Linde002::PHP

As a lot of people outside of IT like to say. We IT people are “different”. As a recent post by Catherine Devlin stated:

Given a choice between spending an hour doing a task manually, or spending three hours writing a program to do it automatically… a geek will write the program, every single time.

Combine this with the “10 Ways IT employees are different from everyone else” by Ericka Chickowki and you get a glimpse into this special group of employees.

1. ‘Geeks are a self-selected group.’
2. ‘The nature of geek work is different.’
3. ‘Power is useless on geeks.’
4. ‘Geeks are more attached to the technology than they are to you.’
5. ‘Geeks are judgmental.’
6. ‘Geeks are introverted.’
7. ‘Failure is normal to geeks.’
8. ‘Geeks “at the keyboard” know more about the technology than their managers do.’
9. ‘Geeks are goal-oriented, not task-oriented’
10. ‘IT creativity springs from environment, not incentives.’

As with every group of special people the IT crowd need special handling, and this is precisely where a lot of companies that aren’t dedicated IT shops go wrong. The general feeling is that an office is an office and every employee reacts roughly the same to the ‘office space’.

This doesn’t work for IT people, number 10 of our list states that creativity springs from environment. And this is especially true for programmers. If a programmer does not feel that his creative bone is tickled in some shape, way or form he will not perform as desired or expected. You cannot throw a programmer in front of a random workstation in a sterile cubicle and expect magic to happen. Creativity needs input and an outlet and his daily environment should be precisely this.

The above makes even more sense if you look at number 2: ‘The nature of geek work is different.’. Because geek work is different. Programming for example isn’t just “requirements & sugar in, result out”. For programmers especially those phases of the process couldn’t be less interesting. “The fun isn’t in the destination, it’s in the journey’ and this is a complete opposite of the way business looks at something.

This is why, in my opinion, you should let geeks manage geeks. I am not stating a complete laissez-faire of IT work, this would result in a lot of cool shiny applications and gadgets but not a drop of real work done. But put your IT crowd in the hands of someone who speaks their language and knows how to get them to get the work done without impairing their creativity.

The sooner you stop applying business logic to your geeks the sooner your work will get done. And your geeks will thank you for it.