How does a formerly tech-savvy IT employee devolve into a tech dinosaur? Just as plants and animals of the past, individuals run a great risk of having their technical know-how decay and become embedded in sedimentary rock. The process of technical fossilization is one that is clearly on display in modern day IT departments. In essence, enterprises are running on fossil fuel–or as HBR’s Susan Cramm puts it, “IT is Stocked with Out-of-Date Geeks“. There look to be two driving factors that have led to a dependency on IT employees whose technical beliefs and opinions have been set in limestone: Confirmation Bias and The Corporate Ladder.
Confirmation Bias is seeing the world through a filter, thinking selectively. Most people like to believe that they are always able to objectively process information; however, numerous studies have concluded that people tend to seek out consistent information that confirms their beliefs and evidence to the contrary is swiftly dismissed. As IT employees solidify their preconceived notions about technology, they become staunch defenders of this selective filter that has been frozen over time. Their attention becomes laser focused on what confirms…as opposed to what informs. When technological innovations come along that challenge these dogmatic cognitive shortcuts and introduce cognitive dissonance, the typical response is to entrench themselves by means of motivated reasoning. As TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington puts it, “These are the cavemen…who were afraid of fire when it was discovered because it burned, or was too technologically advanced to really understand. The smart guys used it to cook their meat and keep them warm, and multiplied.” The only way to combat this bias is to not promote those who cling to their technical hammers and treat everything as it were a nail. It is the innovator’s who need to be promoted and those who continuously make decisions based on “No one ever got fired for buying X” (FUD) logic, need to be promotionally starved to the point of evolution or extinction. This is where the Corporate Ladder comes into play.
In large corporations today, it’s commonplace to have your most inexperienced programmers write the code that runs your business, while those who demonstrate great technical acumen work their way into positions of unaccountable authority. As these once technical leaders progress towards positions of prestige, their first-hand technical knowledge quickly becomes defunct and ultimately outdated to the point of fossilization. To resolve this, we need to invert the process. The act of checking code into a production environment should be an earned privilege and not something you work away from. Better yet, IT needs to adopt the Corporate Lattice approach to combat “the rigidity of the ladder’s hierarchy, its constraints on information flows, and the limitations of its singular upward path to success”. Too many IT developers are being confronted with a false dichotomy–to get ahead, you need to choose one of two non-coding career tracks: architect or manager. With a lattice, there’s no single track to success, but myriad routes to progress. With such a structure, tech-savvy employees can work to keep up with the pace of technology and avoid the fate of the dinosaur.
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