Vengeance is Mine, Sayeth The Techies

When San Francisco network administrator Terry Childs was jailed and set $5 million bail in June the blogosphere erupted. It was as if the very public expose of Childs’ anger and frustration with his managers, which had allegedly caused him to hold captive San Francisco’s omnipresent data network, was resonating with tech workers everywhere, igniting deep-seated passions as it ripped a scab off a deeply festering wound.

Everyone seemed to have a view, and among tech workers themselves, many of those viewpoints were negative. Frustration and a deep-seated sense of insecurity were clearly endemic. The bad news, if you will forgive Strategic Advantage director and CEO Clive Bailey his pun, is that while Australian tech workers may be, on the whole, slightly more content and somewhat less vulnerable to the effects of a flagging economy than their US counterparts, the nation is every bit as exposed to “Childs-like” behaviour as the US.

“Whilst Childs’ response was extreme, I have seen a lot of passive-aggressive behaviour from techies over the years in IT,” Bailey says.

“This has ranged from an aggrieved techie pulling the plug on his manager’s network connection or system access on a random basis and then taking ages to ‘fix’ this ‘complex’ problem, to one incident where a developer encrypted the access to some key business software and then walked out.”

Bailey blames tech workers’ simmering levels of anger on poor management and the often extreme pressure brought to bear on IT departments by companies trying to cut costs (but not services!) in tough economic times. When IT departments are unable to demonstrate their true value to their business colleagues, those colleagues are much more inclined to see IT as a cost burden and hence an early target for budget reductions in challenging times.

“Will we see more Childs-like behaviour? Possibly, but I think the ongoing ‘subversive’ behaviour of techies is more likely to be the norm, and I have to wonder how much it costs organisations because I would bet that most companies have no idea that it is even going on,” Bailey says.

While the cases that typically reach the media are extreme examples, an unhealthy mix of paranoia and distemper is common in many IT workplaces. Budgetary and personnel concerns, a perceived lack of respect from the business, and long or inconvenient hours to maintain service level commitments frequently create an atmosphere where irrational decisions or reactions can have significant negative impact.And that doesn’t even take into account the nature of the work itself.

Independent contractor Steve Jenkin began his career in professional computing in 1974 and has been working with Unix since 1977. During that time, he says, he has met no happy admins.

“It’s a thankless task, done invisibly, reporting to ‘decision makers’ who are completely non-technical in small orgs or, in larger places, could have once been technical, but are very far removed from current state of practice.”

In fact, Jenkin says in smaller sites the situation is particularly dire. Managers simply fail to appreciate the degree of skill and level of effort — physical, mental and emotional — that it takes to keep a site “calm”.

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If “management” are half-way competent, they might make promises about training, conferences or trips — but these are honoured more in the absence than in fulfilment, Jenkin says.

According to Jenkin, four worlds collide on the Admins’ Desk: technical. business, users and vendors/suppliers. The resulting pressure, he says, means that the question isn’t “is such anger endemic”, it’s “what proportion of the time are you on the verge of walking out or causing damage”.

“The answer would curdle the stomach of any competent risk committee or governance sub-committee of any Board,” Jenkins says.

In fact, if a recent study conducted by security company Cyber-Ark at the Infosecurity 2008 event in Europe holds any validity such folk should be quaking in their boots. Of the 300 system administrators surveyed, 88 per cent said they would take sensitive data with them when leaving their current place of employment if fired, and one-third would abscond with company password lists.

“Most company directors are blissfully unaware of the administrative or privileged passwords that their IT staff has access to, which allows them to see everything that is going on within the company,” Cyber-Ark CEO Udi Mokady says.

You’d think that might make for a pretty powerful incentive for keeping admin staff happy at all costs, yet levels of discontent in many sectors seem instead to just keep on growing.

Matter of Opinion

Just how prevalent tech workers’ anger and frustration is in Australian workplaces would seem to depend very much on who you ask.

When it comes to the federal government sector, both deputy CIO for the Australian government at the Department of Finance and Deregulation Patrick Callioni, and Australian government CIO and general manager AGIMO Ann Steward, insist that staff are, on the whole, fairly content.

“I don’t see evidence of [such anger] in my immediate workplace and, in my three decades plus in the public service I have observed it only rarely,” Callioni says. “I think this is because the public service workforce is driven by factors peculiar to that sector. However, with the departure of the boomers and the ascent of the X and Y generations this may — I stress may — change.”

“From the interactions that I have with my CIO peers and that my team has with their peers, there’s a lot of vibrancy around, and government continues to be a marketplace that has some of the most interesting work under way, and access to a fantastic array of technology,” Steward says. “I know from our own apprentices — and now graduates — that we have coming in here, they are just absolutely delighted to have the chance to work on something that is really stimulating. It’s a really positive response we’ve seen.”

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However, Cheryl Hannah, who has been on long-service leave from the Immigration Department for the past seven months and has 10 years experience as a senior executive in IT, including CIO from 2001 to 2006, says in her absence many highly-experienced staff have “jumped ship” because the expectations for IT staff are just too high.

“It’s not just that the staff themselves are in revolt; I think the whole foundation of what we expect IT to do for business is so ill-defined and overblown that it’s not surprising that you get huge churn, with lots of failed projects and lots of unhappy people, both in the business and in IT,” Hannah says.

A lot of the blame can be sheeted home to the industry’s habit of “convulsing over some new technology which is supposedly going to be the magic bullet and never is”, Hannah says. For example, when object-based and object oriented language for software development was meant to be the answer to everyone’s prayer in the mid 1990s, the Immigration Department invested in an object oriented language, Seer*HPS, only to find that after barely two years it was the only site left working in the language in the Southern Hemisphere.

“That wave passed over our heads costing a lot of money and caused enormous grief,” she says. “When I went to Europe to ferret out who was still successfully using it, IBM had walked away from it in Ireland, and I picked up a whole lot of programmers from Ireland that I then took to Australia to work for us because we had to find our own resources — there wasn’t anybody in the market who was still interested in training anybody or working in that system. And now the people who invested in learning Seer*HPS find their skills are completely obsolete — as anachronistic as learning Persian.

“And hard on its heels came the promise of the next wave of integration and the promise of business process integration etc, and they’re still all promises; it’s nearly 10 years later and none of that stuff has been realised.

“Underlying the discontent of staff is a fundamentally flawed approach to trying to get big blocks of IT work done, with at least part of the problem being that the products themselves are very immature,” Hannah says.

The picture is no better in New Zealand, it would seem. Hayden Searle, technical specialist for IT Connections NZI, says all too often managers of IT teams have “the same level of IT smarts as a general home user”.

Searle says that when he worked for Telecom NZ the organisation was paying $20,000 less than market rates and saw no reason to reward IT staff any better. “Many times we had system failures that were blamed on the IT guys. The fact that we had highlighted the issue months before it happened and asked for funds to rectify the problem never came into it — it was still our fault. The manager, not knowing any better, took the side of the business and blamed us too,” he says.

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“IT is a fickle industry where companies want the best staff but aren’t prepared to pay for them,” Searle says. “And IT staff, who realise that they won’t get what they’re worth, have to slave their guts out for minimal pay and work in poor conditions, where it is a constant fight to get resources or capital to purchase equipment to stop things breaking.”

“The IT department and systems are the lifeblood of any company these days, and are one of the hardest working departments, with long hours, weekend work etc. Yet we seem to be given the ‘short end of the stick’ when it comes to pay reviews or money from the budget.

“I would bet that 95 per cent of IT managers wouldn’t be able to do a tenth of the jobs performed by their staff, let alone understand what most of us talk about. And the general feeling from people I have spoken to is that CIOs are either promoted accountants or so far out of touch with technology that they wouldn’t have a clue.”

Another barometer comes from the recruiters. Peter Acheson, COO of Peoplebank, says that as a leader of Australia’s largest ICT skills provider his phones start ringing with employees looking for a new job in direct proportion to levels of discontent. Acheson knows that when he gets multiple calls (in one recent case, 40-50 calls in a single week) that the levels are rising fast. And in subsequent interviews, Peter is able to get a clear fix on both the severity and causes of smouldering discontent among workers.

Acheson says while he doesn’t believe such anger is endemic it certainly exists, most usually in organisations where management hasn’t got the brief about IT as a key business enabler.

“Five or 10 years ago, when CIO stood for ‘Career Is Over’, IT was largely treated as a necessary but expensive evil,” Acheson says. “As a direct consequence, IT managers and their teams weren’t afforded much respect, and levels of frustration were high.”

Now that most organisations see IT as an enabler, like sales or marketing, and a potential source of competitive advantage, Acheson sees that most have employed skilled CIOs and IT managers who have implemented up-to-date workplace practices that protect the broader business.

“So in short, endemic dissatisfaction is largely confined to the ‘odd angry workplace’ that’s characterised by poor management and/or a lack of respect for IT,” he says.

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Airing Grievances

It may also be the case that IT is seen as “angrier” since IT folks have become more apt to complain in public venues. Patrick Gray, owner of US-based Prevoyance Group and author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology, says he wrote about exactly this topic and got quite an earful on TechRepublic (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=546).

“I think IT tends to fault ‘management’ — those nameless, faceless corporate-types — when the problem lies on both ends of the spectrum,” Gray says. “IT people are not seen as valuable, and their positions on things like security are ignored because they are not couched in a business context. That ‘suit’ who seems to ignore IT’s recommendations really doesn’t want to hear about cryptography standards, some tidbit from DEFCON or other esoteric technical lingo. They want a dollars and cents explanation of the impact, and some options to mitigate risk. When IT can articulate a problem in that fashion, the corporate types will react.

“Terry Childs should be jailed, and anyone in IT that makes veiled threats about taking down their company’s infrastructure should face the same investigative and legal actions as an accountant that glibly threatens to steal from the company coffers,” Gray says.

“Part of the reason for IT’s poor treatment and lack of respect is precisely this type of tactless gamesmanship.”

Once Were Heroes

Of course there is nothing new about technicians holding their employers to ransom. Infonomics managing director and Standards Australia Technical Committee IT-030 Chair Mark Toomey saw his first case almost 30 years ago. In that case, he says, it was all about money — the technician wanted a bigger slice of the action. These days there can be a much wider range of drivers.

“Recently, I reviewed an organisation’s IT at the request of the board,” Toomey says. “There had been a number of fairly serious operational problems and the company was suffering because of them.

“What I found was that most people in the IT and business operations area had been working excessive hours over a very long period, and were exhausted. Of course, tired people make mistakes and this was a classic example. There was a senior executive who was getting kudos for the achievements of the heroes who worked the long hours while hiding that overwork situation from the rest of the executives and the board. Of course, the scheme backfired and with some simple changes, the overload problem went away, people were able to think clearly, and the operational problems stopped happening.

“However, nobody here was particularly angry or vindictive; they were just trying hard and hoping that they would survive. I suspect that this situation, where the risk is not a dramatic action but a progressive and serious reduction in performance, is much more commonplace and deserving of considerable attention,” Toomey says.

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Toomey also says it was once the case that IT specialists were heroes, working grossly excessive hours as they wrangled raw new technology into submission. Those days are gone — the technology now submits much more benignly, and the wrangling has moved from the technology arena to the business arena, where the new problem is the business use of IT.

Now, he says, everyone knows business depends “pathologically on IT” but too many business leaders are oblivious of their responsibility to use the tool properly and to thoroughly understand the constraints and to accept a level of responsibility. At the same time demands on every technician are far greater, forcing even the most low-level technical people to have an understanding of the business context in which they operate.

And, Toomey says, too many business leaders failed to consider the long-term consequences of their decision to downsize IT after Y2K and GST projects were completed, which has directly contributed to the current skills shortage and hence pressure on the industry.

“Bottom line: organisations are at risk not only from discontented IT workers, but from the broad negative messages that business gives to the marketplace about IT,” Toomey says. “Smart organisations will adopt practices that align with ISO 38500, the new international standard for corporate governance of IT, ensuring that they have the right mix and calibre of skills to ensure that their organisation performs as it should, with very clear understanding and quite deliberate attention to the myriad human behaviour factors that will underpin the performance.”

This version of the story originally appeared in CIO's print edition.