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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.
1. users
:(
2. job security
thankfully, I have job security because i work for state government (state government don't lay off employees) but I still have to deal with users that should know the basics of how to use a computer since they probably have a computer at home or use their computer at work enough
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
...if this survey had been conducted just 5 or 6 years ago.
This "chic" is not exclusive to IT. It appears that bitching and moaning, and taking things for granted, is common in popular spoon-fed TV-enslaved western culture.
... that's fully lame.
Personally, I find that sort of 'pleasure' abhorent. Sitting around bitching about things, or criticizing something just for the social effect
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I got into college for programming at the very beginning of the boom. I did it because I liked programming, not because it was going to pay me lots of money. Of course I was looking forward to the money, but I still liked the programming.
Now, I've found that the programming is becoming stale and boring. It very well could be just this job causing those feelings, because I hardly do any real programming anymore, but until I get another programming job I won't know for sure. And I managed to graduate a year before the bust, so I couldn't build up those wages like some. I'm only making $6000 more then my starting wage 3.5 years ago. So the money definately isn't worth it. Currently, I'm considering looking for a new IT job, or going back to school for welding or something more hands-on. So at least for me, it's not so much that it's boring work, or that I'm only interested in the money. It's more that I think I need more variety and action in my job. Because god knows insurance is NOT a fun and exciting job...
But then again, no IT guys have to work in feces in a sweaty, humid, tiny room. STFU you little baby.
The key to understanding the comment as given is that it is the exact same people, over and over again, downloading the BonziBuddy this week, spreading MyDoom next week, and installing three other pieces of spy ware the week after.
Then, they yell at you because they somehow, in a manner I don't fully understand, rationalize it to be your fault.
If you're a sociopath, this doesn't bother you. If you're human, the unrelenting pounding of stupid people upset at you, and in general being obstinately stupid, can easily match most plausible physical jobs. Sure, they may not be shoveling shit, but the shit shoveler can go home, take a shower, change clothes, and be more-or-less OK. The IT-frontliner goes home, and is emotionally exhausted. This should not be trivialized just because it's not physical; in many ways its worse. (For one thing, your nose tends to adjust to bad smells, your brain and emotions tend to get sensitized to stupidity.)
If a person makes a mistake and learns from it, it's understandable; we're all newbies. The good people never call because they fix their own problems. But if you think dealing with unrelenting and unapologetic (and sometime downright arrogant) stupidity is so easy, I invite you to spend a year doing front-line tech support. There is a reason the attrition rate of tech support is much higher then shit-shoveling.
All IT people at some point shutdown. They one day wake up and say "I have learned enough, I don't want to learn anything new". And these people simply work with what they have learned.
Now it may take 40 years for this to happen but it happens to all (alright most for those mathematicians) IT workers; People hate change and IT is all about change everyday (every hour?). It is stressful fighting for your job everyday when new college people are released ever year with fresh training and new ideas without any legacy burden. I'm not in anyway bashing College Hires but the younger you are the more resilient you are. The more resilient you are the better you perform. So as you're moving in the IT field you need to look at moving on or up to prevent yourself from being exterminated.
Grab something to move into when you start heading into retirement age. God knows I don't want to be in IT at age 70 fending off those young whipper snappers.
The problem is, as someone who loves software engineering, I really take pride in trying to implement stuff not just in a way that works, but in a way that is easy to read, change, optimize, etc. It's rather frustrating for me to work with people who don't have any sense of craftmanship. Especially when my job is made more difficult because of careless get-it-done coding.
Unless you happen to have a natural talent for it, if you go into a field for purely superficial reasons you are going to perpetuate mediocrity and, I believe, contribute to harming that industry. To summarize: Working with people who don't care really sucks for those of us that do.
At my last job, there was a strong get-it-done culture. Most people there did not go home and tinker around on the computer as a personal interest, they did their duty each day and then went on to escape the computer for the rest of the evening. I was miserable. Luckily there were a small number of people there that I could talk shop with, and who actually cared about how things were done.
At my current job, everyone is actually interested in what they are doing, and it is a *much* nicer place to be.
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
That all said, I'll wager that when the "DotCom Boom" was happening, many of the "other 6 of the 7" got into IT for the money. If you don't love what you do then get out of it.
There's definitely some of that -- don't even ask me how many art or business majors I knew back in the day who were "retrained" for IT -- but I think a lot of those people have been shaken out of it by now, either by leaving the industry entirely or, more frighteningly, by scurrying up to management.
But there are other stories, too. The simple fact is, most college educations will not in the least prepare you for the realities of working as a programmer. (I'll speak to that specifically, since it's what I know -- other IT jobs may vary.)
Some of this is relatively trivial. I was forced to take a lot of comp sci theory classes that have never and will never be useful on the job. Some of that was interesting, some of it was there simply because the university had professors that knew it and did research on it and they didn't know what else to do with them. Instead of, say, 10% of my course load being required to be physics, they could have had me take even a single class involving databases, something many professional programmers will touch on nearly every day of their working lives. That part of it though, is water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned. People who like the field and want to be in it can learn and adapt to overcome those kinds of gaps.
The more troubling thing is that working as a programmer is a whole lot different than doing programming in college.
I've known people who loved programming and did great with it in school and for their own projects, but who were utterly broken by the realities of dealing with clients. Some couldn't handle the (gasp) social skills tasks of having to deal with clients or non-technical people at their own companies. Others were slowly ground down towards insanity by having to continually retrofit their work to comply with the seemingly insane demands of the clients or end users. When you do programming projects in school or for yourself, the spec rarely changes fifty times partway through for (as far as you can tell) no reason. In the real world, it happens all the time.
To take another example, I work with a guy who will probably be shaken out of the IT industry sooner or later. It's obvious to everyone, including him, that he isn't happy. It's not that he doesn't like programming in general. The problem, in his case, are the realities of enterprise level programming. He can't stand that he can write some code, test it and find it working just fine, and come in to work the next day to discover that someone else on the far side of the office working on a seemingly unrelated one of the few thousand files that make up the project has effectively broken his work. He can't take looking at something that works one day and not the next and not even (without doing a fair amount of investigation) know how or why. That's another reality of working in IT that doesn't really come up in school.
Myself, I'm happy, but sometimes it's true what they say: If you love something, the last thing you want to try to do is do it for a living.
IT Professionals are really a wide range of jobs in my opinion. One guy replies saying he likes doing all the cabling work that he does. Another responds that he doesn't like programmer. Those are very different jobs in my opinion and the research in the article seems to lump them together. But anyway, I have a pretty good idea of why programmers are unhappy. For one thing, businesses treat programmers like crap. I got into programming about 4 years ago. I'm in a small office where I mostly work on projects myself. I like my job because it is kind of an artistic release at times. I get to put my own quality standards into the project and when I'm done I can look at my work and be very happy with it. Thats a "Craft" view of programming. But businesses hate that. I even find myself fighting with my employers on an ongoing basis because they want speed and effeciency, not quality. They also want things to be predictable. They don't like that I often spend a good portion of time at the beginning of all my projects researching "Whats new" and trying to implement new things into my work. They want reliable time constraints for my work. I'm also finishing up my degree in IT, and I'm taking a senior level course right now called Software Engineering. This course has 100% confirmed by belief that the industry wants nothing to do with craft programming. They want what they call "ego-less" programmers that don't care about their own work as much as the group as a whole's work. They want guys that follow the same processes every time and do reliable, predictable work every time. They want (and have probably succeeded in the corporate world) to turn programmers and software developers into factory workers. They want us sitting on the assembly line, pushing out code as if we are machines. What they don't realize is the human aspect of programming. People don't WANT to work that way. It is boring. Look at open source projects as an example. We use a lot of open source applications at our office, and my bosses are completely dumbfounded as to why anyone would put out work for free. I try to tell them that it is because they actually enjoy doing what they do. They enjoy getting credit for their efforts. Business people just don't understand this. If you treat programming like a craft, you'll get better results, and your employees will be more happy. That is what I'm going to live and die by in this industry, because I refuse to ever become a cubicle code monkey. I'll become a hair dresser before I let myself become a code monkey.
One of the things that boggled me when I first got into Systems Administration was how a lot of admins were roped into just a couple of different tasks and knew absolutely nothing outside of that realm. Sure, they have college degrees and no doubt are intelligent people, but I couldn't fathom how they didn't have the desire and tenacity to learn it all.
See, I was new and hungry. Everything around me I wanted to learn and did to the best of my ability. I got great enjoyment from my job. I got to travel, I was paid well, and things were good.
As time passed on and the years seemed to blend together, something changed. I started noticing little things about my career... One thing was job growth..career growth.. Where was I going ? Did I want to be a manager? Was there really anything beyond Systems Administration? I looked at some of the veterans in the company, guys that have been here for 20+ years. They are still SA's.. some of them lead projects..some are stuck in their old ways, refusing to learn new technology..refusing to implement anything new. Scared to touch certain things because they are scared it will come crumbling down. Some letting their pride get in the way of good worksmanship. Some of the less technical ones have gone the way of management.
Do I want to be an SA in 20 years from now? I dunno... I used to read man pages for fun..I don't really find that fun anymore. Can't really pinpoint why. RFC's before bed... Tech manuals like novels. Perhaps I'm burned out... but from what? I'm doing what I've always wanted to do.. Perhaps it is my current company. Maybe I'm not suited for stagnant environments. Maybe it's 8 years of sitting in a 8x8 cubicle , which is in fact smaller than a jail cell.. I've even considered a career change, hell, I'm still young enough.
-L
Don't Panic.
For the last 4 years, my job title has been 'programmer'.
During this time, if you lump it all together, I have probably spent about 1 of those years programming.
The rest is:
I generally enjoy all of this. If all I did was write code all day- I think I would be bored out of my mind. Occasionally sitting in a meeting mindlessly staring out the window while they talk about our 'under-served clientele' (I work for the government, and EVERYONE is underserved...except for me) can be relaxing. If nothing else I get to learn a lot of new politically correct buzzwords.
Like a lot of people, I don't see myself writing code for the next 20 years. I would like to be in a position like my boss has. She was a good techie, who (rightfully) got promoted up. As long as she hires other good techies, she is set. And, when she wants to, she can get her hands dirty in some interesting project.
No reason to lie.
I somewhat disagree with your analogy. Although I do see some IT shops that view programming talent with the 'factory' mindset, I think a majority of large software products want you to apply what you're studying: Software Engineering.
I know, I know, there are 10k /. readers out there who just rolled their eyes ("Software development is not like bridge design!" "Programmers are not engineers!") but there are engineering practices that are applicable to software development: proper QA/QC, documenting everything, spending 70% of the SDLC in requirements and design, carefully designing dependencies before implementation, etc. These are not by themselves fun or 'crafty' activities, but in the bigger picture of developing a large and mature software project, can be very fulfilling.
That is not to say you can ROM the time for a software project like a bridge; there are things unique to each and every large project that cannot be accounted for. But, if care is given during the software lifecycle, a project team can deliver a mature, maintainable, usable project, still allow the company to make money, and still allow the developers to practice some 'craft'. I do believe that the difference between the best packages and the average ones lie in the company's investment in that last activity.
*BUT*, craft by itself, in anything but small to medium-small IT projects, is asking for disaster in terms of budget and schedule. The SEI level 1 nickname isn't 'folklore' for nothing. In fact, I would postulate that that's why so many jobs are going away from the Western companies: Western developers' insistence that software development is some kind of magic that cannot even be remotely predicted or estimated. Nonsense!