Ok, I’m going to give him credit right now. This article is just a continuation of the article written by Kevin Schroeder over at eschrade.com.
He’s right. In fact, I really won’t hire anyone that’s a straight developer. To take it one step further, I haven’t hired anyone that was straight tech person in a long time. I’m not. I managed restaurants until I was about 28 years old. I don’t have a degree (never even made it through a semester of college.) I like people that have a customer service background, because, and I know this is going to make some of you techno-nerds crazy (as if 1000’s of people were actually reading this), most IT people have some bizarre notion that the computers they work on are for use in some black hole completely devoid of people (I know this is correct…I’ve had peers actually tell me this.)
My job as a developer, no, as an IT person is to develop solutions that make other people more efficient at the real work…which is being of service to some group of people (ours are the chronically injured, we’re healthcare), but it might be the ones that need to take care of their money or those that are building structures for other people to live in.
In case Kevin actually reads this, I was a technical support person for several years and currently manage all facets of our technology services (system administration, hardware deployment, network management, telecom.)
So, kudos to my colleague for saying what I’ve been saying for years (just never this publicly.)
Later, I hear customers calling….