Devil's Advocate: Why do techies get such a bad press?

In his latest look at some of the quirks littering the ebusiness landscape, Martin Brampton, director at consultancy Black Sheep Research, asks some legitimate questions about a subject at the heart of the industry - the persecution of the techie...

Everyone seems to have it in for techies, propellerheads, geeks or whatever we call them. Why do we deride them so? Would the world be a better place without them? And what could they do to improve their image?

Of course you will note that I'm talking about them. I'm certainly not admitting to being one of them. Just because I'm spending a lot of time and energy figuring out how to move from my old Nokia Communicator to something new doesn't make me a geek. Does it?

It's funny how it seems to be a characteristic of IT to talk about techies. Engineers work with equally technical matters, but they don't get called names. Unless you count "engineer" as name-calling. For a time, it was suggested that engineers were more worldly people who had figured out how to do the things they do reliably and to budget. IT people, who couldn't do either, were urged to become more like engineers. After all, engineers know the ins and outs of building things like, say, footbridges across the River Thames.

Doctors spend years learning intricate details about people's bodies. They know all about the complex chemical reactions that take place inside them, and the effect of introducing drugs, vaccines and so on. Apparently they also spend some time learning how to interact with patients, but maybe that part of the course is optional, as the results are not always very apparent. Yet we rarely call doctors by pejorative names like "geek".

Maybe it is the boredom factor. Just as E L Wisty mused over the man who was the worst off in the whole world, I suppose there must be someone somewhere who is the most boring man in the world. Would he perhaps be an actuary? They are said to be the people who found accounting too exciting. No, nowadays many people would claim that he would be one of the techies from the world of IT.

You will notice that I have talked only about the most boring man. Research shows that girls find IT rather interesting when they are 11. By the time they are 13, girls have realised that IT would involve working with people who they are told "live at home with their mothers, who knit cardigans for them". But then another theory suggests that girls lose interest in IT as soon as it starts being taught as a school subject.

Who is most dismissive of techies? Apart from 13-year-old girls, in my experience it seems to be sales people. Now sales people generally get paid more than techies, and enjoy rushing about in fast cars and talking on mobile phones. But they live in a dream world - they have to, in order to cope with the repeated setbacks of the salesperson's life.

Perhaps they are also being just a little defensive. Usually lacking detailed knowledge themselves, they like to diminish the value of the techies. Are those brash, confident sales people really insecure inside?

Is it such a bad thing to be engrossed in the intellectual challenges of technology, rather than the worldly matters of selling and money? Surely it is in our interests to have different kinds of people in the world. We may run into some tricky problems at the interfaces between different groups but that is part of what makes life challenging and exciting.

Technical innovation in IT over the last half century has been quite extraordinary. Not every novelty turns out worthwhile but few people want to go back to a world without computers. Maybe we should be kinder to our techies, encourage more girls to join them and try to persuade them to abandon the cardigans.

** Martin Brampton is a director and founder of Black Sheep Research (http://www.black-sheep-research.co.uk ), an independent consultancy providing research, writing and speaking services on a wide range of business and technology subjects. Martin was previously a director at Bloor Research, and has worked with IT as a user and analyst for over 20 years. He is a frequent contributor to silicon.com's weekly Behind the Headlines TV programme and can be contacted at silicon@black-sheep-research.co.uk.