Slashdot Mirror
Abused IT Workers Ready To Quit
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that new research is suggesting as many as a quarter of all IT staff in small to medium businesses have suffered some sort of abuse and are looking for careers elsewhere (PDF). "The study also found that over a third have suffered from sleepless nights or headaches as a result of IT problems at work, while 59 percent spend between one and 10 hours a week working on IT systems outside normal hours. ... The biggest cause of stress among IT staff is problems arising from operational day-to-day tasks, the survey found. Another major cause came from loss of critical data, according to Connect."
The number of BOFH increased significantly in 2008.
"But it is hugely disappointing that, all too often, this has led to them being verbally or even physically abused.
They fired me! They would spank me, and would respond with "Faster! Harder! Tell me how I've been a BAD BOY! Tell me that I'm a filthy little whore!"
That's when they discovered that I was a masochistic pervert and canned me.
Yeah I'm talking to you. The wannabe computer programmer who thinks they are good at computers because they can click around the computer enough times and find the reboot button and 'fix' an inherently flawed windows system. You think you're cool because you can pirate photoshop but not know anything about it, get Microsoft Office for free but have the literacy of a 1st grader when writing a paper, and get a copy of Norton Anti-virus because your inherently flawed system is useless without Administrative privileges. Get a clue, you are not smart, you are just a corporate sheep for a company that will bury you if you ever tried to write any software that did anything remotely useful. You are a clickaround and all you know is your ugly gray existence that is Windows.
Want the source code to windows vista?
head -n 1000000 /dev/random > Windows.com
The IT manager Book of Abuse:
* cat-5 strangulation
* bayesian water torture
* physical loopback devices
* burning and branding
* PROFIT!
Sorry to troll but this is from the heart. I'm not that big but I will straight whoop that ass if someone attempts to phsically abuse me in the workplace. Maybe I'll lose, and if I do I'll be back to jack up your car.
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
If that's your idea of abuse, the waaahmbulance is definitely coming to pick you up.
I hijack supertankers for ransom. It's fun and pays really well! Back in college, I never would have guessed those Somali language courses would end up being so useful.
As someone who migrated away from a direct IT job to an HR job that is tangentially IT related,...
All the babes work in HR!
Correction. System administration is baby sitting. Development is not. Unless you are doing maintenance of legacy systems in which case you are not a baby sitter, you are more a wet nurse.
Yeah, a wet nurse to a viper.
Baww your math wasn't good enough was it? But if you ever need something built in the real world that needs to work who are you going to call? thats right, a real engineer. The ego is just a small side effect of being number one.
I have personally quit 2 jobs in the past because I was asked to work with Microsoft products.
Pshaw.
I quit an all-Unix shop when I found out my boss used emacs.
Burn, infidel!
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
You mentioned illegal. Are you working on an H1B visa or something?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I watch a lot of hockey and I know pretty much everything the players are supposed to do. I could just step right in on an NHL team and fill in. I'm that awesome.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
You flunked all your computer courses and you can't so much as boot up a video game without a call to the IT helpdesk.
And yes, that IS the only possible reason for you to have made that post. You'll claim it isn't, but that lie won't even fool yourself, much less anyone with a functioning brain.
I know I could skate around and not score any goals too. Seems to work for a lot of them.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
Dream jobs do exist. If you can get to them will depend only of your choices at High School.
If you chose hang out with the gangsta kids, get blow jobs from the gangsta hoes, beat the geeks for their lunch money, and spend most of the time smoking pot instead of in classroom, you will become a rich Rapper, rich Pornstar, rich drug dealer, or somehow a rich something. So, you will drive Bentleys and Lambos, have a house in Star Island and another in Beverly Hills, and have a private jet and a 100 ft yacht.
Otherwise, if you chose to study hard, hang out with the geeks from the computer club, code at home instead of go out and get drunk with the rest of the kids, you are going to become an abused IT professional, with a broken marriage, 120 hours work week, and a salary that is a joke.
That is why I always hit my little boy when he gets close to any of the computers at home, so I can create a conditional reflex on him of hating anything that is computer related. He will be very thankful to me, when he gets all those crackhead hot sluts inside his million dollar pool, instead of spend his night fixing the bosses E-mail server...
I found one way to avoid abuse was to adopt a simple practice of sharpening your hunting knife at lunch
Proudly Butchering code for 20 years
That was just beautiful, man. Just perfect.
The fact that you can demonstrate such an awesome grasp of this fundamental concept makes me want to vote you IT Czar.
Seriously. I want you to go all around the world and talk to absolutely everyone and repeat that little speech. I wanna see you show up as a guest on The Daily Show. I want to see them make "Backup Plane: The Movie" I want you to wander the Earth like Johnny Appleseed and Samuel Jackson in "Pulp Fiction," getting into adventures and imparting this wisdom to all you meet.
And then maybe, just maybe, on some faraway golden day, in a better world than the one we have now, I'll pick up my phone to hear some poor netadmin chump cry out for help and when I ask that vile bastard "Do you have any backups?" maybe, just maybe, he'll say "Yes, I took them yesterday."
And when that glorious day comes, ToasterMonkey, I swear I will find the tallest twin peaks in the world, and dynamite the first into the shape of a toaster, and the other into the shape of a monkey, in your eternal glorious honor.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."