While being part of an intense brainstorming with co-workers whose work you value very much (and hopefully who value yours...) is indeed really rewarding, it is a job where congratulations are quite rare.
In fact, each and every member of your family and/or friends (those ones not part of the geeky crowd of course) think your daily work consists in installing windows XP on computers and debugging the latest Canon printer.
The main issue with this is not the incommodities of the week-ends spent fixing your family's computers (well not only that...), but the real problem is that the role of IT workers is not at all clear for the society we all live in.
For a little comparison, while mostly none of us has ever put a foot in a sewer system, we have quite a good idea of what it looks like (maybe a bit false, but yet a good grasp) and we do recognize the utility of having people working on it... and moreover we won't ask these people if we know them to come home for a good dinner and a toilet flusher replacement.
Difficulty is that, even inside the IT field, it is quite hard to keep on the track. You can never rest and think you've learnt everything for the coming ten years (but that's the beauty of it).
As the Nautilus' motto "Mobilis in mobili" expressed it, IT field is constantly moving in a moving society...
The problem being IT should be part of the society and not a wonderful submarine lost in the society's deep sea...
So we have two separate moving things:
- A ocean of People's view on IT, not even close to the point. Yet this view is shifting; but at a slow pace.
- A flow of the IT field, moving at a great speed, with such a thick hull that nobody can imagine what's inside.
What do you think "normal folks" think about when they see commercials about blade servers on TV? What do you think they'll understand when they'll be served Web 3.0 and SOA 3.0 next to Windows Vista Extra and diapers?
IT vocabulary has become so gibberish and acronyms so much the focus of IT business that nobody, except if properly documented, can have the equivalent of the grasp we have of the people working in sewers...
So I urge each and every IT worker in the world to go out of its dark and badly ventilated office and explain to the world that his job is as valuable as any other in the world, and using as many metaphors as needed, to explain what he's really doing!
This way we'll be able to synchronize a bit these flows...and integrate IT in our society.
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