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."

Comments

Obviously...

[HerculesMO]

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.

Re:It's not so bad

[Chyeld]

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'.

Re:It's not so bad

[ZygnuX]

If there was actually a little bit more of knowledge about IT, the people who work there wouldn't be treated that badly.

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.

Backups aren't all they're cut out to be

[TubeSteak]

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

Serious cause of IT stress

[whoever57]

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.

definitely agree

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:It's not so bad

[drolli]

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).

Reactive vs. Proactive

[hemp]

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.

Yup yup yup

[rawtatoor]

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

Sometimes you can't say no.

[Drakin020]

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.