A couple of my colleagues back at InfoWorld (including IT Director Kevin Railsback) IM’ed me today to say that a story I wrote about a year ago is featured today on Fark.com and is currently driving a ton of traffic to InfoWorld.com. The story is “Top 20 IT Mistakes,” and some are pretty general (“1. Botching your outsourcing strategy“) while others are pretty darn specific (“18. Underestimating PHP“). All in all, I think the list holds up pretty well after a year.
The comments on Fark are entertaining and include a few suggestions beyond my original 20, gathered here for your enjoyment. My personal favorites are “Planning your IT approach via idiotic online lists” and “Feeling more informed and enlightened after reading an InfoWorld top 20 mistake list.”
Some other favorites:
- not blocking Fark at the Firewall
- Hiring non-technical managers who think they understand technology [offered as a corrolary to my #7, “Promoting the wrong people” -CD]
- Forgetting to delete your name off the list of employees that spend their work hours surfing the internet for porn
- Forgetting to put your bosses name on the same list
- Ever getting a job in IT to begin with [I include this one because this reflects a lot of the sentiment in the rest of the comments. -CD]
- Volunteering for being ‘Temporary Oncall’ with temporary = forever.
- Making IT employees pay for their coffee (oh yes, they actually make us buy the coffee and they are in food distribution) and then taking away the coffee machine. [The horror! That would never happen at Yahoo! -CD]
- Do not hire anyone who thinks that it is funny that they “don’t know anything about computers”.
- Don’t spill soda on your keyboard.
Add your own here.
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