IT Manager

KNOWN ALIASES / DISGUISES:

MARKET AVERAGE

$135,000

* Varies wildly based on company size, location, and the actual technical competency required (often inversely proportional to the latter).

"A premium paid for perpetual middle-management buffer duty, absorbing user complaints from below and unrealistic demands from above."

[DIAGNOSIS]Often caught between obsolete legacy systems, unmanageable user expectations, and executive demands for 'innovation' with no budget. They are the first to be downsized when 'digital transformation' initiatives fail or a cheaper, cloud-based solution is adopted, rendering their on-premise expertise redundant.

"Their duties include creating job posts, interviewing and hiring qualified candidates, relaying information between upper management and department employees and managing the department budget."

OTIOSE TRANSLATION

Recruiting warm bodies to babysit legacy systems, then translating executive whims into incomprehensible directives for those unfortunate enough to report to them, all while battling accounting for a budget that perpetually shrinks.

"IT managers are responsible for planning, supervising, and managing all activities related to a company’s computer and information systems, which includes managing IT team members, identifying IT training opportunities and overseeing security measures."

OTIOSE TRANSLATION

Aggregating vendor proposals for systems nobody asked for, micro-managing underpaid technicians, approving 'training' that consists of mandatory compliance videos, and forwarding phishing emails to the security team without understanding them.

"An IT manager installs, maintains and upgrades a company’s hardware and software systems. They implement systems, policies and procedures to maintain a secure work environment. IT managers are also responsible for managing staff and coaching employees to ensure the safety of data and the integrity of hardware and software systems."

OTIOSE TRANSLATION

Delegating actual system implementation to engineers, enforcing draconian 'security policies' that hinder productivity, and 'coaching' staff through performance reviews based on arbitrary KPIs while the actual data integrity is a continuous fire drill.

[09:00 - 10:00]

Ticket Triage & Blame Allocation

Reviewing the overnight deluge of help desk tickets, strategically reassigning the most problematic ones to junior staff or 'escalating' them to external vendors for maximum plausible deniability.

[11:00 - 12:00]

Executive Demand Translation

Attending a 'strategic alignment' meeting where vague corporate objectives are presented as immediate, mission-critical IT projects, requiring instantaneous, impossible solutions.

[14:00 - 15:00]

Vendor Management & Budget Justification

Engaging in performative negotiations with software and hardware vendors, simultaneously attempting to justify an inadequate budget to finance executives who view IT as a pure cost center.

"It’s low because of the amount of users that are supported, some of the legacy issues the help desk is forced to support, the amount of staff you have reporting to, and the general lack of technical aptitude the users have. I know this role well, though it’s not mine, and the numbers are all burnout numbers and it’s very much nonstop. The company operates 24/7 so the manager’s key focus are between 7 AM and 7 PM, but they still have to be accountable for the other days and ensuring our brutally strict SLA is consistently enforced (30 minutes for critical, 4 hours for low priority [think: how do I change my font?)"

— r/sysadmin

"What I've come to appreciate is that a manager can be good at 'reporting up' to their boss (e.g. personally, results-wise, or whatever), and sometimes, rightly or wrongly, that is all that matters. ... KPIs are the death of any company. If you have to force people to arbitrarily quantify what they do, you either don't trust them or don't understand their role well enough. And since KPIs are tied to salary, inevitably they end up being gamed to the point of uselessness."

— r/programming

"My job is 90% translating executive panic into actionable items for engineers who know better, and 10% explaining to said executives why 'just restarting the internet' won't solve their VPN issues."

— teamblind.com

"We're the designated scapegoats for every system outage, budget overrun, and user error, yet we have zero actual power to fix the root organizational incompetence."

— r/cscareerquestions