Is Most IT Really Corrupt?
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@DustinB3403 said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@msff-amman-Itofficer said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
ir own businesses, some are managing hotels... but by and large, does raising the pay change the pool of talent? We are not talking about an individual business, but the entire field.
Well for starts having I.T helper can make documentation is easier and after I worked on project with ThoughtWorks, they pair up as driver technique, and 2 sit on one machine, 1 develops and the other helps to understand and document.
Documentation fights corruption cause it removes you out of the dark. and if I left the company I cant leave them hostage cause they have the docs which will allow another person to follow and understand.
Outside documentation or review would provide this.
Or would at least help. Good auditing and oversight can go a long way.
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IT does give you the ability to commit crimes with much less of a chance of being caught. If I go to the local walmart and hold a gun to somebody's head and rob them for $23.45, the police will be called and a somewhat large effort will be put together to find me. On the other hand, if I do some online phishing and completely hide my identity and steal let's say $3,000. It's likely that no effort will be put in to track me down.
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Yh like someone will understand the mess that I create besides me.
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@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
How many departments have so much opportunity to no longer do their jobs and have no one notice?
I'm sure there is enough opportunity to cause this to be common place, which is why it's seen so often.
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@IRJ said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
IT does give you the ability to commit crimes with much less of a chance of being caught. If I go to the local walmart and hold a gun to somebody's head and rob them for $23.45, the police will be called and a somewhat large effort will be put together to find me. On the other hand, if I do some online phishing and completely hide my identity and steal let's say $3,000. It's likely that no effort will be put in to track me down.
And that's not IT, just white collar crime vs. blue collar. IT takes it to a whole new level where even the people being stolen from generally cannot identify that theft has happened.
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@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@IRJ said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
IT does give you the ability to commit crimes with much less of a chance of being caught. If I go to the local walmart and hold a gun to somebody's head and rob them for $23.45, the police will be called and a somewhat large effort will be put together to find me. On the other hand, if I do some online phishing and completely hide my identity and steal let's say $3,000. It's likely that no effort will be put in to track me down.
And that's not IT, just white collar crime vs. blue collar. IT takes it to a whole new level where even the people being stolen from generally cannot identify that theft has happened.
You must know IT on order to be successful.
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@DustinB3403 said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
How many departments have so much opportunity to no longer do their jobs and have no one notice?
I'm sure there is enough opportunity to cause this to be common place, which is why it's seen so often.
Hard to want to keep doing the job you are paid to do if the management can't tell when you've stopped. And even if you cause the company to go out of business, the chances that you will still be around and/or that they can identify you as the problem are so low that it is a good risk to take if you are less than ethical.
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@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@IRJ said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
IT does give you the ability to commit crimes with much less of a chance of being caught. If I go to the local walmart and hold a gun to somebody's head and rob them for $23.45, the police will be called and a somewhat large effort will be put together to find me. On the other hand, if I do some online phishing and completely hide my identity and steal let's say $3,000. It's likely that no effort will be put in to track me down.
And that's not IT, just white collar crime vs. blue collar. IT takes it to a whole new level where even the people being stolen from generally cannot identify that theft has happened.
I would rephrase that, because if you notice that something is amiss then it wasn't a perfect crime.
"And that's not IT, just white collar crime vs. blue collar. IT takes it to a whole new level where even the people being stolen from generally cannot identify who performed the crime."
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@IRJ said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@IRJ said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
IT does give you the ability to commit crimes with much less of a chance of being caught. If I go to the local walmart and hold a gun to somebody's head and rob them for $23.45, the police will be called and a somewhat large effort will be put together to find me. On the other hand, if I do some online phishing and completely hide my identity and steal let's say $3,000. It's likely that no effort will be put in to track me down.
And that's not IT, just white collar crime vs. blue collar. IT takes it to a whole new level where even the people being stolen from generally cannot identify that theft has happened.
You must know IT on order to be successful.
Not for phishing. Not for a lot of things. You can do that via paper.
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The things you listen are not necessarily because of IT. Other professions could do this to a business as well. This is just a moral issue related to the person not the profession. Because IT can make this easy to do, it attracts that type of person.
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@PenguinWrangler said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
The things you listen are not necessarily because of IT. Other professions could do this to a business as well. This is just a moral issue related to the person not the profession. Because IT can make this easy to do, it attracts that type of person.
Absolutely, 100% agree. But IT I think has loads more opportunity for this... much because IT has access to things and because IT is too confusing for most businesses to oversee and they just hope for the best, which makes a market ripe to be taken advantage of and attracts people interested in taking advantage of it.
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Worth noting, in case it is not clear, that a ton of the corruption that I see doesn't come from the people labelled as IT, but the people who are the actual IT decision makes, often people with other titles higher up the organizational ladder who are actually running IT, but not taking the blame or being overseen properly.
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@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@PenguinWrangler said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
The things you listen are not necessarily because of IT. Other professions could do this to a business as well. This is just a moral issue related to the person not the profession. Because IT can make this easy to do, it attracts that type of person.
Absolutely, 100% agree. But IT I think has loads more opportunity for this... much because IT has access to things and because IT is too confusing for most businesses to oversee and they just hope for the best, which makes a market ripe to be taken advantage of and attracts people interested in taking advantage of it.
It really is with jobs that give a lot of power, law enforcement, politicians, government bureaucrats, and now IT will attract bad people because of the power that is inherit in the position. I was a prison guard for the state of Missouri, I was the evening shift supervisor of the supermax unit at the prison I worked at. I saw it with officers who come in fresh and drunk on their power. I got some of them fired because they were going to get people hurt.
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@PenguinWrangler said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@PenguinWrangler said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
The things you listen are not necessarily because of IT. Other professions could do this to a business as well. This is just a moral issue related to the person not the profession. Because IT can make this easy to do, it attracts that type of person.
Absolutely, 100% agree. But IT I think has loads more opportunity for this... much because IT has access to things and because IT is too confusing for most businesses to oversee and they just hope for the best, which makes a market ripe to be taken advantage of and attracts people interested in taking advantage of it.
It really is with jobs that give a lot of power, law enforcement, politicians, government bureaucrats, and now IT will attract bad people because of the power that is inherit in the position. I was a prison guard for the state of Missouri, I was the evening shift supervisor of the supermax unit at the prison I worked at. I saw it with officers who come in fresh and drunk on their power. I got some of them fired because they were going to get people hurt.
You did what is right in that situation. I'd like to think that all of us here would report issues like this to the powers that be. Whether somebody drunk on their power, or just making bad business decisions.
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@scottalanmiller I think steering back to IT is a bit of an unnecessary turn away from the actual problem, which is the people. If the problem isn't IT, but that bad people are attracted to the power inherent in IT, then wouldn't a sensible approach be to attempt to both address the problem of how to screen for undesirable types in such roles, as well as how or why people are that way, and proceed from there?
We may not be able to do much about the latter, but it's still going to be a fundamental problem regardless. That would mean that there is no truly effective way to screen a good liar except by trying to prevent them from being developed in the first place, right? Maybe far more philosophical than most such discussions go, but I feel like that failing to include that in the considerations is a bit of missing the forest for the trees to a degree.
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I think most of that list of corrupt acts applies to quite a few job roles/departments within companies. I would think that it is people, in general, not specifically IT people that do these things. I also would hope that most people don't do these things.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller I think steering back to IT is a bit of an unnecessary turn away from the actual problem, which is the people. If the problem isn't IT, but that bad people are attracted to the power inherent in IT, then wouldn't a sensible approach be to attempt to both address the problem of how to screen for undesirable types in such roles, as well as how or why people are that way, and proceed from there?
I don't know if I agree. I mean at a high level I do. But IT doesn't weird power, if anything it is often seen as a rather impotent part of the field. IT has some form of power, but it is pretty meager in the grand scheme of things. What I normally see as corruption in IT is people handing the power over and avoiding their responsibility. Not what you would expect from someone grabbing power.
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@wrx7m said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
I think most of that list of corrupt acts applies to quite a few job roles/departments within companies. I would think that it is people, in general, not specifically IT people that do these things. I also would hope that most people don't do these things.
Having worked in a lot of different fields, for some reason IT really sticks out as having this problem more than most. Some, like medical, seem really bad. But IT seems, to me, to fall pretty hard to the wrong side of the skew. Maybe it is just more visible to me (totally reasonable to assume) or maybe it is because IT is so hard for others to see or maybe it is that IT has a social acceptance in being corrupt that other fields would not tolerate.
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@irj said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@IRJ said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
IT does give you the ability to commit crimes with much less of a chance of being caught. If I go to the local walmart and hold a gun to somebody's head and rob them for $23.45, the police will be called and a somewhat large effort will be put together to find me. On the other hand, if I do some online phishing and completely hide my identity and steal let's say $3,000. It's likely that no effort will be put in to track me down.
And that's not IT, just white collar crime vs. blue collar. IT takes it to a whole new level where even the people being stolen from generally cannot identify that theft has happened.
You must know IT on order to be successful.
What is stopping you from getting a contract and then bidding out your own contract to a subcontractor who actually supports the site? Free money.
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This was an interesting read. I had never really given any thought to corruption in IT beyond the faking it idea. I sure as heck wouldn't feel comfortable working somewhere and not knowing what I'm doing and not even making an effort to learn.
