A resume is best described as a coded record of achievement, a message in Braille for practiced readers, expanded by a cover detailing the personality that animates those achievements. Like many business people, I like to believe that the years of running my own company has made me a better intuiter of these codes – and therefore ever less likely to need to punch one out. Yet here I am; needs partially must. I understand that a literal resume would be a touch coy, but that to put too much padding in a brief biog is like putting it on a football player – it simply over-animates it. So, in the interests of industry, I’ll try to reproduce the original raw athlete.

Animation Level: Early Disney:

Charles Warwick Eade was born in 1965, and raised in Pakuranga, Auckland, New Zealand. He has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Auckland. He qualified (in an age more relevant) as a Novell Certified Netware Engineer and Microsoft Certified Engineer. He has written Business software since the beginning of his career, from Fox-Pro to Silverlight. In 1988, he founded LanCom Technology, a managed services provider to small and medium enterprises in Auckland (and over New Zealand). He is a member of the New Zealand Computer Society.

Lead by Warwick , the development team at LANcom , has developed the IT talent assessment application – Hireroom and more recently released the RS-U set of tools for managed services providers

Animation Level: Middle Disney:

Most of my experience is with small to medium sized enterprises, 10- 400 employees, and therefore my thoughts are mainly applicable to these put upon populations. Most companies with fewer employees are (as I well recall) living hand-over-mouth with equipment of all kinds, and I wish them well. Any Company with more than 400 employees should have well paid and therefore well trained IT professionals in house, who know how to hire (and when to fire) outside IT assistance. My more limited experience with entities of this size (both with Government Departments and in the private sector) indicates that this is rarely the case.

Animation Level: Pixar:

This experience enables me to make the core claims of my Profession and Expertise. IT hardware, based as it is on both the greatest pure technological advances and the greatest physics breakthroughs of the last century (we will be revisiting this axiom pre-nauseum), works. Very, very, very well. IT software, moreover, is more predictable than an accountant’s ledger. If written properly, it cannot do but what it is programmed (is a program) to do. A large 400+ company should have IT pros for whom the above is as banal a truism as that Company vans with refueling, licensed drivers and occasional maintenance should go. They should not treat IT implementation/maintenance, any more than the workings of internal combustion, as an inherently problematic or intuitive process.

As a professional of longstanding, I of course understand that an IT pro need not/cannot know everything about every situation. That in some situations, sometimes due to resource scarcity,

IT professionals may have to push the limits of their expertise, and knowledge. Or, on occasions, retreat and consult with senior colleagues, perhaps at their limits.

Animation Level: Pekar:

But there are limits, dammit. There are honest limits. A reseller company has no business offering Email infrastructure if they cannot/will not offer a single person who knows how email works, and knowing how it works goes beyond clicking through dialogues. When a rep does click on an icon, moreover, and nothing happens, expertise goes beyond a dogbiscuit fixation on the screen or a scramble in the Microsoft textbook to find out where the “registry” is.

Know Your Shit. Seriously. Know your shit or stop defrauding people. And, in all seriousness, only the largest Telecommunications Duo/Monopolies can openly laugh at that principle.

Animation Level: Weta:

Rewinding 23 years of professional employment in IT places me in 1988, when a newly minted but hardly gilded B.E. degree promised me a career of precious little glitter in conventional industry. With that rather swiftly in mind I joined with a colleague to form the first iteration of LANcom. In 1990 I bought him out, and started filling in my resume properly. I had actually been paid to write software since High School, so we could say my career began 27 years ago. One of the salient points of this blog, however, is that, technologically, I really can’t. 23 years then – and a salute to my genuine seniors.

Of my 2.3 decades, at least 2.1 have contained a continuous test of my staff*, my family and my wife as I continually ranted about the various exemplars of the fundamental distinction contained in the blog: Making money in IT frequently has no connection with an understanding of IT, or even actually a career in the industry. A representative form of the rant?

“Take modern medicine, subtract every aspect of governing legislation** and the very notion of malpractice, open the hospitals to homeopathy and discourage the idea of the inate superiority of the learning an MD acquires over a decade. Then fire all the coroners….”

….and you have the modern IT industry. Except with far less death and far more overpriced machinery.

This is a bitter analogy I will need to return to, but we should also promote a better class of irony. Consider Newton’s magnificently pseudo-modest snipe at the diminutive Hooker. Newton was a paramount genius, celebrated with exquisite justice for the annus-et-demi mirabuli he squeezed in among his alchemic adventures. We are none of us equivalent geniuses, so our modesty can have a clearer ring:

“We explore brilliant technology, standing on the shoulders of Giants, literally to enable its use by anyone who can recognize its usefulness.”

This is both a profitable and not ignoble ideal, and I hope this blog, in travelling its small way, promotes these complementary notions.

Animation Level: South Park:

Mark Eade has a BA and MA (1^st class hons) from the University of Auckland, and an ABD from the University of British Columbia. For all his incompletion, he writes – and is impressed by those who, paid handsomely in every discipline from public entertainment to punditry, cannot.

Clearly, he needs his brother.

*Actually, those experts who have been with me for years are fairly indulgent.

** There is actually a huge, almost tragic exception to this, a foundation stone tribute to the ignorance of US Law in the early 90’s. It concerns not practice, but patents, and we will discuss it later.