Robert X. Cringely — Door Number Three

And the Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth

I'll begin this third and (I promise) last column on IT management with a confession: I have been fired from every job I have ever held. ... Most of the times I have been fired it's because I've been judged to be unmanageable, which is to say I won't shut up. The ultimate reason given is usually something minor. ...

    You know us. We are useful but sometimes a pain in the ass. We have opinions and speak our minds and don't suffer fools at all. We stand up to authority from time to time. Sometimes we're wrong. We get fired a lot and hired a lot, too, because we are generally useful, though dangerous.

---

    We serve the company but often don't feel part of it. Certainly the value structures and lines of authority that function perfectly well for most of the rest of the company don't work at all well for IT. We're vital but at the same time, well, so different...

    Remember Door Number Three from Let's Make a Deal? It could reveal a sports car or a donkey, but whatever was behind Door Number Three was unlike anything you could imagine.
    We need a Door Number Three for IT professionals.

    I have a friend of 20 years who is in a key technical role at a very large company. He's too vital to the company to risk losing but too geeky to fit in. He's on the craft (non-management) salary scale, but way higher than he ought to be for having no direct responsibility. All he does, in fact, is from time to time save his company from ruin. And even more rarely, he saves all the rest of us from ruin, too, in ways I am not at liberty to explain. How do you manage such a guy? Where he works they have him report to the CEO. The Big Guy has 5-6 direct reports and one of them -- my friend -- doesn't manage anyone or anything.

    THAT'S Door Number Three.

    We're in an important transition period not just for IT, but also for business in general. ... The old ways of doing things are changing and ought to. And in this way IT is leading -- or ought to lead -- the way. ...

    We're in a mess. The world is screwed up and some of that can be traced to the improper use of IT as a financial weapon. But the people of IT actually present many of the answers we need, because they are living much deeper in technology than other parts of the company or of our society.

    Think about it. There has nearly always been a class of eggheads showing us a path toward new business models, whether it was Edison and Firestone, Hewlett and Packard, Noyce and Moore, Gates and Allen, or Brin and Page. It takes in each case a generation to happen, but ultimately we all (and I mean ALL -- everyone in the total organization) come to look like the geeks of the generation before. ...

    ... the world changed from HTML to Javascript/SOAP/Ajax (or from financial regulation is bad to financial regulation will save us).

    At the heart of this is a concept completely foreign to traditional business -- Open Source. What the open source community has demonstrated is the superiority of a strategy that emphasizes early proof of concept, early release, and frequent releases with features added as needed -- probably totaling 20 percent of the features identified in a needs assessment.

    Last week's column was a utopian vision that simply requires all the old managers to be reprogrammed or accept a bullet in the head. But it is not at all utopian if applied solely (or initially) to IT, where this stuff actually works pretty well.

    IT people are most of the time building fortresses or feeling unappreciated -- often both at the same time. ...

(in toto)