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Correlation Between Stress and Technology?
marshman113 asks: "I'm an undergraduate Cognitive Science major at a famous public university and currently enrolled in a Stress and Disease course. Being somewhat of a techie myself, I've decided to write my term paper on the relationship between technology and stress. I'm sure all of you hard-working Slashdot readers experience a fair amount of stress, on a daily basis. Has the evolution of technology in the workplace (computer, internet, email, etc...), which is suppose to make your job easier, made it any less stressful? If so, how? If not, why?"
Try having children. I can punch my computer without going to jail.
It led to a massive explosion of "micromanagement" by the bosses back in headquarters who understood little or nothing of conditions on the ground faced by the front line. Local managers who previously had enough authority and "slack" to carve profitable operations suddenly faced unprecendented meddling by ambitious "newbies" who neither spoke the local language nor even tried to understand the local conditions.
When something went right, some schmuck at headquarters took credit for it. When it went wrong, as it almost invariably did, failures were blamed entirely on local personnel.
Not a few of the fall guys wrote long, detailed, bitter postmortems. Look 'em up.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The implementation of a mandatory logon to our corporate instant message client has made my job easier as well as more stressful. It is easier because I can ask a co-worker a question a lot faster with it than if I send him/her an email. But it has also introduced a little stress in my life as the IM server logs when everyone logs in and out of the system thus my boss can track when we get to work and when we leave for the day. If you are a few minutes late he asks you what took so long to get to work, by a few minutes I literally mean 1-2 minutes. The installation of a door badge system at our office has also added to this stress level as he checks these logs also and asks the same questions if you are 1-2 minutes late for work. I have not had to have my boss ask about me being tardy yet but the first day the systems where in a coworker of mine was asked about his tardiness and our boss was not joking with him.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." Linus Torvalds
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