Talk to someone who has worked in IT for decades and more often than not, they'll regale you with stories of the "good old days," when the workplace was lively and creative juices flowed.
Nowadays it's a different story, they usually say, and place their blame along any number of lines: outsourcing, offshoring, cost-cutting, IT commoditization, reactivity where there was once proactivity, not to mention the shoddy desks in their office in dusty room at the end of the hall.
n the simplest terms: too many IT workplaces have become Dilbert-ized—micromanaged, bureaucratic and stifled creatively. It's become an environment where busy work is praised and morale is low.
IT is isn't fun anymore, and while a lack of fun at work may not seem worth stopping the presses over, the long-term effects of depriving a field of appealing work may very likely look like this: Students are turning away from computer science at an alarming rate. There's a huge talent shortage across the entire field, and, in confidence, enterprise IT workers say they'd probably choose a different career path if they could go back and start over again.
"When I first got involved in IT, it was fun. It was a cool job; you were a hero because you helped people do things," Bruce Skaistis, founder of eGlobal CIO, a consulting firm, told eWEEK. "Now I go in to organizations and it has become drudgery. They seem beat-down, in less nice facilities. If you want to attract better people back into IT you need to make it more fun again. You need to recognize it as a problem."
But how to go about bringing IT's appeal back? Answers come from surprising places. Recipient of the 2006 Turning award and IBM Fellow Emeriti Frances Allen said in a recent interview that the answer lies within the field.
"I believe that there was great excitement early on. You couldn't have had a more wonderful experience than I did at IBM in 1960. We worked through wonderful problems with wonderful people. There was always the sense that there was so much more to do, more than we ever had time for," said Allen.
"The excitement is not as much now, which is unfortunate, because we've really just gotten started."
eWEEK spoke to long-time IT professionals about ways they think the fun and excitement can be brought back to IT. Beyond blaming external factors, they speak of bringing focus back to what is already in-house: professionals eager to love their work again.
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