If you are preparing for a career in IT or are new to IT, many of the "dirty little secrets" listed below may surprise you because we don't usually talk about them out loud. If you are an IT veteran, you've probably encountered most of these issues and have a few of your own to add - and please, by all means, take a moment to add them to the discussion. Most of these secrets are aimed at network administrators, IT managers, and desktop support professionals. This list is not aimed at developers and programmers - they have their own set of additional dirty little secrets - but some of these will apply to them as well.
1.) The pay in IT is good compared to many other professions, but since they pay you well, they often think they own you
2.) It will be your fault when users make silly errors
3.) You will go from goat to hero and back again multiple times within any given day
4.) Certifications won't always help you become a better technologist, but they can help you land a better job or a pay raise
5.) Your nontechnical co-workers will use you as personal tech support for their home PCs
6.) Vendors and consultants will take all the credit when things work well and will blame you when things go wrong
7.) You'll spend far more time babysitting old technologies than implementing new ones
8.) Veteran IT professionals are often the biggest roadblock to implementing new technologies
9.) Some IT professionals deploy technologies that do more to consolidate their own power than to help the business
10.) IT pros frequently use jargon to confuse nontechnical business managers and hide the fact that they screwed up
Tech Sanity Check , By Jason Hiner, Executive Editor
