IT fixes peoples computers. Software Developers don't do that. We aren't Network Admins, we don't know how to set up or fix AD and we don't manage hardware. IT is a different field. I write software to process data and mostly I don't interact with hardware or troubleshooting arbitrary software directly. If I am offering support I am a level above IT. I understand that IT needs to be done but it is a very different job and should be treated that way.
... and that is wrong with the software development today. Our generations of developers started with playing games, using computer, reinstalling, configuring computers, then we started to mess with computers, os, hardware, network, routers, programing came in somewhere in the middle (we wanted to make a game, demo scene, ), cleaning malware, then we started automating the computer tasks, learned multiple programing languages with a clear vision - "I want to learn C, coz then I can do anything" :D, switches multiple computers, security started to become an issue (winnuke (tm) :D), riding the irc splits, taking over irc channels for fun, started to study networks at low level, got first data loss, learned to rescue data, switching controllers on hard disk, studying prolog as it was hilarious, got first job, ... when we started to develop commercial software we had accumulated decade of knowledge from multiple platforms and OSs (I have wrote my first program in simons basic on c64 at age of 11, put together my first 386 from components). We have tinkered with anything coming under our hands, software development was just another skill and we use our knowledge from IT in development and vice versa.
Today? At 20... "what will I be doing for a living? Hm, I did some html and copy pasted js, I WILL BE A DEVELOPER and be RICH". Went to college, learned to develop. But I don't have any foundation, web and sql is all I know, and I am sleeping with Programming patterns book under my pillow and looking at latest programming hype (silently laughing at year of nosql databases and year of blockchain, now AI, and eagerly waiting for the next silver bullet that will solve ALL our problems :D)
IT is not a different field, but the level of today knowledge IS, also the attitude.
A friend of mine is having a successful software company and he said to me once: "If I get a guy with the attitude and background we had, I will hire him even if I wont be hiring at that moment. They became so rare, that it is worth having him on a bench, just to be there when you need him".
Why, I have a good view from here :) And I can take great photos of scenery, now I do understand what the photos are showing is not something that everyone would love but still, those are photos, you can shoot the one making them but the scenery is not going to change by that, or we would just shoot all war journalists and there would be no more wars.
But joke aside, what is the issue, do you disagree?
I started on other peoples computers personally. I poked around and played with linux and some networking and when I went to school for it I realized that it was too late to learn it from the ground up. If you are still trying to figure out how a driver is written in C then you aren't up to date on any current programming paradigm. While I get that 20 years ago you needed to care exactly how memory was handled to properly optimize your code, now I am writing data processing jobs that take 10-15 TB of memory spread across 30 computers. If I fuck up 1 MB of ram per computer it really doesn't matter and it is way more efficient to just add another machine rather than pay me for two months of work to fiddle it down to perfect.
The scales I work at are more about Big O than anything. If I make a mistake that is N^2 vs Log N then I wait a week for a job to finish verses 1 hour. That is an issue. If I add on 10 min because I inefficiently use swap space it doesn't matter. I need to pay attention to the higher abstraction rather than the minute details. Sure I can fix a computer but if I do that rather than stopping a job from doing puts across regions it will cost the company 12000 dollars for each hour I am removing malware.
I would argue that demand has increased dramatically, but the supply of natural-born developers (eg. those tinkering since childhood, not just following the money) has not.
In my experience, Software Developers that can't configure/diagnose/fix hardware/networking issues are usually pretty mediocre at development as well. And vice versa for "IT" guys that can't program. Specialization is for insects.
And, like, literally everyone since Adam Smith and his pins.
Assessing how good people are at skill A by trying to determine how good they are at ever-so-slightly-related skill B is what led google and the rest of the valley down the ridiculous problem solving interview quest of the aughts. Take your manhole covers and suck on them!
Abstraction is a skill, one that’s difficult to assess in an hour-long interview, but one which allows me to say “I’m great at C# but I’ll call someone when the printer is broken” - because there are only so many hours in the day.
Rather, we manage peoples computers, and the environment that allows them to function. The misconception that IT is only there to fix, is because we're invisible to you when everything works as expected.
I worked in a tech startup, where everyone did everything, and where doing everything was considered high-status: it meant you were competent at everything. Or perhaps the other way round: trying to avoid any computer-related task, for whatever reason, was perceived as an admission of incompetence, therefore low-status.
(I didn't agree with that philosophy. I am humble enough to admit that I am not an expert at something, e.g. setting up printers; and lazy enough that I want to avoid such work if I can.)
I also worked in a non-tech company with sufficiently large internal software development department, where as a programmer I focused on developing software; and if any part of the technical infrastructure stopped working, I just called the internal tech support.
> where everyone did everything, and where doing everything was considered high-status: it meant you were competent at everything.
In my current (non-IT/software dev) workplace, the CEO and the manager pride themselves on how all our staff can do everything. We're all sold on it with the line that "..all your future employers will be amazed at how much you can do!" Unfortunately, everything we produce is second rate junk as a result of this, as we are "all responsible for quality control," and the customers pay appropriately.
It's not that it doesn't work, clearly it does for some businesses, it's just that someone has to be responsible for making sure that the product is fit to be presented to the customer, and if everyone's running around doing everything, nobody's really doing anything.
I feel your pain. That is exactly where this kind of reasoning goes.
There is always something you don't know, no matter how "senior full-stack" whatever you are. And when that happens, and the company culture does not allow you to admit it, the only solution is to use google, stack exchange, download a book or two, and perhaps ask a friend -- but neither of that makes you an expert overnight (and sometimes "overnight" is literally as much time as the agile process used in your company will give you; just because someone else, who actually is an expert in that stuff, could do that in a day).
The more I know about the things I specialize at, the more I am aware that you can't reach that depth of knowledge and experience by giving three smart questions to the search engine, and reading the three resulting articles. And by analogy, I assume the same is true about some of the things I don't specialize at.
But I have kids to feed, so sometimes I just bite my tongue and produce whatever is possible within given constraints.
This company culture also leads to playing games where everyone claims to believe that of course anyone can easily do anything -- but there are tasks that everyone is trying very hard to avoid: "It's not that I couldn't do that, I am just very busy now working on some other high-priority stuff that only I can do. Perhaps John would like to take this nice and simple task?" "Uhm, I am also in the middle of, uhm, something. Perhaps Joe could do this?" Joe doesn't have a plausible excuse ready (or is not present at the moment), so he is assigned the task. The meeting ends. If anything goes wrong, it's all Joe's fault.
In long term this reinforces the status ladder within the company, because the high-status guys are in the best position to refuse the tasks outside of their field of competence (by claiming they have more important stuff to do); the low-status guys get stuck with the tasks, produce mediocre results, and that is taken as a proof that they really deserved the low status. (If they are inexperienced 20-somethings, they will quite often buy it, and feel guilty about their incompetence. Then some moment later they change job, and realize it was all actually about the company culture.)
I'm at a "tech" place, but we're very small (8 developers).
Laptops, printers, email, document storage and so on is part of the software development team's responsibility -- so we outsource all of it, and spend a little time on it roughly every 6 months for a new system or similar.
"Hey, I can't print". "Here's the helpdesk number for the people we pay for printers". (Some people were annoyed at first, but understood when they saw the developers' salaries compared to what we paid for the "boring" services.)
