[majesticglue]

and IT "assholes" think the run of the mill business drones are "assholes" as well. Their inability to be effective at their jobs tend to make IT lives worse because they can't understand what IT workers do but IT workers can understand what the basic run of the mill business drones do...and their work tends to be a bunch of pointless meetings.

Yeah, I work at a corporate office and have made it a mission to see what kind of work they do, and majority of the time...it's pointless meetings and meetings that involve pointing to IT workers and saying "do this". I check many of their daily schedules, and see what kind of stuff they talk about in meetings...just wow. Am I an "asshole"? Sure you can call me that, but I can call them useless in turn because I wonder how many more qualified people out there who can replace these workers.

[jmye]

> but IT workers can understand what the basic run of the mill business drones do...and their work tends to be a bunch of pointless meetings.

What an ironic comment.

Sorry, any early-career worker looking down their nose at anyone else (or pretending to have any idea what their job entails, especially because they “looked at a calendar”) might as well go back to middle school. They definitely need to grow up.

[photonerd]

While true, it’s very fair to say that many (possibly most) meetings in a corporate environment contain a lot of absolutely pointless time wasting.

I say this with the perspective of someone who has slowly had to have many more of these meetings added to his calendar over the years.

Some are very important, some are reasonable but often bloated, but so many are a waste of time.

At the very least: they’re 5-10 mins of work spread over an hour. It’s occasionally maddening.

[ryan_lane]

I find that a lot of engineers don't understand good communication, and definitely don't understand the value of relationships.

When I was really junior, I'd go to meetings and think that the vast majority of the time was wasted. As I became more senior, I realized that a lot of that wasted time is for providing context, relationship building, and alignment. You may not need those things for your current task, but your leadership and partner teams may need these things.

Yes, a lot of meetings could be emails, and a lot of meetings could be better run (agendas and objectives in the invite, action items assigned at the end), but unless you're working somewhere awful, most meetings probably have a reasonable purpose and aren't all filler. Lots of jobs require way more meetings, and probably aren't filled with context relevant to you.

Looking down on non-engineering positions is a personality trait I associate with inexperience. It's absolutely something I'd consider when denying a promo.

[jmye]

> When I was really junior, I'd go to meetings and think that the vast majority of the time was wasted. As I became more senior, I realized that a lot of that wasted time is for providing context, relationship building, and alignment. You may not need those things for your current task, but your leadership and partner teams may need these things.

100% agree. In early or IC roles, it's easy to think "just let me go do X" (or worse, "talking about X or Y is a waste of time when X is the obvious answer") without seeing the bigger picture that there's tremendous value in making sure other teams are aware of what X is, why it's important, and having a chance to weigh in or ask questions. Certainly there are valid complaints about some people's meetings, but those shouldn't overshadow the alignment/communication value meetings can have.

[belorn]

> I realized that a lot of that wasted time is for providing context, relationship building, and alignment.

A lot of that seems to be about office politics, which historically been something which engineers and office workers in general has disliked. It is a generally unhappy fact that relationship building and office alignments is what dictate who get promoted, who get raises, who get the desired assignments and who don't.

It might be true that those who refuse playing that game is associated with inexperience. In my experience, employees who get tired of it generally leave large companies, which leaves behind only inexperience employees or those who enjoy the game.

[photonerd]

Looking down on, yes. Suffering nonsense meetings silently? No.

My entire point was that there is a major difference between the two & that while the instinct to look down on others for this organizational symptom is immature, it’s not unfounded or without basis to highlight the issue: they’re blaming the wrong thing however.

And I often find that in those types of meeting communication & relationship building is the absolute last thing that is happening. Most of these meetings are CYA, checklist, type meetings.

Meetings that literally only exist to allow someone to demonstrate they had a meeting about something.

Worse, the actual communication that is happening is usually in side channels.

[ryan_lane]

I'm guessing you're junior, or you'd have more control over these meetings, or have the ability to decline ones that you believed weren't going to be good use of your time.

Having good meeting culture requires everyone involved to improve it. If you want meetings to be better, set them up, add an agenda and objectives, and run the meeting so that it's effective. If you can't run the meeting, if it doesn't have an agenda or objectives, ask the person who created it for them. Ask for action items at the end of the meeting, if no one is calling for them. If it's mostly status meetings, propose a better process to track and communicate status.

If you're working through side channels, you're part of the problem.

Calling people assholes, rather than improving the situation, is an indicator of inexperience.

[photonerd]

This is the most wrong, yet condescending and naive, comment I’ve encountered on HN so far.

I’m actually impressed.

Call me in 20 years, maybe you’ll have learned something.

[DropInIn]

Getting real "toxic positivity" vibes off your whole line of arguments...

[totallywrong]

> and IT "assholes" think the run of the mill business drones are "assholes" as well. Their inability to be effective at their jobs tend to make IT lives worse because they can't understand what IT workers

Have you ever dealt with an average IT department in a non-tech company? This attitude doesn't help anyone and I really want to believe that only a small minority of tech people think of any other worker anywhere as an "asshole".

[yesco]

I'm a Sr. SE at a large medical device company and can confirm that our IT dept is filled with assholes. We do everything we can to keep systems out of their hands because they are so difficult to work with compared to every other part of the company.

I get they have to deal with a bunch of technical inepts constantly falling for phishing attacks and occasionally teams will make outrageous requests to them that simply can't be done, but their attitude is terrible.

If you ask for something simple but "scary", like a firewall or internal network change, they will immediately assume you are just some idiot and speak dismissively to you in a very obvious manner. It's extremely frustrating because they won't even bother to read your emails that justify the change and will just invent some unrelated excuses about why they can't or say they will get back to you later (they don't).

Ironically the only way to get anything done through them is to have my team members create a bunch of duplicate tickets (1 per person), and schedule multiple pointless meetings with them that essentially just consist of me reading my emails to them out loud.

Non-technical teams in the company get the same treatment but lack the technical background to counter them. Frequently I've had team leaders come to me to get a second opinions on the stuff IT tells them and it bothers me how much they seem to clearly exaggerate the difficulty of things. To the point where I can't help but wonder if they are just pretending to know what they are doing, and use their better-than-you attitude to mask their own ineptitude.

So overall I feel the negative reputation of IT departments is earned.

[mschuster91]

> and it bothers me how much they seem to clearly exaggerate the difficulty of things.

Scotty Engineering principle at work. I'm no stranger to that, it's often enough the only strategy keeping higher management from completely swamping you with work.

[ori_prior]

It's not that it usually is the Scotty Engineering principle. It is more often a hedge against unforeseen complications, because if you give a realistic estimate that would be true for 90% of the tickets, the 10% will come to bite you. So to not get chewed up for providing realistic 90%-true estimates, you give 99.9%-true estimates that are far higher, but with just a .1% chance of being screwed instead of a 10% chance. Which is, at 10 tickets per day, getting chewed up daily vs. once every two weeks or so.

[Bloating]

reminds me of the saying "don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that guy behind the tree".

Its always us vs them.