Where have all the cowboys gone?

No, I don’t mean like the song, I mean, where have all the geeks gone in IT?

I was reading an article / blog / posting about Developers vs. Coders, and boy was that guy right on! His point is that we don’t have Developers anymore, we have coders. Developers know the (dare I say a term used around here a lot) end-to-end picture of the problem whereas coders are people who come to work, code VB, Java, etc all day and go home, never to work on a computer until they return to work. The business I work for is loaded with coders, and very few Developers.

Geeks, Similar to Developers who know their whole environment, Geeks are given a problem in IT, and can usually understand the whole picture (Network, Server, App, O/S, Hardware, etc), and wrap their brains around it to come up with the proper solution.

What happened to all the geeks in IT? Ithink they quit and went to work for Google?

What I find we have are a bunch of IT people that know little or nothing of IT. This has always been an issue in the Microsoft space, with MCSE badges flashed at a whim, but it’s getting worse every day.

For example, lets look at the people who work on Windows XP/NT/200x. I am currently working on an issue with a memory leak in a vendors program. Now memory leaks are a bitch, and tough to find. Try to find a regular IT person who can find the memory leak is close to impossible. Whats Ironic about this particular topic, is in the NT 4.0 Resource Kit Book that MS used to sell, they spent almost two(2) chapters explaining how to use all the tools to find memory leaks, and even gave you a sample program that simulated a leaky program. You think any MCSE has ever read that book? Unlikely.

I know ‘true’ computer types don’t like to see the MCSE badge promoted because they feel it doesn’t stand for anything, and I tend to agree, to a large extent. Most MCSE’s couldn’t troubleshoot their way out of a paper bag without calling Microsoft first.

But this isn’t just true of MS type, some, and very few Linux types have limited knowledge of what they are truly working on. There are some linux types that site outside my office, that similar to coders, will SSH into a box, run a predefined script, copy some files, and that is the extent of their knowledge, yet they are considered IT.

So where have all the Geeks in IT gone?

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