberg | 08/06/2008 @ 14:02
You are correct. I can’t imagine how you’d even measure that aside from n lines of code with no bugs or something. Comparing across a single organization is hard enough let alone differing environments. My observations are anecdotal at best but I think you’ll admit a team that gets along tends toward productive more than one that does not, no?

I guess I read her comments differently. I didn’t interpret it as “everyone has to like/be like me”. Rather, she’s looking for people who are not going to be more trouble than they’re worth. I’d put up w/ a difficult programmer if he’s good but there is a breakpoint in there somewhere. YMMV.
- Duffy | 08/06/2008 @ 16:21
Her sin is one of confusing the moderate with the extreme. In theory, you aren’t going to gutterball the interview in the manner she’s described, unless the guy in front of you is a “Nick Burns” type.

In practice, I would argue, this will twist around to the point where everyone outside a narrow scope of personality inclination is going to end up gutterballed. Notice how carefully her words are chosen:

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.

The kind of “standardization” that actually improves the process, comes from people who have an idea of “what they think is the best way to run an IT department.” I’m sure the people who are already there, greatly appreciate being on the receiving end of this deference. Just keep in mind it isn’t just a smidgen of deference. It is complete. Unyielding and uncompromising. That is, presuming “Mary” is accurately representing the old-timers in IT when she holds those interviews, and you have to subject that to some doubt as well.

The point is that the candidate is not to benefit from any doubt, therefore only the most glaringly tame specimens will squeak through this screening. …if I see any hint…

So who do you get when all’s said and done? You get Wesley Mouch, that’s who you get.

From then on, people helped Wesley Mouch to advance, for the same reason as that which had prompted Uncle Julius: they were people who believed that mediocrity was safe. The men who now sat in front of his desk had been taught that the law of causality was a superstition and that one had to deal with the situation of the moment without considering its cause. By the situation of the moment, they had concluded that Wesley Mouch was a man of superlative skill and cunning, since millions aspired to power, but he was the one who had achieved it. It was not within their method of thinking to know that Wesley Mouch was the zero at the meeting point of forces unleashed in destruction against one another.

And that’s exactly what information technology does not need. That’s your happy-talky-jokey constant-jibber-jabber with the perfectly straight teeth who never shuts up. And can’t be counted on to do anything.
- mkfreeberg | 08/06/2008 @ 17:14
Hmmm. Lotsa jobs in IT, eh? Should I go back to work? Just long enough to get that new Miata I want? Nah… I’m nearly six years removed, and that’s a frickin’ eon in the technology biz…

As for “rogues”… I had a few work for me in my day, and I protected them like a Mama Bear looks after her cubs…coz they produced. The one guy I’m thinking about had THE most miserable people-skills I’ve ever seen in a “professional,” but Dang! The boy could CODE, and he had a work-ethic that Simon Legree would envy. Personally, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a “rogue-free” IT org. Everyone has “keep ’em in the back room” types. Every-frickin’-one, NO exceptions.
- Buck | 08/06/2008 @ 17:17
MKF: I agree. “Mary” chose her words with Clintonian precision. Silly me, I took her at face value.
- Duffy | 08/07/2008 @ 09:59
I’m just sayin’. You know…she could easily have said “If I see strong evidence of a ‘rogue’ personality I will become reluctant…” That is not what she said; it isn’t even the face value. She was telling applicants to be mindful of people like her; to conceal even a “hint” of being a rogue.

Mary catches so much as a whiff, and you’re gutterballed. Tragedy is, just like my ex-, Mary is quite correct — she is not alone, and the way most of these things go, they’re conducted exactly the way she conducts them. So the people with unconventional ideas are systematically filtered out…in a field in which, the name of the game is to figure out how to do things that other people have tried to figure out how to do, and failed to figure out. So the criteria is exactly the opposed to what they’re supposed to be trying to find when they interview these people.
- mkfreeberg | 08/07/2008 @ 10:36

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Mary Got Pummeled on the IT Labor DisconnectWednesday, August 6th, 2008

Mary Got Pummeled on the IT Labor Disconnect
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008