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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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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
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!
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
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...