Blessed are the Geeks
(First published in Conspectus, January 1999)

by Jonathan Steffen

Abstract

When personal computers entered the workplace in the 1980s, they subverted not only standard operational and administrative procedures but also traditional attitudes towards the employment relationship.

Change management specialist Jonathan Steffen considers the implications for employers who expect their staff to do their own IT troubleshooting.

You buy a car. It has four wheels, an engine, and all the other bits and pieces required to get you from A to B, plus various knobs and buttons which are fun just to play with.

You set off on the road to B, but you never get there. The furthest you get is B minus X - at which point your new vehicle grinds to an inexplicable halt. You abandon it at the roadside, spraying invective indiscriminately at lamp-posts, trees and street signs as you go, and trudge back to the dealer who sold it to you.

The dealer displays no surprise at your return. ‘Ah yes,’ he says, ‘there are usually a few teething problems with that model.’ He hands you a manual weighing a kilo and a half, a monkey wrench and a couple of rubber bands. ‘Cheaper if you fix it yourself,’ he says, helpfully. ‘It’s very simple, really. And it’ll save you the call-out charge.’

An unimaginable scenario, even in the darkest days of British manufacturing unreliability in the 1970s. But if we replace the car with a computer and the dealer with a software house, it suddenly becomes a great deal more realistic. The product you have just bought is not faulty at all: it is evolving. It has a functionality that can get you not only from A to B but all the way from A to Z. And back. In seconds. All it needs is a little post-implementational enhancement. Here’s a manual, by the way - it’s much cheaper if you do it yourself. You won’t even need the rubber bands, let alone the monkey-wrench.

The astonishing thing is that most of the people reading these lines will be sitting at a computer. Many of them will be looking at other people sitting at computers as they read this. And probably all of those people will have experience of being let down by the very machine they are sitting at. Even more astonishing, however, is the fact that the vast majority of those people will regard those technical failures as a normal part of working life. As a normal part of life, indeed - for many of them will spend their leisure hours sitting at different computers and facing the same problem. Those different computers being, of course, purchased with money they earned while sitting at their workplace computers.

This is a revolution in our entire concept of work. A fleet of delivery lorries stranded simultaneously on motorways around the UK and out of action for hours at a stretch owing to a single fault is beyond the realms of statistical probability. Nor can one imagine a board of management whose briefcases spontaneously explode for no apparent reason, or a company kitchen in which all the frying pans mysteriously cease to function before lunchtime. A network of computers ‘down’ for a morning is part and parcel of modern working life, however.

And yet we use them. We buy them. We buy more and more of them all the time, for both business and private purposes, and their functionality erodes the divide between the office and the home, between the working and the personal sphere. ‘Work’ is no longer an office with a couple of filing cabinets and a struggling pot plant. ‘Work’ is where the computer is. ‘Work’ is where the computer is even when the computer isn’t working.

The implications of this revolution are only gradually becoming apparent to both employers and employees. We know, of course, that the IT revolution has radically transformed business functions such as accounting and materials management, allowing transactions that would previously have taken days to be completed in instants. We know that computerisation has facilitated outsourcing as a strategy to drive down fixed production and payroll costs while maintaining control over quality. And we know that the constantly evolving technology of the late twentieth century has given rise not only to empowered organisations with flat hierarchies and short decision-paths but also to networked, global and even virtual organisations of a kind inconceivable only ten years ago.

But the implications go much further. And they are of key significance for anyone with HR responsibility.

Computers, with their inherent dynamic of development, subvert the very processes they mimic. If the rationale for using software programmes for the creation of purchase orders, for instance, was that they could do the job faster than the manual systems they replaced, the fact is that they were never designed as a mere imitation of those systems. They were created by highly intelligent people who were fascinated much more by the potential of their new invention than by the dry detail of the idiosyncratic, bureaucratic and frequently inefficient systems which they made redundant. The whole conceptual world of computing is based on the notion of the possible rather than the actual. And thus it offers us more than we ever need in order to do the tasks required of us. This massive excess of functionality breeds complexity, which in turn creates instability. The more complex an implementation is, the more likely it is to fail. The greater the functionality of a system, the less likely it is to function reliably.

This must be a bitter truth for software developers. It is perhaps an even bitterer truth for the people buying their programmes. And it has a profound effect upon the people using those programmes - which is to say, virtually everyone in working life today.

The old command and control systems of companies in the high industrial age were not, of course, inherently efficient. But they were innately stable. Developed over the course of years, if not decades, they involved complex rituals which were jealously guarded by those who presided over them. They had their ultimate incarnation in the MD’s secretary who was the only person to understand the company filing system, and in whose absence the work of the entire board ground to a halt.

Many readers of these pages will remember how extremely difficult it was to get past that dragon of a gatekeeper, who had the added charm of preserving in her head a wealth of incriminating detail about her boss which, of course, made him doubly dependent on her and strengthened her position yet further. The obstructive secretary and her male counterpart, the man who wouldn’t move unless you had a chitty, wielded immense power in the companies of the past. So powerful were they in their solid, secretive ways that one can easily understand the enthusiasm with which managers seized on the idea of replacing them with computers.

There is one key difference between an MRP system and a man who won’t move unless you have a chitty, however. And that is that computers are incapable of saying no. They can, of course, crash, which makes them temporarily unavailable for use, but they cannot deny you if you know the correct instructions to give them. Faced with the fearsome secretary or the stonewaller in the brown stockroom coat, one might resort to all manner of persuasive tricks in order to achieve one’s object. But it is persuasion that is needed in such a situation rather than the knowledge of which fields to click.

The eternally evolving nature of computer programmes, in combination with their inherent excess of functionality, means that the resourceful employee will always find ways of getting his or her computer to work. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that this preparedness to hack about until one finds a way of doing something is one of the conditions of employability in the modern world. An employee who merely wishes to carry out instructions, acting as the guardian and preserver of an arbitrary system, is unlikely to have the wherewithal to cope with the constant changes that computers thrust upon him or her in the form of new software programmes and unexpected glitches. That person will be perceived as adding little value to the company’s operations by saying things like ‘I preferred the old way’ or ‘I need it explained to me.’ On the contrary, that employee will be seen as being in a state of ‘downtime’ while other, more technologically minded members of staff deal ‘productively’ with the latest challenge. The technologically astute are up and running: the enemies of technology are in limbo.

Presented daily with such choices, most employees will develop the degree of IT literacy necessary for holding on to their jobs. This has happened already, and is a continually evolving process, of course, as the knowledge and skills acquired to deal with a given set of tools are rendered obsolete by the advent of a new set of tools in the form of a new upgrade or implementation. It has a profound effect, however, on the psychological relationship between employer and employee. The employer, as owner of systems that either sporadically malfunction or else are periodically rendered obsolete by technological developments, is diminished as an authority in the eyes of the employee. Especially diminished are those of maturer years who, for whatever reason, do not have the computer literacy required to carry out the work necessary for the company to function on a day-to-day basis.

This imbalance will change, of course, as younger generations who have grown up with computers find their way to the top rungs of industry. The twenty-first century will see managers in their forties, fifties and sixties for whom the business potential of a company is not enhanced but actually defined by the IT platforms it uses. And that new breed of manager is much more likely to understand the complaints of the IT department and the arguments of IT consultants.

For the meanwhile, however, we are negotiating an interim phase, in which the employees most worth recruiting and holding onto are the ones who are happy to thumb through that kilo-and-a-half manual when the need arises, get on the floor under their desks, and hack about until their computer does what they want it to. The really resourceful will probably even find an innovative use for the rubber bands. Blessed are the geeks.

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