What Termites Taught Me About IT Careers
I hate termites. I know, I know... you come here for IT career thoughts, but trust me on this when I say that termites reminded me of an important lesson that I think we could all use a refresher on.
Termites. Just chewing straight up a pressure treated post. Sweet. My spring was about to get fun!
Just as lockdown was sweeping the country in March of this year, I went outside to enjoy an unseasonably warm day. While the kids played in the front yard, I leaned against the post at the bottom of the railing going up my front porch steps. I heard a cracking sound, and the post snapped in two, and dirt fell out – followed shortly thereafter by small white bugs. I had termites. As if being locked in the house for a few weeks wasn’t bad enough, now I had to deal with the horror of getting a termite company to come out and treat the property.
Over the next week I got quotes from a few and picked one that offered a great value. They came out and installed the traps without issue and were friendly and vigilant about maintaining proper distance. After that was done, I called a handyman that we’ve used multiple times in the past to come and repair my front steps. I had already sawed a good portion of the railing off, making sure to remove all the parts I could that were infested with the termites. I was very fortunate that they hadn’t gotten any further into the structure – they were working their way up the handrail towards the main body of the porch. Had they gotten further, I would have been in deep trouble.
This is an actual picture of my old staircase in a pile. Note the insect damage to the pressure treated stringer. Pressure treated lumber, you may or may not know, isn’t supposed to be susceptible to insect damage.
This made my day. So much fun.
The handyman came out and after assessing it said it would be best to just start fresh since the stringers had been chewed up a bit – despite them being pressure treated, they were old enough that it was wearing off. I agreed, wanting to start from a position of zero insect damage. We agreed on a price of about $1400, and he came back two or three weeks later, dismantled my stairs, and started putting up the new ones. A day later he had finished and after he left (I was busy working inside while he was building), I came out to find the shoddiest job I’d ever seen on stairs. The stairs were uneven (both left to right and the rise between each step), the handrails were bowed out, and the top step had a weird gap on it that made it wavy. It was a horrible mess.
I lived with it over the summer, but every time I saw them I got angrier and angrier at how I ended up with a bad set of steps that I paid a ton of cash for. One beautiful summer day, I was enduring my seventh or eighth Zoom call of the day, and was longingly looking outside, and I saw my amazing octogenarian next door neighbors walking by (side note: I hope to be half as active as they are at 85) and they stopped and the husband made this wavy motion with his hand… while obviously looking at my steps. His wife shook her head and they both continued their walk. I saw him a day or two later as we were both mowing our lawns, and I asked him what his impression of the stairs was. “The damn things are cockeyed,” he remarked flatly - part of his charm is his directness.
About this time, when I would take walks around the neighborhood and saw a beautiful new deck going up at a house that belongs to some neighbors my wife is friends with. So, after being angry about my terrible stairs for six months, I reached out to the contractor that built our neighbor’s deck and contracted with him to re-do them as well as upgrade some of the rest of the porch. Lo and behold - we now have a nice, level set of steps that look great from the street. Not only that, but no one will trip on them, and they will last years and years (since they’re made almost entirely of plastic now). I have also started discussions with our new contractor about expanding our rear deck and maybe installing a patio.
Now that we’re to the end of this particular home improvement story, did you spot the IT career lesson in the story? If not, let me break this down into some simple components:
I had termites that damaged my stairs.
I needed my stairs replaced and it was going to be expensive.
I hired someone to do it I had used before.
They did a bad job.
I hired someone else that did good work for my neighbor to redo the stairs at additional cost.
I didn’t ever call the first person for anything again.
How about now? Do you see it more clearly? Still no? Okay - let me keep the exact same order, but use fancier business words to describe each of these steps. Maybe that will bring it into focus.
I experienced an impact due to adverse conditions. (I had termites that damaged my stairs.)
I needed to invest in a capital project to reposition my organization. (I needed my stairs replaced and it was going to be expensive.)
I secured a seasoned project manager. (I hired someone to do it I had used before.)
The project went sideways and results were poor. (They did a bad job.)
I contacted my network to find a qualified project manager to rescue the project. (I hired someone else that did good work for my neighbor to redo the stairs at additional cost.)
I fired the original project manager. (I didn’t ever call the first person for anything again.)
I don’t know how the project went south. His LinkedIn photo was spectacular!
I’m sure you see it now, right? You could just as easily have replaced “stairs” with “hybrid cloud infrastructure”. This is a story that plays out in IT shops every day around the world. A project gets screwed up, and the person responsible finds themselves in hot water – or even looking for their next gig as a result.
I’m always trying to learn how to get better and use any experience to try to continuously improve. So now that we see the connection between my porch and a major IT project, the question as I see it is, “what are the takeaways from this that we can use?” After thinking about it for a bit, I see two important things that can be of use to me (and hopefully to you) as we both manage priorities and projects in our professional lives.
First, never forget that you are serving customers, and those customers ultimately have a choice to work with you. If you think that’s not true, then you should talk to some of the sales teams at SaaS companies who are trained to sell to the line-of-business owner and ignore IT entirely. IT teams should be cognizant of the fact that in many cases, the business owners have an option to engage outside providers instead of looking internally. Of course, in the most basic cases, this is with outsourcing of the entire IT group which is an increasingly common model, especially in healthcare and education.
The important thing to remember is to treat your internal constituents as valued customers and strive to deliver them great results. Remember: at the end of the day, you are compensated for doing a job for them – and they have every right to expect that it will be done competently by a professional. Ultimately, your employer doesn’t need to deal with subpar results and in the long run – they won’t. Sure, you may skate one or two times when the task doesn’t truly matter, but when it’s something big, important, and visible, you may not get a second strike before they move on and find someone (or a whole new outfit) that can do a better job.
That brings us nicely to my second point: prioritize the visible and expensive projects. They are the ones that are getting reported on and have visibility to upper levels of management. Often you get a clue as to which projects these are, because words like “strategic priority” are thrown around. On my house, the front steps are a very visible component of the house. Every visitor and person driving by is going to see them, so I care about the quality of work much more than the wire management going into the electrical panel in my garage. Businesses are no different. If you’re working on the platform that your company will use for something as essential and customer-impacting as taking payments or processing financial information, there is an expectation for the project to deliver excellence. This is in contrast to an internal tool that is used by the finance group to review SKUs shipped in the past week – there may be a tolerance for that to be slow or buggy in a way that would never be acceptable for a customer-facing project.
Time is a finite resource, and because it is the only resource you can’t ever get more of you should apply yours as much as possible only where it makes sense - so prioritize your time and effort accordingly. Generally, what is good for your company is going to be good for your career, so act accordingly! If you happen to get put on a project that can be highly visible, you should make sure you knock it out of the park. If you are able to put your best work on the most important and most visible projects, that does a few things for you. First, it ensures that you have the opportunity to get your best work noticed by people who have lots of influence and make decisions in your company. Second, because those projects are so visible, it means they are likely really important for the company overall. It’s on projects like these that you have an opportunity to make a really positive impact on your company’s operations, profit, or reputation in the marketplace. That’s certainly something you’d like to have on your resume.
Oh, I have no doubt it causes some awe.
None at all.
Above all else, I hope what you take away from this is that if you have the opportunity to work on a visible capital project, you have a real opportunity to improve, maintain, or damage your reputation – and the majority of that is going to come as people see the output of your work. Act accordingly and make sure you make it the best you can possibly do so you capitalize on that opportunity to improve your reputation. To look at it another way, I’m certainly not going to recommend that old handyman to anyone I know ever again, but I’m definitely going to rehire and recommend the professional who made my steps look better than they did before the termites ever decided to use them as a Golden Corral buffet.
Oh - and if you take two things away from this, the other one should be: “get termite traps installed.” Trust me on this one.
Questions for thought:
Have you ever been put on a project that you knew the top-level executives in your company cared about?
Do you prioritize your tasks based on their importance to the company?
If you aren’t sure what tasks or projects are more important to your employer, how do you think you can find out?
