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Post by MartinT on Oct 9, 2020 7:52:29 GMT
Taking the above thread title from an IT forum that I use a lot, using Donald Rumsfeld's famous saying, it strikes me that many members, working in many fields, must feel the same way on occasion or even all the time. It also impinges on Imposter Syndrome, the feeling that you don't know enough about your line of work and sometimes feel a fraud. This is what I posted this morning...
I was struck by how so many good people in the field of IT feel the same way. Does this apply to you in your field?
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Post by jandl100 on Oct 9, 2020 8:41:00 GMT
Yes, back in my day as a technical team leader then manager in IT-related work I definitely suffered a bit from Imposter Syndrome.
Generally others, including thankfully people more senior than me, thought much more highly of me than I did.
I kept getting promoted and I bumbled along reasonably successfully, so either I was lucky on an ongoing basis or they were right!
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Post by MikeMusic on Oct 9, 2020 9:09:05 GMT
When I ran my business I often referred to experts.
Some were. Others knew less than me
What we don't know is reinforced by the Covid issue.
We are finding out more and more that change things utterly from early in the year
The interweb and YouTube are great balancers
Remind me of the name of the 4 stages of learning
Unknowing Incompetence
Knowing Incompetence
Knowing Competence
Unknowing Competence
Being a young soul, (who said thick ?) I've had to learn almost everything
The boss sails into stuff with her Unknowing Competence and is very puzzled on the rare occasions she doesn't know
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Post by John on Oct 9, 2020 9:58:42 GMT
When I was managing multiple services for the national Autistic society I certainly felt at times out of my depth
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Post by ajski2fly on Oct 9, 2020 10:41:51 GMT
Hi Martin,
I started in IT as a numpty COBOL programmer after 9 month TOPS (Manpower Services Course) at Data General in central London, sponsored bu Thorn EMI. My 3 month work placement was at Scicon Engineering, I was given a relational dB project to do on my own, which I knew nothing much about, and the programming was not on IBM but Unix, which I knew nothing about. I felt like a duck firmly stuck in a frozen pond. I got the manuals out, read for about 2 weeks, got logged on, wrote some specifications, got them reviewed and built the dam thing. It worked and they offered me a job, sadly 2 weeks before I became permanent, Maggie Thatcher cut projects and my offer was removed.
Next off to McDermott Engineering where I was used as dogs body to run batch jobs for the accounts dept, after 2 months I was very fed up, so I got the TSO, JCL and Easytrieve(trickytreive I called it) manuals out, and in quiet moments started building an automated process that end users could use to run the damn things themselves. I showed it to the head of the accounts 6 months later much to my bosses annoyance, she was very pleased and said we have been asking for something like this for 3 years. I was then begrudgingly given some COBOL programming work.
The next few years continued in this vain through various jobs in other companies and at each one I ended up training myself and moving up the ranks. I always felt out of my depth but I seemed to leave others behind on the way. Then I got into Systems Testing at GEISCO in London, Testing was a dirty work in the 80's and resisted by arrogant developers. I was a contractor and my new manager said I want you to create a testing process and procedures that will hold the development in check/account and ensure we end up with a great system(s) that are stable and networked across the world. Once again a big challenge, I had to recruit a small team after defining the test procedures and tools, and gaining senior management approval, I really don't know how I did it at the time, maybe I was just young and naive.
Then off to part of a bank in the city onto credit/debit card systems as a senior systems tester in a team of 4, to say this was complex is major an understatement, multiple platforms and systems interlinked, from EPOS to multiple databases with all sorts of encryption involved. There was little documentation, I spent 6 weeks going threw JCL and system flows, looking at 3 green screen based systems, just to get an understanding of how it all hanged together. Then the IT development manager came up to me and said "Time you took responsibility for the next quarterly release, here are the program specs and functional change docs. You have 6 weeks to write the test plans, 4 weeks testing and then 3 weeks parallel testing with production before the go live date, and you have to one week of co-ordinated testing with 7 other banks, oh and by the way it always goes live and it never goes wrong, if it doesn't your out, ". I did it with 2 others and a superb operational support team, I don't think I had ever experienced so much stress before. I spent the next 5 years working on these systems and building automated testing procedures, built a test team and ended up the test manager, more by default in my view. I then got to work on Windows NT GOLD(pre-release) for a back office work flow system, me and everyone else learnt on the spot, but we relied on our combined experience and transferred our skills.
I went on for another 10 years working in other business areas in IT management roles in UK and EU, often knowing nothing about what I was initially working on, but my experience got me through.
Looking back on it I really don't know how I did it, I and others had some fun times, often working very long hours, but getting a lot of satisfaction when we succeeded and delivered. However when I reached my late 40's I was physically and mentally burnt out, the ducks came home to roost on the frozen pond and I was finding it very hard to cope and manage the levels of stress I felt. One thing that I remember feeling most of all was that my brain felt it was completely full up with 20+ years of IT crap, and I was becoming confused and unable to focus.
So I bailed out and spent a few years recovering and decided I was not going back to that level of pressure, and went onto other things. However 6 years later I had a heart attack and had several operations. The medics said it was most likely due to severe stress levels over many years as I was generally physically fit, not over-weight, and did not have high blood pressure and I was definitely not on the heart attack spectrum.
So being a duck frozen in ponds take its toll from my personal experience.
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Post by Clive on Oct 9, 2020 11:30:04 GMT
More IT from myself too. In the early 80s working for DEC I was supporting RT11, RSX, VMS, DECnet etc.. When not doing straight product support I was being charged out...even in those days I was charged out at around £1k per day. Sometimes I was fairly fluent technically, other times it was a matter of being a chapter or page ahead of the customer reading the manual...often I'd be reading it in the car park before delivering the consultancy.
This trick is to know your limitations and have a feel for what you don't know. At least that way you can find out the missing information. Be honest and open with people, be pleasant too...you are given latitude if they like and trust you. When you don't know what you don't know and are in a position of influence or power...then you're dangerous.
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Post by Slinger on Oct 9, 2020 12:13:37 GMT
My "rules," were pretty much these:
Know your limitations, but know that many of those limitations are actually opportunities to learn interesting new stuff (when you can free up the time).
Keep a great phone/email book containing the name of everyone who has ever assisted you in any way, and know when to ask for help with stuff you don't know ...yet.
Always get to work 10-15 minutes early so you're sitting at your desk with no nasty surprises waiting and a cup of coffee in your hand while everyone else is rushing in and trying to answer their phone while taking their coat off.
Never trust anyone who doesn't have at least some degree of impostor syndrome, because it can mean that they think they actually do know everything. These people are often dangerous.
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Post by MartinT on Oct 9, 2020 12:41:05 GMT
Thank you all, your replies make great reading and I found myself nodding in agreement along the way. Paul's point about coming in early with coffee in hand before starting work has often got me going in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Mike mentioned COVID and that has pretty much changed the landscape of education this year - not just for IT, of course, but it has certainly hit us hard. We could never have predicted the enormity of changes that have forced upon us things that might have taken a few years to implement but which had to be done pretty much on the spot. Office 365, Exchange Online, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, Adobe Cloud to ensure that everything is joined up and truly available everywhere; a much fatter internet line and new Wi-Fi system to cope with the sheer amount of traffic in both directions; a new SAN disk storage system, new backup processes, webcams in every classroom, new interactive whiteboards, laptops and iPads for remote workers, endless training, it just goes on.
I didn't help myself by changing jobs in May so that all of my introductory work was done remotely. At this rate of compression, I feel that I could achieve all my targets in the one year rather than the four I have left until retirement!
Paul is right, imposter syndrome is always just around the corner.
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Post by jandl100 on Oct 9, 2020 14:06:58 GMT
My goodness, Adrian ajski2fly, what a story. I know I could never have coped with or survived even a fraction of your experiences at work. I wouldn't even have attempted it. Now I understand why you 'burned out' to a degree. The body isn't designed to cope with that level of ongoing stress. I was way more chilled, only really stressed occasionally and for short periods. Thank goodness! |
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Post by ajski2fly on Oct 9, 2020 14:39:44 GMT
My goodness, Adrian ajski2fly , what a story. I know I could never have coped with or survived even a fraction of your experiences at work. I wouldn't even have attempted it. Now I understand why you 'burned out' to a degree. The body isn't designed to cope with that level of ongoing stress. I was way more chilled, only really stressed occasionally and for short periods. Thank goodness! Funny Jerry, I did not really think about it at the time, the 5 years on the credit/debit card systems the East End of London from '86 to '92 were quite interesting at times. We had as I said quarterly releases, and then layered on top of these running in parallel were major system(s) upgrades/integrations, often they were migrations from a particular architecture or system to another replacing existing and adding new functionality. So at some point both a quarterly release and major system upgrade would go live together, so layers of code would be merged as necessary. Parallel production testing was really fun, we took an image of ALL the system(s) inputs for a day, (online, transactions, data files of all sorts, databases etc) and all the resulting outputs (files, databases, reports, interface files, data steams you name it). We then set up a mirror of the existing production environment on a dedicated test system(S)/platform(S) and would migrate any data, data file changes, and database changes to support the next releases functionality and code, often we would build our own migration tools and software to do so. We then ran the whole days processing and nightly batch runs emulating the production run that had previously run live in production, we set the system(s) date to the original run date. Then we ran a host of file and data comparison tools to identify and differences in data, between the original production run and the new one. Every difference found had to then be explained, it was either an expected change or it was a fault/bug, all faults had to be resolved, and this would often requiring re-running some or all of the software suite(s) and re-comparing. Until everything was explained and resolved it could not be signed off and go live, it always did go live on the scheduled date. We just worked longer and longer nights, getting it sorted over the 3 weeks. Myself and 3 colleagues on one of these held the record of the most hours clocked Monday to Friday, we all did more than 100 hours each in the week before it went live. It had to be a small and very skilled team, 2 developers, a senior systems tester, supported by 2 operational support people to run jobs and systems. Often we would get a London cab home, 40 or 50 miles away, at between 1 & 2 in the night and come back on the first train and start work again by 7:30am. When I look back on it I really don't know how we did it, I think we just lived on adrenaline, take aways and comradeship. Mental really!!! |
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Post by MikeMusic on Oct 9, 2020 14:51:12 GMT
When I started my own business I had bugger all idea about running a business. Trained in sales, quite well it turned out, I jumped in and learned as I went along. Seemed to be a good idea to have an accountant so I got one after a while Where are your copy invoices- he said Do I need them ? er yes, oh. Many other things too. One I still remember We used to print loads of manuals and Thorn EMI became a big customer. They asked why we didn't supply a delivery note. I was affronted they didn't trust us but I worked out how to do it and supplied a delivery note. A while later I realised all deliveries had to have a delivery note - duh Visiting Sharp in Manchester I saw a delivery from us that looked like it had been through a war. I asked what happened. Oh, this is normal, we expect to lose manuals from you (!) Our packing changed the next day so each package was bomb proof. I had no idea that the overnight service didn't treat our wonderful boxes with great care..... Thinking computers were the way forward (in a little print company, what an idiot  ) I asked one of our customers to write us a suite of programmes to run the business. Based on dBase II it took months to get to me and months to debug with me as the debugger. So bad I went to Kingston Poly on a 2 day dBase II course. Showed my wonder package to the teacher who was gob smacked to see how horribly bad it was. What good old John worked out was that if something didn't work you just bung in and Endif and/or Enddo or 2 or 3 or 4 until it did. I decided to correct it myself. Not so clever for a bloke supposed to be running his own business. Fixing one bit often caused other problems Months later I had it running almost perfectly and started adding modules to enable other items to be produced and as above wrote the delivery note module. The business was very successful and we were often swamped with work I looked around and to my great delight discovered W.Edwards Deming Long story short we did around twice the work with half the people. Having been treated badly, I thought by my previous employers I decided I would always treat my guys well. Think it was the third time that one diabetic guy got pissed and had a day or three off that I would not pay sick pay until six months. That was useful. Classic from one God squad guy when reminded that we didn't pay sick pay under 6 months If I'd know that I would have come in There could be more if you're really bad |
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Post by Slinger on Oct 9, 2020 15:32:53 GMT
One IT job I had (before I started playing at being a contractor) was as an "IT Assistant," at the head office of a multi-branch retail company. I ended up writing UNIX code and raw SQL queries to extract sales info from a SCO Unix box (in CSV format) and then transforming that information into multiple and bespoke reports using templates I developed in FoxPro 2.6 for Windoze. I didn't know how to do any of that when I took the job, nor was it actually a part of the job I signed up for. It was a heck of a learning curve, I was entirely self-taught from manuals and the internet, and it was all occasioned by a series of the usual " can we do this?" questions aimed at my boss, whose speciality was Electronic POS systems. Our main job was, in fact managing the conversion of the company to Electronic Point Of Sale (EPOS). Brief explanation here: The structure was that I had a boss, and her boss was the Financial Director for the company, then came the two MDs, but we both also dealt with the MDs on a one-to-one, first-name basis. The one thing I wrote that really blew the directors' minds was a system I wrote which not only pulled the sales data every night when the shop branches were polled for it, but then, in FoxPro (my own copy I should probably add) subtracted the day's sales from the prior stock levels of over 30,000 products across all of our branches, separated out which items needed topping up because they'd reached a pre-determined replenishment level, selected the correct suppliers, and then faxed those suppliers overnight (I made FoxPro work the fax machine too, yes, fax, it was the 1990s but it might as well have been the stone-age) with a sales order to each supplier for each individual branch, the template for which was also designed in FoxPro. Apart from it being much faster, and much more accurate it saved long, standard-rate, phone calls, as everything was done overnight and also saved the buyers and their secretaries fielding long, daily phone calls. The reason they were a bit stunned was because it wasn't something they'd asked us to investigate, it was an innovation that I'd come up with, and built on the QT, and I was able to present it to them as a fait accompli. To help with inter-branch comms I also implemented and maintained the company intranet for internal branch mail etc. Oh, and I wrote the staff training manual for the new electronic tills. They didn't quite upgrade from Arkwright specials, but it was close.  So from next to nothing I taught myself enough UNIX, a lot of SQL, a heck of lot of FoxPro, and learned how to set up an intranet. Oh, and I built their prototype website, which, by the time I left, was fielding emails from six of the seven continents. We didn't trade much with Antarctica. I suppose, via the training manual I also became, albeit briefly, a technical writer of sorts too. And I published the little company magazine. I've just remembered that. They loved it when I stuck them with the bill for an A3 inkjet. They liked the mag though. My "pressure" was 100% self-induced, and I thoroughly enjoyed it for the most part.  I was then made redundant, and my job title went to someone whose answer to everything PC-related was " reboot" or " reinstall Windows." For anything more complex they got contracted outside help for, one assumes, a lot less than they had ended up paying me. The IT manager, my boss, had already been replaced, by a very nice lady who used to manage one of our stores. and I wasn't even given a sniff at the job. That should have told me something. Sorry, that was long, boring, and rambling. I don't think I've ever written everything down about that job in one go before, and I was having fun reading it back. Please ignore. My actual point, if there was to be one, was that thing I said earlier about knowing one's limitations, but also realising that they don't necessarily have to be immutable limits. |
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Post by ajski2fly on Oct 9, 2020 16:10:45 GMT
Sounds like the JFDI approach, well done. |
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Post by jandl100 on Oct 9, 2020 16:59:33 GMT
Sorry, that was long, boring, and rambling. No,no. (You don't think I actually read it, do you? I gave up about half way through the 2nd sentence. ) |
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Post by MartinT on Oct 9, 2020 17:15:36 GMT
Great stories, chaps, keep them coming!
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Post by John on Oct 9, 2020 17:21:21 GMT
When at NAS(National Autistic Society) I was managing 13 projects some of them with some very complex people. Most of my time was attending meetings that could be quite intense and dealing with just stupidity from a few individuals due to previous poor management.
When I first started I was manging just 2 projects with better pay so a big change in demand. The previous managers all got burned out with stress. Towards the end I was just surviving and not really coping with the stress anymore. I used to dread the restructures. It just meant more duties with unrealistic targets, no support from up top and less money. In the end they wanted to add another day service with 50 clients I decided to leave. I have no regrets leaving.
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Post by MartinT on Oct 9, 2020 18:00:32 GMT
You mention restructures or the wonderful 'Business Process Re-engineering' (a euphemism for streamlining by making jobs redundant), I have been involved in three such projects in my lifetime, and all three were abject failures. Name and shame: the consulting companies were Andersen Consulting, Meritus and Cambridge Associates. In each case, I was made a part of the team and did my best to really try to improve the company. However, it became clear to me each time that there was a hidden agenda which would never be admitted: never mind shiny new processes, who can we get rid of?
To summarise three sorry tales that caused me a great deal of personal stress and disillusionment, the outcome was always that key personnel and their very important processes were chopped, systems were arbitrarily changed (for instance, in my first BPR the transaction system was changed from Oracle to SAP, at great cost and heartache, for no good reason at all except 'change'), job titles were reworked (always a good way to claim redundant positions) and huge stresses placed on the workforce. Two of the companies involved went on to go bust and one pretty much reversed all the changes made in later years.
All three consulting companies walked away with sodding great pay cheques, Leaving a ridiculously large amount of useless documentation. I still have presentations from all three in my cache of 'stuff that may be useful one day'. Never again, and my contempt for most consultants remains to this day.
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Post by MikeMusic on Oct 9, 2020 18:06:20 GMT
One IT job I had (before I started playing at being a contractor) was as an "IT Assistant," at the head office of a multi-branch retail company. I ended up writing UNIX code and raw SQL queries to extract sales info from a SCO Unix box (in CSV format) and then transforming that information into multiple and bespoke reports using templates I developed in FoxPro 2.6 for Windoze. I didn't know how to do any of that when I took the job, nor was it actually a part of the job I signed up for. It was a heck of a learning curve, I was entirely self-taught from manuals and the internet, and it was all occasioned by a series of the usual " can we do this?" questions aimed at my boss, whose speciality was Electronic POS systems. Our main job was, in fact managing the conversion of the company to Electronic Point Of Sale (EPOS). Brief explanation here: The structure was that I had a boss, and her boss was the Financial Director for the company, then came the two MDs, but we both also dealt with the MDs on a one-to-one, first-name basis. The one thing I wrote that really blew the directors' minds was a system I wrote which not only pulled the sales data every night when the shop branches were polled for it, but then, in FoxPro (my own copy I should probably add) subtracted the day's sales from the prior stock levels of over 30,000 products across all of our branches, separated out which items needed topping up because they'd reached a pre-determined replenishment level, selected the correct suppliers, and then faxed those suppliers overnight (I made FoxPro work the fax machine too, yes, fax, it was the 1990s but it might as well have been the stone-age) with a sales order to each supplier for each individual branch, the template for which was also designed in FoxPro. Apart from it being much faster, and much more accurate it saved long, standard-rate, phone calls, as everything was done overnight and also saved the buyers and their secretaries fielding long, daily phone calls. The reason they were a bit stunned was because it wasn't something they'd asked us to investigate, it was an innovation that I'd come up with, and built on the QT, and I was able to present it to them as a fait accompli. To help with inter-branch comms I also implemented and maintained the company intranet for internal branch mail etc. Oh, and I wrote the staff training manual for the new electronic tills. They didn't quite upgrade from Arkwright specials, but it was close. So from next to nothing I taught myself enough UNIX, a lot of SQL, a heck of lot of FoxPro, and learned how to set up an intranet. Oh, and I built their prototype website, which, by the time I left, was fielding emails from six of the seven continents. We didn't trade much with Antarctica. I suppose, via the training manual I also became, albeit briefly, a technical writer of sorts too. And I published the little company magazine. I've just remembered that. They loved it when I stuck them with the bill for an A3 inkjet. They liked the mag though. My "pressure" was 100% self-induced, and I thoroughly enjoyed it for the most part. I was then made redundant, and my job title went to someone whose answer to everything PC-related was " reboot" or " reinstall Windows." For anything more complex they got contracted outside help for, one assumes, a lot less than they had ended up paying me. The IT manager, my boss, had already been replaced, by a very nice lady who used to manage one of our stores. and I wasn't even given a sniff at the job. That should have told me something. Sorry, that was long, boring, and rambling. I don't think I've ever written everything down about that job in one go before, and I was having fun reading it back. Please ignore. My actual point, if there was to be one, was that thing I said earlier about knowing one's limitations, but also realising that they don't necessarily have to be immutable limits. We are brothers in FoxPro ! Except you knew what you were doing Amazing the amount of great people that get used, burned, burned out, rejected, made redundant and more And still the arseholes run the business I did it the unusual way. Start my own business as I couldn't work for idiots. Success. Yay ! Sell the business and not agree with 90% of what the new owners did |
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Post by MartinT on Oct 13, 2020 6:52:45 GMT
Every time I have a stressful day at work now, I just recite in my mind "four years to go, tick-tock". It really helps to know I have a target retirement date that's reachable - hopefully before I die!
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Post by MikeMusic on Oct 13, 2020 9:11:33 GMT
You will have it sorted the day before and wonder if you might stay on with so little to do |
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) I asked one of our customers to write us a suite of programmes to run the business.
