Programmers Vs. IT Workers
This is a message to all managers and bosses in the world who think it’s a good idea offload IT work to their coders: Stop.
Stop now and stop forever. It will hurt your business every single time.
Meet Charles
The Computer Programmer, let’s call him Charles, by his very nature loves to solve difficult problems and to create things. He has dedicated his life to piecing together the large and ever evolving puzzle that is software, discovering every day new ways to accomplish his task.
Work is hard, because programming is hard. Charles likes it, though. Charles is getting to make things while expanding his skills. Charles is happy because he is getting to make a living doing something that is natural to him.
It’s been years of hard work, but Charles has built a coding skill set from nothing. With nothing but a computer and a desire to learn, Charles has learned to create softwares that can solve real problems in the real world. Through countless hours of self study, Charles made himself into the man he is, the man that can code it and code it right.
His skill provide a value to his company. Any time he is tasked with a programming project, he is solving real business problems that may only be easily solvable through software. Day to day, he provides work that is invaluable to his company, because he is providing a useful skill that he has taken the time to hone and develop into what it is today.
In Comes The Manager
And then one day his manager, let’s call him Dillon, decides they’re getting to many calls for their current IT team for the IT workers to handle. Somehow, he needs to get more manpower into the IT department.
“Hmm, what if I had Charles spend time every day answering a few IT calls, I mean he is a ‘computer guy’, that’s right up his alley!”, says Dillon, “That way, I wouldn’t have to hire a new IT guy!”
The manager might think that they’ve come up with a good solution, that since Charles is a programmer he’d be well suited to IT. Dillon is happy that he has solved his problem of not having enough IT workers, in his mind he is delegating with maximum efficiency. Dillon is dead wrong. What Dillon has done is put Charles in a position where 1. He is unhappy with the work he is doing, and 2. His skills are being misused in the worst kind of way. In fact, his skills are not being used at all in IT, because IT is generally unrelated to software development.
We need IT people and we need software people, but software people really aren’t meant to do IT work. They just don’t have that kind of patience.
Software involves a daily challenge of solving new problems that haven’t been solved before, using methods that need to be determined by an experienced software developer.
IT typically involves answering random questions to frustrated people on the phone, questions that have been asked and answered thousands of times before. The two tasks couldn’t be more different.
Dillon’s decision to make Charles do IT work sets in motion the events that lead to Charles’s decision to quit his job.
Since Dillon the manager has now injected computer work directly into Charles the programmer’s life, it will interfere with everything he does. The additional IT work that Charles is doing has nothing to do with the projects he’s working on, or even what his skillset actually is. In fact, this work has nothing to do with software engineering or programming at all. This work is, comparatively speaking, garbage work for Charles. Everything that Charles likes about his job is completely absent when he has to do IT work.
Since high IT traffic can come in at any time of the day Charles must be ready to take calls in 24/7. This adds a huge amount of stress, because Charles needs to be ready to do something he hates doing every single day. Just the thought of maybe having to do IT work during any given day is enough to add stress.
Any time Charles has to switch from coding to answering random IT questions, it will completely take him out of his coding work. Solving a software problem can take hours and hours of thought, and any time that train of thought is broken it takes some time to “pick up where you left off”. The time wasted from this switch could be a few minutes, but also may be a few hours depending on the complexity of the problem where the programmer left off. A programmer needs time and space to think about his programming tasks.
Charles is now taking IT calls every day for some time.
Charles Has Had Enough
Eventually, the stress builds up as Charles is tasked with more and more duties that take him out of his programming work. Not only is he having to do these things that he doesn’t want to on a daily basis, he’s also being hurt professionally.
Charles realizes that the additional task that manager Dillon is giving to Charles is keeping him from doing what he truly wants as a professional, and that’s to solve problems by creating software. Any time he wastes by doing these IT calls he will necessarily lose time he could’ve spent developing his programming skills.
He’s being robbed of his ability to do his job correctly, he’s being robbed of the professional practice that will make his career a successful one, and he’s being robbed of all the things he likes about his job.
Charles has now decided to start looking for another job, a job that hopefully has a respect for the art of programming and it’s practitioners. He’s realized that he’s not happy with having to work this way every day, and that there is a huge demand for quality software developers in the world today.
Charles finds another job, because he has a strong skill set, and he leaves his manager Dillon forever.
This is what happens when you make your programmers do IT work. They will leave. I know because Charles is based on a close friend of mine, and leaving is exactly what he did.
When you make a programmer do IT work, you’re telling a architect to guard the castle. Sure, the architect CAN guard the castle, but that job would better be done by an actual guard. Then, the architect is free to do what he loves to do and what he’s good at: Architecture.
Charles spent years of effort to develop the skills that allow him to be able to create useful softwares, Dillon should’ve recognized that. Dillon should’ve never made a professional do work that does not match there skillset.
The bottom line is, no programmer wants to do IT work. It’s just not why they got into the field. If you’re a programmer who is employed as a programmer that is being made to do a large amount of IT work, either talk to your boss about why you shouldn’t be doing IT work or get out. You need to be in a place where your boss understands what you bring to the table, and understands how to leverage those skills.
Programmers are practitioners of the art of software, IT people are practitioners in the art of patience.
So, managers, if you have a talented programmer and you make them do IT work, they WILL leave you and they won’t look back. Learn the difference between IT workers and computer programmers and your business will thank you for it.
I hope you enjoyed this article! If you liked it, please follow to support the author here on medium or follow his twitter at @caldwell_way.
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