Are corporate IT people jerks?

[Cheese Sandwich]

What is your perception? :D

[jgrabham]

Do canonical count?

[NilsE]

No, I don't think I have ever been a jerk ;):)

[matthinckley]

well I don't think I'm a jerk.. but I work at a corporate help desk.. is that what you are referring to or are you talking about IT people as in the network admins? or something else?

[prizrak]

Hey I'm not a jerk :( Well if you **** me off I will most likely sever your limbs but that's not just about IT

[Cheese Sandwich]

well I don't think I'm a jerk.. but I work at a corporate help desk.. is that what you are referring to or are you talking about IT people as in the network admins? or something else?

Just IT people in general within corporate organizations - i.e. the people you go to when you're having computer problems & that come around to do upgrades & maintainance, etc.

[jgrabham]

Just IT people in general within corporate organizations - i.e. the people you go to when you're having computer problems & that come around to do upgrades & maintainance, etc.

Then no :]

[Dragonbite]

I'm an IT person, and I'm a jerk!

[muguwmp67]

I used to be a consultant, and I was amazed at some of the experiences I had with some client's IT departments. The same departments usually treated their own users just as poorly as visitors.

However, those departments that were good and helpful, were usually VERY good departments. IT departments need to remember that they are a service portion of the company and it is their job to enable users, not hinder them.

I have heard stories of users with problematic laptops that after taking them into their IT department several times for assistance and getting none, have actually physically damaged their laptops in order to get a new one. The same company had a problem with the IT department reading employee's email (and not as part of any company watchdog policy).

[UbLnoy]

I voted "no, they're patient and polite" when you consider what they have to deal with.

Not only do they have to try and figure out the problem, and fix it, but they have to figure
out what us idiot users have screwed up trying to fix the problem ourselves. :)

[AlanR8]

I did the job for almost five years and decided there are two types of people in this world, people people and keyboard people.

Keyboard people can be hard to deal with and may come across as "jerks" as you asked/stated.

Good IT people are people people

Make sense of that :)

[Sunflower1970]

My experience with IT people in my company has been good. They're friendly, answer questions, are, usually, very patient with those that aren't very good with computers...(some of the questions and problems I've heard from coworkers...makes me wonder how the IT people don't strangle them...)

[MOS95B]

All of them I've ever had to work with treat you as you treat them. I got along great with them because, having a tech background but not being able to use it on the job, I knew what they could or couldn't do for me. The people that demanded the impossible be done yesterday got treated as jerks. They also didn't score all the free goodies when it came time for IT to replace systems... ;)

[Dragonbite]

For an IT person, unless you are in a company that develops software as the product you're in customer service, whether your customer are executives, grunts, businesses or external clients it's your job to service them.

Some IT people I know put on a gruff-attitude with somebody until they find out that it IS a bug/issue/problem (and not PEBKAC), or that you are one. Moving from Accounting to IT really blew me out of the water how friendly they became when I was "one of them"

[Tundro Walker]

At all the places I've worked, the IT folks tend to be stand-offish and blunt. And, if you had to work a day in their life, you probably would too. On a regular basis, they usually have to deal with a range of stupid issues, from somebody spilling Coke on their keyboard to some nit-wit who decided to bring in a personal copy of Ubuntu to try to dual-boot their company machine to it (w/o IT authorization).

I'm usually considered a "power-user" / "developer" at my jobs, but sometimes IT has to come over and install stuff on my machine because a paranoid boss doesn't want me to have admin rights to my own machine. I chat with them, and I hear their stories. I even live with an IT support specialist. I hear his stories. While they try to be polite, their patience is really pushed sometimes. However, if they find out you actually know your way around a computer, but have common sense enough not to jack with your computer too much, forcing them to come out and fix whatever you screwed up, they'll change their attitude and can be pretty friendly when they see you (because they know you're NOT causing issues for them, like some of the other PEBKAC's around the building.)

At my current job, I get both attitudes. The regular IT guy who installs new software on my comp occasionally knows I'm pretty good with comps (because I'm the only one on my floor running automated scripts at 2am). He's really friendly and likes coming to see me...because he rarely has to see me, and it's usually for something positive, like installing new faboo software that he's eager to check out.

Another guy, though, was pretty standoffish and a bit rude when he came over to move my computer during a recent department shift. But, I didn't mind, because he had to move computers all day, and listen to stupid questions from folks who want to know how to get rid of some stupid toolbar off their Internet Explorer that they somehow got at the one site the corporate net-nanny surf-blocker didn't block them from, where they found the stupid spyware/adware toolbar to begin with.

Seriously, if you had to save other people from their own stupidity all day, you'd get a bit annoyed, too, and it would show, no matter how polite and professional you try to act.

[Hendrixski]

hah hah.

Nah. the only times I've dealt with IT people they were very polite but very incompetent. I did a lot of consulting for companies like Kodak or the the University of Rochester, even the air force... and yeah, nobody at any of those places had a clue about how to set me up with the accounts I needed so that I can start programming stuff on their systems. they were polite though.

[beercz]

What's a jerk?

[Tundro Walker]

They also didn't score all the free goodies when it came time for IT to replace systems... ;)

That reminded me of another reason why some IT folks are gruff... They know the difference between good & crap equipment. And yet, they don't usually have a say in which dept or person gets the good or crap equipment.

Case in point, some new developers started at my job. I had to work with one to help solve an issue with an online site. I noticed she had a dinky little POS computer that normally goes to the sales folks as little more than a "terminal" computer. She was forced to use it for systems development. She was loading up an IDE and some libraries, and it took forever. But, she didn't complain.

I stumbled across the IT guy I'm on friendly terms with in the hall, and we chatted a bit. I mentioned the rinky-dink computer the developer had, and he really got livid. He knew the developers would need power-house machines. But, all the ones they were currently getting in were going to executives or team leads in departments like Sales, who use it little more than for web-browsing and email. What a waste. Plus, it was partially the development dept's fault, because they gave him such short notice about the new hires start dates. So, he had to scrounge up some computers fast, and all he had was dinky little things. He started going off about other cases where that's happened, like when a marketing brown-noser got a new computer even though they hardly did much with it, meanwhile a data-grinder like me in another dept gets a crappy little computer to do report automation on.


Sadly, I've seen this happen at all the companies I've worked for, too.

[jrusso2]

I have been working in IT for 10 years and yes I see this field tends to attract alot of jerks.

[Dragonbite]

At least it's easy to get IT people into a meeting....

"Free food"
or

"Free stuff"
Simple, but effective.

:KS