Cracker-Jack Box IT Engineers

The question has to be asked. How do some of these people get their jobs? Was it a prize in the bottom of a Crack-Jack box?

The reality is that businesses, industries, and regulatory bodies are used to handling things in a much more monolithic and structured process. Take engineering for example. If a beam made of certain materials designed in a specific way can hold X amount of weight, it will generally always hold X amount of weight until the materials or design changes.

Same goes with law. If it is illegal to do something today, it will probably be illegal tomorrow as well. It will take a big change and shift in the culture and perspective of the populous to make a change in the laws operate.

Unfortunately, the technology field doesn’t work this way. When companies started really investing in technology in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, it was okay to not have an education or background in technology because nobody really knew what they were doing anyway. If you could hook up a computer and get the printer to work, that was some next-level stuff!

Fast forward to 2020.

Some of those same people who got their start in technology in the late 90’s and early 2000’s have stuck it out and with their “experience”, have been able to fail their way up the corporate ladder. You’ll find these people all over the place. Absolutely incompetent technology professionals in strategic positions within high-powered organizations with ties to unknowing and generally ignorant leadership who value the handshake over the reality that is light-speed changes that occur on the technology landscape.

“We got hacked” – well, I guess Bob in accounting wasn’t doing his job right.

“We got phished” – well, they used a domain that looked like ours, we should buy it.

“We need to reach this level of compliance” – well, maybe we should create custom apps on our firewall to track our users

The reality is there are people who have been to school to learn this stuff, spent their whole lives in their bedrooms learning how to pick apart your coding skills, and general savants that can pick apart your network security. On your team, you’ve got a guy that failed up through the corporate world who fills his calendars with meetings and wasting time to be “important” to those of the hold hat.

So we’re calling you out old-school. Get your stuff together. Realize that you wouldn’t hire a CFO with no real-world experience. So quite hiring “Senior IT Guy” with no experience in the IT industry. Quit failing up your most incompetent experienced people to protect your assets. Start realizing these people need to be the best, cutting edge, security minded people available. They probably won’t golf, and they probably won’t want to hang out with you after work.

Get over it.