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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.
37% of U.K. workers don't feel they belong to any statistical demographic.
70% don't believe that their job reflects their true potential
I'm not surprised. I don't think anyone wants to imagine "Help Desk II" being the maximum of their potential.
Of course it's just normal griping by the expected percentage of always-disgruntled employees. We here at Yoyodyne value our employees, and try to create a flexible work environment that enables them to be more productive with less stress.
Now quit posting to Slashdot and get back to work. You've got a deadline coming up and it looks like you'll be working an 80-hour week to catch up. I suggest you get busy.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I've been working at my job doing verification work for about 5 years. I generally feel like I'm doing the same job I was doing 5 yeas ago without any real change or growth.
But today I had one of our new hires come in and ask a few questions about solutions that are pretty much daily routine - obvious - to me now. And I realized that 5 years ago, I had to ask very similar questions. Since then, I had become the expert. And thinking about it, there are a lot of job proficiencies and responsibilities I've acquired over the 5 years that I just wasn't consciously aware of on a daily basis without actually stopping to think about them.
It's easy to forget that you didn't always know everything you know now, and that your job has changed more than just salary grades and amounts.
paintball
I want to feel valued by having a wage increase. I don't care much for the smiles and congratulations.... they're few and far between anyway, and then what are they going to say? "Thank you for keeping the network up, like it should be anyway"?
As far as I'm concerned, nobody knows I exist until the network goes down - then they all start to care.
I don't mind. I just want the cold hard cash anyhow.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Interesting viewpoint.
The difference between the chap keeping the air conditioning working, and the guy who keeps the servers running is that when the air con fails, people open the windows to the street to let air in, and feel hot and bothered.
When the servers go down, the people who bring in the money suddenly can't contact by email the people they need to talk to, to get money in.
The secretaries can't produce documentation, or access their calendars. Meetings fall off the face of the earth. Important messages don't reach their destinations.
The IT dept are responsible for making sure the history of the company is recorded, and to make sure people get the information reliably that makes the company operate. No, they're not the whole of the company, but if they screw up, it can almost kill a company stone dead, or at least damage it badly.
I'd hazard a guess from this, that you're someone who's never worked in a high availability server environment, with sensitive data, and having to translate business requirements into infrastructure.
By your argument, the 'guy who brings in the money', i.e. the sales department staff, would be just fine if you cut their email, phone and mail services. After all, those sections don't bring in any money do they? So they don't count do they?
And before you talk about company structure, I've run my own company for a considerable time, hired staff, and run it from the perspective of MD.
Everyone in that company is there to bring in money efficiently, and without communications, you may as well shut up shop and go home.
IT, lest it slip your mind is 'Information Technology'. The technology part is not the big part. The information is. And when you trust someone with ALL your information, that's a hell of a responsibility to carry.
So, IMHO, you're pretty far off the mark.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You only know if you are loved based on how the lover treats you. A lot of times, I know I was 'valued' by the company highly. But the treatment I received indicated that management valued me as an asset, not as an entire person. I was valued, but many qualities I consider integral to my sense of self were viewed as 'inconvenient', and 'obstacles to my advancement'. This is a very mixed message. It doesn't say, "we love you", it says, "we -would- love you if you were a little different; all you need to do is to stop being -you-."
Many managers, both in and out of IT, are very poor at communicating with employees.
Another problem is that many IT people are dissatisfied with "the way we've always done things." A lot of times, management insists on doing various things in very sub-optimal ways, and it can grate on the nerves of people who can't help but see better and more efficient ways to do things.
When your ability to patch the same broken software, on your day off, for the 300th time is 'valued', but your repeated requests to be allowed to -fix- the damn thing once and for all are ignored, it grates on the nerves.
In the post titled, "PHB - leave us alone!", AccUser points out another thing. It can be reslly frustrating to do something really spectacular and have management ignore it, while simultaneously misrepresenting and over-praising accomplishments that the IT staff knows are technologically crap.
A lot of bosses can't step outside their world view enough to really communicate with techies who have very different values. I've turned down some very lucrative jobs because there is no way I could reconcile my values with those of the firm's managers.
Managers focus so much on delivery dates, market share, product names, what color the splash screen should be, etc. These are necessary things, but a smart manager will realize that these are -never- going to be the motivators for the tech staff. Getting defects under control, smooth and predictable integration, automating bullshit tasks or removing them entirely; -these- are the IT staff motivators.
You are a cog, a part, a line in the overhead, like lights and rent and shrinkage. You should be grateful you have a job because we are thinking of shipping your job off to the place that had a thousand people drown in the monsoon flooding last week.