Mediocre IT Departments

charlieharper

charlieharper

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I have a question.
I've been doing some contracting for a large multinational company to do some integrations.

Why is it that whenever I'm in touch with their IT departments to ask for stuff, it feels like they are a bunch of noobs who don't have answers for basic questions. IE, I ask 1 question about an API or something then it needs to go through about 30 people till I finally get an answer 2 weeks later.

Compared to when I do contracting for tech startups, questions usually gets answered before I need them and I feel like the noob.

Poor HR?
 
Its business agility. It can easily be compromised the larger the company gets. Companies that lack business agility will fail.
 
Yeah its often the case in big companies where it takes time for queries and tickets to get to the right team. Things get passed around until they land in the right place and often a lot of people don't have the knowledge so its a guessing game. Pretty frustrating but doubt HR has anything to do with it. Also you can't really compare things to a start up. There are inherently less people at start ups so less chance of things going to the wrong person.
 
Because tech startups are IT companies by default...everyone in them is a nerd and everything that isn't technology is the second hand step child service they are forced to have.

"Normal" companies are flipped around and IT is just sub-service of the company and not it's backbone like the tech startup.

You'll usually find in a startup at some point the now CTO or even CEO was the IT department in the beginning and that makes all the difference.

It's a priority and process problem really, very little to do with HR.

What is an HR problem and even more so with startups is the very nature of contract workers not being processed properly and onboarded correctly and likely that might be where things fall apart for you because you aren't informed about the correct way to go about things and get indirectly fobbed off by IT for doing it wrong or existing in the first place.

Whenever I have some problem with process not being followed or ignored it almost always relates to contractors.
 
Ah IT departments in big corps, they are special... I mean for me I try to get guys that have a certain way of doing things, perhaps a little obsessive but they do what they are hired for, the IT department seems to hire people who have touched a PC.
 
bridgeburner said:
Yeah its often the case in big companies where it takes time for queries and tickets to get to the right team. Things get passed around until they land in the right place and often a lot of people don't have the knowledge so its a guessing game. Pretty frustrating but doubt HR has anything to do with it. Also you can't really compare things to a start up. There are inherently less people at start ups so less chance of things going to the wrong person.
Click to expand...
Yet it is completely feasible for a large company to be as agile as a start-up.
 
Lupus said:
Ah IT departments in big corps, they are special... I mean for me I try to get guys that have a certain way of doing things, perhaps a little obsessive but they do what they are hired for, the IT department seems to hire people who have touched a PC.
Click to expand...
Once, back in school.
 
charlieharper said:
I have a question.
I've been doing some contracting for a large multinational company to do some integrations.

Why is it that whenever I'm in touch with their IT departments to ask for stuff, it feels like they are a bunch of noobs who don't have answers for basic questions. IE, I ask 1 question about an API or something then it needs to go through about 30 people till I finally get an answer 2 weeks later.

Compared to when I do contracting for tech startups, questions usually gets answered before I need them and I feel like the noob.

Poor HR?
Click to expand...

I think a couple of reasons.

1) This large multinational company is likely not a IT company.
2) Often these big companies struggle with a legacy mindset, the focus is not on new but keeping what they have up and running.
3) Large multinational company have a lot of bureaucracy, decision making is slow and nobody wants to commit so the buck gets passed around.
4) HR says hire according to color and not the ability to do the work.
5) Big companies struggle to attract and retain talent, everyone wants to work for the exciting & "free to do what you want" start up because dealing with red tape is tiring.
 
Most of my clients' IT departments they try to spend as little as possible, on tech and people.
It shows.

Then we have our internal IT department as an IT service provider - I can bitch and moan about them for days.
The further they stay away from me the better.
 
charlieharper said:
I have a question.
I've been doing some contracting for a large multinational company to do some integrations.

Why is it that whenever I'm in touch with their IT departments to ask for stuff, it feels like they are a bunch of noobs who don't have answers for basic questions. IE, I ask 1 question about an API or something then it needs to go through about 30 people till I finally get an answer 2 weeks later.

Compared to when I do contracting for tech startups, questions usually gets answered before I need them and I feel like the noob.

Poor HR?
Click to expand...
simple , with big IT departments , you will have many IT people that are not skilled and can go under the radar.In small IT departments its hard to hide away , as everybody in the department needs to pull their weight.
 
charlieharper said:
I have a question.
I've been doing some contracting for a large multinational company to do some integrations.

Why is it that whenever I'm in touch with their IT departments to ask for stuff, it feels like they are a bunch of noobs who don't have answers for basic questions. IE, I ask 1 question about an API or something then it needs to go through about 30 people till I finally get an answer 2 weeks later.

Compared to when I do contracting for tech startups, questions usually gets answered before I need them and I feel like the noob.

Poor HR?
Click to expand...
FinTech, or pure Financial company?
 
The vast majority of SA companies are manned by mediocrity, with middle and upper management only hiring people that "fit the office culture" ie people that won't make them look bad for their lack of skill and knowledge.
 
Polymathic said:
The vast majority of SA companies are manned by mediocrity, with middle and upper management only hiring people that "fit the office culture" ie people that won't make them look bad for their lack of skill and knowledge.
Click to expand...
In SA it is like excellence is a barrier to success. Saffers copy their leaders.
 
ubercal said:
simple , with big IT departments , you will have many IT people that are not skilled and can go under the radar.In small IT departments its hard to hide away , as everybody in the department needs to pull their weight.
Click to expand...
I don't think that's accurate.

I work in telecoms and in my company I specialise only on a certain system out of the almost 50 the company uses. If an ISP has a query about something not related to my system, I will refer them to the integration team for direction. There's a group email for them. They're about 20 people.

The problem with sending a mail to a group email address is everybody thinks someone else will reply until someone in management notices my request two weeks later and asks one specific person to reply.

If I have to thumb suck, I think we're about 300 - 400 people in IT so its impossible to know who supports or maintains which systems
 
Polymathic said:
The vast majority of SA companies are manned by mediocrity, with middle and upper management only hiring people that "fit the office culture" ie people that won't make them look bad for their lack of skill and knowledge.
Click to expand...
The vast majority of people in the world are mediocre, no matter their job/career.
Nothing to do with SA or management
 
Simple answer is economics. In a large company that gets hundreds of queries daily cannot afford to pay a full team of technical experts to man the phones - spending 99% of their time answering simple questions that a non-technical person could have handled just as easy.

So they have a handful of techies that do 2nd line support on the issues that the call center can't handle.
 
charlieharper said:
I have a question.
I've been doing some contracting for a large multinational company to do some integrations.

Why is it that whenever I'm in touch with their IT departments to ask for stuff, it feels like they are a bunch of noobs who don't have answers for basic questions. IE, I ask 1 question about an API or something then it needs to go through about 30 people till I finally get an answer 2 weeks later.

Compared to when I do contracting for tech startups, questions usually gets answered before I need them and I feel like the noob.

Poor HR?
Click to expand...
Government/Public Sector Client? Yes I read the large multinational part. But it sounds like the public sector
 
The_Ogre said:
I don't think that's accurate.

I work in telecoms and in my company I specialise only on a certain system out of the almost 50 the company uses. If an ISP has a query about something not related to my system, I will refer them to the integration team for direction. There's a group email for them. They're about 20 people.

The problem with sending a mail to a group email address is everybody thinks someone else will reply until someone in management notices my request two weeks later and asks one specific person to reply.

If I have to thumb suck, I think we're about 300 - 400 people in IT so its impossible to know who supports or maintains which systems
Click to expand...
Also taking into account the original team might not be responsible for that particular piece/tech anymore. Then trying to find the new owner of said piece can take a couple of emails (and sometimes during restructuring etc some smaller things fall through the cracks and there is no one officially responsible....)
 
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