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by justherefortart
2976 days ago
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My favorite thing is seeing people I wouldn't hire to be a low level IT tech as CIO/IT Director because they're a "network guy". So not only do they end up not understanding 90%+ of IT's functions in any real sense, they are typically not even trained on how to manage. I work with one such moron at my current job. The entire company goes around the fool, yet they keep him. Why? The acting CEO is likely embezzling and competent IT might shine a light on it. That and the CEO outsources work to her husband's company for 10s of thousands a month with no deliverables or results (beyond what I suspect is the normal embezzlement in other areas). I've been in this field for ~25 or so years. Maybe I'm jaded by working in consulting/contracting for most of that (and working for myself). I have never worked with an IT Director or CIO that I would personally hire for my own business in that entire time. Being technical enough to make the right decisions and having enough managerial experience/knowledge to be a good manager at the same time is extraordinarily elusive. Another question is, how do people hire a CIO, when they themselves don't understand IT (or even want IT it seems). They guess or outsource it. I've never seen that work either. |
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But people start to ask you for IT related things because you are the "tech" guy. If your honest and say you need to hire someone to do that specific task, often people are ok with that.
I follow this simple guide when hiring someone to do something I don't understand.
1. Explain to me how you would solve problem X, in as many steps as possible. I make them walk me through it, and ask for more and more detail. Usually spending about an hour.
2. If they have no problems getting into the details, then we set a roadmap and schedule and I check in periodically to make sure we are staying close to it. If they can't stick to their own plan... I move on.
3. If they could give me enough detail to start with, and too much of it was, I'll have to do research or figure it out when we get there, I don't hire them.
4. This results with me having a solid bank of IT people I can outsource problems too, and in tern executives depend on ME to deliver actual results.
That doesn't sound awful, but it actually is. I get to spend extremely little time doing something I could potentially be great at, WEB DEVELOPMENT. And I know the people that work for me, think I'm an idiot and don't understand why they don't have my job.
I try to ask questions and get domain knowledge as I go, but unless you are a genius or spend many years, its just too hard to know everything. And I can't pretend that I'm an expert at managing people, because I'm not. I just do those 4 steps, and then try to be friendly. That's it.
I feel like I'm stuck managing a team of people, when I would rather be an intern for a master developer.