Vlad Big Book of IT Firm Staffing

From the mailbag:

“Just because you’re a sociopath doesn’t disqualify people who won’t carry a mobile phone every time they leave their house from working in the IT field.”

Dear gmail.com “IT professional”, since blog comment concept seems to be beyond you, let’s discuss this in a full blog post.

Not being passionate about what you do doesn’t disqualify you from holding a job. It just makes you a crappy employee. Visit your local Burger King, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Sonic, Subway, Quizno’s, Moes, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Dominos, KFC, In-n-Out Burger, Chick-Fil-A, Chipotle, Panera Bread or any minimum-wage-dwelling institution and look at people between 25 and 45.. You will find defeated people hardly dragging themselves the 4 feet between the fry machine and the counter. Their jobs are nothing but a deficiency of the Henry Ford production line optimization – it’s cheaper to employ them at $6/hour than to automate the process!

IT works in pretty much the same way, there are so many technology jobs out there that exist solely because some dude cheated on his Numerical Analysis class and the peer code review happened to fall on a Friday before a long weekend. But as software and hardware get better, those jobs are disappearing or at least being farmed out to some third world nation where a 13 year old is sitting chained to a phone reading the kb article to someone that couldn’t figure out how to use Google.

So if you’re a minimalist and have no passion for IT but happen to do it because it’s easy…

Now, let’s say you’re a business owner, and you have one of the gmail.com people in your organization. How can you tell if you have a team of exceptional IT people that are passionate about what they do vs. McDonalds fry man. There is a very simple way to figure this out, let’s call this one the Vlad Fry Test.

Vlad’s Fry Test

Pick a member of your staff and ask them if they have anything going on tonight. Repeat until you find one that doesn’t. Make sure you aren’t abusing the labor laws, that this person isn’t being paid significantly below the market average for their role – this is an IT Professional test, not a test of how far you can push a college kid thats trying to earn tuition. Pick the member of the same sex, if you own an IT company odds are you have a personality of a door knob and your attempt to gauge employees after-hours availability will come off as a very poor pickup line. So if you’re a boy, pick a boy. If you’re a girl, pick a girl.

Assign them two tasks at exactly 4:30pm: one challenging that you guess could take an hour, and one that is dead easy drop in the bucket 2-minute task. “Hey, if you get a chance, could you take care of these two?” – notice there is no obligation, notice there is no penalty, notice there is no deadline.

If they do the easy one and hit digg.com for about 20 minutes waiting for the clock to hit 5, you’ve got an opportunistic minimalist. This person is with you simply because at this point it is just easier to work there than get a new, better paying job. The moment they get offered more money, or better opportunity, they will bolt. They likely have no loyalty to their profession or to your organization so if this is what you’re building your business on its time to re-evaluate your roster.

On the other hand, you may have someone totally oblivious to the clock, that will get totally immersed in the problem and will work till its solved. Even if it takes two hours more. This type of a person is the one you give a raise to, because they take pride in their job and profession over the ticking sound the clock above their head makes. They are not focused on the opportunistic “will leave you as soon as I can get a better job offer” qualities, but on the challenge that the job presents and that gives them fulfillment. They will stay with you forever.

Now, let’s say you’re not into profiling… (this works great around this time of the year):

“Today we are focusing on operational efficiencies. I want all of you to sit at your desk from 9-5 and look at what you do every day. Is there anything we could do better, anything that we are doing that takes up a ton of time that we could get rid of, anything that we should be doing, anything you do that could be fixed??…. anyhow, just focus on that and let’s see if we can make this place a lot less stressful than it usually is.”

Turn on the webcam, go to Panera and get an ice tea. Say hi to the dude you fired four paragraphs above. Open your laptop and watch the zoo. True geeks will be so happy that they got one day without running around like they got their heads cut off that they will focus on writing documentation. Writing a script to nuke all those patches that are piling up on the servers. Building a virtual machine. Reinstalling the OS on their laptop to make it run faster. Downloading an eval of the software they heard about. Ordering the spare parts that seem to be running low and we always don’t have them when the most important clients need them. Sitting around the spool crimping ethernet cables.

… Or maybe they spend the day on youtube.com, digg.com, monster.com or better yet freeones. If that’s the zoo you’ve built I recommend this video (safe for work).

Anyone else want to take a spin on vlad@vladville.com?