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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.
Go BOFH on your users.
It's a sure way to de-stress
What happens when our religion is our IT work? Then when we practice it, wouldn't it become a viscious spiral into hell?
For developers, or those who otherwise sit at the keyboard and monitor for long stretches, don't underestimate the importance of getting up to do a few stretches every once in a while.
Once I sat in front of Visio, concentrating on state diagrams for a loong time. (I was just learning how to use Visio.) When I finally got up, my mouse arm was wracked in pain. I had sat there for hours, sans break, without realizing it.
Dark Reflection
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!
...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.
I've been a programmer for many years. I have a personality type that thrives on stress. So you know what I do? Consulting. I get brought in on doomed projects. Every month is a working marathon. Right now I've been on a job since February, the original deadline was May, the latest deadline for that May deliver is Sept. I eat stress for breakfast, sure my health starts to go after 14-16 hour days 6 days a week (sometimes 7), but I get paid very well for it and take some time off to recover between jobs.
Well I keep meaning to take some time off between jobs, but the head hunters just throw more ridiculous sums of money at me. I haven't had a proper vacation for years, but after a week of not working I start getting bored. I'm sure things would be different if I had a family waiting for me to get home at night, but considering I'm only 3 years out of college, this is fun. Also the stress on the job pales in comparison to the stress I went through during plebe year at Annapolis. I transfered to UW Madison after that year, but stress does not effect me in the same way it used to.
"They tend to be less emotionally stable."
But is that because they are in IT, or are they in IT because of that?
..... That make firms with rec rooms, fun company outings, enforced breaks during the workday (to read, improve your IT education, etc.), and subsidized memberships to gyms and the like the ones to work for. I would suspect that those companies have IT staff that are less stressed and they have less retention issues..... Not to mention they lower the risk of some overstressed IT person going postal. More examples can be found here:
. htmly our-employees-by-offering-company-perks/
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,20972,00
http://self-help.vocaboly.com/archives/495/value-
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
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.
I am officially gone from
You need to experience more of the world. What passes for "religion" in the main stream media (and politics :-( ) in the US is just a stagnant tidal pool among all religions.
I'm reminded of a great quote from the Dalai Lama(iirc, and *) that I saw a few months ago. Some interviewer was asking what it would mean to Buddhism if scientists proved something contrary to our teachings. He looked at the interviewer like he was insane, then said that the teachings would be changed to reflect reality. No fuss, but then again the central premise of Buddhism is to become truly aware of what's going on. (Which is an incredibly scary thing, once you start to get serious about it. You can't hide things from yourself any longer.)
(*) ObDisclosure -- I consider myself a Buddhist in a Tibetean tradition, so strictly speaking the Dalai Lama is our spiritual leader. But it's nothing like what you would see in the Catholic church, for instance. I just thought the statement really caught the way that it's a non-issue.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Depending on your coworkers and what happens during the little bits of downtime you get, how the stress affects you (well, me anyways) can change drastically. I work IT at a college, and we're being prepped for the onslaught of the students returning next week. Basically, we're having our shifts broken up, everyone is working, and we are keeping the workers in and out so no one gets fucked by the horde of students who don't know how to take care of spyware. That seems to be a fairly good model, and one that I know is used by the fast food industry, or at least places I've worked at.
On top of that, I think that a lot of the stress that common IT jobs have is from the repetitiveness of what happens all the time. Explaining the same thing not only to customers, but to your boss or to management several times is much more annoying that one would think. Sometimes I get pretty ecstatic when someone comes in with an extremely difficult problem as opposed to an easy one, simply because I get to actually think about what I'm doing instead of just regurgitating the same stuff over and over again. The stress doesn't necessarily have to come from the work load; sometimes it's just a lack of job satisfaction.
I used to go to the gym 3-5 times a week on my way home from work until a manager complained I was only spending 8-9 hours a day working.
So you updated your resume and found a job working for sane people, right?
Stress is when you get given too much work to do in too short a period of time and it can only be completed through your own raw output, not by referencing the work of others - usually as a result of poor resourcing and budgeting by management, and over-commitment to service levels.
one might say people who continue to work for such companies or in such conditions are idiots and just stressing themselves. This is either true (in a lot of cases) or just short-sighted (in many others).
As an example, I work in a high stress position, providing my services cheaper than my peers for a job I genuinely believe in (providing technology to under-privileged children so they can complete school and break out of the poverty cycle). If that's not worth a bit of stress, I don't know what is.
anyone who says they have no stress or don't believe in stress just doesn't have a stressful job. their experiences don't define anyone elses - nor invalidate them.
Perfect. Another "abuser" who so easily gave up her name. Let me go see here... Clickity, click, click, clack... Ahhh, yes. Let me see here. hmmm... looks like all her current programming work is being done out of her home directory. Click, click, clack.... Too bad it just suffered a disk failure. And lets go look for those backup tapes so I can perform the recovery. Lets see here, yes, tape103842. Lets just put it in the specially built "custom" DLT drive (you know the one that I modified the read/write head so that it actually writes the binary converted DC electric sine wave from the power supply to the tape when trying to "restore" a file). That will get things back in order. Let me also go connect my "special network patch cord" in for Libby's computer (the one that connects to the 240V 40Amp plug back here with the other end being her computer's NIC). Bzzzzz... POP! Yes, another satisfied customer.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I worked for IBM Global Services many years ago. They were trying to pull this kind of mandatory overtime crap when I quit in 1997.
This seems like an attempt to circumvent labor laws. IANAL. In any event, it skirts the mutual understanding between you and your employer when the salary offer is made: the annualized figure is based on a standardized number of work hours per year, which is calculated from a 40-hour work week. Requiring 15% overtime (46 hours per week, or over an hour a day) amounts to a de facto pay cut. Put another way, if any hours worked beyond 8 in one day are worth time and a half, then your paycheck should be 22.5% bigger. IBM, if your pay and benefits aren't 22.5% higher than the competitive benchmark for this position, than you're SOL.
This is such a sneaky, underhanded tactic. Boo!
I was going to write a comment about why you're on a narrow-focussed path of self-destruction, but I think I'll just hit you with a stick instead. :-)
The rest of the IT people are probably touchy and grouchy because the intern is taking too damn long to do even simple jobs and spends all their time talking to the users when they should be moving on to the next task. Plus management has just dumped another 4 man weeks of extra project work per week on them because they've got an intern to pick up the day-to-day work.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
I do not want to be lumped into "IT". I am a programmer, not IT.
Programmers do real work. IT is, more often than not, the adversary.
IT: We are taking away administrator rights.
Programmer: What?
IT: If you download and install any software from the Internet, you will be fired.
Programmer: What?
IT: If you need anything installed, we will install it for you.
Programmer: I need X, Y, and Z installed.
IT: That software is not on the approved list
Programmer: What software is on the approved list?
IT: This list is empty.
Programmer: Can I at least have an editor?
IT: Windows comes with Notepad.exe. Use that.
The above is a true story.