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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."
These 'small and midsize' businesses don't have the staff to hire a DBA, a sysadmin, a helpdesk guy -- you're it. You're the jack of all trades.
It's rather logical to think you're going to get abused, because the same person who is fixing SQL queries is now known to be the helpdesk guy, and unfortunately can't keep up with the work.
That said, I've been there. And working 80 hour weeks, I had enough, and moved to a large, massive corporation with good job deliniation. Not only do I learn more because I have the time, I work 40 hours a week (barely) and make far more money with better benefits.
Just a reminder folks, work to live, don't live to work. There is no such thing as a 'dream' job, because at the end of the day you'll always want more, best to find a job that allows you to live your life to the fullest and provides you a good salary as a bonus :)
Cheers and good luck to those out of work in '09, it's shaping up to be a tough year.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
As someone who migrated away from a direct IT job to an HR job that is tangentially IT related, allow me to say that I am far far happier now than when I was doing the death march for people who thought of their IT folk as "geeks" who lived for abuse and being taken advantage of.
And my mind still gets a work out, and I still get to keep my hand in the water. And, as an extra bonus, when I go home at night. I can actually enjoy tinkering on my own projects instead of feeling as if I'm just bringing 'work' home with me.
Yes, right now is a bad time to jump for some people. On the other hand, I also realize that as a group, those of us drawn to IT often wait too long before jumping. Don't wait for the perfect moment. Pick one and make it 'perfect'.
Like the post office or public education...it never stops.
Unlike those examples, it never pauses. Face it guys...you are babysitting. Networks, servers, desktops, whatever... IT is babysitting. And this baby always needs sitting....
Instead of quitting in an "employers market"... try something like Gracie Jiu Jitsu... choking a motherfucker out makes me feel better after a day of IT BS.
On the bright side, we'll all be up shit creek when we use all the fossil fuels. At least your servers won't need babysitting anymore.
THL phish sticks
I guess one of the pitfalls is that there still exists management who believes it's all about turning the right kind of switch and everything will get fixed auto-magically.
And at the very end of TFA:
"Ten per cent of the companies surveyed said they had lost critical data through backup tape failures."
Is it just me, or does 10% seem like a huge loss rate?
/Test your backup
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The biggest cause of stress among IT staff is problems arising from operational day-to-day tasks
In other news, doctors get stressed by having to do clinicals, and retail workers get stressed out by daily customers.
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Managers who expect that data will never be lost, yet are unwilling to authorize equipment purchase and hours required to install and maintain a proper backup system.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
1 to troll in 2 seconds...
Honestly I think this acceptance of things going wrong and "thats just the way IT is" belongs in the Windows world.
I have personally quit 2 jobs in the past because I was asked to work with Microsoft products.
User friendly and sysadmin friendly are two different things.
While I don't condone abusing the incompetent, we have been doing our own source code repository backups in engineering, since IT admitted that they cannot recover the repository from backups. We can't recover the repository either, since IT "owns" it, nor are we permitted to use an alternative, but we do incremental and full backups regularly of a "latest" sandbox, and at each release tag, so we can reconstruct the data set.
We have a Linux development environment, but those systems are hobbled by a Windows-centric IT shop that has firewalls blocking access to Google from non-Windows systems and Linux-centric forums everywhere.
This level of incompetence is typical of IT at many small-to-medium (once, even large) places I have worked. Mordac(s), the preventer(s) of information services, work(s) at too many places, and I wouldn't miss them if they all quit and got jobs where they could be useful.
some people forget that a good number of IT workers are exempt from over time pay.
I'm sorry, but I am smarter than most of the people I work with. Because not only do I know how to do my job, I often times have to tell them how to do THEIR job. I have to know how to do their jobs, well enough to tell them how computers help them in their job, and to help them learn how to use computers to do their jobs.
I may not know all the details, and peculiarities of their job, but I know what their job is, and how to do it.
I'm fully convinced that I could actually "do" their job (well, most peoples jobs), should they get hit by a car. Or at least do a passable job of faking it (which I'm also convinced that many of them do anyway).
And that isn't ego either. I don't want to do their job. I would hate it. And often times, pays a lot less than what I make.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I'm a computer science academic, and so our department at one point got the brilliant idea that they could save money by greatly reducing the IT staff. After all, computer scientists have PhDs in Computer Stuff, so can run all their own IT, right? It turns out not really---and even when they can, it'd be a full-time job to do so, and they already have other full-time jobs (like writing papers and research grants and teaching classes and supervising grad students).
What's kept the whole thing running at all is that the reduced staff has two really excellent people who manage to pull things together, both of whom are much much better at their jobs than any numbers of CS PhDs would be at that job, because being a top-quality IT staff member and being a top-quality CS researcher just aren't the same job.
I suppose the change has sort of increased the respect the IT people around here get though: you definitely notice all the stuff that used to Just Work after the IT staff gets canned.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In *every* Job work can be endless. In my experience (as a scientist) good management can break the endless task into sub-tasks which are doable in a reasonable time, while bad management will do the opposite. That is, shifting the responsibility for the schedule of the whole project to the lower levels. This is *extremely* stupid. If you manage a project, it is your responsibility to stay within costs, time, and promised goals. Over-hours count as costs. If not directly, then indirectly because it may drive your best workers away. Or the person who worked 40hours overtime/week the last year (good luck with replacing him/her).
Other reasons i have seen for stress and frustration: bad information system infrastructure. For example everybody handle backups himself. That is plainly stupid. I have worked as sysadmin for a long time. And there are few things i very willingly leave to be done by experts, and one of them is backup/archiving (the other one is the mailserver...). Distributing these functions makes sese fro mthe viewpoint of your boss (since assuming you may go doe not leave them woth their pants down. They at least can sent you a mail, and from your viewpoint (you dont take additional stress if things go wrong just wo restore your capability to retrieve backups needed for recovery or e-mail to communicate). I figured that accepting certain troubles is sometimes worth it if you reduce the responsibility of a single person/admin/programmer. This includes bad code.
Last but not least: If you are responsible you have to live with the coworkers/programmers you are given. If you have a person writing not so fancy code, let him/her work in a productive way (e.g. i had a coworker who wrote code i would call uninspired at best, and a if-then-else hell at worst, but well documented - but there where tasks when exactly that was needed - e.g. for writing instrument drivers). It is not good to force newbies in OOP to design a base class and the interfaces in a framework. This will cause additional night-shifts (and headache to everybody).
I find a lot of folks in the IT trenches tend to be reactive rather than proactive.
They seem to enjoy being the "goto" guy that saves the day by resurrecting the server with the melty motherboard and toasted power supply while hundreds of users anxiously sit by their desks in breathless anticipation. Merely, switching to a failover server would never be as rewarding.
They regale in bragging to their co-workers and more importantly, their bosses about how many hours they spent rebuilding databases and applying emergency kernel patches at 3 am.
Face it, what kind of attention do you get when your servers never fail? When you never lose a database?
Nothing.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
And IT is still the industry that refuses any form of unionization. Everybody is too smart and too privliged because of the technicality of what they do to see the benefits of working together to make things better for us.
And before you start flaming, think where you would be if you were actually on your own, if you had to code your own OS, compiler, library and every other piece of software you use in your job. Yeah, but you are a lone wolf. Keep it up IT
Outside normal hours eh? Maybe if IT professionals go into their professions not expecting 8-5 jobs, then "normal" might have a different definition?
Man are you clueless.......
Your comments reek of a know-it-all ego. First off you speak like all in IT have an ego. Farthest from the truth.
I will refute your anecdotal evidence with some anecdotal evidence of my own.
I used to be in IT. Specifically, I was a programmer. It felt natural and fun and really stroked my own inherent nerdiness. (Additionally, it was a way to insulate myself from having to be in uncomfortable social situations, but that's not really germane to the subject at hand...)
I left IT last March and have since been in sales. Now I spend much of my day talking to strangers on the phone. In other words, I am doing cold-calling. How am I doing? Well, the web app I wrote that tracks the results of my calls tells me that I have made 4063 calls since then with 703 conversation with "decision makers". Additionally, I have only had one person hang up on me.
It is a very, very, very different world here in sales. It's touchy feely, talky, and decidedly NON geeky. Well, there is a slight geeky side to it, but it's psychological and thus a "soft science". So I don't consider it to be true geek.
Where is this going? Well, since I'm doing b2b and providing a technological service, I occasionally run into business owners who tell me, "Our IT department handles that, you need to talk to them." I have to tell you, that's poison to my ears when I hear that. Why? It's because IT workers view me unconditionally as some stupid uppity sales weasel who knows nothing about technology and deserves to be looked down upon. I think this is partly due to the fact that by adopting my service I would be depriving them of a job, but moreso because they view themselves as the master of their domain and don't like to be educated.
And, honestly, I empathize with them. If I were in their shoes, I would view me as a stupid sales weasel. This is partly because I deliberately sound stupid on the phone (it puts business owners at ease -- there's that "touchy feely" stuff), but moreso because being smart and competant is very much part of IT culture. I remember feeling like I had to compete against all the other IT workers in my job. My brain power was my currency and my dick size in the IT world. I haven't ever worked an IT job that wasn't like that. You have to be able to build up a defensive barrier to survive in that kind of environment -- where all of your peers are going to try to show you up with their brain. You have to be ready to show them that they're wrong and know nothing.
In fact, isn't that what you did to the Parent by telling him, in essence, "You know nothing of what you speak, moron!"?
I also talked to my sister about this, since she works doing sales for web services in the UK. She shares my opinion, calling IT workers "smug" and "condescending". And she's right. I think IT workers and trained to be that way by their peers. If they have to be ready to defend themselves against their peers, how much respect do you expect them to have for some slimy sales weasel who makes much more money than they do and never has to think about recursion or race conditions?
But it still sucks when I have talk to an IT worker the phone.
I'll also add that my many phone conversations have allowed me to gain several levels in Wetware Hacking, which is fun.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
You can't always say no.
I literally was up until 3:30am last night. During that day our SAN's SPS went offline and as a result, write cache was disabled on our SAN. This affected our file server and it would lock up, resulting in users locking up.
So I had to stay up late with Dell trying to get it fixed. What would have happened if I had said no? I would have to deal with all the problems in the morning, and listen to it from over 100 users.
Sometimes you just can't say no. But to make matters worse, once you give your boss the notion that you will work outside of business hours, they will expect you to do it more.
Much like getting a business phone...When I first hit the industry, I thought getting a work phone would be awesome!...Now? Because I checked my email so much outside of work, they expect a response out of me when they send an email.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
To expand on this, a large percentage of the decent-to-amazing IT workers are smarter than their co-workers. All businesses need worker-ants. Bodies to answer phones, tally numbers, clean the offices, and interface with customers and higher-ups in the company.
None of these jobs explicitly requires intelligence. None of them require the ability to problem-solve, to creatively find solutions to seemingly impossible problems, to make things do things they aren't meant to do.
While I only spent a few years in IT, before moving into the job-security and summers-off of education, I realized this quite well. I also had co-workers who realized this, and would put in obscene hours "keeping the company afloat". I did not. Why? Because while I was smarter than a lot of my co-workers, I also realized that I would see NO benefit from busting my ass doing over-time work. There would be no promotion, no additional job security, no additional pay, no accolades from the higher-ups in the business.
I was pretty glad that this had been my attitude when lay-offs came, because they were pointy-haired-boss style. Our corporate overlord did random lay-offs. RANDOM! Not need-based, not performance-based, not cost-benefit-analysis-based. RANDOM! People who had been working there 2 weeks to 15 years got laid off in a mass purging, at RANDOM! Had I been busting my ass up until I got that pink slip, I would have been pissed. As were a couple of the account executives who had been putting in serious OT to save "important" accounts.
IT gets shat upon because IT lets it happen. Mix Ego with poor social skills, no backbone, and a fear of the uncertain, and it's all but certain that you'll get trod upon.
Saying "Fuck NO!" is as likely to get you fired/laid off as not saying anything at all. And it's far more satisfying.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Which is part of the damn problem. The manager expects you to do work outside of work.
In any other job it's unthinkable, but because of the long standing tradition of putting in more hours then expected IT workers get screwed.
That's just not true. Accountants, lawyers and engineers are expected to work unpaid overtime if there is work that needs to be done. That's part of being a "professional" is that you do what needs to be done and you get paid by the year, not the hour.
Saying no is key to keeping your sanity.
And saying "no" is not something that geeks enjoy, because it takes a certain ability to withstand emotional games that geeks aren't good at. A common reason that geeks (including me) are attracted to scientific and technical endeavors is that we're socially a bit obtuse and aren't good at getting other people to appreciate us. We yearn for objective and scrupulously fair evaluation. We don't want to argue about our performance; we want it to speak for ourselves. It's even better to be alone with the computer: the computer is scrupulously fair.
We try to excuse ourselves from normal social maneuvering and rely entirely on our intelligence, competence, and ultimately, our good work. Unfortunately, that doesn't work when dealing with people who are angry, fearful, and willing to trample other people. And who isn't willing to trample on the lowly IT geek? Who isn't angry and fearful in an IT crisis?
When a geek encounters aggression, unfair accusations, and outrageous demands, his response to the social stress is to withdraw (leaving the accusations unchallenged) and fall back on his technical skills (by working overtime to fix the problem.)
The geek might try to stick up for himself by using facts and logic, but his aggressor will just become more aggressive and insulting. The aggressor understands the audience (bystanders and management) better than the geek and is able to snow them with indignation and misrepresentation, leaving the geek feeling shamed, embarrassed, and sorry that he stuck up for himself. What is his refuge? Demonstrating his ability with a scrupulously fair audience: the computer. So he works overtime to fix things for the guy who just abused him.
I've never worked an IT job, but I've experienced this as a software developer for a very small company. I no longer work there, and they still pay me a retainer and frequent consulting fees because they haven't managed to entirely replace me :-) Line up a better job and QUIT! Easier said than done, I know. Good luck to everyone stuck in that position. Read a few books like this one, work on sticking up for yourself, and keep it cool.
This is the attitude that I see the most. I recently was offered a job at a small company and I declined it. The question that I asked the recruiter was, "Do the owners of the company see the IT department as an enabler that will make their business better, or do they see it as a cost center that they have to put up with?" The guy was honest with me and told me that getting them to spend money on IT always required a lot of arm twisting. To quote him, "The owner of the company looks at each dollar spent on IT as one less dollar of profit for his company." I declined the position. If my first job hadn't been for a small company, and I hadn't seen my boss struggling with management for every necessary expense, I probably wouldn't have known to ask the question I asked. The only benefit I can see from working at a small company is that once you get everything running, your job should be on cruise. It might take a year or two to get to that point, but once you're there, it will be easy street. The reason I quit my first job is because I got bored. There literally wasn't anything to do because management didn't want to spend money on IT. Everything was running smoothly and other than the occasional problem with a workstation drive crashing or something, my days were devoid of challenge. Like someone else said, it depends on your personality. If you want to work hard and be rewarded accordingly, a small company probably isn't the best place to work (unless the company is going to be growing a lot). On the other hand, if you're good at IT but want to have a life outside of work, a small company might be good for you. FWIW, I settled for an in between medium. After consulting for 8 years I now work at a moderate sized non-profit ($15 million a year budget), 250 workstations, 15 servers. I'm salary and work about 30 hours a week.
And being in HR, the "babes" know the sexual harassment policy word-for-word
Sure, until you get them next door to the bar an get a couple of drinks into them. Then ... not so much. A great many people present a different personality at work than away from work, and guess where the people who were partying when us geeks were studying ended up?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
As I said in a previous post, I'm a sysadmin.
I almost always clock over 40 hours PLUS the off-hours time I spend working in my head on problems at work.
My wife caught me logging on a couple of weeks ago at three in the morning -- I just REALLY wanted to check ONE MORE LITTLE THING.
My boss doesn't worry about giving me work -- he worries about keeping people out of my hair so I can be more productive.
Being a sysadmin is DEMANDING, HARD and often THANKLESS. You either love it and live it -- or you're better off going elsewhere. There's great money to be made if you go the distance, but that's not going to be enough if you don't love this job.
Thankfully, I DO love this work! The stats in the article about hours worked and losing sleep -- I was REALLY surprised the numbers were that low. It's all worth it, though, when you do the impossible -- even if very few people at your office realize it.
Life is short: void the warranty.
In my 2 IT jobs over the last 10 years, it has been my experience that the majority of my stress on the job, is caused by incompetent co-workers.
The people that hire IT/CS staff rarely understand that continuing education is what differentiates great IT staff from poor IT staff. The people that hire IT/CS sometimes having a good understanding of the 'buzzwords' or 'skillsets' required for a particular job, but do not understand how rapidly IT changes, and how important it is to hire people that are self-motivated learners.
Most of my major problems and frustrations as a developer/sys analyst, comes from working with people that have just enough knowledge to complete projects in their area, but not enough motivation or additional knowledge to complete their projects in a way that eases transitions over time.
As time goes on, the systems become more and more tangled and difficult to work with, to the point that any new project declared by management is 10x harder than it needs to be.
I consider management part of the "co-worker" set also. Most managers of IT sub-departments (manager of network services, manager of data center, etc..) have enough knowledge to direct their employees fairly well in their own little kingdom, but rarely have an understanding of the "big picture" as it comes to the IT services as a whole.
The net result of these little ignorant "kingdoms" inside an IT department, is a very frustrated worker trying to implement projects which are often much more difficult because of conflicting priorities and resource allocation.
One of the stereotypes of IT/CS work, is that it is too hard for the average person to understand: it is 'mysterious'. This view tends to reinforce the idea that it is OK to not explain your IT actions, and just 'fix the problem'. Numerous uncoordinated 'fixes' often results in project delays and failures.
To sum up:
While I haven't yet seen an 'in production' way to make sure that the right staff are hired, and I have seen a few ways that address the issues of managers communicating, and ways to unveil the natural secret-like way in which a lot of IT work is accomplished.
The first a quick 15 minute "who's doing what next week" type meeting. Everyone in IT, as well as super users of all the systems, meets on a friday afternoon and just rapidly spills out what is going on. Standing meeting to keep it fast. Just a quick mention of the DETAILS of your work. Whether or not everyone understands what you say is irrelevant. The major purpose being to throw everything in IT out in the air and see if anyone else sees a problem with it.
The second helpful thing I've seen is to have a group of USERS, not IT staff, help direct the priority of projects. IT managers have to present their projects and justifications for those projects, and the users decide what is most important. You'd be surprised how well that works to bridge the gap between IT and its user base. Oftentimes, a user/superuser of your systems can be frustrated by a mysterious network slowdown, a service outage, or or or... Keeping them in the loop takes that frustration away, which keeps it off your day to day IT workers.
And the last good thing I've seen is to make sure that IT has meetings that span departments. Your desktop staff, helpdesk, developers, server admins, etc.. should all be meeting together to just 'shoot the shit' every so often. It is amazing to see what could have been big problems adverted by having a no agenda cross department meeting every couple weeks.
At any rate, none of the above applies to small IT teams, but it has, and is working, for our larger 100+ IT staff at the institution that I'm working for.
What I can't understand is how these long-hours heroes can claim honestly that their mind is still functioning at full capacity after all that time.
Some people claim long hours when actually they are chatterboxes - standing around at the water cooler talking nonsense or spouting verbal diarrhea on the phone or on meetings and having to come in on Saturday to finish their work.
I am contracted to do 7.5 hour days, 5 days a week. I have worked genuine very insane hours in the past (14 hours for 8 weeks) and it nearly killed me. It was a real struggle after about 9 hours to keep my brain focused on the task.
I've also worked at an industrial site where they limited the number of hours you could work in a certain period, because the manager's best friend had been a hero once and worked something stupid like 23 hours non-stop and got himself killed driving home when he fell asleep.
Having to work long hours is a failure in the system. If it's not you, it's management's failure to plan or having unrealistic expectations from the staff. It's down right inhumane and uncivilised.
It produces ill, bitter and twisted people, poor quality work, and poor company performance.
Stick Men