> and IT "assholes" think the run of the mill business drones are "assholes" as well. Their inability to be effective at their jobs tend to make IT lives worse because they can't understand what IT workers
Have you ever dealt with an average IT department in a non-tech company? This attitude doesn't help anyone and I really want to believe that only a small minority of tech people think of any other worker anywhere as an "asshole".
I'm a Sr. SE at a large medical device company and can confirm that our IT dept is filled with assholes. We do everything we can to keep systems out of their hands because they are so difficult to work with compared to every other part of the company.
I get they have to deal with a bunch of technical inepts constantly falling for phishing attacks and occasionally teams will make outrageous requests to them that simply can't be done, but their attitude is terrible.
If you ask for something simple but "scary", like a firewall or internal network change, they will immediately assume you are just some idiot and speak dismissively to you in a very obvious manner. It's extremely frustrating because they won't even bother to read your emails that justify the change and will just invent some unrelated excuses about why they can't or say they will get back to you later (they don't).
Ironically the only way to get anything done through them is to have my team members create a bunch of duplicate tickets (1 per person), and schedule multiple pointless meetings with them that essentially just consist of me reading my emails to them out loud.
Non-technical teams in the company get the same treatment but lack the technical background to counter them. Frequently I've had team leaders come to me to get a second opinions on the stuff IT tells them and it bothers me how much they seem to clearly exaggerate the difficulty of things. To the point where I can't help but wonder if they are just pretending to know what they are doing, and use their better-than-you attitude to mask their own ineptitude.
So overall I feel the negative reputation of IT departments is earned.
> and it bothers me how much they seem to clearly exaggerate the difficulty of things.
Scotty Engineering principle at work. I'm no stranger to that, it's often enough the only strategy keeping higher management from completely swamping you with work.
It's not that it usually is the Scotty Engineering principle. It is more often a hedge against unforeseen complications, because if you give a realistic estimate that would be true for 90% of the tickets, the 10% will come to bite you. So to not get chewed up for providing realistic 90%-true estimates, you give 99.9%-true estimates that are far higher, but with just a .1% chance of being screwed instead of a 10% chance. Which is, at 10 tickets per day, getting chewed up daily vs. once every two weeks or so.
Have you ever dealt with an average IT department in a non-tech company? This attitude doesn't help anyone and I really want to believe that only a small minority of tech people think of any other worker anywhere as an "asshole".