Great points - I do wonder when the “programmers, DBAs, system administrators” etc. are thought of as IT people. I spend as much time getting their PC’s to work as most of them do in their jobs.
We do have a mac guy on staff but he is not really technical - just hand holds the graphics department. He doesn’t do the on-call rotation nor does setups or troubleshooting on anything other than that department. Wasted job as far as I am concerned but he is a nice guy - young kid - degree in graphic arts.
As far as working on the car - I don’t see a correlation - I’m the only one in my shop (40 or so guys and gals)who does anything with a vehicle other than putting gas in it a driving. I do drive them occasionally to the dealer to get their cars.
- have a good weekend.
Most of the programmers, DBAs, and system administrators that I know are perfectly able to maintain their own computers if they are given administrator logins and in small companies, it's not like people have a dedicated IT department to call. All of those job functions are also generally listed in any list of IT (aka "Information Technology") jobs or roles that I've ever seen, from job search sites to applications to receive free IT industry magazines. Of course that all begs the question of why anyone should have to spend any significant amount of time getting desktop computers working unless the problem is a hardware failure or maybe setting up a new PC. They should just work.
The correlation with cars is not that IT people like working on cars, too, but that some people enjoy spending time tinkering with pieces of technology and it the difficulty in doing maintenance is considered part of the fun. I'm talking about the people who get a gleam in their eye when they talk about defragmenting their hard drive, hacking their registry, or overclocking their CPU.
No, I'm not excited about the new Office 2007 interface, for example. I find it annoying that I have to spend 5 minutes finding a function that used to be easy to find in a menu in earlier versions. And, frankly, a lot of the fluff in the Mac OS doesn't excite me that much, either. I'm still running OS X 10.3 (two versions old) and the 2004 version of Office for the Mac on my own Mac because I just don't have a compelling reason to upgrade.
I use my computer at home to do email, web browsing, word processing, and graphics and I use my computer at work for email, web browsing, software development, project management, and database work. Fiddling with the OS is a distraction from what I really want to be doing on a computer. It's like consciously thinking "breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out". It's something I don't want to have to think about and if I do find myself having to think about it, it generally means I've got a problem and things aren't working correctly unless I'm an athlete at the cutting edge of physical performance.