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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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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.
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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 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
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
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.
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!
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
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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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
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.
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
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?
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.
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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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! :)
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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...