Specialization, or Jack-of-all-trades?

Usually when I sit down and start typing I have somewhat of an idea of what I'm going to say for the blog entry. This time I really didn't know, so I decided to write about something that I don't think I've touched on before.

You can't really go to school for a career in IT. I really won't concede that one to anything. You can't go to school and know you're going to be a Network Administrator or a System Engineer.

You go to school for the framework, the base skills, and the contacts. All learning in IT is done on the job, and honestly, takes a lot of personal investment. The person who works in IT that hasn't dedicated off hours to learning or advancing themselves is someone I would absolutely never hire. You just can't do IT without accepting the fact that: yes, it's a crazy world that will touch and intrude on your life in every aspect.

So, what do you do? Some people jump in and learn everything they can and become masters of nothing. Sorry, you just can't be the best at everything. If you're one of those people that are never wrong - then please, find a new career. Too many of these people exist in IT already. The profession is a black hole for people with asinine personalities simply because there is a lot of knowledge hoarding and opportunity to make entire systems or processes dependent on whatever mood you are in for the day. Not the way to go.

Other people tend to specialize, and only excel in a single skill. Ok - you can become the master of your skill, but it is going to be really hard to find places that hire you for that one skill if you end up needing to change careers or are no longer needed / replaced. Someone in this situation needs to be ready to be able to move vast distances and make sacrifices. Just make sure that maintaining the knowledge in your skill is worth the tradeoffs in convenience and being able to find jobs easily.

So, I guess I've just said that both paths aren't really that great. That's right - neither of them really matter, honestly. What does matter is these basic facts: you're easy to work with, have an open mind, aren't afraid to be wrong, and knows how to ask questions. Master those four skills and you'll only have problems sorting out the vast opportunities always available to you.

Greed is Good

I'm a strong believer in the invisible hand of capitalism.

Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" and all that stuff. More importantly, I strongly believe in the fact that most (if not all) humans are absolutely selfish and are looking out for their own interests before the interests of others. You will not find complete altruism in any real human. Perhaps mythological figures or stories - but those only exist as a method of control. A fantasy, one could say, a story about how things will never be in order to dangle that wide-eyed hope of something too good to be true just outside your field of vision.

However, this isn't to say that the world is full of selfish self-serving people that won't lift a finger to help you. Quite the opposite. Humans are social creatures and need each other to survive. One human trying to better themselves will, by default, need the services and/or byproducts of other humans to succeed. In so doing, this person or entity may benefit others or even society as well in their pursuit for wealth or recognition.

In real terms, think of it this way. You have three men who want to make money:

• The first man robs a bank and gets rich. He goes to jail shortly thereafter and loses it all.
• The second man leads a life of frugality and saves his money, making an average income doing a relatively unskilled job.
• The third man puts himself through school and researches a cure for a rare disease, ends up marketing it as a drug, and becomes unbelievably rich while at the same time providing jobs for hundreds of people and saving the lives of thousands of patients.

All three of them are driven by the universal litmus of success and/or happiness: Money.

The first one took away from society. The second lived within society's rules and was neither a positive or a negative. And the third ended up benefiting society. Sure, the third man did a lot of good. But would he really have dedicated decades of his life if deep down inside he didn't think he'd make a hell of a lot of money someday?

The Business

An IT department that eschews the business for its own benefit is a doomed and inefficient entity. It's a ticking time bomb of resentment, and will spur the facets of the business to hire their own miniature siloed IT specialists as opposed to using what the company has provided.

A decentralized IT department is a very dangerous thing. It can work in some cases, perhaps organizations with vastly different components (different industries, for example) - and perhaps with some kind of logical separation that makes sense (student support vs. faculty support, for instance) - but if your IT department DBA's are struggling to negotiate with a Finance department's DBA's, you have trouble. One should spend the time to look inward and see how the IT department can expand to fill these specialized gaps, as opposed to letting them slip through the cracks.