February 9, 2015 / by June Blender / General / 2 Comments

Labor-saving devices and the IT Pro

There’s an old story about a man who is often seen about town walking beside his bicycle. He pushes it up hills and skips to keep pace with it as it rolls down hills. Finally, a woman approaches the man and asks him why he doesn’t just ride the bicycle? “I’m very busy,” replied the man, “and I don’t have time to get on!”

 

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This absurd little tale makes us feel wise, because we are all well informed about labor-saving devices. We know empirically that the time spent mounting (and even dismounting) the bike is far outweighed by the time saved in riding, or even in leaving the bicycle behind. But when it comes to our own work, we’re often not that different from the poor, harried fellow.

It takes time to learn a new skill, even one that will make us much far more efficient. It costs money to buy a power tool, so we continue laboring with the screwdriver. It’s not rational, but sometimes, we feel that we don’t have a choice, especially when someone else makes the financial decisions.

This problem hits home for many IT pros who are highly skilled and extremely valuable, but can’t convince management to buy tools for them, even when the labor-cost-savings is apparent and the same managers fund developer tools that can cost 5x more.

It also hits home here at SAPIEN Technologies, Inc, where we work really hard to create software that makes you extremely efficient. We put critical resources right at your fingertips and automate every repeatable element in the process. And, our customers tell us all the time that our products have made them heroes – working faster, smarter, more productively, and more professionally. But, to use our products, you have to buy them and you have to invest some time to learn to use them really well.

This week, Windows PowerShell MVP, Jeffery Hicks (@JeffHicks), weighed in on the topic in a blog post entitled, How hard are you working?. Jeffery’s post sparked a thoughtful conversation in the PowerShell group on Facebook and on his blog post. Take a few minutes to read the post and join the conversation.

June Blender is a technology evangelist at SAPIEN Technologies, Inc. You can reach her at juneb@sapien.com or follow her on Twitter at @juneb_get_help.