Entitlement of Geekdom

Posted by steve on July 11, 2008 |

Within any office environment, there are always some very interesting social dynamics. Every department has corresponding personalities that one would expect knowing the stereotype. The people working in accounting department tend to be cautious and conservative, straight to the point with numbers and figures; but often seem to have a hidden wild streak to offset the hassles of rather restrained daily personality (These are most likely, the craziest and drunkest people at company parties). Engineers are often filled with plethora of trivial knowledge from all walks of life, and have a tendency to always drive meetings into levels of detail that it was not intended for. Designers are always somewhat aloof and odd in their ways, seemingly to harmonize on a different frequency than everyone else. In a politcally correct climate, we regard stereotypes as taboo, when in reality stereotypes are often established from years of factual observations.

Once you understand the stereotype, establishing relationships within the different cultures within the office is pretty easy. Of course, there will always be someone on the fringe, where personality and ideals clash in such catastrophic way that you’ll never truly get along, even on just a professional level. After all, it’s impossible to love the human race in its entirety. So we learn to get along, or at least learn to ignore those cases of absolute incompatibility.

For the most part, I get along with people just fine. However, if there was one personality that I simply can’t stand in an office environment, it has to be the self-righteous IT admin.

These IT admins usually share the following characteristics:

• They’re usually not the admin for your external servers, such as the customer database, or web server, the internet store… or any outward facing assets.
• Instead, they’re usually the internal admin that manages your desktop, network, storage & email.
• Often times, they’re contracted via a third party consulting/management company. This probably has more to do with very few smaller companies want a full-time IT staff. After all, when nothing is wrong with your corporate network, they just sit there and do nothing.
• They’re usually some very biased zealot championing some company or another. For example, a Microsoft-certified IT admin will endless push MS products & praise Microsoft, after all, their livelihood depends on the continued dominance of Microsoft.
• In contrast, they could also be a super dedicated Linux/Unix geek, where they would transition every system you have to open source as much as possible. They might also insist that every website you build must also be viewable in Lynx.

All those characteristics can probably be interpreted as “charming” or “eccentric” in the same vein as Jon Arbuckle. However, this one last characteristic is what really, really drives me nuts:

• Often times, they’re just complete assholes to anyone who they don’t think have any computer knowledge.

The odds, from the view of most IT admins, are against me, given the fact that I’m a Mac user. Often they will refuse to support me, and then laugh at me for my lack of Windows prowness. The assumption is that since I’m a Mac user, I know nothing about how a computer “really” work and will never understand the greatness and the knowledge that’s being held inside their brain as opposed to mine. Of course, they would have no idea that I once upon time, had a SLI-enabled rig with water pipes directing the flow of heat throughout my self-built system. A computer where every single part and spec, down to the cycling speed of the RAM was carefully researched & picked out by yours truly. I’ve simply grown tired of Windows, and tired of spending thousands of extra money just to get 5 more frames-per-second out of some first-person shooting game that I will get tired of before I’m half-way through the game anyway.

To them, being a “Mac user” pretty much equivocate to being completely computer illiterate. That, in turn, gives them the right to sneer and talk to me in that, “I know you won’t understand this, so let me explain this to you as what I would with a five year-old…” tone.

I don’t find it surprising that they would communicate to me in such a tone. What I do find extremely surprising, is that IT admins are seemingly the only people in the company that can also carry that tone of indignity while talking to VP level staff, CEO’s, and sometimes, even the vaunted Board of Directors! These IT admins, are the only people that can simply tell the VP of (insert any non-technical department here, obviously if you talk to the VP of IT that way, you wouldn’t have a job for much longer) that they don’t know what they’re doing, what they’re talking about, at times infer that they’re extremely dumb for having done something. As for resolutions, they will fix whatever mistake you just made, but not before scolding you and making you feel guilty. Of course, they’ll never fully explain to you what happened, either because they don’t really know, or they think it’s a waste of time to educate that little brain of yours with limited capacity for understanding their technical ingenuity.

The reality is this: IT admins are the new generation mechanics. Simply that, glorified mechanics.

Even VP and CEO’s whimper at the feet of IT admins, because they either do not want to deal with the complexity of computers, or do not have the time to deal with it. If you think about it, a CEO can have ran several multi-million dollar, successful corporations, and still resort to sending the car down to the shop for an oil change. In fact, they would be more likely to simply send everything to the shop than dealing with it themselves. Does the car mechanic talk down to the CEO? Of course not, because they understand that they’re in a service industry, and bad service eventually leads to not having any business down the road.

IT admins don’t see themselves as being a part of the service industry, but rather in a strange way, feels as if they’re in control of something much greater. If the CEO doesn’t get email today, then the whole company is screwed, therefore the wellness of the company relies strictly upon the shoulder of the IT admin, right?

Just as these proud IT admins are talking down to people as if they were five year-olds, the five year-olds are commoditizing what the IT industry does best. We’re approaching an age where a huge majority of our kids growing up knowing how to use a computer. They’re building their own websites, writing codes as a part of school assignments. Just how much longer will the current generation of IT admins be able to snicker at those people who don’t know how to use a computer? As the number of computer illiteracy dwindles, so does the job security of IT administration.

So, word of advice: Stop acting like assholes. There will come a day that they’ll just fire you and hire the sixteen year old from next door to do your job.

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