What other job can you think of where you get free candy all day? And not just candy, but chocolate and snacks and anything else made by the company I work for. (To avoid possible backlash, I'm going to avoid mentioning the company by name here. From here on out we'll call it "Venus".) All this as a perk for working the in the IT department of a multi-national company that produces some of the most ridiculously addictive candies ever.

My job is something that I've done before - replacing computers - and I'm coming along in my training just dandily. In an ironic twist of fate, whereas IHS was migrating away from a Novell infrastructure to an all Active Directory infrastructure, Venus is doing just the opposite - moving from AD to Novell, and along with it, moving away from Outlook to Lotus Notes. (Side note: I have never seen an e-mail program with such a hideously-designed UI. It's unspeakably horrendous.) The biggest difference, though, is in the way we're managed.

Our team consists of four people - myself and another computer, uh, builder, a member of the main IT department, and one "senior" tech. He's only our senior by a few months, but apparently it was seen fit to make him the de facto leader of our little motley crew. Why they chose him to lead us is completely beyond me; he has about as much leadership ability as a certain church manager type who is frequently referenced here. He insists on doing anything outside of the most basic functions of the job himself, and has a very slow-burning temper. His temperament is completely unsuited to leading in any form. What ticks me off most, however, is his refusal to cross-train people.

(Warning: technical jargon beyond this point.)

Way back in the day when I worked at IHS, I had a ticket for something called a Blaster Printer. They're little networkable thermal label printers that the pharmacy and phlebotomists used to print labels for sample containers. The ticket I had was to get set up a new printer, which was being installed in one of the medical office buildings within the main hospital. I got it set up and put into place and started pinging IPs within the subnet to find a free one to put the printer on. I found a free one and assigned it to the printer (They weren't able to use DHCP - everything had to be written into a text file then sent via parallel cable directly to the printer.) and asked Lynn the lab networking person to send a test label. When it didn't print, we tried again, and at this point Lynn informed me that queue for the printer wasn't emptying. We figured maybe we had picked an IP address that wasn't free and tried a new one. Nothing. We tried another, and still nothing. At this point I considered that perhaps the printer had a bad network card, but it pinged just fine, and I could print a test label directly to it from my laptop. I was perplexed. After three more hours of troubleshooting I gave up and called the networking people, who sent out a tech to try and diagnose the problem. It took him two hours of fustzing around in the router to figure out that the printer wasn't ARPing...it had an IP address, but it wasn't telling the router was that IP was until the router asked for it. Most devices ARP as soon as they're on the network, and in case they don't, the router sends out an ARP request every ten minutes or so. Since we weren't waiting that long, the router never got a chance to get the printer's IP address. When I mentioned to the network tech that had I known about the simple networking protocol, this entire (now seven-hour) ticket could have been avoided.

(End technical jargon warning.)

What do you suppose his response was? "You're not in networking, you don't need to know stuff like that."

This is one of the most ignorant pieces of garbage that I've ever heard anyone say. "You don't need to know.". Nothing more than a slightly broader understanding of networks would have prevented seven hours of wasted time, and I didn't need to know.

Unfortunately, this attitude is prevalent in many, many IT teams. One department wants to hoard power and knowledge and so they insist on not sharing knowledge of their technology with anybody else. It even happens at a personal level within departments. One tech knows something the others don't - but he refuses to explain it. He keeps the information for himself thinking it will contribute to his job security, or perhaps just to gratify his ego. "They come to me when they need help.".

People who act like this should be fired.

Harsh? Not at all. From an organizational standpoint, no value is added to the company by one person hoarding knowledge. But even more damaging is the value it subtracts from the team. When only one person knows how to do something, the team become less efficient because that person possesses knowledge that the others don't - he's the only one can fix a certain type of problem. That person becomes a knowledge black hole - gaining and gaining all sorts of information but never giving back. And especially in an IT environment where there's always something new to learn, this kind of behavior brings the team down and causes wasted time and effort. Which brings me to back to my immediate boss.

His attitude is one of "You don't need to know how to set up this program, just me, I'll do it." This creates a bottleneck when we have to wait for him to do stuff, and is a very anti-efficient attitude to have. He's also a firm believer in another very prevalent IT world attitude, the "Not my job, not my problem.". attitude. It manifests as a pathological unwillingness to go even slightly beyond the bounds of his stated job description to the point of even discouraging me from installing a simple application that only one user had. He would have had me put in a ticket to make someone come out from desktop support to do nothing more than run an thirty-second install program. His acerbic personality is off-putting to the users, and yet he blames them for his inability to get along with them. "They're just afraid of change.".

And I'm not saying that it's necessary to go out of your way all the time to the detriment of your own work, or take on more responsibility than you can handle without screwing up, or disregard policies that are meant to keep one person or groups of people from getting too much dumped on them at once. (I have more opinions about "corporate policies" - if they're stupid, ignore them.) But it's important to realize that most users don't care about how their computers works - they just want it to work so they can do their jobs. And just because they can't program in LISP or hack apart the Windows registry or figure out that it's that button that they need to press doesn't mean they're any less intelligent than the IT people. A lot of very smart people I've known are technphobic - they have a very understandable fear that touching some unknown control on their computer will make it break, or they just can't grasp the concepts that come so easily to younger people who grew up with computers.

Antisocial IT behavior is absolutely inexcusable in an environment where one is in charge of the members of a team. What makes a good team leader is not necessarily technical ability (which he has lots of) but the ability to interact with people well, the ability to delegate and teach others to do the things you know how to do. And the "Not my job" attitude is stupid beyond belief - what do you think contributes to customer satisfaction more? "No, I will not tell you how to save a file to your networked drives. You will have to submit form IT-SUKS-4242 in triplicate to the helpdesk." or "Sure, you just click the green square and press this button."? I for one am sick of the "Not my job." and "You don't need to know." worldviews that are so prevalent in this profession.

Grow up.

Exit, stage left. Sparks