For better or worse, I've had a moderately successful career in IT. After nearly 15 years of working in the field, I've accrued a certain level seniority relative to my peers. Unfortunately, this means I'm generally in the position of being "the expert" on any number of technologies, tasks, etc. By itself, that isn't the unfortunate part. No, what's unfortunate is that I am generally charged with making advanced technologies more accessible to less experienced people. Even that isn't inherently problematic.
What's problematic is, much as seems to be going on with society at large, IT is being dumbed-down. New IT technologies are still frequently quite complex. Thus, the clueful amongst us get tasked with figuring it out for the less clueful. Unfortunately, what one used to be able to assume as knowledge-baseline, ten years ago, for more junior staff doesn't hold true, today. Truly, it seems like we're expected to be turning over ever more complex technologies to people that are less and less prepared to manage them. Thus, the documents we're tasked with writing requires more and more dumbing down. In many cases, it seems like I'm expected to write things so that a poorly-trained chimp can do them.
Don't get me wrong. For the most part, I like what I do. I get to work with some cool stuff. It just feels like, more and more, those that I am tasked with helping aren't ready (or, worse, particularly interested) in those things I'm tasked with helping them with.
As the years pass, I find that I am forced to more frequently despair of the lack of expertise present or expected in people who's job it is (or should be) to know what the fuck it is they're doing
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