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UK Companies Love IT Workers, Love Not Returned
Roblimo writes "'The study, completed in early July, showed that U.K. employees working in the information technology industry are more valued than they think they are,' says a story at ITMJ.com, but it also says, 'According to the results of the survey, only 45% of IT workers feel valued at work, and 70% don't believe that their job reflects their true potential.' Not only that, but 'Seventy-five percent feel discriminated against because of their age; 43% say their bosses think they are too young, and 32% feel too old.' That leaves only 25% who believe they're the right age for their jobs, and only 30% who feel they're working to their true potential. Does this mean U.K. employers need to worry about a mass exodus from the I.T. field, or is this just normal griping?"
Does this mean U.K. employers need to worry about a mass exodus from the I.T. field, or is this just normal griping?
Griping, as they say: "The grass is always greener on the other side."
The reality is that often it isn't, people (not just IT workers) fail to see just how good their job is and resign themselves to being miserable about it. I program C# about 50% of the time, do internal user support 10% of the time, reply to emails 10% time (this annoys me), deal with external customer support another 10% of the time. The remaining 20% is probably spent on administration etc.
I love my job, I love the variety, the sallary is good for my age and my coworkers are motivated but easy enough to get a long with. A think a key failing with IT people is believing you can storm in at 20 and somehow be a senior developer. I have a simple message to people with this attitude: you're not a genius, get over yourself; this trade takes a long time to learn. Just because you hacked together a perl script to do something useful on your private linux box doesn't make you a seasoned professional. Building professional code takes as much experience as it does intelligence.
Serve your apprenticeship get the experience and become a better coder. Don't be arrogant towards your superiors because believe it or not most of the time they deserve to be there. Remember, your time will come and for the moment there is a lot of wisdom in just be content with what you have: A brilliant job where you can be creative and intelligent.
Simon.
I can confirm that my company clearly does not love IT workers.
Take a look at the obvious measure any company uses: Cost.
IT is a cost centre. We're seen as an expense. The business resents the expense.
Ignore the way that the technology we recommend and implement now generates a significant percentage of our sales (over the web), how better telephone systems (including VRU) mean greatly reduced call centre cost, how the business would collapse if we switched off any of the 140+ systems essential to our daily operations.
We're kept out of decision making. Our director isn't directly on the board, he reports to another board member - who also owns finance and HR.
We're treated like second-class citizens. Shiny new building goes up; IT get shoved into the old building.
The business want shiny new features - on the websites (we have dozens), in the call centres, in our retail estate. So they go out and buy expensive systems, make deals for software, agree hosting - and then blame IT when things don't work together, when we have massive duplication of functionality and capability, when vendor lock-in causes excessive cost. So much for using the experience and expertise of the IT professionals that would have stopped them making those mistakes.
On top of all that, they decided to outsource all our development to India. Current status of outsourcing:
Development costs : Higher
Delivery timescales : Longer
Quality of deliverables : Lower
Customer (i.e. internal customers) satisfaction : Lower
The last thing that hurts is that the internal politics here are the worse I've ever seen. Different departments actively try to make the others look bad, and IT systems often become the battleground. Result? Continual derision of the IT systems we put in place to their specs.
Yet despite this, my team is very capable, very loyal, we are well paid compared to other people in the company (but don't quite reach average levels for the IT industry) and we continually push, recommend, innovate and strive to improve the business, the IT systems and processes supporting it, all while keeping costs down.
If it wasn't for the great CV fodder I'm picking up I'd personally have walked out a long time ago. This company doesn't love its IT people, and its IT people definitely don't love it.
The reality is a bit more complex than that "oh, they'd be griping anyway" over-simplification. A lot of working places really _are_ bad at showing any appreciation, if they actually appreciate their employees.
Yes, the trade takes a long time to learn, and I can certainly realize that after over 20 years of programming computers. But that also means enough time to see such "employee appreciation" as:
- control-freak PHB's.
True story: I've worked a couple of years for someone who genuinely thought that he needs to keep clicking on Netscape's title bar to show it that he's watching. He genuinely believed that it makes Netscape load faster. I swear to God I'm not making it up.
True story: we had to make a nazi time-keeping program for another company. Think popping up every few minutes to ask you if you still work on the project. And if within 1 minute you didn't click on "Yes" (e.g., because you needed to go talk to another co-worker about that very project), it would close the project and mark you as idle.
- people who think that negative feedback and threats are the only thing that motivates their team, and god forbid ever telling someone "you've done a good job" would turn someone into a slacker.
I could give a personal example again, but a sadder one are the recent stories about a HP PHB making "it could be YOUR job that moves to India next" the corporate motivational motto. Yeah, that sooo makes people feel "appreciated." Not.
- Pushing people to do massive unpaid overtime. Often not even as a desperate crunch phase at the end, but actually planning from the start that you can use and abuse people for 84 hours a week.
E.g., see the famous EA employee's blog. E.g., see the fucktard, the name escapes me at the moment, who was complaining that the VC-appointed CEO ruined his company by letting programmers work only 40 hours a week.
True story: Dunno about you, but having someone (A) override my time estimates on the _explicit_ assumption that he can use me twice as many hours a week anyway, and (B) have him then tell me crap like "wth do you need free wekends for anyway? You'd just sit in front of a computer anyway" and then "ok, then I'll cut your salary if you only want to work 40 hours a week" (i.e., "only" the time in my contract)... doesn't exactly tell me "you're appreciated". (And, yes, I did quit after that.)
- Huge egos.
True story: the company with the nazi timekeeping program again. Among many other nasty experiences with the boss there when we delivered the program (such as demanding that we bring sleeping bags and noone leaves until we undo the changes that his representative had asked us to do), one thing that irked me was his repeating about twice per hour, "The golden rule is: whoever has the gold makes the rules. And that's me." So, hey, he's the guy with the gold, everyone must obey him like they're serfs. If he says bring a sleeping bag and sleep here on the floor tonight, you're supposed to say "yes, sir!" because he's the guy with the gold, you know.
(Tangent: I had assumed he was the company owner or something, the way he kept repeating that he's the one with the gold. Turned out he was just an employee, which they fired later for horrible job performance.)
- Seeing purchases and decisions made by blatantly disregarding the feedback of the programmers/IT workers who'll actually use that crap, and trusting the nice snake-oil salesman instead.
Yeah, it so says "appreciated" to see you're not even trusted to know the language you program in, the architecture you've designed, or the IDE you program in. Surely a high level manager coming from, say, the automotive industry knows better than you, and is more qualified than the programmers to decide such stuff.
Etc.
Basically, trust me, if the only reason to "gripe" you've seen so far is "but I wanna be senior developper at 20 years old", then you have a damn good job. Hang onto it at all cost. In the rest of the world, there are far worse gripes than that.
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