How to succeed in IT

Pilot fish is fresh out of school at his first IT job, and he spends his time shadowing the single resource on the company's call center application.

"The lead programmer went on vacation after moving a new version into production," reports fish. "On Monday, the application kept failing. All the execs went scrambling to figure out how to contact the programmer on some remote Caribbean island and fly him back."

On a hunch, fish decides to take a look at the new source code to see if he can spot any problems.

And it's not long before he finds a line of code surrounded by comments that read: "TAKE THIS LINE OUT BEFORE MOVING TO PRODUCTION!"

Fish comments out the line, tests the result and contacts QA. Then he heads for the big conference room where the IT bigwigs are trying to figure out what to do about the outage.

One aggravated exec asks what the bottom-rung fish is doing there. "I fixed the problem," he says.

A few questions and answers later, it's clear that everything has been tested, and the CIO approves the move to production -- and the call center app is soon back up and running.

"Afterward, the VP for the call center application asked how I solved the problem," says fish. "I told him the truth. The VP exclaimed, 'So none of my big-shot managers could figure this out?'

"The next day, I was promoted."

Sharky defines success just one way: By the true tales of IT life he gets. Send me yours at sharky@computerworld.com. You'll get a stylish Shark shirt if I use it. Add your comments below, and read some great old tales in the Sharkives.

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