Don’t do this.
This is really, REALLY bad. Don’t do this.
A letter to a fictional business owner, whose name is Steve.
Don’t abdicate your IT (jesus christ).
If you’re an idiot, you’ll entrust your IT to an office manager. You’ll listent to your employees. Even worse, you’ll listen to your partner who’s an idiot and a moron. Bad move(s).
You’ll hire some IT company to provide “helpdesk services” with some kind of response time. All you’re doing is covering up your own incompetence and the incompetence of your employees. When you start making decisions on knee-jerk response requests while your employees are fucking around and your partner can’t even personally handle his own technology, you’re out of control.
Yes, Steve. You. You’re out of control and a bad manager.
It’s not too late to fix this. Here’s what you do:
Require your employees learn basic technical skills that kids these days are coming out of school with. Your current employees suck, and its not their fault. They haven’t been provided the training they need. Don’t stress them out with weekly meeting stressing “productivity” and “efficiency.” That’s your problem, not theirs. You hired artists, not managers. You’re the goddamn manager, Steve.
You and your partner need to take responsibility for your own technology. Unless you want the fucking Genius Bar experience for the rest of your life, get over it and commit the time to learning. You think you’re too busy. Get over yourself, and stop being an asshole about it.
Hire a competent, skilled, dedicated and professional technologist to complement and supplement and upgrade your skill set, not to abdicate your personal managerial obsolesence to some typical tech consultancy that will gladly accept your money so you can pretend its not your responsibility as the owner. You’ll pay for it dearly moving forward because you’ll be paying for all the problem-response reaction, but you’ll feel good every time the problem is repaired quickly! A little dopamine reward for your bad management instincts. A good technologist is hard to find. The best ones are employed by really big businesses, and you can’t afford them Steve at your business’ scale. So if you find one, don’t let her/him go.
But Steve, you can pretend that all the times you let your kid work on your computer didn’t impact your business. That’s an owner’s prerogative. Maybe the one time he worked on that virtual machine without virus protection had nothing to do with the ransomware. Maybe it didn’t? It’s easy to ignore or dismiss things like this, but at the end of the day, who owns the IT function?
Yup, the owner. You.
Oh, Steve. You’re so fired.
