The myth of the "rock star" IT worker
> “I received an award for my work,” he added. “I almost felt guilty.”
One place I worked had more than its fair share of "superstar" IT people. At least that was how they saw themselves. To everyone else they were egotistical jerks who seemed to specialise in fixing the problems that they, themselves, had caused.
While Gladstone here seems to have made a genuine mistake - or simply wasn't told of a crucial change, these superstars positively feed on the bodge-disaster-crisis-superhuman effort-solution cycle to further their own reputations. It also seemed to dovetail nicely with t'management's view that they employed super-talented people, ones who would work 48-hours straight (with maybe only the first 24 of those actually being productive) to fix a problem.
But it was never publicised that the cause of those problems were the self-same people. Ones who were always "too busy" to patch systems, to perform (mundane) upgrades or preventative maintenance / housekeeping. Or even to test their supposed fixes, which often became unstuck and created the next set of problems.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
