Right now, we are in an age characterized by what some people call “hyper-individualism,” where we consider the individual the most important unit of value (as opposed to the cause, the organization, or the company). You can see this emphasis in the products and services we buy: iPods are about your music, wherever you are; streaming media and Tivo are about what you want to watch, when you want to watch it; Twitter is about giving you your very own kind of paparazzi.

Blogger and social media guru Chris Brogan recently posted an article that really got me thinking about this trend. During these trying economic times, he recommends that you treat yourself as a personal brand, like a consultant, even if you’re in a full time working position, because companies are going to treat you like a temporary, as-needed resource. So what we get are hyper-individualistic companies, with “me, now” philosophies and employees who have to think in the same way to survive (and to grow). I count myself as one of these employees.

So we’re seeing this “me, now” philosophy show up in the economy, in business, and at the individual level with social media.

I hate to be a harbinger, but this worries me a bit.

Could the more-for-me, what-I-want, when-I-want-it consumerism/investment strategy that brought down the economy tell us something about the look-at-me, who-I-am-now, as-I-see-fit social media information “economy?”

Let’s make this analogy a bit more concrete and draw some stronger parallels (since we love analogies around here at Intermz).

The economy crashed because it was growing on value in the stock market, housing market, etc that simply wasn’t there–a bubble of perceived (vs. actual) value. That perceived value was created by lots of people wanting to get rich quickly, who invested in increasingly complicated and opaque things, and consumers who borrowed more and more money to buy more stuff they thought they could use their ever-more-valuable houses to pay for. (This economist predicted the 2008 crash a year earlier.) We all had to have more than yesterday, so to slake that thirst, we had to rely on false value; we told the goose to lay gold-looking eggs. Both investors and consumers, often the same people, were focused on more for me now, not some for all of us over time.

So here’s the tie-in: Could it be that social media and its unprecedented emphasis on creating personal value could turn into an unsustainable bubble of its own? And I’m not talking about value bubbles for social media companies like Twitter and Facebook who still haven’t figured out how to make real value (i.e., money). I’m talking about value for each of us, by of us.

If we focus so much on our individual selves, how great and wonderful we are, our “personal brands” as full-time consultants and “presidents of our own careers,” could we run the risk of trying to be perceived as valuable rather than actually valuable? The people who had to have more before the 2008 recession based their decisions on perceived value. A personal brand is but a “collection of symbols, experiences and associations” connected with a person, after all. Does that sound like a focus on real value to you?

I realize I sound really crass at the moment, but I’m worried that we might end up creating individual bubbles that will pop just like the economic bubble did in 2008 because we had to create faux personal value; as more people join the social media, personal-president movement, we might be compelled to find value where it doesn’t really exist–just to stay in the game.

You might retort that the Internet, the big information market, is efficient and will prevent those bubbles from forming, that the market will remove individuals lacking real value–but that’s what many people thought about our economy before 2008, too.

Maybe some, or a lot of us are creating our very own personal bubbles right now.

My advice? Keep your eye on the basics: invest in what you know. In this case, know thyself, and you will know you true, and your potential, value.

An article I recently read suggested that a reason employers are having a difficult time finding qualified IT employees might be the result of the narrow focus of the employer’s own requirements. This makes sense. As the number of different technologies and industries in which we specialize grows, it is more and more difficult for us workers to maintain a wide range of skills with requisite depth. If you check job descriptions these days, it’s not surprising to find something like: “Required skills: 5+ years of database administration on Sybase, in a data warehousing environment, with .NET experience, Web Sphere experience, in the pharmaceutical industry.” On top of that, you would typically see a long list of “experience with X a big plus.”

Well, requirements like that really limit the number of qualified candidates available.

The good news for us is that, if we are qualified, we can command a good wage/rate - standard supply and demand curve economics. The bad news is that, in order to become qualified, you need to spend a lot of time within a very particular constellation of areas, which can make you a lot less able to move around.

My personal experience has reflected this. The more experience I get, the better the positions I can find, but the fewer of those positions there seem to be. Thus, when I want to change locations/companies for any number of reasons, my flexibility has become more diminished over time.

Obviously, some career paths and specializations are more flexible than others, and some of us may never encounter much difficulty moving around. If all things were equal, the specific requirements by employers, and the focused skill sets of employees, generally work well together. But not all things are equal. The number of technologies various industries have to choose from grows daily. However, the capacity for employees to add on those new technologies to their skill set, to a usable degree, is finite, for all intents and purposes.

For one particular position, I was the only one interviewing. They had many applicants apply, only two qualified candidates, and only one willing to relocate. The employer commented that this was a serious problem for them.

This situation applies across all industries, and not just IT. But few industries experience the same kind of change, quarter over quarter, that we do. The sheer array of technologies a person could, and might need to, specialize in today is humbling.

As either an employer or employee, have you seen or experienced the same? What, if anything, can we do about it?

That sounds good. But the study, they admit, doesn’t factor in the cost of getting an MBA. That got me thinking.

If you were a senior IT professional, making in the neighborhood of $100k, an 8.2% raise would equate to $8,200 per year.

That’s pretty good. But factor in the cost of acquiring an MBA and the picture changes a little. Acquiring an MBA can cost anywhere between $60-130k for a two year program. This equates to a break-even period of between seven and 16 years in which to recoup your investment, assuming everything else remains constant.

But that’s the rub - nothing has to stay constant. Don’t get me wrong, my whole family has a tradition of graduate level education, but the Computer World article seems to suggest that an 8.2% increase is a substatial reason to get an MBA.

However, my experience has been that moving between jobs every few years can manifest salary increases of 20% or more, each move, if you play your cards right. Moving jobs, or being a consultant, also has the added benefit of greatly broadening your skills. (Obviously, the downside is you would have to move jobs every couple of years, or you might have to travel constantly. But for some, especially the younger generation, moving around is increasingly becoming the norm - and almost expected.)

Within a seven to 16 year period, one could move up the salary ladder many times, in many different ways, other than via an MBA. (Bloomberg says forget the MBA and become a geologist.)

So this begs the question: Why get an MBA if you’re in IT?

I imagine those who get one in IT did so to move up into management. However, for some of us, the reason we like IT is because we like being hands on with the technology. My father, a 30 year veteran DBA, turned down management positions for that reason.

If you have an MBA, has it helped you in your IT career? If so, how did you use it? Did you get it for the purpose of moving into a management position?

I’ll be frank. I don’t want to be called an “IT guy.” Among my IT colleagues, when we refer to the IT guy, we mean desktop or hardware support. When tech support calls, we are talking to “the IT guys”; call this elitism, but there it is. (For brevity, I mean the gender neutral intepretation of “guy.”) But, when my friends say, “I know an IT guy,” they mean me. And despite working in IT, as many of you do, I don’t like to call myself an “IT guy.”

So what’s my pickle with this title?

Well, I’m not desktop or hardware support. I’m a data architect/ETL developer. Which is different. Right? I think so. But people in the greater public don’t think so. IT folks are often represented by the Geek Squad and those monochromely-dressed guys in the IBM commercials. (They don’t know that we’re guitar-playing/motorcycle-riding mountain bikers with attitude!) Granted, no one outside our industry needs to know what our true, convoluted titles are, so I can understand the easy-to-use “IT” moniker. I suppose, then, my real qualm is with the “guy” part of “IT guy.”

When we refer to other professionals, we definitely don’t say “the plumber guy,” or “the doctor guy,” or “the laywer guy.” If you say those outloud, the inclusion of “guy” somehow changes the connotation, and not in a good way. (Try it.)

Yet, we do have the “cable guy.” So what, if anything, puts the “IT guy” and the “cable guy” in a similar group?

Ultimately, what I want to know is: what does “IT guy” really mean?

Is it simply someone, anyone, who works with technology? If so, are you ok with being called, or referring to yourself as, “an IT guy?” If you’re not ok with it, why not?

Perhaps me, and a few colleagues of mine, are in denial and really are just IT guys. Maybe the label doesn’t matter at all. But sometimes, labels matter; would you trust your health to a “doctor guy?” We’re having some debate about this in my peer group and would love to get your opinions.

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?

One day, a student moseyed into the TA office and, after a few words about the upcoming lecture, suddenly became very quiet, as if he was unsure whether or not to ask what was on his mind. I encouraged him to go for it and he asked abashedly: “Can you tell me why I should choose this career?”

We had a long talk about that. Afterward, I began to realize how many of our students were, in one way or another, asking the same question.

First of all, I’d like to distill what an IT career tends to entail. Whether you’re working for a buttoned-up large corporation, a small local company, or a paradigm-shifting outfit like Google, IT people are basically divided into two basic roles: designers and builders.

Designers, like architects, decide what elements are needed, where they should go, and how they should work together. They produce blueprints.

Builders (better known as developers), like construction workers, translate blueprints into functioning technology systems. They produce code, computer hardware, and networks.

Often, designers are builders, and vice-versa.

So, why choose IT as your career? Well, the first thing most people want to know is how much they can get paid. Information technology people are some of the highest paid groups, on average, in any organization. For non-management positions, the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) indicates that IT workers, on average, earn 77% more per year than any other occupational category [1].

Obviously, specific professional occupations, like doctors and lawyers, can outrank IT by a good margin. However, when compared in terms of the BLS occupational categories, only Legal Occupations outrank IT - and only by $13,000 per year.

Why? Information Technology people are responsible for building and maintaining the computer systems that keep modern companies running and competitive; without those systems, some would lose literally millions of dollars a day, while some would simply go out of business. Imagine what would happen if your bank stopped functioning because a natural disaster damaged its networks, resulting in interrupted deposits and withdrawals. People might overdraw their accounts, miss payments, etc. It would wreak havoc for the bank, its customers, and all the other businesses that depend on those same customers. Hence, IT people are paid well to provide their critical, behind-the-scenes service.

Now that we have the compensation piece out of the way, are there other reasons to choose IT as a career?

There are many (albeit subjective) reasons to enter the IT industry.

The biggest one is that IT is a great place for people who like problem solving. Both designers and developers in IT are confronted with many variagated puzzles almost daily. They are tasked with creating fixes for very tricky problems, like how to balance a website’s user-friendliness with the number of features it has, or whether it’s better to make a program faster or crash less.

One of my favorite things about IT is that you are always building things. Whether it’s a database, a piece of software, or a network, the feeling of accomplishment you get from knowing what you built actually works, and works well, is a feeling like no other. If you ever made paper airplanes as a child, and were constantly tweaking a plane to make it fly further, faster, or higher, and you  succeeded, you know how it feels.

On a more pragmatic note: the time and cost for learning IT skills is very low. This means that you can learn well-paying skills very quickly. In fact, many highly-skilled IT people are mostly self-taught. Additionally, computers are cheap and give you access to endless amounts of information via the Internet that are like launch pads for developing whatever skills interest you - website design, programming, database design, security, and even building computers. Through the course of my career, I have acquired enough skills to have been paid for three of those five types of jobs and have allowed me travel the world on someone else’s tab - and all at relatively very young ages.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about an IT career is that you are building skills that you can use to join an exciting startup or start your own business (both of which I have done continue to do). Because IT skills are, I believe, very easy to pick up, and because the cost of creating a new website, piece of software, or other “next greatest thing” is just the cost of a computer, some cheap (often free) software, and your time, you really will have a shot at becoming the next Google or Facebook.

But, if all that risk is not your style, you can always get a good gig with a big corporation. In Michigan, the unemployment rate for IT workers is around 2%. The unemployment rate for all sectors is over 7%.

Good luck and happy building!

———–

Sometimes you find yourself filling the role of an expert in a particular area in your job and having to educate colleagues about that area. However, despite how much of an expert you think you are, you will always come against resistance from people who have different ways of doing the same thing. In the end, if your idea is truly the better one, you must get buy-in from the right people to get your ideas adopted. Otherwise, no matter how good your ideas are, if no one buys into them, they (and eventually you) will get ignored.

I work in IT and have been recently put into a position, by my manager, of bringing a more structured development process to my department. I’ve cultivated some best-practices from leading experts in my field over the years that revolve around prioritizing scalability and flexibility over quick and dirty techniques. These practices, however, are quite contrary to the long-held practices of some of my team mates.

So far, I have been fortunate to receive very little resistance to the methods I have pitched to the team. So why am I writing this article about educating and influencing co-workers? Well, a particular co-worker of mine, whose background is couched in highly structured organizations, has commented on my success at mitigating resistance to my ideas. He has been frustrated that some of his own attempts to streamline the department have been met with hostility and can’t understand why I have succeeded where he has not. So I decided to pay attention to what factors could be contributing to my ability to persuade.

It’s common knowledge that the best way to get buy-in on an idea is to educate naysayers as to why your idea is superior to theirs. With some well thought-out arguments, you can brow-beat people into accepting your ways. However, I found that the delivery of those arguments is as important, if not more important, than the arguments themselves. Without proper delivery, you can create enemies instead of winning converts. And the way to win converts is to realize that, after all is said and done, the people you are trying to convince simply want to be respected. They may not like your ideas, but the last thing they want is to feel like they are stupid. Here are some ways to convince people get buy-in of your ideas without alienating the people who could become your biggest supporters. (All of this assumes that your ideas are, in fact, the better ideas).

When you are fielding suggestions and requests from other people, it can be very easy to immediately overrule them and focus on why your idea is preferential. Rejecting peoples’ ideas offhand can be bad for your career like a leaky fuel line is for your car - you may not notice the effects immediately, but when it gets bad, it will be too late. Instead, show them that you are taking their suggestion seriously, no matter how belligerently they present them. (Remember, people are often initially belligerent because they anticipate that you will be equally belligerent in response. Try not to take it too personally.) My top 7 ways for doing that are:

1. Furrow your brow and nod while looking off at a wall.
2. Listen to their entire argument before you respond. (Pause before response for effect.)
3. List the benefits of their suggestions back to them.
4. Use phrases like “consider carefully” and “important issue” when talking about their idea.
5. Feign uncertainty.
6. Give in.
7. Enlist the help of the greater group and credit the naysayer.

I used to work with a colleague, Kishore Nagururu, at Publix Super Markets who always impressed with his ability to sell his ideas (which were often the best ideas anyway). I noticed that, when teammembers objected to his ideas, he often furrowed his brow and nodded while looking introspective. His technique did a great many things. Firstly, it showed that he was genuinely interested in their ideas and considered them seriously. Secondly, it often got those people to stop talking before they started to repeat themselves. And thirdly, people were much more willing to listen to his arguments. How do I know it worked like that? I was often one of his objectors - and it worked wonders on me.

I used to read the Encylopedia Brown series of books as a youngster. Enclyopedia Brown was a child genius who could recall obscure facts instantly. One of the most useful things I took from his character was a technique he employed to prevent himself from appearing like such a know-it-all: Before responding to a question like “What is the longest river in the world?” he would pause as if he needed to think about it for a second, even though he knew the answer off the top of his head. That small pause to think, even if you don’t need to, pays huge dividends when influencing people because it shows you are not just out to prove you know more than they do.

Letting your teammembers know you listened to their arguments instead of simply hearing them is an extremely effective way of winning over hearts and minds. One of the best ways to do that is repeating back to them all the arguments they posed to you. Once you do that, you can quell any doubt that you misunderstood or ignored their ideas. This makes them more likely to listen to your arguments. Once again, you earn their respect by respecting them.

And while you are responding to their ideas, whether you already disagree with them or not, strategic use of phrases like “we should definitely weigh those factors” and “you bring up a good point” are money when it comes to winning cohorts. It shows that not only are their ideas worth considering, but that they could significantly influence your ultimate decision or trigger a bigger discussion. It makes them feel knowledgeable, important, and a part of the decision making process. In reality, one of the most effective ways to influence others is to allow them to influence you.

Pretending you are uncertain about whose idea is the best (even if you already know) can help ameliorate a strongly-opinionated co-worker. By pausing to think and saying you are really not sure whether ideas A or B are better, you can buy some time to “think” about it. What you are really doing is, of course, telling them that their idea is good enough to make you uncertain about your own idea. Then you can take that time to “weight” the pros and cons and pitch your conclusions later - even if you already know what your conclusion is.

Sometimes, if your idea is only marginally better, it might be more important, for the sake of the project and your relationship, to adopt the opposing idea. In those cases, the differences are probably more stylistic than practical, so go ahead and give into the idea, and give in without reservation. Something like: “That sounds good, let’s do that.”

And other times, a person just won’t let go of his or her idea and push you to implement it, despite using all of the techniques above. That scenario usually indicates a belief in a “current” way of doing things which differs from your “new” way of doing things. In those cases, you might need get the greater group involved and get buy in from all involved parties. How do you do that without looking like you’re trying to set up a lynch mob? Simple. After you pause for effect and furrow and nod, tell your co-worker that their idea brings up an serious enough issue that it warrants a discussion with the larger community. Then, during the right meeting, and with the go-ahead from your boss, pitch the issue to the team. Then present your idea and the opposing idea, while being careful not to attack your colleague’s idea. Instead, credit your colleague for bringing the important issue to your attention and allow the “panel” to weigh the evidence for themselves. If you are right, the team will back you, and your opponent will have to relent. If you’re wrong, or it doesn’t really matter, you’ll know what to do.

Either way, everyone gets educated on the right information, the best decision gets made, and everyone gets to move on. And, in the end, that’s all that really matters.

If you want to learn more about the art of pitching ideas, Guy Kawasaki is probably the guru on the topic (not to mention one of my personal heroes). His blog is a wealth of information.

If you liked, or didn’t like this post, or if you tried any of the techniques, please drop me a comment! I’d love to hear from you.