Good for you. I have learned this lesson the hard way as well. I see these kind of people everywhere in IT. They often put them in charge because they lack any real technical skills. They fill AA quotas, act as managers and act as project managers(shudder). Because of their fundamental lack of understanding of anything technical, even the concepts, they immediately gravitate towards the people they like the most. This may be an orbiter that has his nose up their ass or some guy they want to sleep with, maybe even a 3rd wave feminist ally, but they have almost zero ability to discern what is going on. This causes huge problems when you have to work with other groups. Example: I need to create an IPSEC tunnel that requires NAT rules across domains for an OPC connection to Pi. The manager or project manager, who was hired based on their electrical engineering degree from a school that isn’t even known for that, doesn’t know the difference between an IP address and a MAC address. They can’t possibly understand NAT rules, firewalls and domains. I walk in and request A. Then the network “engineer” who can’t do his job says “you don’t need A because the angle of the dangle is not proportionate to the heat of the beat.” No one listens to me. I update project notes with those comments because what choice do I have? If I say nothing I get hosed because I can’t get my job done. If I say something, someone above will see it and the network engineer and manager look horrible. Predictably, they accuse me of lying, then correct the issue after weeks of more meetings and debate. After that, I’m marked with a bulls eye and I have made several enemies. No matter how kind my notes are, how polite I am in the meeting, it simply doesn’t matter. I am damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I put in my project notes and shoot off my emails in a polite but firm manner. Lying for them, covering for them, gets you nothing. They are intimidated by you and will come after you with all guns blazing no matter what. The best thing you can do is look for another job.
What these people will do is get hired for a job they have no business in. They will float around for months, sometimes years, until upper management finally sees they can’t keep anyone worth a damn working there. Even if they can keep people with the company, no work is getting done. Eventually, they are let go or forced out and move on to their next corporate victim. I have seen seen a lady go from IT manager to facilities manager when she was hopping corporations. They were paying her 60k + a year to fill fruit bowls. I’m not kidding.
In fact, I have seen people in IT, who have been working at a high level in IT for several years, that can’t tell me what a kernel is, the difference between a MAC and IP address or what VLANs are. They will argue with you constantly, the hamster wheel kicks into action right away. I have hired or helped hire over 36 people in this industry and I know how to weed them out fast. I have learned not to have any technical discussions with anyone at work that I don’t work over. I wait and size them up according to their ability and I can assess them fairly quickly. Any interactions I have between them, anytime they try and ask me anything technical, I pretend I have a phone call or something to do. Often, they will look something up on the internet to ask someone in an effort to prove how smart they are. It’s like a kid who is looking up a chimpanzee in an encyclopedia and asking you questions about it but that kid doesn’t understand what a primate is or even what a mammal is. They have no context for what they’re asking. The technical aspect of the job isn’t the hardest part in the office anymore, it’s the social aspect. There are often not even general AoRs because no one wants to take responsibility for their work. I have seen people make careers out of simply criticizing others and shuffling work around. Getting along with these people is an art in and of itself that often takes more energy than learning the technical aspect of your job.
Headbanger 2 years, 2 months ago.
If you keep doing what you've always done... you're gonna keep getting what you always got.
