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IT Stress In The Workplace
peec writes: "Found this story in Information Week. It talks a great deal about IT stress. How to prevent it and what causes it in the workplace. Great for everyone in IT and their bosses."
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I'm so tempted to agree.. But I think it should be a matter of personal preference. As much as I like being a little buzzed (and I'm not the only one, at least 1/3 of the people I work with do it too), I know for a fact that I think more clearly after a few days off of weed.
Of course, this only depends on if you think when you work. I didn't need to think at my last IT job (I was a button-pusher) but now that I'm trying to do some work for myself, I've found that I need my wits about me.
i like traffic lights
:)
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
i like traffic lights
but only when there green....
I have the most un-stressed uncle, because he's a war-between-the-states reenactor with access to a period gatling gun and cannon. The gatling gun and piano combination can lift years of stress in minutes.
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
If I could get the meeting mavens to work! My stress level would be much lower! Of 6 people in the department 2 do the work while the rest stand around and talk. Not about projects or business, personal BS. I clocked one last week while she spent 3 hours and 24 minutes on the phone with family members. As these people make up ideas that wont get beyond the meeting stage they are able to get out of the work they were hired for. My only hope is a VP gets the guts up to out-source the whole I/T department. I went from consultant to full time employee, I'm regretting the move.
However, the sciences do face an ongoing challenge in that many entering grad students don't fully realize the limited number of job openings in academia. I was fortunate to enter the real-world job market just before the employment crunch hit. Many of my younger friends were not as fortunate.
From my crude set of observations of the real-world, it would seem that many in the IT industry are facing the same set of problems encountered in the sciences. Use, abuse, then toss away young talent.
IMHO, trolling slashdot is the best IT-related stress relief. It is just so obvious.
-=(V)0(V)0cr0(V)3=-
Quoted from Olin Shivers' page at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ shivers/autoweapons.html
.223 loads, the gas ports on my M16 would clog like you wouldn't believe. Steer clear of that stuff.
It's common knowledge that whenever you get two or more CS grad students together, the conversation will inevitably drift to the same topic: automatic weapons. Lately, we've noticed that whenever we attend a CS party, picnic, or bullsession, we always hear the same questions and discussions, usually from the younger grad students:
When I switched from guncotton to standard ball powder on my
You haven't cleared an ejection port jam until you've cleared one in the Hill district at 4:00 AM on a Saturday morning.
I want to mount an M60 in front of the sun roof of my Tercel, but the mounting bracket wasn't drilled for import cars. How did Josh Bloch do his?
What exactly are those special 'conference rounds' that Newell hand loads before AAAI every year?
Some of my friends at the MIT AI Lab don't like M203's because the grenade launcher adds too much weight, but I wouldn't have gotten out of IJCAI-85 in one piece if it hadn't been for those 40mm flechette rounds. What do you think?
Do you have to be a god-damned tenured professor to get teflon rounds at this place?
Does the 'reasonable person principle' cover hosing down a member of the Soar project after he's used the phrase 'cognitively plausible' for the fifteenth time in a 20 minute conference talk?
Where did Prof. Vrsalovic get that Kalashnikov AK-47?
I used to use Dri-Slide to lube my M16. How come my advisor says Dri-Slide is for momma's boys and Stanford profs?
Does the way Jon Webb keeps flicking the safety of his Mac-10 on and off at thesis defenses make you nervous, too?
In short, there is a lot of concern in this department for the proper care, handling and etiquette of automatic weapons. So as a service to the department, we are starting a two week daily series on "The Care and Handling of Your M16A1." Every day for the next two weeks, we will post on the wall outside our office the day's helpful hint on care and maintenance of that good old departmental standby: the M16A1. Our thanks to the US Army, whose training manuals we have shamelessly cribbed for material.
We would like to encourage other knowledgeable members of the CS community to share their expertise in a similar fashion. There is a real need for this kind of dialogue in the department. The new students come in here every fall, and are totally unequipped to handle the realities of graduate student life at CMU. Computability theory and lexical scoping are fine things to know about, but they just don't cut the mustard when somebody from the Psych department opens up on you with an Ingram set to full auto.
-the friendly automatic weapons enthusiasts of SkyCave1, Olin, Derek, and Allan
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
Unfortunately people who know what they are doing are in their cubes doing real work, while people who don't (perhaps management) are walking around asking advice from the exact people you are describing (who after all aren't doing any real work in their cubes).
Peter Principle: People rise to the level of their own incompetence
Dilbert Principle: If the moron can't do the job, promote them to management, it gets them out of the way and it's easier than firing them. Keep a resume standing by.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Santa Clara county is full of parks. Between the county and state run parks Santa Clara and San Mateo counties both have alot of open space. I work in Santa Clara (city) and co-workers often go mountainbiking at Alviso. My S.O. does the same in Palo Alto at a park behind Stanford. I'd say I've got 10 parks within 20 minutes driving time. Of course depending on where your job was located your milage may vary.
OTOH; There are many things here that detract from quality of life. Stupid people abound, but I think its like that anywhere. Going any sort of distance after work is frustrating due to traffic. Housing prices are high but then again the salaries here are also porportionally higher.
Of course the ideal would be to make silicon valley wages with a T1 uplink in the bahamas; now that would be quality of life!
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Here in London a 35 hour week is quite common, at least on paper. And 5-6 weeks annual leave.
Great Windows SFTP Server!
For some reason, me thinking about something in the shower tends to be productive. Dunno if it's the relaxation, the concentration of doing another task, or what. Just works.
>This same guy raced sailboats on the weekend, and treated all of 'his' (regardless of who they reported to) employees as if we
::blink::
>were crew on a sailing vessel.
::blink::
Uh, did this guy use ``Hubbard Technology"?
[Note to the puzzled: L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, had a thing for sailing. He gathered his most faithful culties onto a private navy, where he could be a Commodore of all he surveyed. Even though his most significant act while a commissioned officer during WW II was to shell an island belonging to Mexico, & thus cause an international incident.
[But I fear Nonesuch here may have actually worked for someone employing Scieno teachings. Which would explain why the company is on life support.]
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I went out trap shooting for the first time this year - a 12 gague Browning - hit about 3 of evey 5 of them. We shot at a local gun club range (I have a 'city' lot - they don't appreciate firearm discharge in the limits...). I think just about anybody could fire a shotgun, given the proper instruction - I got a few minutes of safety ideas, then a quick 'this is how you should stand and nest the butt end'. In fact, I think the geek/nerd community would be pretty good at it - it's all just point/click ;-)
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I remember when I first took a programming class. We started with plain C, and I spent a lot of time cooking up my own projects because the ones we were assigned were too boring.
One morning, after getting about 5 hours of sleep because I coded too late, I had one of those half-asleep dreams where you know you're asleep but you can't wake up.
The alarm clock was blaring, but I couldn't turn it off because I was busy in my dream trying to get a pointer to it so I could access the snooze button...
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
We always knew it was a powder day up in the mountains when my boss would call in sick, or call in and re-arrange all his meetings for the afternoon! Season tickets pay for themselves in about 5 trips... it makes going up for a morning worth it!
A few years ago I went back to attend a wedding and chatted with one of the more humorless strict faculty member. I was rather shocked when he said that he knew about some of rather wild behavior. He also said that he accepted this because he knew that the faculty were putting us under a great deal of stress, pushing us to our limits. As long as we performed, he and others were willing to look the other way.
But I don't think that he knew *everything* that we did. For instance, I don't think he knows that I once stuck an ax in his door. :)
Install VNC or SMS on users' computers. Next time you get stressed/bored, connect to their machine, open up Paint, and write "HEELLPPP MEEEE!!!" with red paint. It does wonders for your stress levels. http://www.dtheatre.com
Personally, I couldn't see living in California. I need a job where I can telecommute 90% of the time, so I can pick a state to live in distinct from picking the job I work at.
Anybody need a Solaris/OpenBSD/Cisco network security analyst? I won't need to ask for six figures if work will pay for my T1 line.
Send email for the URL to my resume...
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
http://cord.de/fun/bofh/
What was your username again?
You're pumping large amounts of lead into your backyard (I assume you're not firing steel shot), but you stop to wonder about a little shrapnel? Just fire from a safe distance, and you should be fine. If you're too afraid to toss them by hand, then epoxy them to the underside of a clay, and fire that. A tattered aluminum AOL disc makes for a lovely conversation piece.
Now this is GREAT advice. Even if you are not stressed out by IT (everyone feels thier particular job/environment is stressful, I find) taking time to do this stuff can really help. If I am not in a tidy environment I find it hard to concentrate (I can but I feel distracted). I find the mindless act of tidying (or perhaps doing some cardio exercise or something) for twenty minutes or so can do wonders...
Have you ever had a flash of inspiration while doing this? It's the best.... :)
--8<--
--8<--
has anyone ever seen Office Space? I don't think you can add your two cents to this debate without seeing it:
Peter Gibbons: I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day you see me, that's the worst day of my life.
Dr. Swanson: What about today? Is today the worst
day of your life?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Dr. Swanson: Wow. That's messed up.
click here to incinerate homeless people
At some point, the only solution is to stop cleaning up after them. Let their incompetence shine through. When things fall apart and the boss is looking for someone to blame, you can literally say "I told you so."
It may sound childish, but it's no more childish than your coworkers' behavior and sometimes it's the only way they will learn.
And that, my little grasshopper, is why you'll stay in your tech job as all your enemies climb the corporate ladder of management.
I guess we should all be subjected to flogging and other forms of torture so we know what a blessing a normal life is. Or perhaps we should be forced to live in a cardboard box under a bridge so we can appreciate our homes. How is construction a 'real' job and one where you sit on your arse coding isn't? IF YOU'RE GETTING PAID FOR IT, IT'S A REAL JOB.
Good God, that's like less than half of what IT workers here work in a week...
I keep hearing "we get paid damn well."
...).
:) -- and by 2020, I should be able to find millions who will code 110 hours, for a mere $250K, and think they're better off than people today!
It amazes me how much the effects of compounded inflation on dollar amounts have fooled people into ignoring their real pay. $100,000 sure does sound like a lot!
Assuming 7-8% CAGR of prices since 1980, consumer products cost about 3.5 times what they did in 1980. (Housing in the Bay Area alone is another story; medical insurance and education are higher by percent growth than consumer goods;
In 2000 dollars, a salary in the 100K range is roughly equivalent to what a salary in the 30K range was 1980 dollars. (Ignoring that you get taxed more on the 100K).
My father, for instance, made 30K in 1980 working as a technician in a rural water plant, a job that required his attention about half of the forty hours he put in per week, and required only a high school education plus a good knowledge of chemistry. Costs of living in rural areas are MUCH less than, say, Silicon Valley; etc.
As an entrepreneur, I could hardly hope for a better labour market
>there's too little fun stuff to do, and there >aren't enough females
As a Valley native, I find that there is plenty to do in the area. I don't know what "fun stuff" constitutes for you, but: The area is packed with excellent restaurants serving a variety of different cuisines. San Francisco (and to a lesser extent, San Jose) has good cultural venues, including museums, symphony, ballet, and opera. The area's two most prestigious universities, Stanford and Berkeley, offer continuing education classes. There are a number of parks sprinkled throughout the area. Visit the beach at Half Moon Bay (quiet and nice drive up) or Santa Cruz (people watching). There are plenty of clubs and parties to go to on the weekends. The weather is nice all year.
If you want to escape, the Monterey aquarium is a must-see, Yosemite National Park is about 5 hours away, and you can make it down to LA in a day's drive.
I'm not sure why you think there aren't enough females. I'd say the general population is about 50/50, and there were more than a few women at the high tech company where I worked, even in engineering/programming positions.
---- I'm going to lead you kicking and screaming, giggling and laughing into the future.
SweatShopWeek.com
Backlash
In today's fast-paced textiles economy, business demands more than ever from the labor force, and sweatshop professionals are feeling the heat. Is your company at risk of driving out its top talent?
By Marianne McGeeparvat, Diane Lee Ho, and Michelle Mbuto
Michael Millervasranjan is a seasoned sweatshop professional who thrives as lead assembler of soccar balls at Camp Jiva Spalding at Calcutta. His job is both challenging and rewarding, and it affords him the flexibility to ensure he has a few hours sleep -- something that's very important to him. But things weren't always so rosy. Like too many sweatshop professionals, Millervasranjan was once a walking zombie.
A few years ago, while employed at a government-run textiles factory, Millervasranjan was working on a sewing process to streamline the company's assembly line. "We were working six and seven days a week, 20 hours a day," he recalls. The overload not only taxed his waking hours, causing a mind-numbing fatigue, it led to a syndrome Millervasranjan dubbed "sleep stitching". "You wake up tired because you were so busy all night working on stitching together garments," he says.
The rollout of the sewing process coincided with Millervasranjan's hard-earned sick leave for hepititus. He was nervous about leaving, concerned that the factory might still be ridden with bugs. Millervasranjan feared the project was another example of ill-conceived planning by his boss, whom Millervasranjan say was out of touch with the working conditions. The boss' cluelessness, Millervasrangan says, typically led him to make promises to company honchos that left the sweatshop workers scrambling to meet impossible deadlines. Millervasranjan took his scheduled leave -- but, as he feared, bugs had prolificly spread in the assembly line. When he returned, he stayed at the job for only six more weeks. The causes of Millervasranjan's job frustration and exhoustion, commonly known as burnout, were unrealistic expactations and over-promises. The result: He quit.
Burnout is nothing new. But the backlash exemplified above may be growing.
Sweatshop work has always been stressful. Projects have short deadlines and implimentation schedules. Sweatshop operations support require 24-by-7 availability. And every new sweatshop paradigm shift brings with it the need for new skills.
What's different today is the acceleration and volume of sweatshop work, driven largely by the bourgeois in rich western countries. The race by multinational global corporate sweatshops and goverment run factories to compete for the textiles, shoes, and cottage industry market has hastened the demand for sweatshop-dependent labor. Also, the sweatshop-product floodgates have opened at many corporations that had products and budgets on hold while year 2000 work was completed.
Exacerbating the situation is an elite bourgeois culture spinning out of control, with wealth-induced psychological problems reaching an all-time high (see sidebar story, "My Gold-Plated SUV Doesn't Make Me Happy Any More"). Also the influx of refugees looking for any job they can find adds its own pressure: Many foreign refugees, accustomed to beatings and random murder, are willing to bear 120 or more hours a week, raising the bar even higher for local sweatshop workers (see sidebar story, "Foreign Refugees Add to the Pressure").
Cumulatively, this grind is fueling a backlash within sweatshop organizations -- at government run factories and, in particular, at corporate sweatshops -- that's manifested in the reduced productivity from sweatshop workers, abrupt career changes, even en masse deaths when an overworked employee bails out and takes along several collegues. Worse yet, disgrunted employees may sabotage products they are working on.
The good news is that companies are tuning in to the increasing stress levels of their sweatshop workers and taking steps to make things better. Of necessity, many sweatshops offer flexible schedules, seperate housing, and task sharing. Savvier ones seek to create a sweatshop culture that espouses mutual respect and shared values, open-curtain communications and mentoring, creativity and fun. Sweatshop workers are gettings savvier too. Many are seeking work situations that fit their lifestyles, such as respect for privacy when using the toilet. And some sweatshop workers who signed on for the breakneck pace and promised riches of sweatshop work, are returning with relief to fasting every other day.
In terms of job stress and stress-related problems, sweatshop workers have plenty of company. An estimated 1 million workers are absent on an average workday because of stress-related complaints, according to the Sweatshop Institute of Stress, a nonprofit organization in Lahore. Job stress is estimated to cost global corporations $300 billion annually, including absenteeism, diminished productivity, employee death, and medical, and postmortem fees.
But sweatshop workers may be contributing more than their share of that amount. At a remote coffee bean field in the Andes, "Hell Week" was the term used to describe the seven days that employees were overworked to get a 100 case shipment out. Boberouli, the field overseer, recalls what the eighty-member indentured servitude team faced as it was gearing up: the regional boss disregarded the reduction in productivity the last winter from 17 deaths due to starvation and extermination of native people by the government, and demanded instead that the sweatshop staff re-architect the system to accommodate 250,000 beans per worker the first day.
That fueled a whirl of 24-hour workdays, panicked psychotic episodes, dinners of stray dogs, and a 3-year-old girl taking the place of her mother who died due to exhaustion.
The upshot? The team made its deadline, but the price paid was both immediate and lasting. The fledgling gourmet coffee company and its slave labor went into the launch stressed and exhausted, damaged by broken field worker relationships and an extra $50,000 in expenses, the overseer said. Shortly thereafter, three workers died mysteriously, and the company was bought out by StarBucks.
Calling sweatshop work a marathon that must be run at a sprinter's pace is both an understatement and faulty, says Elliott HerrMasie, director of the HerrMasie Center, a sweatshop training and indentured-servitude firm. Unlike a marathon, there's no finish line in sweatshops. Projects often come rolling in one after the other, leaving little or no time to regroup. Meanwhile, basic human necessities themselves have tethered sweatshop people to their jobs round-the-clock. "We've changed our definition of what busy is," Says HerrMasie. "Now it's hyper-busy. Everyone's got a needle and thread, a shovel, a jewelry detail."
For S-B Power Toys Co., a toy manufacturer in South East Asia, eight back-to-back projects cost the company three key sweatshop bosses to mutiny, says Mark ApplhansQueDong, director of labor development. The consequence of those "departures": more pressure on remaining bosses. "It puts a burden on everyone," ApplehansQueDong says. "The work still has to get done."
------
Ok, well, you get the point. I hope I didn't offend anyone of any specific nationality, I certainly didn't intend to...I just wanted to make a little reality check here...as we sit in our polycarbonate, ergo-molded productivity environments with our Jolt and ThinkGeek chic, whining about how hard it is to type listen to music and type at keyboards for 10 hours a day, then go home to do the same thing until bedtime.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Man! Somebody needs some Prozac surreptitiously sprinkled on his/her corn flakes.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister has a lot of great information about making the tech environment more human friendly. It was reviewed by slashdot a while ago, and is every bit as good as the praise in that review makes it out to be. I always buy a copy for any new boss I get, and sometimes they even read it.
--
The McDonalds, Burgerking and Taco Bell around here are hiring for 7 to 8 dollars an hour.
And they pay overtime.
So if you get paid 8 dollars an hour with overtime you make the same money. Not bad for a position that only requires the ability to read.
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
No one will respect IT personel and the stresses they go through, until there is bloodshed. It's time to go postal, BOFH style!
Holy Brooks' Law, Batman! Or maybe it's Alioth's Law: adding more hours to a project just makes the demand for labor greater.
1. Come in at 7 (YES)
Take 30 min lunch
3. Leave at 3:30. No more without extra pay at higher than normal rates. 40 hours a week solid. Any more and your high salary is an illusion. $75000 a year at 60 hours is equiv. to $50000 a year at 40. Anything beyond 40 hours should be paid as overtime.
4. Your 3 and 4 clash. If IT is not the be-all and end-all why are you only spending 3 hours per day awake and doing non-IT activities? Leave after 8 hours and ACTUALLY have a life. If you think 1 1/2 hours per day of non-IT is refreshing, try a few more. You might like it. Getting home at 4 gives you 6 hours awake and away from work. That's almost as much time as you're spending at work.
LetterJ
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
One hour a day to read any O'Riley and Associtates book you want. - I've found that, this not only relaxes most of the team. At its worst gives them that much needed mid day nap, or some comapny time to brush up and polish their skill set. With this one hour I had a macintosh desktop guy teach himself unix in a year and get promoted to unix admin.
In a perfect situation I would give each employee 10 days training on any related technology every 90 days, though try getting a CEO or CFO to agree to this.
No days longer than 12 hours, NO MATTER WHAT! - after 12 hours at work, you are working at a negitive preformance ratio, and falling to sleep on keyboards does more damage than good. When the project is at risk of being fsck'ed by a sleepy worker, the project can wait. Yes this does piss off the MBA types, however, their job is at the expense of your technology.
Every 24 hours of overtime is rewarded with one complimentary day off. - In a perfect world this would fly at most companies.
Weekly Team Building events - dinner, movie, video games, whatever, just get out with the team and blow off some steam.
Open Door Policy - keep open desk hours, and nothing that you are doing is so important that you cant clear your desk for your team.
LISTEN TO YOUR STAFF - sometimes i myself have been so overworked that the sanity came from my team, sometimes it did not, however its all about perspective and as long as you and your team share a common perspective on things, you've done 50% of your work.
Be a minute manager - go get the book 'minute manager' and memorize it. Spend a minute giving the instruction. Check back with your employee when the deadline has come. Spend a minute praising or criticising their work. Your teammate should be encouraged to come to you if they have issues or a need, and give them that minute, and spend the other minute it takes to help them. ...and with reliable team mates, you'll have spent a whole three minutes per project.
Know your, and your team limits and never cross them, if you do it once, it will be expected from you every time thereon. Your team will feel that you sold them out.
Exercise! - there is no greater way to reduce stress than jumping rope, and punching the bag an hour a day.
..hope these small tidbits help, this is what I have done in the past, during my 0% voulentary atrrition rate management roles.
A good manager serves his staff as well as they both serve the company. (but dont be a pushover)
christopher
This communication is secured using Rot-26 Encryption Algorithm, Unauthorized decryption will be subject to laughter.
I relieve it. 6pm, and it's quake time at the office. The rune mod (artifact quake) makes it so much more fun. The ultimate stress reliever.
Oh and it's cool to throw a couple of bots in, give them "customer" skins and set them to stupid so you can just blow them up and watch little customer gibs go everywhere.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
I was just kidding, I've never worked high. I might try that thing with the acid sometime though.
I always find that I need something close at hand to squeeze, break, or otherwise pummel whenever the NT4 workstations give me the BSOD. Trouble is, that something is usually the mouse, keyboard, or table (I never go for the monitor; don't want to hit glass!). One great stress reliever is classic DOOM or Quake. They're fast-paced bloody stress relievers. Don't use Q2, Half-Life, or Unreal; those are more free-time games. Q3 is okay as long as it's single player or a match with a low fraglimit (don't forget about WORKING today!).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Problem with Silicon Valley nightlife, is there is nothing in the south bay, from S. SF up through San Jose (unless you are into cover bands, arena rock, or yuppie jazz). Basically, SF is the place, but clubs are being shut down, and bands squeezed out of the warehouses they need for raves and practice spaces. (Check this out: http://www.sfbg.com/AandE/34/46/vacant.html). East bay still has some potential, but the writing is on the wall...
I'm part of the new wave of IT professionals. I got into programming to avoid work. Sure, I'm making less in the position I'm in, but I can come in late and leave early and as long as I get actual stuff done, the boss doesn't mind. I'm using my skills to make an adequate level of compensation in exchange for less real work.
A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither. - Thomas Jefferson
Housing is too expensive, traffic is bad
If you're worried about rising housing costs.. you don't want to come as far south as San Diego.
Housing here is getting insane too.
Traffic is getting worse everyday too.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
There is a ton to do! I've lived here three years and I'm still not bored.
SF Bay is a great place for sailing (one of the best in the world) and on an IT salary a good ~22 foot sailboat is very affordable. There are lots of parks to see if you like outdoors, hiking, camping, etc.
If you are more into urban nightlife SF has more to do then alot of big cities. Oakland has lots of warehouse raves if thats your thing. Even San Jose has enough clubs and bars to keep most people satisfied.
You can do the touristy stuff; you can drive a few hours and go skiing or surfing; theres more deep-geek stuff to do than you can shake a stick at. The first step is to leave the house.
As far as housing/commuting goes; yeah housing is expensive. the trick is to get some friends together and rent a house. Much better (even cheaper given the room) then getting an apartment. Get a house near where you work and your commute will be much easier (and work off hours). Dono what to tell you about finding girls, but there are plenty if you look.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Not very long ago, I was just out of college, in my new job. We had to get this demo up and going quickly to win some business. The goals were unrealistically high, and we ended up working 90+ hour weeks for three months.
I am being completely serious when I say we would have got more and better quality work done if we had done 40 hour weeks.
Once you start working 12-hour-plus days you get into negative productivity. After a while we were all so freakin' tired that we would add more bugs than actual good code. Negative productivity. The trouble is, the negative productivity forces you to work even longer hours as deadlines are missed, leading to more negative productivity - a vicious circle. And manglement, sorry management, don't seem to understand this!
Just before one of our big demos, we were doing some last-minute stuff (like at 3 am). I made a really really dumb mistake due to tiredness - something simple like '=' instead of '==' in an if statement. Too tired to stay awake, I went home. Two guys were just finishing up when they ran into the resultant bug. They were so tired that it took them another three hours to find the problem - if they had been normally wakeful, it would have been something they found in five or ten minutes!
Well, at least we could have an ice cream break at 2:30 am when the CMVC server went down for a backup!
A recent study has also shown that lack of sleep actually has a greater effect than a couple or three beers on reaction times. When these exhausted IT workers drive home, they are effectively driving intoxicated.
What did I learn from this episode?
I will now take all my vacation in the vacation year. If management tell me I can't, I leave. I have told them this. My manager is actually very non-pointy haired, and accepts and agrees with this! I'm very lucky to have a good manager.
I refuse to work excessive overtime. Some overtime here and there is to be expected - but it shoudn't be a regular and/or excessive thing. If I'm getting too tired, the overtime gets cut back. If management whine, I look for a new job. My manager is an ex-developer who was forced into excessive overtime. She understands this too.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Stress isn't caused by situations, it's caused by reactions to situations. Once I realised this, I don't get stressed.
If the shit hits the fan, I just keep working and tell people, I can clean up all this shit, or I can do what I'm sposed to do and fix the fan.
I think I pushed that metaphor a little too far.
I don't know, I do sweet f**k all and get paid sweeties.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
I guess I havent :) Back to my cave :)
:)
Care to pass the entrace rock?
It's the pressure points: like massage or acupuncture. And the running water.
Lord give me the strength to change the things I can, the patience to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know how to get rid of the bodies of people like this poor guy's boss. Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I find that too many carbs actually diminish performance, and you feel bloated ;)
I'm lucky. I work for a small produce company and I am their first and only IT person. What I say goes, so I guess I'm ok. The only point of stress I can think of is trying to get my boss to understand my long lunches and flexible hours. After all, if they expect me to be on call 24 hours/day even on vacation, and come in to do maintenance at night, they're gonna have to give a little.
I'm on a chair.
And if the 'IT Chief' is next to the decision makers then he/she is much more likely to be a manager first and a technologist second. So you still end up with the same problems; unrealistic expectations, impossible time tables and little factual understanding of the issues at hand. There is no way to win...
Only one real way to know if you got enough sleep: don't set the alarm. I have one but only use it for early morning travel needs (air/train).
with an e-mail address like that, it's no wonder :P
Scientoligists are consistent, you can understand and predict their actions. This guy has other major problems.
My New Rule
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
and are paying $60 for an entre
Oh, cause my boss, when he paid a cool 3/4 million for a TV commerical to promote our web site, that was nothing. The web site 100% my full responiablity, everything but the html was all me. The server, the software, the back end CGI code, all me, had a web developer do all the html and images.
And when I asked, "how many hits can we expect"?, the CEO just blankly starred at me, after a second, "alot, it doesn't matter, make sure your server says up and can handle the load, I have alot of money on this, are you sure it is going to work, the commerical is going to run tommorrow night"
::blink::
"I thought you said it wasn't for another month"
::blink::
"No, tomorrow at 5 NYC time, prime time, it is ready right?"
::blink::
"No, it is not ready, the dealine was set for a month from now, I got over a months worth of stuff to do on the server!"
::blink::
"What are you doing talking to me then?"
::blink:::
"Dam good question"
Cause I can see how it would be stress full to fuck up some dude's $60 dinner...
Cause after you have work OVER 24 STAIGHT, not even ONE 5 minute break, I can see how getting a steak "extra rare" instead of "rare" could be extremely stress full.
Ever see a web developer so tried that he talks in html tags with out them noticing he was doing it? Actucally that was the high lite, quite funny:
"Less than P Greater than. Where should I upload this image files to question mark question mark Less than slash P greater than"
Later on in the week, he informed me that I answered with
"cough cough weird-o cough cough, to the same place you uploaded the other times, in the image directory."
He said I actucally said the WORD "cough" and didn't actucally cough.
After you have been straining for so long to the point where you are unaware of even your own communications, I can see some guy saying "Un excuse me dip shit, I didn't want cheese on this" can be so stressfull to the point of breakage.
The commerical did go off. The site did hold, got over 32 thousand hits in two hours. Out of those hits, 17 orders where place at $19.99 a order. (call forwarding service).
That turns stress into a depression. The company went under.
The staring at a computer screen for over 24 hours staight cause visual hallictions the week after. I developed audio hallications from that experince that I still hear today. I am currently going to a doctor for PTSD (post tranmic stress disorder) that was a direct effect from the stress that was caused in that 24+ hour period.
I can see how getting a salad with the wrong dressing can become unbearable at times.
I have found that the difference between the "most productive" and "least productive" in this business is at least an order of magnitude.
The trouble, of course, is that the most productive get coopted into spending much of their time making up for the mis-efforts of the least productive, often to the detriment of their own assigned tasks. Call it "teamwork", or "loyalty", but it still sucks.
If you're lucky, you're manager will see the difference, but all too often, they are so clueless, that they are incompetent to tell one from the other. And incompetent team members sometimes make up for it politically, by casting out those who might expose their incompetence for what it is. This is called "not being a team player".
Even fix a problem on which a man-year has already been spent, in, say, an hour? Do that eight times a year, and you're 8 times more productive than the average, even if you do nothing else. Have you any idea how badly that fucks up management metrics? Not to mention foster insecurity and resentment among coworkers?
Then there's the "What do we do?...," "Do X...," "We can't do X...," time passes, "The competition did X! What now?..." scenario. Know how frustrating it is to have to out-design yourself? It sucks. But, I digress.
I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that the only solution is to become an independent contractor.
You could've hired me.
My goal was to participate in a well functioning IT department, idiots be damned. My primary focus is technology - that's all I really care about, so I wanted to see it work properly for users. It doesn't matter much because now I write code (as a good comp.sci major should) which is what I want to do for a living anyway. :-)
That's all fine and dandy but a job that sucks is a job that sucks regardless of how much you're being paid. If you're new to the IT industry you'll learn this soon enough. High pay is great when you first start but you'll eventually find out that bullshit hours and no life isn't worth what you're getting in return.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
I live in Santa Cruz for just those reasons. Well, except the females thing. See, the "not enough females" belief is nonsense - There's just not enough females where you hang out.
We pay a little more rent than you do over there, but we have some cool firms here in town, we have the weather that the rest of California thinks it has, there's only two starbuck's in the county (so far) and it's easy to score a binger. What more could you ask for? Oh yeah, the beautiful sunsets over the monterey bay, the fact that we're near SF and all that crap in the valley, et cetera.
It's easy to bitch about your situation. Many people, including myself, are fond of doing so. But remember that you're the one wearing your shoes; Only you can make them move somewhere where you might be happier.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Thanks for the support." Pretty harsh moderation. You'd think people would be helpful and post a working link to informationweek.com rather than bitch about "redundancies" -- amazing choice, considering that it was the first post, btw.
___________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Look, your experience sucks more. Obviously I agree.
My response concerned time pressure and the fact that occasionally there are demands for per-client custom orders beyond the IT industry. In your case it sounds like your boss is a moron who doesn't know how to evaluate a project or communicate. Otherwise how could the development team not know they were going live (ready or not) in 24 hours. Sucks to be you.
And, just for all the over-worked scumbag wage slaves out there who would give thier thumbs to know how to program (so they could escape thier dead-end job with no possibility of a raise let alone advancement) it isn't one steak that's stressful, it's the 80th, and it's after three weeks working in a hot smoky little hell-hole for a guy who is convinced the WWII Germans were RIGHT and keeps "accidentally" dropping your knife on the floor, etc. Everybody's job sucks sometimes. My point was if my job is going to suck I want to be paid well. IT pays well. I hope I never have to go through what you did...
Thanks
--8<--
--8<--
What you're forgetting in your schedule is all those days you get up at 9am instead of 8am, or 10am, simply because you feel like it. Or the Monday nights you go out drinking - because you don't need to be up before noon if you get hungover.
Grad students are the most insipid whiners in the world. They think their extended vacation is work. I used to listen to them bitch and moan on a day in, day out basis. Meanwhile they were sleeping in and drinking like the true welfare bums they are.
Trust me, get a real job a real company (preferrably a startup), and you will look back on grad school the way sophomores look back on kindergarten.
I've never spent a day on a heavy construction site. But I have worked my share of menial shitty jobs. The whole idea that construction is a 'real job' while computer jobs aren't is ludicrous. It's like the people with the menial jobs are saying: "at lease I have a REAL job" to make themselves feel better.
If I don't smoke, I will no longer be cool.
2) drink coffee/tea/Coke/Dr.Pepper. It's bad for your heart, among other things.
Bad for heart, good for staying awake.
3) eat sporadically. It's bad for your entire body.
Not everyone has the luxury of being able to sit down and have a healthy meal all the time.
4) stay awake late. If you don't have enough free time for sleep, cut down on work-time.
You obviously have no frame of reference to what the software industry is like.
Make sure you
1) tell your boss if you have too much/too little work to do.
You're fired.
2) have good breathing air. Open a window if not.
They tend to keep us techies in rooms with no windows
3) eat enough vegetables and fish.
I can have anchovies and jalepenos on my pizza, thank you very much
4) get enough sleep.
We have too much work to do. Sleep just interferes with our productivity.
5) listen to your own body
My body likes big paychecks
IT employees are not able to lead "normal" lives. We always have to carry pagers, cell phones, PDA's, etc. We have to code all night for a project that we spent 8 months on, only to start from scratch and do it again because someone in management wanted something different...the day before lauch date.
This kind of "peeking" is extremely professionally unethical - how would you like it if your doctor's secretary had a snigger over your file and shared it with your neighbours?
If you were working for me I'd fire your ass, no matter how good you are (or not).
If I don't smoke, I will no longer be cool.
;-)
That's a major problem I see. Is it worth chest-pains, anxiety attacks (unless you smoke more), and bad stamina?
Bad for heart, good for staying awake.
I agree, but what's the point? The body tells when it's time to quit, why not listen to it?
Not everyone has the luxury of being able to sit down and have a healthy meal all the time.
I'm not the one talking about "all the time".... Why do you feel you have to do something all the time?
You obviously have no frame of reference to what the software industry is like.
I'm working there, but noone said you gotta suffer just "because it's the way it is". Oh wait, they did tell you that, but forgot to mention it's voluntary.
You're fired.
It's just a job. There's lots of other opportunities in IT still. No point in keeping a job where they don't respect you as a human being.
They tend to keep us techies in rooms with no windows
Demand better ventilation or a better spot. Heck, even a server-room has better ventilation.
I can have anchovies and jalepenos on my pizza, thank you very much
That's good, but cooked veggies aren't as good as fresh ones.
We have too much work to do. Sleep just interferes with our productivity.
People are more than just being "productive" at work and being "consumers" in their spare time. Though if you like it, fine with me, it's your life.
My body likes big paychecks
Correction: Your brain does. It's neither deserved or needed for a good life. Just you wait till they don't need you anymore. Not sure if that'll happen in our lifetime though.
IT employees are not able to lead "normal" lives. We always have to carry pagers, cell phones, PDA's, etc. We have to code all night for a project that we spent 8 months on, only to start from scratch and do it again because someone in management wanted something different...the day before lauch date.
You make your own life. Nobody calls yourself a victim but yourself.
What matters in life? The size of your paycheck? I'm not saying this to be a prick or a wiseguy. I'm saying this because I'm fed up myself. How about you?
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
...so try Austin
Kinda like:
I snort coke, to work longer hours, to make more money, to buy more coke, to snort coke, to work longer hours, to make more money, to buy more coke.........
Well i'm still in college and have no experience in this, but these stories are really frightening me. What i'm wondering is, why aren't there any IT unions?
Netherlands
Don't even begin to think they are normally the same. Programming is only like IT when you are running against a tight deadline and you have people interrupting/harrassing/second guessing you ever second of they day.
F /...
Stress is when you and a couple of other 20 somethings are responsible for your companies sole way of reaching its customers and something drastic breaks. Thats the stress of hundreds of other people in the company suddenly becoming useless and waiting on you. Mix then in with constant bad decisions by upper management and you are well on your way to your first couple of ulcers. Fun!
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Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
I'm a field tech for a very large retail computing company (we fix cash registers/systems). The work is insanely grueling in that you have the absolute worst users you can possibly imagine (cashier: "Ah dunno, it's just broken..duh") and the hectic pace of pizza delivery to boot (I know, I've been there). With pagers, cell phones, laptop wireless and all other forms of nagging, it's a wonder we get anything done. "When are you going to be there? It's the third call back already! Midnight? No sooner?!?". Oftentimes the day feels like being the proverbial rat in the cage, just waiting for the next sharp stick to be poked in. I oftentimes feel deleterious health effects from the stress. (quaking rage...I often wonder how I avoid shouting at the customers). Our team status is approx. 50% what we need; management won't let us hire more...they already early retired our best guys...some of my coworkers wouldn't know NT if it bit them on the ass...ok, calm down now...ahhhh. ...whatever...make it woooork?"
:-( ) and am socially adept...but I feel that the bad side of dealing with the stress of tech support is ruining my attitude on life and people. Yea, I know I should get another job. But as said elsewhere in this thread, the pay is good. Anyone else have similar experiences?
The Ignorance of The Masses regarding technology can be such a frustration when you are forced to actually deal with such Masses. They regard it as some sort of magic when they even deem to think about it, "But why can't you just
I love technology, and have a lot of friends (though not lately...too busy working
</RANT>
The solution is to integrate, rather than separate, the IT functions into leadership, product planning, marketing, etc... Bring in the engineers early to planning and marketing lets them begin working on solutions sooner. Having more IT personnel work with leadership lets them pitch more creative and doable ideas to the CEO. This gives upper management a more realistic outlook on their companies capabilities, creates a broader sense of misson among all workers. Most importantly it yield intangible rewards such as a greater sense of accomplishment among all staffers, not just the geeks.
I hate sleep programming. I didn't know if other people experienced this, but from the article I would guess that a lot of programmers experience this. The worst part about it is that during sleep programming, I'll actually solve whatever problem I was having, and manage to wake myself up. Then when I try to remember what I was sleep programming, it does make a damn bit of sense!
>people. I also am now a wicked cook. My point is I did all that for about $10 an hour (Canadian) as my peak wage.
what? 10$/hr as peak wage?
i'm begining as a school computer technician, i begun about 1 month ago and i'm paid 16$/hr... it's my second real job, i'm 20...
#DEFINE QUESTION (2b)||(!2b) -- William Shakespeare
Move to Colorado if you want stuff to do. Pretty much guaranteed an interesting IT job in Denver or Boulder. Plenty to do too: hell, at 60-70 miles, Vail is considered too far away (perhaps that's because you pass so many other resorts getting there.) Cost of living is much lower, and the traffic isn't as bad (yet).
No, I completely understand as a former recovering pastry chef myself and having the stretch marks to prove it. The diff being my interaction with the end-users of the products that I made. It somehow was a more wholesome feeling when I handed someone over a loaf of bread than emailing a verbiage of perl scripting. Ah, the smell of sourdough starter in the wee morning hours before the whole city is awake you have already had 3 cigs and if were a chef like me a few shots of rum.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
OK, point taken, but I spent a fair bit of time in swanky hotels, in some many cases working in open kitchens where the guests can see you, and talk to you, and are paying $60 for an entre. They get what they want.
For a while I had to prepare entres for about 80 people a night without any bills in front of me. The sous-chef would call out the orders (in German, this was Switzerland, and I am Canadian) and you just have to remember what is ordered. It's hard. And you better hope you ordered and prepared enough food for the night or it's your ass...
But essentially you are bang on. I left cooking because of monotony (and low pay, and the grease, etc!) and was attracted to computers because of problems solving (despite my complaints I am not in it for the dough). *pun* yeesh! :)
--8<--
--8<--
replace the AK with someone else's microwave... not as load but just as relaxing.
Catch up on sleep on Saturday morning. Study and do research on the weekends, once again working to about 11, then go to the bar. Occassionally, there would be a party, or we would go to a movie. We weren't being paid a lot, so most of our money went towards rent, food, and beer.
Stress? Homework, exams, research projects, and presentations at meetings contributed to the high stress level. All this takes place while the powers to be are evaluating your worthiness to continue. And then there is your Ph.D. qualifying exam. The stress level before that exam is difficult to describe.
The reward for all of this? A totally unchartered future where you find yourself in a highly competitive environment. Financial rewards? Hopefully a good paying job, but probably no IPO. Did I mention that in some of the sciences, many academic job vacancies attract over 100 applicants? I don't know if this more stressful than the IT business, but IT cannot be much worse.
this sucks, why must people i know get sweet OC3
accounts and packet my ass to hell all the
time....its sooo un cool. damned lunix h4x0r
pros monkey butts. ill get you one of these
days steve! !!! i swear i weil!
Indentured Servitude. That's what it's become.
Companies have learned to hire IT persons whose dedication to the profession extends beyond the 9-5 job. No longer do companies look for well rounded, diversified employees, with things like "hobbies" and "families." Oh no. Now they seek persons whose hobbies also happen to be computer-related. This offers not only some of the sharpest minds within the industry, but also a level of dedication well beyond what your typical sane, well adjusted, socially acclimated, etc. employee would ever offer. Couple this with the outrageous salaries that many of us are being paid, and the rampancy of non-compete agreements, and you have, you have.... A violation of Civil Rights!
We are in fact a sub-culture, of sorts, and we are being victimized. The ACLU ought to be made aware of this injustice. I've too many times had to go into my boss and ask for a pay-cut in an attempt to "buy back" a portion or my life and liberty, only to have him surreptitiously give me another promotion and a raise to return the balance to his favor.
I feel trapped by the situation. I feel as if I've sold my soul. I want to go back to a simpler existence. One with an abacus. I made my bed, and I can't get the hell out of it.
That $10 bucks an hour was for cooking, not IT stuff. Most IT people make that when they sneeze these days :)
--8<--
--8<--
Anyway, the next time you are stressed at work take three deep breaths, hold in the last one and imagine you are behind the counter at McDonalds or perhaps your job is cleaning the porta-pottys at construction site. Next haul out your last paystub (or whatever) and exhale while reading it. If you still don't feel better, start shopping around for an organization that will treat you better...
In my experience (and I'm sure many would agree with me), the stress in IT doesn't come from back-breaking work or someone shouting at you for something all day long but from the fact that the stakes are much higher. I worked for a few years as a cook myself and many days when I'm frustrated with a particular project I long for the time when my only work-related worries were sending out a steak medium when the customer ordered a medium-rare. Obviously, the stakes (no pun intended) are higher if you're the head chef in a five-star restaurant, but those positions are rare compared to the number of line cooks in the mom-and-pop restaurants.
Sorry about that. My first time.
That's interesting, I've found that acid is the most effective in increasing productivity. I've tried E and pot, but what I really need to help get me through the day is the hallucinations.
Fired: No. Handled: yes. (It is sorta heavy for general "aimed" shooting.)
:-) (Plus, it's easier to reload a shotgun shell -- talk about stress reduction *grin*)
The AK would be a bad choice. It isn't destructive enough or loud enough. A shotgun would certainly be the firearm of choice -- 12-guage, 14-guage, whatever it takes
Of course, it's been a while since I fired a shotgun too. (I should go home more often.)
I'm not taking mind-altering drugs unless its for fun. Prozac is not fun.
.88 magnum -- it goes through schools.
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It's a
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Reading the article and seeing an ad for your company at the bottom of the page.
I think it's an omen.
AC
I was just kidding, I've never worked high. I might try that thing with the acid sometime though.
:-)
That would be pretty tough to do with street acid, though, since you don't know the dosage. Take a little too much and you sure as hell won't get anything done
--
That was a great article... I just had a whole 2 pages typed up to post and Mozilla crashed... stupid beta software... anyways I just got done working at a company pulling 60 -70 hour weeks... I totally understand, and what did it for us was just getting the VP to do a weekend with us... Needless to say he couldn't hang. After that we didn't have set work hours and just worked on call. With just that we were working 50 hours a week and that was fine with us...
Umm... When do you:
1) Eat?
2) Go to the bathroom?
3) Bathe?
Geez, it takes me a half hour to have a dump and have a shower in the morning.... I think I've given up on breakfast myself, though a Nutrigain or Ensure can do the trick.
Robo-employee here works 60h per week and doesn't appear to have bodily functions.
I like the pager idea though...
Oh well, I work 37.5h/week at work then work another 80h/week taking care of my kids. Not in that priority, kids come first. So nyah.
Just out of curiousity, what's that all about, "Don't eat too much pasta."? Man, pasta is what keeps me going. It's moderately healthy, has tons of carbs and has greeat variety within it's class.
I can't think straight if I don't eat right.. you wouldn't believe how much of the energy you consume goes straight to your brain: something like 20%!
Rami
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rJames.org - illustration
[I thought this one was to good to leave as one long string... -- cybaea]
May the moderators moderate moderately
Ok so you all think you have it bad..
A condensed version of my 2 years spent at a now defunct pre-ipo startup.
Back in 1998 I decided to stop playing Descent on kali long enough to actually go out and look for a job. I found the secret to getting a job here in silicon valley a few years earlier, basically go to the mercury news web site and search the classifieds for "FAX (408)" and sort out what job you want from there. I faxed out to 100 companies looking for IT people saying to myself I'll take whoever bites first.
Bad Mistake.
I started working for a consulting group that worked for the now defunct startup for 36k@yr. Basically this consulting firm had been leeching money from the startup for the last 3 years to deliver a product that was limited to only 1 platform (we'll keep it nameless to stop o/s flame wars) and was leaps and bounds the worst piece of crap ever to be passed off as software. I guess I could tell you its function. Basically video transmission across the internet. But the thing required a t1 line to get 30fps on a 320x240 window. Something Real has been doing for a while.
I questioned the lead from the consulting group about his product choices and offered my advice which he took as a threat. He would constantly belittle me thinking somehow this was going to change my mind and make me see things with his "vision" I don't back down from bullshitters.
So began his abuse of power. He would go into rants about how I didn't order this or I didn't order that. Well duh! I'm not about to charge 6k to my plastic so I can buy his lame ass team new computers. I wasn't about to charge that money then have to sit there with the accounting department trying to justify my re-imbursement. Not to mention it takes time to get all that processed which would have gone into interest charges. He would constantly go around telling people I didn't have my finances in order. I would try and do things the normal way, you know, submitting a credit app/resellers license to a vendor and get net 30 terms. He wouldn't go for that either, we had to do all our purchases through fry's with his sales rep.
In retaliation to me trying to do things right he started to strip me of my power and access. He ordered one of his toadies to remove my access from all machines on the network including mail and file servers. Told everyone to no longer include me in meetings because I was counterproductive to his "Vision" Basically he was making it impossible for me to do my own job. I couldn't create new accounts, I couldn't troubleshoot the servers when they went poof, nothing. He made his toadies take over my former responsibilities and reduced my job to basically just sitting at a desk surfing the web. Because the toadies started getting the extra workload they began resenting me (to this day I can still feel it)
One day my CEO comes by with some potential investors. I was working in the lab on our prototype (herein will be referred to as "POS") when the lead from the consulting group walked by, checked to see if I was in there, then walked over to the CEO and the investors and started bringing them down my way. When they got to the door he came in and started talking about our product. Then he proceeds to tell the investors, "The prototyped would have been finished if "me" had ordered the parts which he can't do because he doesn't have his personal finances in order. He'll get it right eventually because I'm going to repeat to "me" over and over again until he gets it in his head". The words stung me pretty hard. I looked up at the CEO and investors. The investors looked shocked and the CEO, well lets just say he had a look which let me know he felt my pain. After they left I scribbled a note saying I quit and taped that with my key to the door and left.
Later that night I got a phone call from the lead begging me to come back. Well not quite begging, but he was being apologetic in a "well I'm just saying I'm sorry, doesn't mean I mean it" way. Turned out the CEO went back to the lab to talk to me and found the note, went back and chewed this guy out. I agreed to go back (you'd think I learned my lesson)
2 weeks later I got a call from the CEO's office. They had some weird network problem that needed fixing so I went down there. Problem got fixed in like 5 minutes and a reboot. So I decided I'd do some more to get the whole office running smoothly. I found a extra machine, put some server software on it, started getting rid of all the peer network sharing ect, ect. I happened upon the CEO's desk and noticed he was paying almost 10k@month to the consulting firm for me of which %40 went back to the lead. This explains why I wasn't hired on permanent yet. About 8pm I got a call from the CEO asking me to come to his house, his home PC needed some doctoring. So I packed up and went on over.
There was no sick PC when I arrived. He poured me some wine and started telling me about the sorted past him and the lead had had for the last 3 years. Turned out this guy had his fingers into everything and it was either all going back to him or his church in some way or another. The sales guy at fry's was a member of his church, the ISP we used he held stock in and was getting a referral bonus, and myself, sheesh I was his kids college fund. The platform we used he had stock in, the software we used belonged to him and if the IPO was to market it they would have to pay a royalty fee to him. Basically this guy was out to screw this IPO 7 ways to Sunday out of investors money. Well after that we talked about fishing, next day he rented a boat and we went out for bass.
I'm going to condense a bunch of stuff here. Basically it gets worse. I get hired after having to sit through a personal review where this guy tries to rip me apart with lies. Um also he starts to hire all these glass eyed religious fanatics from his church which on a daily basis remind me that I'm going to hell for not being in their religion. Oh yeah that and constantly dropping off their religious books anonymously on my desk. We hire a new dev team, the lead gets fired, the company moves to alameda because the CEO doesn't like the drive from SJC to Sunnyvale.
So by this time I am really caught in the middle of a huge stinkin pile of excrement. I have the dev team from the consulting group resenting me thinking I got their boss fired because I was "buddy buddy" with the CEO. The religious fanatics resent me thinking I ruined this man. The new dev team in Sacramento is uncertain of me because they think I did this single handedly to the ex lead. People start rumors about me just to be mean. It really got weird.
The CEO got what he wanted out of me. A scapegoat for everyone to resent and focus on instead of him. It was pretty fucked.
Then came time for the move. They wouldn't pay for a mover no matter how many quotes I got. I must have received at least 10 quotes from 10 movers. They told me it was my responsibility to get the equipment moved since there wasn't any acceptable quotes. Something told me they were trying to get me to quit but my macho said to show these guys what I was made of. The day of the move nobody offered to help me, they just threw trash all around the space. The sales guys were ripping the local phone books in half and leaving them on the floor. It took 3 U-haul (biggest truck) loads and 18 hour days for a weekend to get all the crap moved (think crap for 30 people). Only a few casualties here and there. Big gouge in the conference room table. In my tired stupor I smashed the U-haul into the basketball hoop at our old office and left it bent at a 45% angle. Other than that the move went smoothly.
Monday came and I called in to say I wasn't about to come in. I was totally sore and hurting but supposedly the CEO was there screaming and yelling that I hadn't unpacked anything. I got him on the phone and told him he can have the lazy sob's that didn't pack their own shit unpack it and sort it out themselves. I hung up and went to sleep.
Next day I went in, this time the CEO was ranting even worse than ever. Our new office was right next to the Oakland raiders HQ. Some drunken raider fan plowed into a ma-bell box that had all the copper for the entire business park. Our website, DNS, everything was all depending on that connection. It took pacbell a month to get it straightened out.
Comment if anyone has this happen to them... You wake up, 15 minutes your dressed and drivin to work, 1.5 hours later your at work, completely oblivious to what happened during your commute. Repeat the mental shutdown on the way home. It started to wear on me to the point where I started saying to myself I should deduct my commute time from my work time. 3 hours a day of commuting sucks for anyone who's ever had to do it. So I started working 5 hour days with a day off here and there.
HR started threatening to make me a hourly employee if I didn't put in my full 8 at the specified times. I told them I'd quit if they did. They did, I quit.
Well after I left the company kept spiraling downward. The Sacramento team all got pink slips. In fact most everyone got pink slips. But by that time I was already at my new job, where I got respect for what I knew and was allowed to implement it.
I got a call from my Old CEO recently. He needed help with some home computer problems again. I told him I was working, no time to call him. Two weeks later I got served papers. The CEO decided he would sue the lead from the consulting firm as a last ditch effort to keep his company afloat. The lead named me personally in the counter suite saying I conspired to slander him, and I gave out his source code and secrets which I didn't. Those wacky religious fanatics go figure.
Lesson I learned from all this.. If it smells like trouble then it probably is. Get out fast. Turn your back and never look back. I hope this can help someone else who is a stressed out IT worker.
--t0qer
May the bridges I burn behind me light my way ahead--bmbr
Hi!
I work for a startup company. Its fast paced. I work long hours. I worry about VC funding and wonder how much longer I will be there. Is IBM hiring Unix admins who hate AIX?
Dude, I kinda enjoyed my summers away from uni digging ditches. I found that letting my brain just shut off for a while vastly improved my enjoyment of using it again later. I also did some work on the pipelines to the same effect. Better money, and you still get to badger sometimes.
Anyway, I got an IT job in a town with a mojor ski resort, and it's shaping up to be a fantastic winter! Flex time kicks ass!
You can never put too much water in a nuclear reactor.
Oh man, I have done time in both a pastry kitchen and as a breakfast cook (I've done many other positions these are just ones that required being up early) and you have a point there. Fresh bread (and a massive baking sheet covered in BACON!) can really start your morning off. Party all night, two hours of sleep, and a coffee and cig out back by the dumpster... Wait a minute! Maybe I SHOULD go back to cooking! :)
Thanks for the reminder. It wasn't all bad...
--8<--
--8<--
- ... tend to work 9 to 5 and that's it.
If that. Those that really make the "big bucks" -- those with "chief" in their title -- (100k to 250k or more) have nothing near the stress of the lower paid (50k to 75k) "techies". To a geek, management is boring; they'd rather be installing routers or breaking something (so they can fix it.)I see how much companies pay people (well, ranges, not exact figures.) It would appear, the less you do, the more you get paid. However, I still think the technical people keeping the show running are paid well -- I wouldn't say very well. As for the 60+ hour work week, that's not a company requirement -- there are laws against that sort of thing; you work 10-16 hours a day because you want to. If you have a Floyd concert to go to, you won't be setting in the office for 16 hours. (And you wouldn't be able to hear your pager anyway.)
Posted by polar_bear:
Um, in regards to "0" - I really think sex should qualify as a stress reliever in its own right...
Christ almighty, remind me to stay off the interstates! In the UK they've had a 12-hour driving limit for a long time. [Of course, haulage company's are made or broken based on how well they can bend that law, but at least the law's there.]
.88 magnum -- it goes through schools.
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It's a
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
$55/hour here. 40 weeks always... The secret is, learn the biz... I work for a wall st. firm, live in a warm sunny place (not in NYC area), know *nix inside and out, but also know the business side of things extremely well. We geeks are very smart, but if you want to be a 60+ hour a week cog in the machine, only learn the latest and greatest web technology (which is a must). Try and understand and appreciate the business you are in as well, talk the same talk as your users, offer them really solutions, not just techno-babble, and you will do very well. Hole up in a corner cubicle with your headphones on listening to AC/DC while you pound out the 1,432nd perl script of your life and never hang out with the business folks, and you get what you deserve, IMHO...
May the moderators moderate moderately Ok so you all think you have it bad.. A condensed version of my 2 years spent at a now defunct pre-ipo startup. Back in 1998 I decided to stop playing Descent on kali long enough to actually go out and look for a job. I found the secret to getting a job here in silicon valley a few years earlier, basically go to the mercury news web site and search the classifieds for "FAX (408)" and sort out what job you want from there. I faxed out to 100 companies looking for IT people saying to myself I'll take whoever bites first. Bad Mistake. I started working for a consulting group that worked for the now defunct startup for 36k@yr. Basically this consulting firm had been leeching money from the startup for the last 3 years to deliver a product that was limited to only 1 platform (we'll keep it nameless to stop o/s flame wars) and was leaps and bounds the worst piece of crap ever to be passed off as software. I guess I could tell you its function. Basically video transmission across the internet. But the thing required a t1 line to get 30fps on a 320x240 window. Something Real has been doing for a while. I questioned the lead from the consulting group about his product choices and offered my advice which he took as a threat. He would constantly belittle me thinking somehow this was going to change my mind and make me see things with his "vision" I don't back down from bullshitters. So began his abuse of power. He would go into rants about how I didn't order this or I didn't order that. Well duh! I'm not about to charge 6k to my plastic so I can buy his lame ass team new computers. I wasn't about to charge that money then have to sit there with the accounting department trying to justify my re-imbursement. Not to mention it takes time to get all that processed which would have gone into interest charges. He would constantly go around telling people I didn't have my finances in order. I would try and do things the normal way, you know, submitting a credit app/resellers license to a vendor and get net 30 terms. He wouldn't go for that either, we had to do all our purchases through fry's with his sales rep. In retaliation to me trying to do things right he started to strip me of my power and access. He ordered one of his toadies to remove my access from all machines on the network including mail and file servers. Told everyone to no longer include me in meetings because I was counterproductive to his "Vision" Basically he was making it impossible for me to do my own job. I couldn't create new accounts, I couldn't troubleshoot the servers when they went poof, nothing. He made his toadies take over my former responsibilities and reduced my job to basically just sitting at a desk surfing the web. Because the toadies started getting the extra workload they began resenting me (to this day I can still feel it) One day my CEO comes by with some potential investors. I was working in the lab on our prototype (herein will be referred to as "POS") when the lead from the consulting group walked by, checked to see if I was in there, then walked over to the CEO and the investors and started bringing them down my way. When they got to the door he came in and started talking about our product. Then he proceeds to tell the investors, "The prototyped would have been finished if "me" had ordered the parts which he can't do because he doesn't have his personal finances in order. He'll get it right eventually because I'm going to repeat to "me" over and over again until he gets it in his head". The words stung me pretty hard. I looked up at the CEO and investors. The investors looked shocked and the CEO, well lets just say he had a look which let me know he felt my pain. After they left I scribbled a note saying I quit and taped that with my key to the door and left. Later that night I got a phone call from the lead begging me to come back. Well not quite begging, but he was being apologetic in a "well I'm just saying I'm sorry, doesn't mean I mean it" way. Turned out the CEO went back to the lab to talk to me and found the note, went back and chewed this guy out. I agreed to go back (you'd think I learned my lesson) 2 weeks later I got a call from the CEO's office. They had some weird network problem that needed fixing so I went down there. Problem got fixed in like 5 minutes and a reboot. So I decided I'd do some more to get the whole office running smoothly. I found a extra machine, put some server software on it, started getting rid of all the peer network sharing ect, ect. I happened upon the CEO's desk and noticed he was paying almost 10k@month to the consulting firm for me of which %40 went back to the lead. This explains why I wasn't hired on permanent yet. About 8pm I got a call from the CEO asking me to come to his house, his home PC needed some doctoring. So I packed up and went on over. There was no sick PC when I arrived. He poured me some wine and started telling me about the sorted past him and the lead had had for the last 3 years. Turned out this guy had his fingers into everything and it was either all going back to him or his church in some way or another. The sales guy at fry's was a member of his church, the ISP we used he held stock in and was getting a referral bonus, and myself, sheesh I was his kids college fund. The platform we used he had stock in, the software we used belonged to him and if the IPO was to market it they would have to pay a royalty fee to him. Basically this guy was out to screw this IPO 7 ways to Sunday out of investors money. Well after that we talked about fishing, next day he rented a boat and we went out for bass. I'm going to condense a bunch of stuff here. Basically it gets worse. I get hired after having to sit through a personal review where this guy tries to rip me apart with lies. Um also he starts to hire all these glass eyed religious fanatics from his church which on a daily basis remind me that I'm going to hell for not being in their religion. Oh yeah that and constantly dropping off their religious books anonymously on my desk. We hire a new dev team, the lead gets fired, the company moves to alameda because the CEO doesn't like the drive from SJC to Sunnyvale. So by this time I am really caught in the middle of a huge stinkin pile of excrement. I have the dev team from the consulting group resenting me thinking I got their boss fired because I was "buddy buddy" with the CEO. The religious fanatics resent me thinking I ruined this man. The new dev team in Sacramento is uncertain of me because they think I did this single handedly to the ex lead. People start rumors about me just to be mean. It really got weird. The CEO got what he wanted out of me. A scapegoat for everyone to resent and focus on instead of him. It was pretty fucked. Then came time for the move. They wouldn't pay for a mover no matter how many quotes I got. I must have received at least 10 quotes from 10 movers. They told me it was my responsibility to get the equipment moved since there wasn't any acceptable quotes. Something told me they were trying to get me to quit but my macho said to show these guys what I was made of. The day of the move nobody offered to help me, they just threw trash all around the space. The sales guys were ripping the local phone books in half and leaving them on the floor. It took 3 U-haul (biggest truck) loads and 18 hour days for a weekend to get all the crap moved (think crap for 30 people). Only a few casualties here and there. Big gouge in the conference room table. In my tired stupor I smashed the U-haul into the basketball hoop at our old office and left it bent at a 45% angle. Other than that the move went smoothly. Monday came and I called in to say I wasn't about to come in. I was totally sore and hurting but supposedly the CEO was there screaming and yelling that I hadn't unpacked anything. I got him on the phone and told him he can have the lazy sob's that didn't pack their own shit unpack it and sort it out themselves. I hung up and went to sleep. Next day I went in, this time the CEO was ranting even worse than ever. Our new office was right next to the Oakland raiders HQ. Some drunken raider fan plowed into a ma-bell box that had all the copper for the entire business park. Our website, DNS, everything was all depending on that connection. It took pacbell a month to get it straightened out. Comment if anyone has this happen to them... You wake up, 15 minutes your dressed and drivin to work, 1.5 hours later your at work, completely oblivious to what happened during your commute. Repeat the mental shutdown on the way home. It started to wear on me to the point where I started saying to myself I should deduct my commute time from my work time. 3 hours a day of commuting sucks for anyone who's ever had to do it. So I started working 5 hour days with a day off here and there. HR started threatening to make me a hourly employee if I didn't put in my full 8 at the specified times. I told them I'd quit if they did. They did, I quit. Well after I left the company kept spiraling downward. The Sacramento team all got pink slips. In fact most everyone got pink slips. But by that time I was already at my new job, where I got respect for what I knew and was allowed to implement it. I got a call from my Old CEO recently. He needed help with some home computer problems again. I told him I was working, no time to call him. Two weeks later I got served papers. The CEO decided he would sue the lead from the consulting firm as a last ditch effort to keep his company afloat. The lead named me personally in the counter suite saying I conspired to slander him, and I gave out his source code and secrets which I didn't. Those wacky religious fanatics go figure. Lesson I learned from all this.. If it smells like trouble then it probably is. Get out fast. Turn your back and never look back. I hope this can help someone else who is a stressed out IT worker. --t0qer May the bridges I burn behind me light my way ahead--bmbr
Depends on your partner. Dealing with my left hand is a stress reliever, dealing with my alleged girlfriend isn't.
You can never put too much water in a nuclear reactor.
Dude, if I only got 25 emails a day, I'd think something was broken. I can get 25 messages from the same person in a day :-)
Oh well, back to my email...
I have to disagree, although I love the weed, I was smoking it regularly while in a high-stress job (computer games start-up - it doesn't get higher-stress than that). It drove me insane. Being stoned when you're mellowing out and coding is great; being stoned when some emergency comes up is a total bummer.
I ended up not smoking during hours. But now, I have the odd smoke during hours and I do find my day is far more productive. But I feel it's a balance.
.88 magnum -- it goes through schools.
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It's a
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
try dropping E too. you don't get the munchies that you do smoking pot, and it's a lot cleaner too(just pop a pill). i've done both, i think rolling is alot better than getting stoned.
I don't like E. It just gives me wierd headrushes and shit, and I don't enjoy it. And I figure that if I'm going to do something that's that bad for me, I damn well better enjoy it. Which is why I'd try heroin before I do E again.
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That's interesting, I've found that acid is the most effective in increasing productivity. I've tried E and pot, but what I really need to help get me through the day is the hallucinations.
Do you actually take enough to start tripping? I read a study somewhere which showed that taking tiny amounts of acid (about half of what is necessary to trip) will increase your attention span and let you focus on a single task for up to 12 hours (they recommended it for long-haul truck drivers and jobs like that, but of course this was before it was made illegal).
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Vote with your feet. If you don't like the working conditions where you are, there are plenty of places you can get the same money for 40 hours.
For the most part, it is largely up to YOU, as an IT person, to LET the company know what to expect from you.
I don't mean you are supposed to be a BOFH to everyone... but...
DO NOT work those extra hours, unless it is really an emergency. And being in a 'continued state of emergency' is no excuse. If you can't do the ordinary day-to-day job in 8 hours, you aren't doing your job right. Server failures and disasters can be an aside.
IF THEY want or expect you to be on call, make SURE they pay extra for it. SIGNIFICANTLY extra, to discourage abusing you. If they can't or won't, make yourself unavailable.
Make certain things clear, in writing, when you are hired about hours worked, who you report to, etc. I know it's common for some manager, or VP, from some other department to come in and start 'demanding' things of the IT department. Those can usually be handled with 'can you please run that through the IT manager, or the IT Directory, or whoever?. What I've found is they will, more often than not, suddenly realize that it's not really THAT important. If it's not important enough for them to follow a simple procedure, it's not important enough for me to waste my time with. Of course, you have to use discretion. Some things really ARE emergencies.
Know who can fire you and who can't. Learn the politics of your company. Go out for lunch with your boss. I don't mean brownnose and suck up and stuff, but you have to know where you stand. Know when to say NO!
I can recall my conversation. The VP of something or other calls up and says 'I want you to do this, right now, today. It's very important.'. I say 'Sure. just call Mr. So-and-so (my boss) who's in his office RIGHT NOW, I'll even put you through, and run it by him. tell him I said I can do it immediately if he says it's okay'. "Oh.. well can't you just do it? "Sure, if you call him and explain to him why I'm disobeying his instructions not to do anything for anyone without his say-so". Catch 22. He says 'okay, it's not that important anyway'.
Get sleep, like others said. Sleep IS very important. The best way to go to bed on time is make a habit of doing your computing on weekends, and get this, IN THE MORNING. Even your personal stuff. Nothing keeps you up at night like a computer.
EXERCISE. I'm bad for this, but get exercise. It makes a HUGE difference.
Don't eat too much pasta. Use those IT skills to do up a spreadsheet of the crap you eat, and rationalize it.
Know where you are going. Always have a plan. Know why you are at the job you are at.
And most of all..
If you don't like something in life, CHANGE IT!
Given that IS professionals tend to be creative and intelligent, it seems to me unethical for them to work so long that they don't have time frequently and deeply to assess the actual benefits and purpose of the work that they do. Each smart person working to improve some project to help some corporation make money is one less working to evaluate the direction society itself should be moving, it seems to me. Hence, unless you've already concluded we're all moving in the right direction, working hard can be unethical.
It's called Artifact Quake. I'll give you a tarball of the mod if you want it.
Quakeworld sucked, can't stand it. Played it once, uninstalled it, never messed with it again. Also, I never really liked ctf in Quake. Tribes is a different story.
Have I actually played quake? What kind of question is that? I was on IRC in #quake waiting for id to release the quake test. I almost nutted my pants whenever I started it up. I have logged more hours of quake than any other game. I remember playing it for as many as 20 hours on end at a friend's house during the weekends. There were three of us, we'd rotate every level and we'd take 10 minute power naps and consume 2 cases of sundrop (if you even know what that is).
As a matter of fact, I just finished playing quake at the office, we played for about an hour and a half.
Rune (or artifact) quake is one of the best mods for Quake ever. And this is coming from me, a guy that doesn't like to play mods, a guy that prefers the vanilla side of quake.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
Have you ever actually fired an AK-47?
.22LR, 9mm, .40S&W, .308, .223, .30-06, etc.
.22LR would be the biggest challenge... it is a small pocket automatic with a 2" barrel... :-)
I'm not the original poster, but I've put several thousand rounds through an AK-47 (specifically a Poly-Tech Legend).
Or are you just looking for a sexy-sounding weapon, and couldn't remember how tospell Kalishnikov? Or that they're even the same?
I ask, because lots of people on slashdot are just talking out of their asses.
And a lot of people on here aren't.
That, and anyone with any real weapons experience would know that 12-gauges make for much more AOL-cd-blasting fun.
Now that is a matter of opinion. While I'm sure that AOL CD's pretty much immediately disintegrate when hit by a 12 guage, there isn't nearly so much challenge to that as there would be to be able to hit them with a rifle. Well, unless you were using slugs in the 12 guage.
Who cares whether you can put little holes through them at great distances, when you can instead blow them into little bits, and they make for interesting clay-substitutes on the range.
Now you've got my curiosity up... I may just have to go out and try both and see which one really is more fun.
While I'm at it, I might just have to do some comparisons as to different rounds...
Actually, of anything I have access to, the
I want to point out somthing, as techies in a tech driven industry we are paid very well. In fact when I look at my companies salary spread sheet (oops abusing sysadmin privilidges) I see that I, being out of school 3 years, am making more then some operations/business folks that have been working 5-10 years or more. Some even with MBA's.
Is it any wonder that these people who hire us and set our salaries don't come to expect theses kind of insane hours? Really I think (no I pretty much know) that they resent the compensation levels that they have to fork out for us. Im not saying that they are correct in their beleifs, but I am absolutley sure I am accurate.
Kill all your users. No users==significantly less stress.
And I looked, and behold, the pokemon all spontaneously combusted.
IT Stress in the Workplace
Wow, that's much worse than IT Stress at home, on the weekends!
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
A lot of the article focused on bad management. While we have that at my company, my biggest problem is the area that I'm in. Quite frankly the Silicon Valley sucks. Housing is too expensive, traffic is bad, there's too little fun stuff to do, and there aren't enough females. I can get around much of the traffic problem by commuting during off hours, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot I can do about housing, for example. I'm thinking of moving back to Southern California, but I'm worried about being able to get an interesting R&D job there.
-- $SIGNATURE
Take up smoking. It will relax you and shave off those years that you would have to spend in management.
Hrm, aside from NT jokes it comes down to this for me: take a few minutes to chill out about situations as they come up. Everything is always an emergency to everyone, but you don't have to buy into it. After a while, all us admin types stop treating everything as an epidimic and there are less hasty mistakes.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
No cell phones during off hours. No allowing yourself to be interrupted on vacation. Avoid all contact with work outside work hours. And know that it is not wrong to do so. Be happy.
This guy apparently hasn't invented the carriage return yet?
)O(
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
Smoke pot! Programming while stoned is lots of fun, and it's easier to get things done. When I'm not stoned, my mind tends to wander and I read Kuro5hin and Smokedot all day :-) Smoking pot also does wonders to reduce stress.
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AAAAAHHH Shuddup M$ wanker! :) I bet your code isn't better than you either!
Besides - how would you like a *really tired* nurse near your bed? eh? Come to think of it - they don't have to pull out of their ass at least 3 months of 18 hours of work/day just like that! I think you need to wake up.
On the other hoof - stress is not only IT specific - but then again - Slashdot mainly is about IT not something else, so *WE TALK ABOUT "IT"*!
Oh, and about beeing in Jamaica... forget it - unless you're some luser PHB - no programmer will be rich enough at 29 to retire! Man - you really have some erotic dreams!
HTH (as in Hope This Hurts - of course)
The article takes a good look at sources, but I think something left out is stressed caused by co-workers, but one type of co-worker in particular. Ever have to work with someone who managed to pick up a lot of buzzwords and trivia, then combined them with arrogance to pass it off as intelligence/knowledge? The most frustrating part is that most people in the user sector don't know the difference between a braggart ("Yeah, I have this new 3dfx Voodoo7 because I was approved for their beta program. That thing is awesome, the clock is at 700MHz. Unfortunately, it doesn't work under Windows 2000, so I had to hack Microsoft to get the beta of Windows 2002 and that works fine. What, you want to see it? Uh, my system is down right now. Ask me next week.") and the real-deal. When I worked in IT, the greatest source of stress was having to clean up one of my co-worker's messes. Even more annoying is the fact that upper management never noticed this. My goal wasn't to get anyone fired, but time after time I reported poor/incorrect/destructive "solutions" made by co-workers that I had to spend a day or more cleaning up. Nothing was ever done. Management never spoke to them, retested them, or anything. They just went thought life, getting paid more than me, leaving more problems or half-assed fixes left and right that were inevitably passed down to me. Ugh!! So damn irritating! It just made me want to POUND MY KEYBOARD KL:RFJKL:DF:JKLSDJGFJKLSDFJKL
it led to a syndrome Miller dubbed "sleep programming." "You wake up tired because you were so busy all night working on those programming problems in your sleep," he says.
"sleep programming" - See Also "Life"
When this happened I had to resolve the problem ASAP. My collegues were not as hot at solving these type of problems, often making the problem worse. I'd get pressured by the customer and management to get the problem fixed. I could escalate to the software supplier, but they were often usesless in responding under pressure, or just too slow to respond. I had no-one to really help me, except perhaps a couple of our consultants.
On numerous occasions I was known to spend all day working in the same room, particularly if more than one system had failed at the same time. I could spend 10-12 hours a day doing this work. The posistion was made more stressful by the contact at the customer site not co-operating properly (such as being able to describe what they had done, or read lines out of log files correctly). I'd sometimes waste hours looking in the wrong place due to the symptoms being incorrectly described.
When the problem was finally resolved, I'd receive no thanks for all the effort I'd applied, even if the problem was the customer's own fault - such as not applying critical OS patches.
The turning point for me was when we had a management change. The PHB in charge of my department was hopeless. He caused too much damage to our existing customers, causing contracts to be cancelled, without signing up anyone worthwhile to replace them. There was one incident that was really stresful.
I had one site report a serious performance problem with their system. I knew that the competance of this site was fairly low (I had problems guiding them through a vi session a week previously), so to determine the fault I had to connect to the system myself remotely via a modem, then poke around log files and monitoring tools as root until I could find a pointer to the cause. The PHB didn't want me to do this, and instead instructed me to produce a list of what I proposed to do, and then have the customer do it themselves. (I think the PHB wanted me to concentrate on his customers instead). As thin involved running diagnostics which if mis-used could smash filesystems, I didn't want to do that. I progressed as normal, resolving the issue eventually. (It was an obscure configuration issue IIRC, and I only found the root cause by accident - if I'd followed the PHB it would never have got resolved.).
Another issue concerned a 3rd party piece of software we had sold a customer. I received a telephone call after 6pm, stating that I must have it running by the end of the day. The manufacturers of this software were not too hot, and releases were often broken. In this case the process start-up script distributed with the media was incorrect, and the process didn't want to run. The manufacturers were also closed that day for a public holiday in their country, and there was nothing on this problem on their web-site.
I spent the next 2 hours second-guessing the startup parameters for the binary, hacking the script until it ran properly, whilst hacking it over a slow dial-up link without any direct access to an editor on the host system. Got no thanks for that, either!
So I've signed up for a course in Acting, a course in Direction, a course in Post Production.
It took until I was halfway through that sentence to realise you're not talking about new programming languages. IKIBHTL.
1) smoke. It's bad for your heart, lungs and arteries, among other things.
2) drink coffee/tea/Coke/Dr.Pepper. It's bad for your heart, among other things.
3) eat sporadically. It's bad for your entire body.
4) stay awake late. If you don't have enough free time for sleep, cut down on work-time.
Make sure you
1) tell your boss if you have too much/too little work to do.
2) have good breathing air. Open a window if not.
3) eat enough vegetables and fish.
4) get enough sleep.
5) listen to your own body.
Disobeying all these rules will almost surely put you 6 feet under ground before really necessary. What people forget is that your life is a living hell before that.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
If you keep a positive outlook towards everything, stress should not be too much of a problem, and you suddenly find that your problems become much easier to solve
That post should be moderated up. There's much self-induced stress among geek techs. Not only do you have a job to do, but you have to defend 3dfx from NVidia advocates, be on the lookout for slanderous comments about Linux, advocate your pet software design methodology, and make sure that annoying fringe groups like Mac owners and Java programmers don't gain any ground. Life is much easier if you do what you enjoy, and live and let live.
The boss' cluelessness, Miller says, typically led him to make promises to company honchos that left the IT staff scrambling to meet impossible deadlines.
Often the difference between a successful project and a stressful disaster is simply whether the schedule was realistic in the first place. So a year-long project can actually "fail" on its very first day, if the person in charge decides to call it a six month project instead.
As for clubs and bars, I don't do'em, so I don't care how many of them San Jose has. All I know is that everything I see about living in the Silicon Valley says it sucks. The politics here in Arizona are bizarre, and the sprawl is no fun either, but if you choose where you live carefully, it's a helluva lot more livable than the Silicon Valley as it currently stands.
SF doesn't suck as far as livability goes, but that's a different world from the Silicon Valley, even if it IS only a couple hours away from San Jose (if the traffic is light :-).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
While an Ak-47 would sound cool, I doubt any geek could fire it more than once or twice.
Are you kidding? I've seen 6 to 9 year olds firing an AK-47. The younger ones only had a little trouble holding onto it. Your average 12 year old wouldn't have problems controlling one -- ask Vietnam vets, a lot of the VC were that young, and in general southeast asians are smaller than people of northern european or african american ancestry like most american GIs were.
Most geeks probably couldn;t fire a Shotgun (moreless pick it up)
WTF? How freaking heavy do you think a shotgun is? A Remington 870 weighs a lot less than a 17" monitor, and I've seen plenty of geeks pick one of those up.
Contrary to the myths purveyed by the media, AK-47's are neither particularly large, nor particularly powerful. The thing that makes them such a classic design is they are simple, reliable and easy to manufacture.
RIGHT ON!! I may be losing hair and sleep, but damn is that pay check nice. The best part about these "high stress techno jobs" is you can go to a bar (get into a fight if your an animal) in your work cloths, try that working at McDonald!!!
lol! I should know, I slavied away at that hell hole for 10 hours at time, for that PHAT $4.25 an hour. Nothing better then spend 10 hours smelling like shit, tossing patties, slipping and sliding on da floor, spitting in people food, spilling "the waste product" all over yourself, making 600 big macs in one night while your friends are having fun, then missing halloween 'cuase gotz to work 'cuase else is working and you're promised dinner which the bitch tried to make you pay for so you steal a whole case of nuggets and fires but this doesn't counter react hearing your friends talk about that night for the rest of your frigging life, and burning da hands so many damn time you lose the feeling of heat, BUT what joy is to remember that was your best damn job in the world of all shit jobs.
Oh yeah, gotta love them shirts and pants, dare you where blue jeans, you would spend weeks short shafted running the grill by ya own damn self. Of course you're to stupid to quit so you live with it until you piss in the freeze by mistake and fail to come the next day after you founding yourself high as hell in your 1980 pontic green lemon with your head in a haft eating hamburger from god knows then after moving your stoned ass inside, having the wierdest experince in your life with some girl on the telephone cause you praticed wicca who now now you can't get out of your head and having you parent yell and screem at you becuase how are you going to pay for the P90 that you bought for 4 grand and learned UNIX on which gave you your job today, but I be damn, IF WORKING AT McDonald DOESN'T MOVATE YOU, NOTHING WILL!!
Every one should work at mcdonalds for at least 6 months to know what a shitty job really means!! Maybe less people would bitch, naw, we would just have more teenage smelling like shit, pissing in our food and being beyond atomic at what ever made them get a job in the first place! Damn goverment.
But heck, if you ever get tried of your geekdom job, McDonald will allways hire you, even if you stole, pissed in the food, and still smell like shit.
Did someone say McDonald? I got a 9. I didn't think anyone said anything. We're going to Taco Hell.
MarNuke
Even more, I believe this article completely forsakes a major demographic of the IT industry - the hordes of masochistic geeks such as myself that actually ENJOY the long hours, tight deadlines, and impossible objectives. If I wanted a boring, 9 to 5 job I would have become a banker. Rather, I chose the ever-evolving, fast paced, IT world in which to make my "millions". I work an average of 60+ hours a week and to be honest I wouldn't know what to do with my self if I didn't. Don't get me wrong, I have a girlfriend, a dog, some might even say a life...the simple fact is that I love the challenge of computers. Generally speaking, if I am not doing something on a computer for work then I am on the same computer doing something for "fun" (Linux!!!).
All in all, I guess it just comes down to the old saying "each unto their own...". Certainly my lifestyle is not for everyone, if fact it is probably for very few.
- j
It's MY-way or the HIGH-way!!! - my father
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
The money is less, but the possibilities of working on something that is actually personally interesting...
:) In fact, those of us that love computer work tend to be the best at the job. Mainly due to having more natural troubleshooting skills then those that took a course at a trade school after seeing the commercials promising, "more money then most college graduates make." Many of us learned/still learn more on our own then we ever did in any fomalized training.
You know, many of us chose IT careers because we do find computers and technology personally interesting.
Personally, I've always been a geek. Even as a little kid I always took things apart to find out how they worked. I enjoy using my brain and solving problems, and yes, a lot of the extra work I do is because I enjoy doing it or am obsessed with solving a problem I'm working on (taught myself customized Solaris jumpstart trees and custom Solaris packages over a weekend last month over just such a problem). That doesn't mean I think we shouldn't be compensated for the time we put into the job, or get taken advantage of because we happen to enjoy most of what we do. I also see the engineers that I support working ungodly hours to meet insane schedules as well.. seems to be the norm for most technical work today, not just IT.
In any case, just because you (I assume) got into IT for the money, doesn't mean we all did. Many of us love working with the latest and greatest hardware that cost more than we could ever afford. We also love having toys to play with... I mean test.
Some of us are also smart enough to not dig a hole we can't get out of by only learning one OS and/or platform. Personally, I touch Windows as little as possible, perferring the control I have over unix boxes much more (mostly Solaris but some HP, and more and more Linux as time passes). But I still make sure I know the basics in every OS I might have to touch, and I'm always willing to learn new skills.
Oh, and yes, I do get enjoyment out of figuring out some obscure hardware/software error, building a new massive farm of servers, etc. The fact that you never did clearly shows (to me anyway) why you don't miss working in IT, and likely never did belong there in the first place.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
You're trolling with the 60 hour week. Any more than 40, and you should start asking questions (of yourself or of management). And you didn't mention exercise (unless sex counts).
Agreed. I currently work in an enjoyable work environment after spending the past year in a seemingly endless world of suck. You know: screaming incompetent bosses, time reporing down to the minute, spending your nights cleaning up after those being rewarded for their ineptitude and stupidity. Oh yes, and the screaming customers for whom I'm cleaning up messes I didn't make, too. =) You all know the story, you can fill in the blanks. This is a job that taught me that people who claim that stress can actually cause you physical damage aren't making stuff up to scare people on Dateline: NBC or some other tabloid news show.
The point (there's a point?) is that I now work in an environment with friendly, experienced, and supportive people. If I stay late for several days or stay all night, management actually goes out of their way to let me know that's not expected.
But yet something's missing.. After talking with others their who left similar situations, we all agree in a strange way, we miss the stress.. It almost like I don't feel like I'm getting anything done unless it feels like someone's stabbed my in the side and I'm fighting just to take a decent breath.
Disclaimer: I am completly insane. Your milage my vary..
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Uncle Duke in 2000!!
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end communication
An AK-47 and a box of AOL cd's do wonders for your psyche after a long day of doing tech support.
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
If you keep a positive outlook towards everything, stress should not be too much of a problem, and you suddenly find that your problems become much easier to solve, as you have the confidence and the knowledge to solve them. This is why I recommend reading books over playing Quake or Doom. If something is dragging you down, go grab a book (as long as it's not something de-motivating), and read it for 15min. It will work wonders for you.
When you have an enjoyable enviroment to work in you do not mind putting in the hours. Less burnout
In reality, everybody in IT was directly commanded by the CTO, who craved stress. He would intentionally delay taking actions on small problems until they turned into a crisis. Network Operations staff would end up working an unscheduled sixteen hour day at least once a week, due to avoidable crisis situations. Come in an hour late the next morning after working 8AM-Midnight, get yelled at.
This same guy raced sailboats on the weekend, and treated all of 'his' (regardless of who they reported to) employees as if we were crew on a sailing vessel.
Insubordination, any hint that you were looking at other positions at a less insane company, and you would be forced to 'walk the plank' (resign), gone by lunch time, never to be spoken of again.
So yes, stress is sometimes very much a direct result of bad management. In this case, Mr. Stressoholic is still the CTO, their stock is still rotting at a quarter of the IPO price, and nobody in management understands why they cannot hire (or retain) good people in our field.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
some of it on some people that annoy you
health
And you don't even need to hate users
goes'
( moderate this - sociophatic -10 )...
0. The simplest is sleep. Get plenty of it. Go to bed at 10pm sharp. There is nothing interesting on TV at that hour anyways. Wake up at 6. That's 8 hours of solid sleep. Factor in an hour of sex if you get lucky, so there's 7 stress-free hours.
1. Get to work early. I take the 6:30 ferry and walk in at 7am, alongwith a few early birds. We get the management crap ( email, timecards ) out of the way & get a headstart before the crowd walks in.
2. Throw away personal contact devices. I threw away my Pager and complained it was lost. I was given a second pager. I then threw it overboard and said it got stolen on the ferry. I then "lost" my third pager on the elevator. Now they've stopped giving me pagers.
3. Get out at 7pm sharp. That's 12 hours a day. No more no less. 60 hours a week solid. Any more is unethical.
4. Do something else with your life. IT is not the be-all and end-all of civilization. The greatest languages ( Lisp, Smalltalk, ML ) are behind us. The fun is over. What you have now is nonsensical crap ( C++, Java, ugh! ) Don't waste your time with such COBOL-for-the-90s-type-languages. Get out and get a life. I love movies. So I've signed up for a course in Acting, a course in Direction, a course in Post Production.
They're from 7:30 to 9 pm, that's an hour and a half on non-IT per day! Its so refreshing to walk into the New School and do something artsy.
5. Stress is all in the mind. Don't take yourself so seriously. Loosen up. Play foosball. Life goes on.
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As far as on the job stress, I work for a college. If I am working on something for the students (say the student programmers have cause the CICS partition to lock up solid for the umpteenth time of the day, or they have forgotten a password for the fiftieth time) and I get a call on the other line, I tell them I will get right to what they want after I fix a particularly complex problem for the students. Since I work at a college, that usually shuts them up for about 5-15 minutes. I also REFUSE to do back flips to get something done unless they go through my boss, or it's an emergency (no power to the Computer Room and it's operating off of batteries is a emergency).
Gorkman
Once you start working 12-hour-plus days you get into negative productivity.
I've been there, and even worked 20-hour days for more than a solid month (never mind why :). Some truly desperate work got done, but I felt like the sterotypical "death warmed over" nearly the whole time, and have now a deep aversion to sleep deprivation that snuck up on and clobbered me pretty well. Also, all my creativity (I mean all) went AWOL, leaving behind a shambling "smart moron" with a hair-trigger temper.
It took a few weeks of enforced complete sleep to persuade the AWOL creativity to fully return. It was disturbing afterwards to realize how much previously easy thought had become so much harder during and after long-term sleep deprivation.
It was a hard lesson, but I guess some people need to learn it at least once. It's easy to think you're more physically tough than you are in reality, when the task is mental and there are few of the warning signs that with more physical tasks tell you that you need badly to stop and rest, preferably with a pillow mushed to the side of your face.
I don't regret having done it (the work needed very badly to be done), but appreciate very much more now the state of being rested and creative, and try very hard to plan my time and priorities way in advance to prevent such necessities from ever again arising. It's just not worth it.
(Oh, brother. I've been up 19 hours now and need once again to forcibly make myself sleep). ;^]
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
My case was exactly the same as the first case in the article:
The happy ending:
- Mg: "How much time do you think this will take?"
- Me: "One month"
- Mg: "This is a simple enough thing, surelly it won't take that much time..."
- Me: "It will take one month!"
- Mg: "This is a really important thing, we're expected to release this in three weeks"
- Me: "It will take one month no matter what, it cannot be done in less than that."
- Mg: "Look, i'll put it down in planning as taking 3 weeks, and we'll try to do it"
- Me: "You can put down whatever you want, it will still take one month. If anybody asks me i will say that i think it will take one month, if [Mg. manager name here] asks me i will say that it will take one month, and that task WILL take one month"
)P.S.It did took one month
Which country did you move to? I heard those Europeans still have 40 hour workweeks...
I'm sure that anyone and everyone here can agree with me when I say:
Spend less time talking about it! Let's get to coding!
Whew I knew I'd feel better.
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arcane for life
Whenever I read an article that focuses on some aspect of working in IT, or IS, or IS&T (when will we finally decide WHAT to call it?), I notice that journalists tend to zoom in on programmers.
While we certainly all love programmers (and who wouldn't? all those glowing eyes ... staring at you ...), Tech Support staffs are just as understaffed and harried as anyone.
I do TS for a small, private college. I have 8 servers and 200 workstations to take care of. I have a faculty teaching with software who don't know how to use the software. I have students who are used to being coddled who run to the President's office en masse whenever a zip disk gets stuck in a drive.
Some days I'd rather be a programmer ... ugh.
One-ton tomato
I have worked in IT jobs, and I have worked in non-IT jobs, and the stress of working as a programmer is nothing compared to some of the other crappy jobs I have had. I Look at it this way: they pay me the big bucks to do what I used to do at home for free. As a matter of fact, I used to spend just about all of my disposable income on various software/hardware/gadgets. Now I get the company to pay for it. And if your company demands 90 hour weeks, 24/7 pager duty, outrageous travel, etc, etc, do what I have done in the past....QUIT. You dont need it, and there is another job out there for a company that will pay you fairly and treat you well. You dont have to put up with it.
If a client wants to exploit me they must pay through the nose to do it. If I've had enough by the end of the contract, I can leave, find another contract, take a holiday, or a break, whatever. *I'm* in control, not them.
I don't care about being made redundant, if I get bored I move on. The only downside is I must do all my training myself. But I make at least double what I could as a permie and I'm having a great time.
Great Windows SFTP Server!
Programming is a patently artificial and unnatural activity. Sitting for x^2 hours at a time, staring at fake light two feet from your face, breathing recirculated, refrigerated air, no wonder my endorphin levels bottom out. Pumping serious iron is my high. I have to excercise seriously or I notice my mood failing within one week. Or, in the immortal words of the Macho Man Randy Savage, "OOOOOHH-YEA BROTHER!!"
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
2) Keep a dart gun handy and fire darts at the monitor.
3) Take a hammer to a unused motherboard. Warning: The fiberglass in these boards can make them hard to destroy. A shotgun may be more entertaining.
4) Get a friend to give you a neck/back massage. Its works wonders
5) Spend the time to setup a stable work environment. The wasted time and frustration do to crashes isn't worth it. (Yes, even some Microsoft boxes can be made somewhat stable with work).
6) Spend some time learning and setting up tricks and shortcuts in your work environment. You might not save time overall, but the convince will be worth it.
7) Take a break every now and then for maintenance, both for yourself (exercise, socialize, learn), you machine (backups, organize files), and your environment (clear off desk, take down sticky notes, clean mouse and monitor).
I was a chef before attending a comp. sci. program. I don't have extensive industry experience yet (so what I am about to should be disregarded by everyone, right?) but from what I have seen it seems like there is stress in IT but we are relatively well paid for our trouble.
As a chef I often worked for weeks on end without a day off or overtime pay. 14 hour days were frequently the norm and the time pressures are immeadiate. There is always someone yelling at you (sometimes that is just "how it is done") and you frequently burn yourself, get cut, fall, etc.
Okay, it's way better than digging ditches (!). I got to eat well, I lived in a bunch of places and met some great people. I also am now a wicked cook. My point is I did all that for about $10 an hour (Canadian) as my peak wage. Now that's pretty crappy money considering the training and experience I had...
Anyway, the next time you are stressed at work take three deep breaths, hold in the last one and imagine you are behind the counter at McDonalds or perhaps your job is cleaning the porta-pottys at construction site. Next haul out your last paystub (or whatever) and exhale while reading it. If you still don't feel better, start shopping around for an organization that will treat you better...
Okay, flame away! :)
--8<--
--8<--
I'm waiting for the _other_ development team
to ftp me the production code.
So, I can upload it to the production server
for the pilot demo in Asia.
Oh, BYW... the demo was supposed to be 7 minutes ago.
* "Uncle this droid is malfunctioning" -- Luke Skywalker
Wow - that's busy city. I mean, 25 mails seriously cuts into the surf time.
nal 11
We are in a field where we get paid,rather well, to be problem solvers. In today's world if the computer isn't working, it is a problem. When John Doe's desktop stops working, real problem or DSO problem, John cannot work until it is fixed or he gets a loaner.
When a server goes down(in smaller operations), everyone stops working until we get it fixed. This is a serious problem for the company.
With the projects management puts on us, it is generally due to unrealistic goals that we burn ourselves out over it. There are two basic situations:
1. Management says this has to be done by this date. They dont' realize it is not realisticly possible becouse we don't tell them. We just say okay, no problem. Then we take it as a personal challenge to meet thier unrealistic goal.
2. Management says get this done by this date and we do becouse we have a family to take care of.
What we have to do is make a stand when they get out of control. We did this at my work not too long ago. While it has not been a long time since, we have seen them pulling us in and listening when they make decisions. Also, they have been "forcing" us out the door at reasonable times to have time with our family and friends. I have already heard comments that we don't seem as disgruntled now as we did before. Also they are commenting that we are doing better work in the time that we are there.
It's amazing what happens when you find that there is life outside of the cubicles that wall you in during the day...