Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students
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@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
I think I was a decent bench tech and I can guarantee that bench doesn't teach you that. Because bench never sees systems running, they really don't know how things relate to each other. They see what works and fails, but not work works well or poorly. Bench rarely would be exposed to enough of the full stack to have any useful insight there.
Well they should lol, anytime I have a chance I run bench marks on hd to make sure it is performing correctly on our important machines. Then i keep the data , organized well of course, so i can compare with another user at a moments notice.
This gets into the grey area of overlap. Typically bench would have no access to run a benchmark of that nature. But if they had access, doing so would be good to monitor for proactive physical drive failure.
In a bench role, bench would use this info to prepare for parts replacement.
In an IT role, IT would use this info to determine capacity planning needs or purchasing changes.
Yeah and since I choose to do this on my own I guess I make myself a little bit of bench which I had not realized before.
Right, we all are a little. I did bench work just today. The difference is that unlike most people, I really picture myself taking off my IT hat for a minute, putting on my bench hat and doing a little bench work, then switching back.
I did a TON of talking about taking hats on and off between tasks while at MangoCon recently.
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@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
One of the things that I find surprising, but I know deep down why it happens, is that a lot of people who call themselves IT get offended when they find out that I define them as bench. But this implies that they see bench as too lowly for them or that they are too good to be seen as bench techs. Which is odd because they are happy with the work and the pay, but feel the need to be labeled something that they are not. This implies that a lot of bench people feel ashamed of the work that they do, which they should not as it is a necessary and valuable career. Why "not being IT" is seen as a mark of shame makes little sense to me. Do lawyers skulk because they practice law instead of doing IT? Seems unlikely.
You could be on to something there.
This is actually, I bet, a pretty big factor. Because people get upset at the whole "I'm not bench, I'm IT" thing, it makes bench people tried to hide inside the IT ranks. This does nothing to improve their situation.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
Yes that does make more sense. For it to make sense I just have to forget previous definitions. What i was originally taught was that bench work was the lowest level of IT and the higher up you go the more of everything that you knew. Good management knew how to do absolutely everything adequately.
Right, and that's part of the reason that I work at this so much and speak at conferences and stuff about it. If you really break it down, it's pretty clear that bench jobs, knowledge and work isn't part of IT and can't be. But if you don't have the right definition to work with, you end up looking at bench as something with overlap and then you can't break it out. But with the "right" definition, pretty quickly it becomes clear that it's a different career path with essentially no IT relationship.
Likewise, I work to help the helpdesk and deskside support roles fight for their independence. They are IT, for sure, but are their own pillars or disciplines within IT rather than being "low lever" admins or whatever people think that they are. They have their own ladders, managers, departments, skills sets, certs, etc. You can be a six figure non-manager helpdesk tech and still have zero ability or interest in moving to network engineering.
Better definitions and career prospects in IT would go a long way to attracting better talent, assisting people in the field actually get where they want to go and produce overall far better results. Without these points being clarified and ironed out, how does IT hiring have any chance?
Yeah I can see how that would only help.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
Another example that I like to use is an analogy from The Bard's Tale (Electronics Arts, 1986.) IT is like the magician, Bench is like the conjurer.
If that doesn't instantly make sense, go play Bard's Tale and get back to me when you've defeat the boss of the fourth dungeon
Lol best example yet. I remember that from too long ago.
I actually use that all the time, but inside IT. I think that The Bard's Tale coloured my perception of the world.
I think of Systems as Magician, and Networking as Conjurer. If you do enough with both, then you are eligible for Sorceror, which is like an Architect. Get high enough in all of them and you can switch to Archmage (CIO).
I like this example a lot. Makes more sense oddly enough
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Recently on SW I was speaking with someone about how the A+ had no utility in IT work and that it was for bench. They kept saying how they took it and found it totally applicable and directly useful for all of their work. Of course, after probing, it turned out that they'd never done nor seen an IT job and worked 100% in bench doing nothing but physical desktop repairs. Literally a pure bench job, like you'd have at the corner computer shop in 1998. Not even close to IT.
If you fixed the one little piece of "how I define bench" instantly all the rest fit neatly into place and he was a perfect example of everything that I had said.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
Recently on SW I was speaking with someone about how the A+ had no utility in IT work and that it was for bench. They kept saying how they took it and found it totally applicable and directly useful for all of their work. Of course, after probing, it turned out that they'd never done nor seen an IT job and worked 100% in bench doing nothing but physical desktop repairs. Literally a pure bench job, like you'd have at the corner computer shop in 1998. Not even close to IT.
If you fixed the one little piece of "how I define bench" instantly all the rest fit neatly into place and he was a perfect example of everything that I had said.
Yeah to have a proper argument we have to be on the same page lol. Otherwise its like talking to my wife..."I have no idea what your saying honey and don't even know how to respond to that."
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I know how that is.
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This video is a perfect example of what would happen if bench people got to make decisions. This is a disaster of stupidity. It's interesting that they did it, I guess. But the whole thing is SO dumb. Every stupid technology is thrown together with no logical use case. I get that they do this just because it makes them money to make stupid videos, I don't fault them for doing what pays the bills. But this is SO bench without IT. Just technology for its own sake, no viable use cases.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
This video is a perfect example of what would happen if bench people got to make decisions. This is a disaster of stupidity. It's interesting that they did it, I guess. But the whole thing is SO dumb. Every stupid technology is thrown together with no logical use case. I get that they do this just because it makes them money to make stupid videos, I don't fault them for doing what pays the bills. But this is SO bench without IT. Just technology for its own sake, no viable use cases.
Ok yeah that was weird. If it works for them then fine. So tech without any business purpose I suppose is what you mean.
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@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
Ok yeah that was weird. If it works for them then fine. So tech without any business purpose I suppose is what you mean.
Exactly. Tech for the purpose of tech, stuff that isn't legal or viable or reasonable in a business. In this case, weird VDI problems that are never mentioned, no talk of cost or applicability (even at the home gaming level), use of totally ridiculous amateur tools when enterprise tools would do a better job for free, etc. That show is a bench show, for good reason as bench is a far bigger market than IT. Every home user likes cool bench stuff, only good businesses enjoy IT stuff.
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More stuff that is bench work, that people often don't think about: the majority of "peripheral support" meaning things like web cams, printers, scanners, monitors and so forth. There is generally no business knowledge or decision making involved in this work. People deploying printers, replacing toner, fixing jams, and so forth are very much on the bench side of things. If you think about replacing toner or ink - it's no more an IT task than a receptionist task.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
This video is a perfect example of what would happen if bench people got to make decisions. This is a disaster of stupidity. It's interesting that they did it, I guess. But the whole thing is SO dumb. Every stupid technology is thrown together with no logical use case. I get that they do this just because it makes them money to make stupid videos, I don't fault them for doing what pays the bills. But this is SO bench without IT. Just technology for its own sake, no viable use cases.
I think you missed the ultimate example here, but it's from the same YouTube channel.
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Didn't miss it, just don't care because it's all stupid. Watching that channel is painful. I'm sure they are nice people, but the show is banal at best.
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@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
Ok yeah that was weird. If it works for them then fine. So tech without any business purpose I suppose is what you mean.
Exactly. Tech for the purpose of tech, stuff that isn't legal or viable or reasonable in a business. In this case, weird VDI problems that are never mentioned, no talk of cost or applicability (even at the home gaming level), use of totally ridiculous amateur tools when enterprise tools would do a better job for free, etc. That show is a bench show, for good reason as bench is a far bigger market than IT. Every home user likes cool bench stuff, only good businesses enjoy IT stuff.
In their defense the tagline for the guys doing the video is "because we can". They're certainly living up to that...
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@worden2 said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
Ok yeah that was weird. If it works for them then fine. So tech without any business purpose I suppose is what you mean.
Exactly. Tech for the purpose of tech, stuff that isn't legal or viable or reasonable in a business. In this case, weird VDI problems that are never mentioned, no talk of cost or applicability (even at the home gaming level), use of totally ridiculous amateur tools when enterprise tools would do a better job for free, etc. That show is a bench show, for good reason as bench is a far bigger market than IT. Every home user likes cool bench stuff, only good businesses enjoy IT stuff.
In their defense the tagline for the guys doing the video is "because we can". They're certainly living up to that...
Yes, and while I think their show is beyond goofy, I get that. I find zero interest in non-IT tech. I'm one of those people that is rare but came to IT because I love business and enjoy tech, tech is a means to the business. It's far more common to be a bench person, love tech and put up with the business to get to play with the biggest tech. To me, tech without business purpose is super boring. There are so many things that I can do "because I can" but... why? The outcome is so boring. Like everything on that show. Of course you can do that, I had machines with 300 users like that decades ago... and it was boring then.
It's worth pointing out that "because we can" should really be the tagline for all of bench. That's the thing about bench, it's pure tech without the business piece. So they are really bench in so many ways.
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@scottalanmiller I understand that point but at the same time IT needs bench just as much as bench needs IT(going by your definition of IT). A lot of the people you call IT don't have the skill to do bench work. So they make decisions on what to buy for users but don't know why it may be good or bad. Often it is bad. So then all those scanners, printers, and other devices they can't actually deploy without their bench people.
So after thinking about this further I just don't think you should separate the different roles the way you are. IT and bench people both depend on the other. This mostly explains why bench people are so opinionated about management in a bad way as IT orders stuff so often that just does not make sense on a technical level. They are two sides of the same coin. I do not think differentiating between IT and bench is even helpful. That just creates a divide between the two groups that does not need to be there.
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@scottalanmiller I know for my first MS degree what interested me was the program was the best combo of IT and business I'd ever seen. Since then I've gotten into education as my "business", but I'll never lose sight of the purpose in it all.
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@jmoore I'll give you an example from current events at my College. We just started an optometric technology degree. We "inherited" it from the University down the road. They had and still have an optometry/ophthalmology degree, but saw no need to maintain the tech side of things. We do AASs anyway so we took it over. An ophthalmologist or optometrist does not grind or shape lenses or do fittings, etc. A technologist does not have the ability or authority to do prescriptions. Each depends on the other, and you might want to say the person with the medical degree might be "above" the person with the technology side, but in fact when you balance the time and money they put into their respective careers, the trade-off is negligible. The Doctor cannot make money with out the technologist, and the technologist has no job without the Doctor. It's a symbiotic relationship even if there is an element of hierarchy involved.
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@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
@scottalanmiller I understand that point but at the same time IT needs bench just as much as bench needs IT(going by your definition of IT). A lot of the people you call IT don't have the skill to do bench work. So they make decisions on what to buy for users but don't know why it may be good or bad. Often it is bad. So then all those scanners, printers, and other devices they can't actually deploy without their bench people.
Again, though, I think you are stuck on IT people who just do a bad job and then associate that in some way with bench skills. There is no connection there. Bad IT people making bad IT decisions is 100% an IT problem, it has no relationship to bench. IT needs bench to plug things in for them, regardless of if IT makes good or bad decisions. They have different roles and both need to exist. But their skills are different and one can never make up for the other.
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@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
So after thinking about this further I just don't think you should separate the different roles the way you are. IT and bench people both depend on the other. This mostly explains why bench people are so opinionated about management in a bad way as IT orders stuff so often that just does not make sense on a technical level. They are two sides of the same coin. I do not think differentiating between IT and bench is even helpful. That just creates a divide between the two groups that does not need to be there.
All roles in a business are codependent, but you never mix HR and IT, or accounting and bench together just because they depend on each other. You keep them carefully separated and know exactly when a job is IT and when it is finance because you need different security, different training, different aptitudes, different unions or legal responsibilities, and you get people who want to do different things.
There is no case where it would ever be useful to see them as one thing. If it appears so, then the roles are being misunderstood. Any mixing of the two would be bad because it means a misconception of what is being accomplished.
It's a divide that is there, whether we want it or not, but it is a divide that is really important. It's different tasks. It's not me that divides it, no person can decide that. It's two different things.
