Like much dark humour, it's inappropriate and often viewed in poor taste outside of those communities.
I'm not sure how else to describe BOFH except as revenge-fantasy porn.
It's a vent/release for people who are often stuck between a rock and a hard place.
In most organisations, IT is seen a as a cost-centre, rather than a business enabler.
So on one hand, you have management often wanting to cut costs to the bone - on the other, you have the very same people complaining that you're implementing certain policies and being a hard-ass about equipment/software/etc. Then when things go down and it's due to the business cutting costs - well, it's still IT's fault.
Then there's the often poorly thought through and inane requests, where people refuse to listen to reason.
And then you have a lot of people who have no awareness of anything outside of themselves - Their issues are always the most important, they shouldn't be required to learn basic IT skills, and anything that goes wrong it's IT's fault, even if they've been provided ample training and education opportunities.
I see similarly dark humour and in-jokes in other high-stress professions.
>> In most organisations, IT is seen a as a cost-centre, rather than a business enabler. So on one hand, you have management often wanting to cut costs to the bone - on the other, you have the very same people complaining that you're implementing certain policies and being a hard-ass about equipment/software/etc. Then when things go down and it's due to the business cutting costs - well, it's still IT's fault.
IT leadership tends to be passive and disempowered. I'm not completely sure why this is, but the behaviours are often the opposite of what you'll often see from leadership in other departments.
What I have observed, and it may stem from the sysadmin mythos, is that you can work behind the scenes staying away from complicated interpersonal relationships, but you won't be successful. This leads to IT never really being embedded fully in projects and seeking out ownership of projects with other parts of the organisation. This transactional relationship puts IT in a bad spot and they fail to do things to improve the organisation.
This evolves into things like R&D in pharma companies having a parallel IT department because the main IT department isn't trusted. The folks on the ground in regular IT would be interested in helping the scientists and delivering tools and services for them, but IT leadership didn't really take much interest in the needs and differences from the mainstream user population (sales, marketing, etc.) so trust broke down.
I once got to participate in a leadership program at a global org. They selected up and coming peers from other departments. My observation was that the folks from the IT would not be the ones I'd choose for key leadership positions, but I was glad to see they were getting to see where other folks were in their development.
So, the dark humour of BOFH is a release for individuals, but it's also an indictment of a culture which IT won't easily escape from.
> I'm not completely sure why this is, but the behaviours are often the opposite of what you'll often see from leadership in other departments.
I think part of the problem is that the vast majority of people who are in CTO/CIO type roles have zero IT knowledge. In the case where it's someone who "came up from the trenches", they were often in a hands-on role for only a relatively short period of time, a long time ago, and were never particularly skilled.
In both cases, they tend to trust their own intuition/gut instinct over that of the advice they get from their team.
Getting good managers who trust their team to give them good advice, and are able to fight (and win) for those things to make things better are few and far between.
Then again, having a good team to begin with can be a problem, too - there's a lot of people in the industry who really simply shouldn't be, and make a lot of poor decisions that just cause pain for others.
So what if IT folks are not the ones you would choose for “key leadership positions”? Maybe they understand something that you, and most other engineers don’t. At half the places I worked at as a sysadm or IT engineer I had access to pay bands, vendor contracts, etc. I was never impressed.
All that I saw was a lot of people fighting very hard over a very marginal and pathetic amount of money, equity, and status, while we wrote yet another multi-million dollar check to some shitty consulting firm in Eastern Europe.
You may think that we’re out of the game, but the truth is we understand it in a way you could hardly imagine.
I'm not sure how else to describe BOFH except as revenge-fantasy porn. It's a vent/release for people who are often stuck between a rock and a hard place.
In most organisations, IT is seen a as a cost-centre, rather than a business enabler. So on one hand, you have management often wanting to cut costs to the bone - on the other, you have the very same people complaining that you're implementing certain policies and being a hard-ass about equipment/software/etc. Then when things go down and it's due to the business cutting costs - well, it's still IT's fault.
Then there's the often poorly thought through and inane requests, where people refuse to listen to reason.
And then you have a lot of people who have no awareness of anything outside of themselves - Their issues are always the most important, they shouldn't be required to learn basic IT skills, and anything that goes wrong it's IT's fault, even if they've been provided ample training and education opportunities.
I see similarly dark humour and in-jokes in other high-stress professions.