Live, from New York… it’s
…… not Steve, because he’s in Massachusetts and can’t leave because of the pandemic.
I’ve enjoyed watching Saturday Night Life for many years. I didn’t start watching it live until the Adam Sandler days, but was able to catch recordings and reruns as far back as the Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd days – which I still think may have been some of the best comedy skits of all time. Frankly, you can’t do much better than Aykroyd’s Super Bass-o-Matic 76 or Murray’s Swill commercials. Honestly, if you haven’t seen them - go watch them. I’ll wait right here – no rush at all.
While there have been some other cult classics and smash hits out of 30 Rockefeller Center’s Studio 8H like Wayne’s World, Toonces the Driving Cat, Massive Headwound Harry, and Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy - none have spoken to me as clearly and directly as Jimmy Fallon’s “Nick Burns: Your Company’s Computer Guy” skits. This one is almost required watching if you’re in IT, so do take a minute to familiarize yourself with the character.
If you’ve seen them, you should remember that the one driving joke in this is that Fallon’s character is a massive jerk. He routinely belittles, castigates, and is generally horrible to his non-IT colleagues. Punctuated by his trademark admonition “Move!”, the character blows his way through an office making everyone around him feel stupid. The real joke is that everyone is looking at Nick Burns and laughing at him because he’s such an antisocial twit.
The thing that you need to pay attention to is best captured by the old idiom “There’s a grain of truth in every joke.” What that means is that for something to be funny there has to be something real in the humor – something the audience can relate to that they recognize from their lives. Otherwise, it’s not funny. If I say to you “It’s the beef, Beck,” you won’t laugh, because it doesn’t mean anything to you; those words have no relationship to your life – but my wife will bust up laughing. Yet millions of people laughed at the Nick Burns skits. They laughed because they got the joke – because they know someone like that from IT.
I want to say that again for the people in the back – enough people could relate to “the jerk from IT” that Saturday Night Live made Nick Burns a recurring character. I was working desktop support when these skits were getting popular, and I laughed right along with them – because I worked with people who could have stood in for Jimmy Fallon if he had a migraine and couldn’t come to work on a given Saturday. I wish that the Nick Burns skits were foreign to me, but they were all too close to home.
This skit makes my blood boil. It’s funny, but I hate that so many people get the joke.
I hope I don’t have to say this next part, but I’m going to because it strikes me that someone in IT who is perpetually condescending and gruff may not be able to parse and accept any nuance. So here it goes: do not be the jerk from IT. If that is even potentially you, if there are any parts of that archetype that ring true for you personally - I want you to do whatever it takes to change right away. In fact, I implore you to be a little introspective and if you see it in your personality or behaviors at all, eradicate it.
I want you to do this for two reasons and I’ll expand on each of them. Simply put: it’s bad for you individually and it’s bad for the entire community of IT professionals. So even if you don’t want to drop the condescension or poor collegiality for your sake - please, please do it for your thousands of colleagues that are actively working to combat the perception that such attitudes and behaviors are endemic to IT teams, because they shouldn’t be.
I can’t make this much simpler: if you’re being abusive, condescending, or a blowhard with your colleagues within or outside of IT, you’re limiting your career options significantly. First off, whether you want to get into a leadership or management position or stay purely technical, you simply cannot get past being in a back-office administrator role without needing to interact with a broader cross-section of your company. And while this shouldn’t be a surprise or news to anyone, those interactions need to be positive. If someone comes away from spending time with you and hopes that it’s a long time before that has to happen again, that perception can spread around the office - and before you know it, you’re that guy from IT. That guy doesn’t get many opportunities to advance.
Let’s reflect for a second on some of my previous posts where I talk about why we have jobs in IT at all: to serve the business we are a part of. That means that the people in marketing that you like to make fun of for not knowing the nuances of configuring VPN are ultimately your customers. For the same reason that if you worked in a bakery you’d want your customers to like you, you should have the same goal working in IT. I believe this so much that now that I run our IT services team, I pay very close attention to customer feedback. It’s a key criterion for promotional opportunities and annual review feedback.
I’ll go a little further: there are few things that get under my skin quite like knowing someone on my team has been rude to or belittled a client of ours. There is no place for that in my organization, and if I find out that you’ve done so your next stop is my office. It will severely limit your opportunities as long as I’m in your management chain if there isn’t a change in attitude. I take this far enough that I don’t permit my team to bemoan customers even when we’re just in our offices – you never know who can overhear. I view this as basic professionalism, and I take it very seriously. I can teach you to fix most things, but I cannot teach you to not be a jerk. You have to not be a jerk on your own.
While this article is about people being jerks, I cannot endorse jerk chicken resoundingly enough. I love jerk chicken, French fries and a Ting on the beach.
If for some reason you don’t care about your own career prospects, I beseech you – please turn it around for [DA1] the sake of the thousands of true professionals within IT that are looking to serve our users with competency, compassion, and courtesy around the world. As long as you go around scoffing at people in your company, the rest of us will never be rid of the perception that such behavior is commonplace in our field. By continuing to be the office jerk, you are actively harming people you don’t know and may never meet. While you may not think that’s realistic, I can tell you a real story from my past that can illustrate my point.
While I was working as a Systems Administrator, I ended up being assigned to a project with some line-of-business stakeholders and showed up what I thought was the first meeting only to find out that it was in fact at least the sixth meeting. It turns out that the organizer had intentionally not invited me to earlier meetings because they didn’t want IT to tell them all the ways their ideas wouldn’t work before they even got off the ground. I told them that there was no way that I would approach the project that way, and I got overt and obvious skepticism from the project leader. After the meeting I asked them why they thought that I would have tried to prevent the project from taking off, and was told how at their last two employers every interaction with IT was like signing up to be told how stupid they were.
So here I am, someone they’ve never met before who really wants to help this project succeed, being treated like an obstacle because the project leader had become prejudiced against IT professionals - even though I had no part in building that perception. It took me a few months to win the respect and trust of that project leader, but we ended up doing some pretty good work together. Today, he calls me directly just to chat and see how things are; he’s a colleague and friend, but I started with a relationship deficit that I never should have to work my way out of.
For those reasons - and a ton more - I hope that you aren’t the “jerk from IT.” My assumption is that virtually everyone who reads this will not be that person, and so this may be 1600 wasted words on you; but if one person reads this who is trying to impress everyone with how smart he is by making those around him feel less so and they change how they’re acting in the office, then this post has been worth it.
In the end, all any of us should be striving for is to help each other out – especially these days. Kindness matters, and I hope that we can shift the perception of IT from Nick Burns to something much more agreeable.
Questions for reflection:
How do you tell if you’re the “jerk from IT”? What do you about it if it turns out that you are?
Have you ever met someone in IT that seems to fit the “Nick Burns” stereotype? How was working with them?
How do we as a community of IT Pros combat some of the widespread perception that “jerk” is the predominant IT personality type?
