The first is a comment a mentor/partner-in-crime made about the sexification of IT. Don Berndt is a lauded IT researcher and professor at the University of South Florida (the school from which I graduated) who’s been involved in many fascinating areas of work like artificial intelligence, behavioral psychology, and market prediction.

He observed that while professionals like lawyers and doctors may have a nice set of interesting stories to tell, on a day-to-day basis, their work can be rather boring and repetitive. While I cannot speak from first hand experience, my wife does emphasize how much of her job is simply mundane paper work, and a good friend of ours, a newly-minted Harvard law graduate, related how many hours she spends reviewing stacks of text. Don suggested that they may have more good stories, but they also go through a lot more of the pedestrian stuff to get there. He went on to say that for many IT folks, each day is interesting to them.

I have to agree with him.

I get to do things I find highly interesting or challenging almost daily.

Of course, the problem of making it interesting to other people still remains.

The second morsel is the reaction I got from a few of my IT coworkers when I asked them if it were possible to make IT dinner conversation: a vehement amalgamation of “no way,” “not in your life,” and emphatic ha-ha-ha’s. What struck me was the intensity of the response. It was almost a mixture of arrogance and defensiveness.

So my question to you is: Could it be that IT people don’t–at least subconsciously–want people to understand their work so that it can remain the esoteric, black-box art that perhaps attracted them to that profession in the first place? Some IT people are the same people who went to coffee shops in high school at 2AM to differentiate themselves from the popular crowd. I was one of them.

It’s no mystery that the people who are attracted to IT are those who are, firstly, not all that interested in spending tons of time connecting with other people, and, secondly, spend unusual amounts of time learning about and perfecting their craft. (See Asperger’s and IT: Dark Secret or Open Secret?) But these same qualities can generate a kind of elitism among some IT folks. A kind of “We run your lives from behind a curtain with our complex and brilliant systems. Don’t bother to ask us how we do it–you wouldn’t understand.” By not bringing our “craft” down to earth and making digestible by the masses, we maintain this sheen of magic and impenetrability around our work.

I realize I am being a bit harsh, but I wanted to suggest the possibility that resistance against making IT sexy may come partly from the very members of the field. So much of identity is not about what you do, but that other people don’t do what you do. In truth, the obsessive qualities that might make IT folks hard to relate to also help them to truly excel at their technical work. My friend, Brenda, said, “I was more concerned with the function of work than the people I worked with.” Despite all that, believe me, I’d rather have a socially inept but exacting person run my website server than a social butterfly–if it goes down at 4AM, who is more likely to be there?

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UPDATE 4/19/08 ***********

It appears that Gmail has fixed this problem. You should be able to log straight into Gmail without going through the https:// route.