Good at your Job vs. Skilled

I see a lot of sentimentality in this sub around the idea that technicians and engineers who have strong skillsets and problem solving are good at their jobs. However, I see a lot of folks who hate their users, and celebrate "bringing down Shirley" for whatever sleight they suffered from her etc.

I wanted to broach the subject of what being **Good at your Job** in IT actually should look like, and why being very skilled doesn't automatically make you good at your job.

Our entire industry is a service industry. Even our engineers, are working in service to other departments in some fashion. Outside of maybe the deepest depths of DevOps, our sector is mostly customer (users are interchangeable with customers for internal departments) service oriented. Server uptime, break/fix, project management, it all comes around to servicing the needs of our organizations and the people that comprise them.

With that in mind, you **cannot** claim to be "Good at your job", if your customer service fkin sucks. In most of our positions, we need to be both good at handling people AND skilled in our specialty. But you can't lack in one side and assume that you're good at your job. Take the ego out of the equation, and stop hating on the Karens and Chads of your workplace.

Think about it like this, if IT was a restaurant, and you were a server. Do you think anyone would say you were "Good at your job" if you never wrote an order down wrong, always delivered the food quickly, 100% perfect at every task associated with waiting on that table, but you constantly sneered at, mouthed off, and ignored your patrons requests? You can maintain a career on skill alone, but without the service side of things, you'll probably constantly flounder at the bottom of your department. Not to mention the extra stress you'll carry around constantly being in combat mode at the workplace because you just can't fkin stand Tina.

TL;DR: Get good at all aspects of your job, including the part where you have to interact with othre people, which **IS** a part of your job.