Yes, us IT guys are reall @$$holes.
Nevermind that all of our business partners want stuff done yesterday--and will give us the requirements tomorrow....
For the third time in three years, I'm being asked to stop everything and put together a proposal for implementing one of my projects early. It's a huge freakin' deal because none of the supporting architecture will be there--I'd have to fudge it all myself. So I'd effectively have to create two versions of my program: the "early" version and the version I've been working on since 2005--and they want it third quarter of this year. The funny thing is, the head on the business side is dead-set against this. It will never get off the ground. Still, I'm wasting two months on this again...
I'm third-level support and spend most of my time writing new programs. If a problem lands on my desk, it's because it has no where else to go. I'm the guy that wrote the program. I'm not the flunkie with a God complex that fields general IT questions. My biggest complaints are end users who are unable to describe a problem. I don't know how to investigate and diagnose "It doesn't work." I try to be polite and ask probing questions, but it's obvious some people hold IT in contempt and will only answer specific questions and volunteer no information. (I feel like a lawyer doing a cross-examination.) The root of the problem is often in that additional information that is not being volunteered--and it is often because it is a situation that we either hadn't anticipated when we wrote the application or my business analysts told me "would never happen". Yes, it is important that you are trying to use your iPhone to access a secured intranet application. We have big firewalls in place to prevent that very thing. Yes, it is important that when it "worked yesterday" you were at your desk and now you are at Starbucks.