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The Unhappy World of IT Professionals
npistentis writes "According to an article on ZDNet.com, only 1 in 7 IT professionals rate themselves as "very happy" with their chosen profession- which stands in stark contrast to one in three hairdressers, plumbers and chefs, and one in four florists. But then again, very few plumbers have to deal with users who consistently download BonziBuddy, blindly click on suspicious email attachments and use their cd trays as cupholders." Of course, it should be noted that by and large IT professionals earn more money then most other jobs - which I suppose is once again a warning of money != happiness.
First off, it is the IT Department's fault if the users are able to install Bonzai Buddy onto their computers and it hoses the system.
Secondly, it is ALSO the IT Deparment's fault if the network is hit with ANY of those Email worms. I am the entire IT Deparment at the company I work for and you know what?
We haven't had ONE single case of any of the recent Email worms making their way into our network. You know why? Because I have done my friggin' job. All of our corporate Email is sent to our mail servers from an outside 'mail scrubbing/spam stomping' outsource company. Due to my forsight, we haven't seen a SINGLE copy of those worms enter our network even ONCE!
If I worked as head of IT at any other corporation, I would find it COMPLETELY unacceptable that the users could do anything to install applications onto their PCs. I would find it entirely unacceptable, if our users were compromised by an Email virus. I am not exactly saying that friggin' heads would roll, but it would be pretty darn close to that.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
France and Germany both seem to have much more liberal hours-of-work and vacation policies.
Sure they do, in fact in France it is ILLEGAL to work >40 hours a week. But.....
We currently have unemployment problems in the US.
No... we don't! If you were to look at France & Germany in a GOOD year the unemployment rates are 10%. If we had unemployment like that here in the US you'd all be screaming at Dubya even more than you do now (if that is possible).
The welfare states of Europe are great if you just want to slide by and work part time while having everyone else pay for your existence when you get too lazy to be productive. The problem is that this means there is no innovation and no dynamic growth, both of which are the keys to the American economy. Europe is a great place to be for paper MCSE's or people with enough political pull to get a cushy union job, it is not a great place for innovating and pushing the boundaries of new technology.
The plumber goes home from work and washes his hands. No more shit. The McDonald's clerk goes home from work secure in the knowledge that all them assholes can no longer get to him. No more shit.
Ah the blinders of "superiority". Spoken like a rich white kid who didn't have to work at a movie theater to pay his way through college. At the theater we had something called the "concessions dream". After someone first two weeks of working behind the concessions stand one would begin to experience nightmares about being late for work and arriving only to find out that it was impossible to perform one's tasks fast enough or well enough to satisfy even a single customer.
People who belittle the effects of this sort of thing are unable to integrate the fact that identical stimuli will have differing effects on different people, and in their ignorance of the actualities of the situation can only make things worse overall.
Yeah, so don't downplay other people's work either hypocrite.
I would like to extend my sincere thanks for fighting the erosion of language into the cesspool where it seems all but certain to find an unfortunate resting place, where homophones are used interchangably, apostrophes are used freely, and so on.
I just might have to bitch-slap the next mouth-breather who writes "should of".