IT Workers Face Dangerous Stress

feminazi writes "William Cross, CIO and Ph.D., told the IBM Share conference this week that IT workers often face dangerous levels of stress. In a Q&A with Computerworld.com, he described some of the manifestions: "They tend to be less emotionally stable. They tend to react strongly to small things that they might not react to under other circumstances. A change in schedule may be a crisis if somebody is really stressed." What to do? "Easy things. Exercise ... learn to relax, learn meditation, learn breathing exercises, participate in your religion — all of those things are very effective stress managers."" This story selected and edited by LinuxWorld editor for the day Saied Pinto.

Comments

That's us, oversensitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Those changes in schedule that IT people get worked up about:

"The hardware you wanted won't be available until two days after launch. Is that going to be a problem?"
"Why the hysterics, the manufacturer said they'll have Linux drivers weeks before our new launch date."
"How long after the launch date do you think it will be before you NEED the backup server?"

The little things I get stress over the day before a large scale deployment:

"We just decided we liked your idea. Can we make the database access clustered?"
"For our launch announcement, how long can we claim it will take to have this ported to Windows Mobile too?"
"The RAM you requested didn't arrive because we didn't order it. How many simultaneous users can we support with half the RAM?"
"We can just add the extra disk space to the servers with USB drives right?"

IT guys are sooo damned touchy!

Stress...

[Threni]

...remind me again, how do we measure it?

I used to believe in stress, but now I've come to realize what I was experiencing was actually exasperation at poor decisions made by people who are paid far more than I. It's not really an illness or disease, as much as a realisation that the criteria applied to who gets the top jobs is utterly useless. Less concentration on shiny suits and bullshit - more on ability to deliver results.

Cause and effect

[taustin]

"They tend to be less emotionally stable."

But is that because they are in IT, or are they in IT because of that?

Are you ready for a revolutionary concept?

[dkleinsc]

People work better when they get enough sleep and aren't working extremely long hours! Furthermore, workers who are able to have a life outside of work are happier, get sick less, and are able to spend time with their families!

I find it disheartening that a manager figuring that out would be worthy of an article. I mean, this shouldn't be rocket science. The general idea I've gotten from various managers is that you can get more productivity out of people with a certain amount of overtime for a short period of time, but frequent overtime or extreme "crunch time" will in the end just destroy your work force and with it your work.