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Appreciating Your Stressful IT Job?
in the trenches asks: "I'm a married, 24-year-old male, and like many posters here on Slashdot I work in the IT industry. I currently work as a website developer (mostly design-related work), but I also do some Perl and PHP programming. As most of you probably have, I've often wondered if I wouldn't enjoy working in a less stressful environment. I've even gone as far as to wonder if I'd prefer some sort of factory job or similar over my current field of work. The problem is this, I LOVE developing websites, but I HATE the stress and responsability that comes with a the job. How do you all cope with the stress and responsability that seems to come hand-in-hand with an IT career?"
I've played this game before and regretted it. The job was great, the money was terrific but it depressed the hell out of me for not finishing my degree (I really enjoy school). I realized after about three years that I'd gone as far as I was going to go in the company w/o my degree and left to finish school.
Have you checked out opportunities available to you that "falls squarely into my interests" on campus? What about a part time job? Bug the career guys at your school if they have them - they got me a job with a Fortune 500 company!
Best of luck.
Having to do more work every day in the same amount of time is inherently stressful. It's kind of like a Tetris game where the pieces keep falling faster and faster. The stress is probably in realizing your desire to comply with this speedup is ultimately going to lead to a situation where things are coming so fast that you'll be unable to handle them and at that point things will collapse. And by then you will be totally frazzled mentally and emotionally. It's the same in white collar programming/adminning or on a blue collar assembly line. Centuries ago in Europe, the workers used to wear wooden shoes called sabots. When the factory boss would speed things up too much, they'd throw their sabots into the gears of the machines. That's where the word sabotage comes from.
I am a 26 year old engaged engineer, so I am not that dissimilar from the sumbitter.
I recently left a job in the aerospace industry for a research engineer position at a major university. I have never been happier. I took a little pay cut, but the cost of living in most college towns is a lot lower than it is in most cities, and I get more benifits (for example I get very cheap access to the athletic facilities instead of having to pay $30/mo for a mediocer health club...).
The work environment is lower pressure, and is more open, more self guided... I work fewer hours on the average day, because I don't feel the pressure to be there like I used to, but I work from home a lot now on the weekends and in the evenings, because I enjoy my job. I enjoyed the work at my old job, but I resented the environment of forced productivity so much that I did not enjoy working on my own time...
I have always been an exersize nut, spending hours at the gym and running each week, since the switch, without really changing my workout routine I have gotten stronger and faster, and I set my new personal record in the half marathon a few weeks ago.
Overall, I definatly recommend academia!
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Excercise 1
1. Assume a comfortable posture lying on your back or sitting. If your are sitting, keep the spine straight, and let your shoulders drop.
2. Close your eyes if it feels comfortable.
3. Bring your attention to your belly, feeling it rise or expand gently on the inbreath and fall or reced on the outbreath.
4. Keep the focus on your breathing, Being with each inbreath for its full duration and with each outbreath for its full duration, as if you were riding the waves of your own breathing
5. Every time you notice that you mind has wandered off the breath, notice what is was that took you away, and then gently bring your attention back to your belly and the feeling of the breath coming in and out.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Caffeine is a stimulant (as I'm sure you know) - it's likely to increase your stress. Beer, on the other hand, is a depressent and will make you more relaxed!
Along with several other techniques from agile processes I have cut down my stress level by clearly communicating that I will manage to finish exactly those tasks that I finish, no more, nothing less.
Therefor I welcome external priorities for the work I'll have to do (as the tasks are also defined by our customers, this is not too much to ask for).
Baseline: For any 25 Tasks, do not accept less than 25 levels of priority. Demand that your customer/boss/whoever sets these priorities for you. After all, you will work through them in an order, and if you happen to have too many tasks for a given time, you'd better have the important ones done when time is over.
Another tip is to use strict timeboxing. It helps a lot to know that you are currently sprinting towards your goal. It does not help, if the goal moves shortly before you reach it. Accept new tasks only for the next timebox/sprint, but never allow stretching a timebox (which may be a week, a month or anything in between).
Ask yourself - do you live to work, or work to live? I love my job designing FPGAs, but my job is just that - a jobby-job. It enables me to do things I enjoy more like grabbing Corona after a long day and enjoying the San Diego sunsets, buying a widescreen HDTV to play Vice City on, or vacations out of the country.
Center yourself; if what you do for a living (and the company you do it for) take that much out of you, do you really have a good quality of life?
IT, IS, and MIS people suck. They're overblown tech school dropouts who are finally realizing their worth in this econo
First, let's figure out what type of stress you are under. There are two types: eustress and distress.
Eustress results from exhilarating experiences. It can be euphoric and powerfully energizing. It is the type of stress you are likely to experience when you win the lottery, get that promotion or receive really good news. It is the orgasmic experience of sex. It is the stress of elation, winning, achieving and produces positive and powerful emotions.
Distress is the forces and pressures of modern life and our responses to them. Most of us think of stress in negative terms. It is the stress of losing, failing, overworking and not coping. It affects us in a negative and often harmful manner. It is unhealthy stress.
It sounds like you are experiencing distress in your current job. Are you unable to cope with the distress? Have you noticed that your distress on the job is bleeding over into your relationship with your wife? Do you find that minor issues become major ones?
If you answered "Yes" to any of these questions, you might want to look for a new position. Take a look at working for a non-profit organization where the "time is money" mentality is considerably lower than working for a corporation. Or you might want to consider starting your own website development business.
Just remember that this is YOUR life and YOU are the one who chooses to put up with the negative stress for a paycheck. Is what you get paid worth the distress you experience?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Is the only way to deal with stress.
Try and exercise hard for an hour each day and the endorphins produced will suppress the production of stress hormones.
I cycle. It's a geek thing to do as you can get into the engineering side of cycle componentry whilst at the same time getting to learn something about physiology and how to train yourself.... VO2 Max, heart rate monitoring etc.
I find that the exercise is the only thing that keeps me sane in a modern Western environment. I think that lack of exercise amongst modern Westerners results in the increased depression and other psychoses we're prone to.
The Machine stops.
I'm a 22 year old sysadmin at a university and part time student. I've been working at the university since May 2000 and got a full-time, permant appointment in December 2003.
Working at the university has it's benefits, but at the moment I'm considering quiting so that I can just get on with my life. You see, I'm still trying to get a degree. I can assure you that I'll be out of there as soon as I get it!
You see, at a university, you will not get the level of recognition, monetary or academic, that you deserve, unless you're part of the teaching staff and have a high academic qualification.
The stress from the bussines world doesn't scare me at all. In my current job, it happens all too often that I have to sit for hours and fix some cock-up so that students can hand in their assignments, when I really need to work on that exact same assignment. And then everyone wants to know why my grades are shit and when I'm going to finish the degree!?
Take a step back and put it in perspective. Urgency is an illusion. The consequences of failure are minor. No one will die. You won't get fired. You won't lose the contract. And even if you do; so what.
Use the snowball as a visualization aid. The snowball is what the earth will be in ten billion years, when we're all dead, life on earth is long gone, and the human race is a lost footnote in the unwritten encyclopedia of galactic history. In the mind numbingly vast halls of space and the inconceivable depths of time none of this daily crap matters at all, not the tiniest bit.
So relax and enjoy your life. In the end, no one will be around to remember, or to care. Do your best because you enjoy the challenge, because you want to live, and learn, and explore. Do it because you feel like it. Or don't.
this is not a sig
Well, I'd like to offer a different experience ....
Alternatively, Imagine the job I took as a builders labourer for 12 months after the .com crash - Not as good money certainly, but enough excercise for me to get quite fit, trim the extra fat away, and bulk up a little. I recieved a decent wage for a job I am not still toiling/worying over at 11.00pm, a useful new set of skills that have served me well, no moronic management getting in the way of doing a good job (Though 'owner builders' were usually a pain in the ass), and -in Australia at least- tradespeople are generally friendly, nice people.
The back problems I had from sitting at the PC every day for 7 years went away within a month, I enjoyed mornings again, programmed for fun in my _spare_time_ and got alot of job satisfaction. I'm back in IT now and finally making cash again as a contractor, but if I get stuck again I won't think twice.
In my experience, nerds can actually do OK in construction - on a jobsite, being intelligent is a genuine advantage - the crew like people who understand things first time, and who speak up if they have questions (Failure to do these two things is what results in low productivity and, more importantly, injuries). You do have to be able get on with people though - I find the best way to do this is to pretend you care about sport, and refrain from making it obvious if you think you are better than the people around you.
A friend of mine who stuck with it was a site manager within a year - he is making as much as most programmers here, is fit and happy. He gets to see his fiancee alot more now. Oh yes, and I got to use a Ramset gun to punch nails through steel beams. That was cool.
Mole? 4? Cars?
Give, and ye shall receive...