Ctrl-Alt-Reboot: Twenty Years of Corporate IT. Nobody Warned Me.

There comes a point in every IT career when you realize that the madness is not a temporary condition. It is the product.

CTRL-ALT-REBOOT is the book that Simon Holt spent twenty years living and considerably longer admitting he was going to write.

It is, he acknowledges freely, a fictional memoir about an industry that most people find either baffling or deeply uninteresting, and he has written it anyway, on the reasonable grounds that the people inside it deserve someone to tell them they are not imagining things.

What follows is an account of how the industry actually works: why the incompetent get promoted and the competent get restructured, why the code written on a weekend in 2003 is still running somewhere right now, and why the most important skill in corporate IT has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with managing the story that other people tell about you.

It is also, unavoidably, quite funny, though Holt would be the first to admit that this depends heavily on whether you have ever sat in a glass-walled meeting room while an open-plan office pretends not to watch.

If you have, welcome. You are among friends. If you haven't - you have been warned.