Interoffice politics can be such a bore. If your office is like mine, there are those managers who are so disorganized you spend a great deal of your free time simply wondering how they could have possibly got into such a high level position. Then there are the customer service representatives who have to field calls from irate clients. Because they are under so much stress, they can tend to rub others the wrong way, always insisting that their clients “get what they want.” So how does an honest, hard working technology professional or computer programmer survive in such a climate?
Technology professionals have particularly difficult jobs because most people simply do not understand what they do. Those who don’t know how to build websites and write code tend to develop fanciful notions about it and to believe that you do some kind of “magic” they could never comprehend. That’s kind of nice for a while. Builds up the old ego for a bit, sure. But the downside to being seen as a wizard is that managers and other office personnel indulge themselves in fantasies of instant gratification. They think that you can wave your wand and do your “magic” at any time of the day or night and create a wonderful new computer phenomenon for them.
Of course, this simply isn’t the case. It takes time to code a program and it takes time to design a website. Even for experts, technology can be complex and projects can be time consuming. So every computer professional eventually ends up asking him or her self at some point: “how can I make these people understand?”
It can definitely be frustrating when you are hard at work on one project, then a computer-illiterate manager comes along and asks for a “little favor” on another project entirely. That little favor could take hours, but he doesn’t know. Computer professionals get frustrated by the ignorance of others every day, as do many professionals. The key to surviving in this climate of misunderstanding is, of course, education.
It would be pointless for you to try to teach your various managers and office mates the intricate ins and outs of computer programming, database management, and so forth. They can’t understand it, and they don’t want to understand it. So you have to simplify it all by assigning time frames to each task. When someone asks for a web page to be redesigned, that’s fine. No problem. It takes X hours. They’ll be shocked. They think it’s magic, after all. Many of these folks think anything on the computer happens instantaneously. They don’t realize that a lot of work goes into that instant gratification. So give them time frames when they give you jobs, even if you have to exaggerate them. It will force them to learn some of the basics of what information technology professionals go through when they are asked to “produce the magic.”
