Finding a Clue in the IT Industry

For those who haven’t figured it out, Team Player is a true story based on my personal experiences in the IT industry over the last 20 plus years and about 10 years into the future. Things get confused in the IT industry.

One of the companies I worked for was FirstClass Systems, which later became LearnStream. At its height, LSI employed anywhere from 175 to 185 people, and hundreds came and went since it opened its doors in 1993 in the basement of the Incutech Building on the UNB campus.

Initially, there were seven of us. We had no desks, no computers, and pretty much no clue about what we would be doing. After a while, we had desks and computers, but still no clue about what we were doing. For me, this continued for seven and a half years in quality assurance, documentation writing, instructional design, marketing and sales … all without a clue.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t alone.

So … there we all were the other day … years later … whole lifetimes apart … still looking for a clue.

Here’s what a horde of IT workers looking for a clue looks like …

This is what IT workers look like from the other side, sensing that, perhaps on this side there may be a clue …

These IT workers thought they found a clue … but it turned out to be just another complicated restaurant menu with no documented ordering process. These people starved for lack of a useable user menu.

These are the two gorgeous women sitting across the table from me, completely enthralled by my manly tales of effective development procedures and quality process management.

These are the two gorgeous women sitting across from me pointing out another gorgeous woman who they are certain would love to hear my manly tales about cascading style sheets and Open Source domination of the world, neither of which I know anything about.

Here’s the three gorgeous women sitting across from me after stuffing me into a beer glass and realizing that this was about as close to having a clue as anyone in the industry was ever going to get.