What the hell is this?

IT is not a professional occupation? Tech support is not?

I know I couldn’t be a programmer, but I also bet that dude (and you know it has to be a dude) couldn’t do my job either.

I’ve built call centers from the ground up (all infrastructure) in a very, very short amount of time. I’ve solved problems that even the vendor of the software in question claimed were “not resolvable.”

I later called the vendor back and told them how to fix their own product.

But I’m not a professional, I guess.

Also, a good tech support person is worth their weight in gold and can solve problems a developer wouldn’t even imagine. Also not a professional, according to this idiot.

IT does get lumped in the “computer janitor” category fairly often. People don’t seem to know what to do with us. They want to treat us like janitors*, but also we usually get paid more than they do and are generally conversant in our job and often in theirs**, so it creates just huge cognitive dissonance. They want to treat us as worthless disposable cogs like they treat janitors, but can’t dispose of us as things start to go downhill rather quickly when they do.

IT people also bother management. They have a lot of power by the nature of their jobs, but management sees them as innately inferior. And we’re also seen as a huge cost center. So management is very, very averse to IT in most companies.

One of the reason programmers want to shit on IT is to avoid the de-professionalization that IT people experience — to say, “I’m not like those IT guys who do unimportant stuff like build the networks my code works across, deploy the servers on which I work and which power my applications. I’m also not like those lowly help desk minions who support my fuck-ups and figure out my code is broken ten ways to Sunday. I’m not like them at all.”

*Note: Janitors should get paid more and in no way should be besmirched. But most people view janitors negatively and want to view IT the same way.

**I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to figure out how to do a significant part of someone’s job on the fly so that I could help them use software that they should’ve already known how to use. Maybe 300 or 400 times in my career?