An IT manager's "chess" metaphor contrasts HR's "checker" mindset: HR seeks homogenous staff, but IT needs diverse specialists. This mismatch creates challenges in hiring, promoting, and compensating IT professionals, often leading to talent loss.
Client RJ smiled slyly and asked me, “What is the difference between Checkers and Chess?”
I assumed this was a clever riddle, and told him I might not be the best person to ask if he was looking for a popular answer because I was a computer science nerd. 35 years ago, before either game had been “solved” by the efforts of AI, I was a decent player of both games, and I’d spent a bit of time researching (as a hobby) how to build computer programs to play each. As I understood it, both games were comparably complex in a mathematical sense. The complexity of the different abilities of the pieces made chess more complex to program, so I had favored checkers in my research.
He shook his head and said I was missing his point. “All the starting pieces on a checkerboard have the same abilities. Chess pieces have different abilities and weaknesses. This is a metaphor for a problem I have when interacting with HR about hiring or promoting members of my IT team. These nice folks in HR think they are hiring checkers—they look at the job description and imagine finding me a certain homogenous person who meets those requirements.”
He went on to explain that his application support team was much more complex. His team needed specialists who excelled at
“I don’t need checkers; I need the right chess pieces to fill out my team.”
This was the best metaphor I encountered that month. Newly hired young and hungry entry level staff ARE checkers. If they are competent, they become experts in a few of these disciplines with time, coaching, and experience.
When working with more senior staff, the rules and constraints that can flow from HR’s “Checkers” mindset can make finding, hiring, promoting, and compensating the chess pieces for your team a real challenge.
For example, a young guy hired to do entry level data center grunt work distinguished himself by teaching himself a programming language and using it to automate complex scheduling tasks that had been the source of production errors. This caught the attention of the operations manager, who promoted the young man to manage disk space. His progress and efficiency there caught the attention of the system administration team, who eventually recruited him to assist with a complex enterprise-wide system upgrade.
When the upgrade was completed successfully, the manager sought to promote the upstart (who was pursuing a computer science degree at night while working full time during the day) to a level commensurate with his demonstrated skill. Word came back from HR—the resulting pay would be three times what we were paying when we hired him three years ago—request denied. The organization had taken this motivated “checker” and transformed him into a valuable chess piece but could not compensate him appropriately for his skills. They soon lost him to a competitor.
HR people and their rules are not evil, but they are often designed for checkers. IT people are much more like chess pieces, with different strengths and abilities. This can present a challenge to managers trying to build and sustain effective, complex teams of IT professionals. The next time you find yourself negotiating with the nice folks in HR, be patient, and consider this metaphor to help them understand the hiring and retention challenges you face. IT professionals know how diverse the skill requirements are for a high speed team, we need to be able to better explain that to folks who don’t understand it.
Lets Hang!