James Wright writes some of his thoughts on the responsibilities of being an IT person:

My issue isn't with reclusive, stubborn or even fed up IT people. Not at all. It's with an attitude prevalent within IT that certain rights are ours by the very nature that we are IT guys. Years of cultivating a geek image have left the industry with a one-hand two-hand image. On the one hand are the backoffice guys who have no social skills (apparently) and no desire to interact with real people. On the other are the managers who, while they properly represent IT to the masses, actually have no idea what's going on.

Apparently there is no in-between. So, if you get a 'manager' 'in the pits' you'd better promote him. If you get a 'geek' in management you'd just better learn to live with it. Which is kind of what Stu is having to do: be a bit of a buffer. Not a lot, but a bit.

All of those excuses would work perfectly if he wasn't in management. If he wasn't in charge of IT. If he wasn't, in fact, the forward-facing face and persona for IT for a multi-million dollar company.

But he is.

It discusses both the responsibilities of being in IT as well as the nature of being the solo technician (which I was at my previous position). I agree with him.

In fact, coming out of college I thought that one of my strengths was going to be the way my IT skills combine with interpersonal skills. Those of you that know me in person would agree that I'm not the most charismatic person around, but after talking to me for an hour you wouldn't necessarily guess that I work in IT at all if I didn't mention it. In addition to that, I've always been better at business relationships than personal ones because the parameters set (okay, so I use the words "parameters" and that might be a giveaway).

Like James, I think that it's important that the IT person make others feel at ease. There is a classic series of skits on SNL with the ugliest, snottiest IT guy on the planet. Funny stuff in part because it hits close to home. At the last job I worked I was dealing with an office of people that didn't know a whole lot about computers. It would have been easy to correct every misconception that they had and to try to spend my times making them IT competent, but IT competence for an IT guy is vastly different for an end-user and so when they said something that was probably incorrect ("Word keeps asking me about the normal.dot, I think my Java's broken!"), I'd correct the problem ("let's replace the normal.dot file"), detailed explanations that they'd obviously never use ("Java was founded by Sun in blah blah blah blah and is primarily a web-based blah blah blah") until they needed such information. A standoffish IT person is one that isn't doing their job.

My people skills may still be one of my strongsuits, but it probably won't help me a whole lot down the line. A couple jobs back I worked under a guy named Jimmy and a guy named Rick. Jimmy was the lead technician and was very good at what he did. Rick was in between Jimmy and the Vice President of IT. Rick had back problems and would be out for months at a time and frankly, we'd never notice the difference. When Jimmy missed so much as two days, the entire IT department was in shambles.

Jimmy was good at what he did, but his people skills were often lacking. Part nerd, part former mechanic, part jester, Jimmy never really learned how to interact with people. Watching him belittle the end user was often fun from an IT perspective, and he was too important to be fired, but it's unlikely he ever would have been promoted. So someone like Rick, who didn't really seem to do anything except know how to talk to people, will always have the leg up.

It's like James says, there doesn't seem to be much of an in between sometimes. I was hoping that my niche in that regard would be helpful, and it could down the line when promotions come up, but so far it really hasn't.