Who has never been given the incredible task of discovering why their grandmother's cell phone is not connecting to the internet? Or to fix the computer that stopped working "out of nowhere" from your uncle? If you study or work in the IT field and have never heard that kind of question, you are doing something wrong.
The technology market is still a very new market and has been changing very fast. For this and other reasons it is very common to find people (mainly older people) who do not understand very well what a professional in the field of technology does. This causes several stereotypes to be created, among them we have the stereotypes:
Someone from IT knows how to fix any defective electronic equipment. Cell phones, notebooks, computers, air conditioning, remote control. And the list of equipment that people think every IT professional knows how to fix goes a long way. But the truth is that most of the time we have no idea of the problem with any of this equipment. We trained to become developers, software engineers, support analysts, and not to fix this type of equipment.
Someone from IT knows the reason for all the problems on the internet. It is login to Facebook that does not work until the photo that the person wants to download and fails. When we hear that kind of thing, we want to rethink the whole career.
An IT professional is always someone who knows math. In fact for some areas the knowledge of mathematics is quite necessary, however, it is not all IT professionals who need to use mathematics on a daily basis, so this type of association again escapes reality a little.
An IT professional is always a nerd. This is perhaps one of the heaviest stereotypes towards IT professionals. "Study 10 hours a day.", "Must have graduated from the most disputed college." and other ideas that try to portray the IT professional as someone from another planet are quite common.
An IT professional is an anti-social person. In fact, people have no idea what the environment of a real tech company is like. The interaction at work is greater than many traditional industries, and besides that, outside of work the story goes far beyond video games and discussions about better processors and video cards.
It is quite inconvenient to hear this kind of stereotypical comment in person, however, it is up to us to explain how things really are, if this scenario is to change. So talk to your relatives, friends and colleagues who don't quite understand the area in which you work and spread more and more the new reality of the IT professional.
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