Have you ever sat down with a programmer?
That title's not meant to be facetious. I’ve never met a programmer that I did not like…seriously. O.K., maybe one, but that was at another job and it was because he was pretty weird--he said he had “fast eyes” and needed a monitor with a super high refresh rate. What the heck are fast eyes? "I am not like regular people,” said he. We might not have liked each other, but at least we agreed on that point. But I digress.
Back to the point. I am lucky. My department has four programmer/developer positions and my associate head supervising them has over 20 years experience in programming, development, and analysis. Developers are smart people, and the ones in my department have been no exception. I went to coffee with Rob today. (Thanks to my bad luck, he is now the senior programmer in the department after a 6 week tenure. It is harder, I think, to hold on to talented IT staff than librarians. Programmers can get jobs outside our field more easily than we can, and for much more money and glory.) I wanted to see how things were going and what his impressions were after a month and a half of library indoctrination.
I like to think I know a lot about running an IT department. But, boy, did he have some good ideas. And I’m not talking about what language to code in or whether Linux is better than Unix. I mean organizational ideas, efficiency ideas. Did I agree with everything he said? Not necessarily. Am I better off for having sat down with him? Most definitely.
Yes, I have made jokes in the past about talking to programmers. Like how do you explain MARC to a 25 year old Oracle Certified Java programmer who graduated in this century and just left a $500M a year internet company to try out academia? But I have also sat through countless excruciatingly painful presentations where several condescending minutes are spent giving advice on “how to talk to your IT people.” Administrators might like to insulate themselves from the techier side of IT by having techie librarians around—at least there is some common ground. But I’ve got news for you, those programmers, developers, and non-librarians bring a lot to the table. They are smart, articulate, and probably have good ideas about organizational efficiency and strategy. Sit down with one and see.
Not to mention those eye-opening "you mean you can DO that?" moments. Talking to programmers is good for widening one's sense of the possible.
Plus when you find yourself trying to explain something "obvious," such as MARC, or my favorite example, that there is not just one flat file of all LC headings, you see the world through their eyes.... and it can be sobering.
It's not the tech people some of us have trouble communicating with these days...