Actual Requirements For Tech Expertise

Companies say they need tech experts. And I have no doubt that this is what they truly think. They write all sorts of fancy job descriptions that sound deliciously complex, only for you to realize, during the interview - or worse, during the first week at work - that their needs are far more basic.

What causes this phenomenon? I submit that this is largely found outside of the tech sector. Companies dealing in food, logistics, healthcare and the like, that find themselves in the position of having to undergo some kind of digital transformation.

In other words, get with the times. Keep up with the Joneses. Move with the world before it moves on without you.

This is what I think is happening. Companies that are largely traditional (with very traditional salary ranges) are finding, to their consternation, that the average techie earns significantly more than their average senior executive - even those techies that don't get hired by banks or Big Tech. In order to hire your run-of-the-mill tech grunt in-house, they'd have to fork out amounts they're not accustomed to.

So what do they do? They raise the price a little more, and ask for a tech expert. After all, if they're going to pay that kind of money, they might as well make it worth the price, eh? That's consumer mentality for you. No, I'm not mocking these companies. Not exactly. That's a perfectly reasonable line of thought if your business is outside of the tech sector.

Hiring the cream of the crop.

But the uncomfortable truth is, these companies don't need experts. They don't need geniuses who can invert a binary tree on the spot, or wax lyrical about recursion. They don't need database specialists who can perform Relational Algebra, or extremely experienced rock-star devs who can name you all the best working practices in tech, in the last decade.

And even in the extremely unlikely scenario that they did need someone like that, chances are such a prodigy would prefer to be climbing the ranks within the tech sector itself, not outside of it.

You see, the main obstacle isn't money, or even the willingness to spend it. The obstacles are both cultural and structural.

Companies that are used to doing things the low-tech way are going to have to get used to doing things at a higher level. It's not just a matter of hiring the tech expert; the company, as a collective whole, needs to up their game. And that is the main sticking point. Techies within the tech industry are used to having their methods accepted. They're certainly rarely in the position where they actually have to justify the merits of technology to their bosses, or aggressively push new ways of doing things. Because in the tech sector, change is practically a way of life.

Outside of the tech sector? Not so much.

Case in point...

An ex-colleague was recently showing me the advances that the company had made in technology. Instead of using a physical punch-card system, now they use a biometric facial recognition system.

As outdated as this machine.

Oh, wow.

Using advanced technology to carry out the antiquated practice of clocking in and out of your workplace, as opposed to using an equally antiquated method of doing so? The technology had changed; the culture hadn't.

I mean, what's the difference here? Whether you're killing trees for paper or merely consuming bandwidth and electricity, you're still satisfying HR's need to have everybody conform to the same work timings. It's still a pig; you're merely putting lipstick on it.

What do these companies need, if not an expert?

Well, just to be clear, I'm not saying that experts aren't useful. I'm saying that were they to be hired by these companies, they would be criminally underused. And that's not the company's fault, exactly. After all, if you're not a tech company and therefore are not accustomed to the way tech companies do things, then a reckless wholesale overhaul of processes has the potential to be a disaster of horrendous proportions. Tech companies do things a certain way because it makes sense to do them a certain way. Other companies, within their own industries, have practices that are a requirement of industry-specific standards. Copying blindly helps absolutely nobody. Useful practices can and should be adopted; the trick is figuring which practices are useful.

But for a start, hiring experts when you have no real need to, and probably can't afford to give them the time and autonomy required for them to make a real difference, simply isn't ideal. Companies convince themselves that they need experts, but that's only because they don't fully grasp just what technology is capable of, and what those experts could accomplish as opposed to the relatively basic nature of the company's operations.

Really, do you need experts to set up a biometric facial recognition system for the purpose of making sure your employees clock in and out on time? That seems extraordinarily petty.

So what do companies actually need to bring up the next technological rung? Well, for starters, someone more well-versed in technology than the average employee would do. And if we're going to be honest, that might not actually mean an expert.

To a layperson, tech
is like witchcraft.

Simply put, some companies are at a technological level where the concept of MS Excel pivot tables is a cause for a Wow response. The tech expert, at this point, is the modern-day equivalent of Hank Morgan appearing to ignorant Englishmen as a powerful sorcerer. What techies do (even the experts) isn't magic, but if you're sufficiently backward in mindset and technology, it may as well be.

A Story

Last year, I was hired by an organization on the recommendation of one of my ex-bosses. He told the Director that what the organization needed at this point wasn't a specialist or an expert, but a generalist. I wasn't sure what this meant at the time, but it wouldn't take me long to find out.

Out of the blue, an issue came up. Apparently, the employees operating the end-of-day sales report module at all the outlets were having trouble opening the report, which was in MS Excel format. They did not want to use the Office 365 web-based interface to open the report, as this would require one extra step, and worse, would actually require them to learn something new. As MS Excel licenses were in short supply, the Infrastructure Manager proposed that I rewrite the report in PDF format (which would open in any browser) while he installed Adobe Acrobat Reader on all the machines, and trained the personnel to use it.

Just use tables.

I did him one better. They just needed the damn report to open up right away without any extra steps? All they needed were HTML tables. Even if they were using bloody Internet Explorer, it would still work. The Infrastructure Manager wouldn't have to go through the nightmarish task of installing software on all machines at all outlets across the island, and no extra training was required.

They thought it would take a week, or at least a few days. I took all of twenty minutes to write the code, and presented it in the morning. The outlet staff were satisfied, and the Infrastructure Manager was off the hook.

Duplicitous of me? Very. But at one fell swoop, I had scored a few goals. One; I'd met the objectives of the outlet staff in a way that inconvenienced them the least. Two; I had saved the Infrastructure Manager a shit-ton of labor.

But I digress; the point of this wasn't to tell you what a sneaky SOB I can be, but rather to illustrate that this would not have been possible had I been a tech expert. A tech expert would have found it unacceptable that staff weren't willing to pick up new technologies (and bear in mind that at this point, cloud-based software isn't exactly new) and refused to enable it. No, I was a run-of-the-mill techie with a healthy respect for best practices in tech, but also a willingness to disregard them when the situation called for it.

The fact that I had years of experience in Desktop Support and already learned (the hard way) about people who refuse to learn new ways of doing things, certainly didn't hurt.

In Summary

For companies outside of the tech sector, hiring tech experts is difficult, and in some cases, sub-optimal. Context is everything. Hiring has to be done in accordance to actual needs and not a wish-list.

Your non-expert,
T___T