Changing IT from a figure of hatred

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I was champing at the bit the minute I read the "Why does everybody hate the IT department?" piece on IT Pro recently, mainly because it seemed to me that in the echoing silence after that statement, there was a rider that adds “and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it”.

Work is just a job, not a soap-opera.

There are many things you can do about it. What's more, there are even things you can do about it which don’t first require you to choose a different set of parents, upbringing, talents and outlook. If you treat problems with humans in the same way as you treat problems with computers, what research can you do and what resources are avaialble to help you get your job done, as a classic nerd, without the kind of blood pressure hikes, interpersonal failures, and futile shrugging that characterises this profession?

I am going to point you to a list of self-help books. Let’s get that out of the way as an initial admission. I want to explain why I think they are useful, but to do that I have to bootstrap your thinking about the whole problem, and to do that I have to visit some topics beloved of Human Resources people, which I know can raise hackles amongst – well, pretty much everybody inside and outside IT. Please try to hold on to your emotions, because I am going to talk about emotions.

A basic divide cuts across humankind. This is a lot wider than nerds vs the rest: it’s about how you experience your emotional reactions. Some people introspect about them – those who are likely to say “that makes me angry”. Others live in them. They say “I am angry!” or quite often “YOU made me Angry!”.

This is a lot wider than nerds vs the rest.

If you are the latter type then I expect some of my advice here might put your laptop or tablet at physical risk: and make no mistake about it, the key to making yourself and your department a bit less hated (which is, after all, an emotional word) is about looking at emotions. So let’s try to rise above that stuff and consider the problem of a system (that happens to be made up of people) which you have to work with (by communicating, and that automatically includes emotional information) and which composes itself then communicates information about you.

I would like to initially direct you to the field of character profiling. Those slightly creepy questionnaires with brand-names like Belbin and Myers-Briggs, which ask a lot of apparently unconnected questions about your emotional affinity for certain value-judgements, then uses them to come out with blanket pigeon-holing statements about you after a hidden process of evaluation. If you’ve never seen one, think of them as spookily over-researched horoscopes.

Just from my description you can see why nerds (who rather like open-box systematic diagnosis and debugging) might not like the whole idea – and I’m not suggesting anyone gets religious about the certainty of the verdicts of these tests. All I want to do now is pass on one conclusion, from Belbin. He asserts that there are nine basic character roles in a team. Successful teams display a balanced selection of those roles. It doesn’t mean there have to be nine people. Several roles can crop up in a single person. Belbin’s crucial observation, for me, is that people best suited to work together in a team don’t naturally like each other. He overturns the idea that opposites attract: He says that opposites succeed.

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