From a software development perspective... (Score 1)

IT staff should *never* badmouth their customers (and yes, users should be considered customers). It is unfortunate that some of them do. There are legitimate reasons for frustrations, however. It seems that you are turning around and blaming the IT staff, which I think is not the appropriate thing to do. This creates a cycle of user-blames-IT-who-blames-users. The blame game circles around the root cause of much of these problems: poor project management.

Software engineering has many similarities to building bridges or buildings, at least at this time. However, perhaps because the product isn't physical, there seems to be an enormous amount of pressure in many companies to build with little regard to SQA testing, documentation, or user community research. This to me is equivalent to opening a restaurant without performing basics like demographic surveys and making sure your broilers are up to fire code standards. Fundamental questions (such as flexibility versus security, a *huge* dilema when designing any IT framework) are often unanswered, and left up to chaos to decide (not always in the way either IT staff or users want).

When bugs arise, there is often a demand to quickly repair the bugs and get them out of there ASAP. I understand that bugs look the same to users, but they are not always easy to solve. To put it in construction terms, you can use spackle to quickly patch up a small hole in the drywall. But patching a major structural defect with spackle is foolhardy. Yet patching software with "spackle", regardless of bug severity, seems to be standard practice in too many companies.

On the opposite side, when I've seen management put into place, they too often act more as a shield than a useful business process tool. Too many help desks have large layers of unnecessary bureaucracy and paperwork to deal with, while the user sits there with their problem. No wonder many users refer to the help desk as the "helpless desk". The same goes for IT change management processes, they are often way too unresponsive in my experience.

Communication and technical skills seem to be a ying and a yang type thing in people: it's rare to see both in the same person. This is why IT management is so important (and well paid): the best kind can act as a successful medium between the technical and the user community, and avoid many of the problems so common with IT development.

Two other points. First, it is mistaken to say that IT is the only field with personality type conflicts. (Take creative people vs. business users, for instance.) Finally, the online world is not representative of the real world. Many people use blogs to vent their frustrations. Hell, just look at the "customers suck!" websites and Livejournal communities. Many of these blogs are vents, nothing more, and not representative of what goes on in the workplace.