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Listening Skills: Disfunctional IT Behavior
September 27, 2004
So it's monday morning and I'm sipping coffee and doing a writeup summarizing some design changes. That's when I got sucked into this saga in the adjacent cube...
Oscar (names and products changed to protect the innocent) shows up in Larry's cube. Larry's my cube neighbor. "How's the BigDBMS installation going?!" Sensing the irration, Larry starts explaining where he's at. The installation isn't going too well because it froze midway, and they'll have to reboot the server. Larry's waiting for the sysadmin to come in for that.
Oscar doesn't worry too much about the details of Larry's explanation. "Gimme the root password, I'll just kill the process," says Oscar, wanting to take over the reins. Trouble is Larry's been down this path already. More questions from Oscar. More been-there-done-that from Larry. Only Oscar is not very clear with his explanations, so there's a lot of repeating the same explanation with different wording.
Finally, the two of them walk over to my cube. I guess they consider me the tie-breaker. I just happen to know what's going on, having chit-chatted with Larry previously. It took 15 seconds to pacify Oscar, and he finally believed Larry. I guess he just wanted someone else to backup the story he was getting from Larry.
By now, the sysadmin, Tom, has come in, who also sits nearby, so I get to listen in on the hilarity. Larry and Oscar walked over to the sysadmin's cube with their story. And you know how sysadmin's are first thing monday morning. No coffee. No slashdot time. Tom's giving them that "dammit I just found a new Linux article that I was half-way through reading, won't you let me finish it" look.
So what happened with Oscar and Larry, happens again with the sysadmin. Tom doesn't believe anything they're saying. "It's not possible that the process got locked up!" By now there was a crowd of 4 outside Tom's cube, everyone just standing around, pontificating about the problem. What's remarkable is that no one had offered a solution beyond what Larry already knew at the start of this saga.
Okay, by now I couldn't concentrate on my writeup, so I walked over and jumped in. "Why don't you guys just walk over to the server - then you can see how locked up it is!" The server is literally 20ft from where we were. Half and hour had gone by since this saga began.
The moral of the story is that my 3 co-workers, all of whom are experienced IT professionals, would not believe each other's testamonials about something quite simple. It was preferable to sit and argue instead of listening and acting. I see a lot of this behaviorial "anti-pattern" all the time in IT shops. I think it's because we love to have the opportunity to solve problems by just spouting forth some fact [which may very well be obvious] rather than just listening carefully and acting. So now I know, next time I laugh at a Dilbert joke about some mandatory HR training on something like Listening Skills, I'll visualize the motivations for that course. :-)
September 27, 2004 at 11:30 AM in Opinions | Permalink
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Comments
Pretty interesting stuff that you got here. Actually, Iam still a student pursuing IT courses in Karachi, Pakistan. Having just a vague idea of what happens in IT departments, I wanted to know how do IT managers justify the ROI to the executives if the solution to a problem is ironically always problem-ridden itself?
Yesterday, I went over a report from IDC about the IT department's role in organizations and the executives reluctant attitude towards initiating any new IT activites, partly because the IT departments have often failed to justify the investment. To what extent is this true?
Rafay Bin Ali
http://rafayali.blogspot.com
rafayali@gmail.com
Posted by: Rafay Bin Ali | Nov 25, 2004 5:31:23 AM
> how do IT managers justify the ROI?
The IDC report you read was probably talking about the slowdown in IT spending in the US. After the gold rush 90s, the executives are just being prudent in seeking justification. They're just doing their job.
Posted by: Vik | Nov 27, 2004 5:30:36 PM
