Are IT bods/contractors smarter than everyone else?

[denver2k]

Honest question. Do you think IT people are smarter than most other folk in business?

I don't mean the plodder permies but the switched on top guys and contractors.

Obviously YES.....Not ALWAYS though...but in most of the cases...

But mostly they are not part of business, they are simply supporting the business....Business treat them just as a replaceable resource. Thats why we have loads of IT contractors but not too many contract dealers,traders,sales people.

[DieScum]

Trout

What complex issues? Most of the tech side of IT is logically quite similar to being a motor mechanic.

Well there is stuff that you probably see as not complex at all which most people are baffled by. Like an SQL query. Most people think that is understandable magic.

Or the interactions between complex systems.

Compare that to other roles in business. Marketing, HR, sales. The complexity of work there is much less. I'm not saying that the work is easier - different skills are required.

But technical professions do mean a constant series of complex challenges. That must alter your brain... perhaps making us in to a sort of super race.

[cailin maith]

Good at thinking in Black and White. But the world is often shades of grey and that does not compute

I don't think IT contractors are smarter, more smug and self opinionated yes.

WTS

[chris79]

The way I see it is those permie guys could quite easily leave their secure jobs and be contractors too for the same money. Don't assume there is a correlation between the amount of money you earn and your ability/intelligence.

A close relative of mine is head of IT for a FTSE100 and he's never contracted in his life, yet he can run circles round most people in the field. You may be an expert in your particular area/skill, but it doesn't mean you are better than the next guy just because they have different employment terms or because you don't report to "a line manager".

[lambrini_socialist]

Honest question. Do you think IT people are smarter than most other folk in business?

I don't mean the plodder permies but the switched on top guys and contractors.

me? yes. the drag-n-drop control jockeys i usually end up working with? no chance.

[lambrini_socialist]

Good at thinking in Black and White. But the world is often shades of grey and that does not compute

and that is a vacuous truism. why not try writing into the comments pages on Teletext?

[sasguru]

Definitely not. IT people usually seem to have some ability in a very narrow field but usually are incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Most lack the social skills to progress up the ladder, leaving a gap at senior levels, that self-serving political types fill. And that is why most IT projects in the UK fail.

[Mich the Tester]

No. We think we’re smarter because we often find ourselves having to follow the lead of intelligent people who behave like idiots. If permies spend long enough doing that, they start losing their brains.

If you speak with nurses and doctors, who are generally pretty intelligent, you’ll hear tales of highly trained professionals being bossed around and judged in their performance by people who know nothing about medicine. Speak to teachers and you’ll hear about their work suffering at the hands of ministerial edicts and performance measurements. Social workers will tell you how their profession has been ruined by form filling and procedures. See The Times; ‘And the end of this perfect paper trail is a dead baby’. In banks, people achieved their targets. Departments ticked off all their KPI’s for years with no sign of trouble. Police officers were told to achieve government targets for handing out speeding fines while relations with the public, the most important weapon in tackling crime, were hitting new lows. Most of these people are not thick.

What we have in common with all these professional people is that we are too often led by those who believe you can use standard management theories for any organisation ranging from a bank to a child protection agency.

The people doing the management and applying the theories aren’t idiots; they are simply misled. They have been taught at their business schools the standard idea that if you want to make a company succesful, you install a ‘corporate dashboard’, add in some KPIs, standardise all the ‘processes’ and procedures and give everyone a 360 degree appraisal. Of course, you need an audit trail for everything, so professionals must spend a huge proportion of their time filling in forms rather than doing their job.

I’m heartened to see that finally the failure of a particular style of management is becoming so obvious thanks to the credit crunch. I think that what has not yet been recognised or properly accounted for in management theroy is the fact that organisations are now very different to those of only 30 years ago in that there are lots of highly educated, and of course highly opinionated people, working at the coalface, at the lowest levels of the organisation. There’s the challenge for professionals; we need to become managers ourselves instead of leaving the job to misled pseudo-professionals selling their Harvard snake-oil.

[sasguru]

No. We think we’re smarter because we often find ourselves having to follow the lead of intelligent people who behave like idiots. If permies spend long enough doing that, they start losing their brains.

If you speak with nurses and doctors, who are generally pretty intelligent, you’ll hear tales of highly trained professionals being bossed around and judged in their performance by people who know nothing about medicine. Speak to teachers and you’ll hear about their work suffering at the hands of ministerial edicts and performance measurements. Social workers will tell you how their profession has been ruined by form filling and procedures. See The Times; ‘And the end of this perfect paper trail is a dead baby’. In banks, people achieved their targets. Departments ticked off all their KPI’s for years with no sign of trouble. Police officers were told to achieve government targets for handing out speeding fines while relations with the public, the most important weapon in tackling crime, were hitting new lows. Most of these people are not thick.

What we have in common with all these professional people is that we are too often led by those who believe you can use standard management theories for any organisation ranging from a bank to a child protection agency.

The people doing the management and applying the theories aren’t idiots; they are simply misled. They have been taught at their business schools the standard idea that if you want to make a company succesful, you install a ‘corporate dashboard’, add in some KPIs, standardise all the ‘processes’ and procedures and give everyone a 360 degree appraisal. Of course, you need an audit trail for everything, so professionals must spend a huge proportion of their time filling in forms rather than doing their job.

I’m heartened to see that finally the failure of a particular style of management is becoming so obvious thanks to the credit crunch. I think that what has not yet been recognised or properly accounted for in management theroy is the fact that organisations are now very different to those of only 30 years ago in that there are lots of highly educated, and of course highly opinionated people, working at the coalface, at the lowest levels of the organisation. There’s the challenge for professionals; we need to become managers ourselves instead of leaving the job to misled pseudo-professionals selling their Harvard snake-oil.

Very erudite, clear and well communicated, but if all you can do is post it on a web site, then your insights are no use to man or beast.
Getting power in the industry is the only way to change things -however that involves getting into the messy world of people.
And most contractors would, understandably, rather take the money and run.

[Mich the Tester]

Very erudite, clear and well communicated, but if all you can do is post it on a web site, then your insights are no use to man or beast.

I agree. I believe I shall shortly be doing somewhat more as I've joined a network of professional people in NL which includes some very experienced managers AND professionals who recognise this problem and want to to something about it on a commercial basis.