Wondered what the real-life counterparts of Jen, Moss and Roy make of Graham Linehan's much-loved sitcom? We asked three tech-heads to tell us what they think.

IT project manager Shaheen, 38, is married with two children and lives in Cheshire. Technical architect Harry, 34, is separated with two children and works in Greater Manchester. Account manager Bob, 31, works for a major IT outsourcing firm in Greater Manchester.

Do people like Moss, Jen and Roy really exist?

Shaheen: People like Jen exist – there's one in our department, who was hired to translate between the geeks and the management but she doesn't have a clue what she's doing.

Harry: People like Moss and Roy exist less and less, because the competencies you need tend to mean you're multi-skilled, so you can't just ignore people and sit in front of a screen all day.

Bob: The Jen figures aren't exclusively female. There are plenty of men with top jobs in project managing who don't know the first thing about IT.

Can you spot IT people by their clothes?

Bob: Yes. One guy I work with has a utility belt. It's got his PDA, his personal GPS unit and multiple phones on it. He's got his pants dead short, and he never speaks to anyone.

Harry: T-shirts [Harry shows his Darth Vader T-shirt with the caption: "I Am Your Father"].

Shaheen: I think it's generally a guy thing. Though I have been known to wear the occasional rock T-shirt to the office.

Are IT people treated with contempt and hidden in a basement, as they are in the show?

Shaheen: When I've worked on site, IT people have a godlike status. I've had factory foreman shouting at staff, telling them what they can and can't do, based on my word and whim, so I've seen the opposite.

Harry: It's quite central to The IT Crowd that the department is stuffed away somewhere, and that isn't the way we work. Going back a few years, it was like that, and people used to complain that we were obnoxious, a bit prickly, difficult to talk to when they needed something sorted out. Now, it's moved, and it's very much integrated with the rest of the business.

Bob: More and more businesses are getting rid of their IT departments. It's all about self service now, and any technical needs are outsourced. In that respect, I think the show is documenting a dying culture. I think it was dying even when the show started.

Do IT people lack social skills?

Harry: There's quite a few stereotypical geeks in our department, but only one or two with no social skills.

Shaheen: One guy I worked with built a wall of box files around the edges of his desk so that people wouldn't look at him. I think IT does attract a few obsessive, slightly odd personalities, definitely.

Bob: Less and less, though what's happening to these people is perhaps a mystery. I think a lot of them have been forced to take on more business-focused roles.

Are IT people particularly into geeky pursuits?

Bob: There's people in the office who spend 20-30 hours a week on Warcraft. But I think you'd find people like that in the rest of the male population.

Harry: Guys on the coding team go home and work on open source stuff in their spare time, and I must confess, one of my hobbies is to build virtual machines when I'm not at work.

Shaheen: I think the only way I can relate to a lot of the stuff that goes on is that I'm into metal and rock – that subculture is massive among IT types.

Does the IT sector respect diversity?

Bob: There is sexism in IT. There are very few women in technical roles.

Harry: Where I work, there is a representative number of ethnic minorities and two women on the configuration team.

Shaheen: I've sat in meetings where senior consultants said: "She's not going to do anything" and "She doesn't know about it." I took it at the time, because I was new, but sexism is a very real thing in IT.

Does the advice "turn it on and off" really work?

Bob: With surprising regularity. From an outsider's point of view, that is everything that we do.

Harry: It solves 80% of problems. You've got to know when to switch it on and off. Switch it off, wait 10 seconds, then switch it on, that's the trick.

Shaheen: It does, but IT people dress it up. They'll say, "Have you given it a service reboot?" There's quite a few euphemisms they've developed because it's often effective. Like a "power recycling", "refresh" and things like that.