Information Technology Dark Side

Working from home is fantastic for introverts like myself. Every morning I put on a nice pair of soft pajamas, wander down the hall to my little office, and work for hours on end with minimal interruptions. No one drops by to tell me how much they drank the previous night. There are no loud [...]

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Recessions are dangerous times for the denizens of corporate IT. Even seemingly recession-proof companies like insurance companies will find ways to reduce redundancy and inefficiency in their work force. Take my former corporate IT employer, which yesterday laid off 90 IT employees in a year in which they were reasonably profitable (too bad they didn’t [...]

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I’ve been working from home exclusively at my new job with Collaborative Software Initiative now for almost three months, and I’ve learned a few interesting things. In many ways, my expectations about working from home and the realities of it have been pretty different, so I thought I’d post some of the observations I’ve made. [...]

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I’ve observed five common ways corporate IT denizens deal with the gradual loss of their soul as they toil away at the dark side. Here they are, in no particular order. I’m not offering these methods up as prescriptions – just observations. Alcohol I almost titled this alcoholism, but I’m not sure what the exact [...]

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One of the career mistakes I made as a denizen of Corporate IT was abandoning a technical role to go into project management. At the time I thought it was a good idea – lots of my friends were doing it, and it seemed like an exciting way to “grow” in a new way. Also, [...]

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Corporate IT is soul-sucking. I was lucky to escape, a hollow shell of the software developer I once was, with a tiny shred of my soul left. It’s been over a month now since I shed those chains and frankly, I feel taller. Protect your soul (or the soul of an IT geek you care [...]

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Most career advice sucks at least 50% of the time. Context matters when it comes to advice because most career problems aren’t simple enough for generalities to work very often. Buy a house. Have kids. Don’t lease cars. Good advice? Sometimes, not always. For career advice to be really useful, it has to context imperial. [...]

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This essay by VC Paul Graham should be required reading for every college graduate. Here’s how it starts: A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of programmers came in on some kind of scavenger hunt. It was obviously one of those corporate “team-building” exercises. They looked [...]

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I play Yahtzee on my phone. I like the game, but the interface sucks. It takes four button pushes to start a new game, and at least that many to exit. Why do I need to confirm that I want to exit a game that automatically saves where I’m at? Who designed that interface? It [...]

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There are times when we walk away from an interaction feeling either super-impressed with someone’s competence without knowing exactly why the person seemed so competent to us. Other times, we get a distinct sense that someone is incompetent, though we might not be able to nail down exactly why. Last night as I observed an [...]

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