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IT Job Satisfaction Plummets To All-Time Low
cweditor writes "IT job satisfaction has plummeted to a 10-year low, according to a recent survey. Another on general job satisfaction rated IT a paltry 45%. From the article: 'The CEB's latest survey found that the willingness of IT employees to "exert high levels of discretionary effort" — put in extra hours to solve a problem, make suggestions for improving processes, and generally seek to play a key role in an organization — has plummeted to its lowest levels since the survey was launched 10 years ago.'"
Been there done that. It's thrilling trying to go out on your own into the wild blue yonder of a startup, but the failure rate is high, it requires being good at wearing multiple hats, and it's not for people with mortgages to pay.
Table-ized A.I.
Around 1999/2000 there was a thought that tech was going the highest paying major in college, and that attracted a few people who would have otherwise gone into other fields. The best tech people are the ones who live around it, read tech news such as this site here, and come home to more pixels than they have at work. Anybody who believes the only tech they need to know is the one or two programs they use at work is blindsided by world events too often.
Every year, the news comes out that US workers are some of the most productive, and every year their productivity rises....
Yet actual wages have stagnated, and even retreated since the 1970s.
Perhaps the days of a free lunch are over, and companies are gonna have to start compensating people appropriately for their work.
... and that's in the best interest of the business. The business likes predictable systems and services.
Most of us slashdotters with low userid numbers can vouch for the fact that a whole lot has changed in the last 12 or so years.
IT used to be the wild west. UNIX was not widely well understood -- even by software developers. UNIX servers were inaccessible. UNIX servers were big bucks. Linux was obscure. Hardly any computer hardware or software did much of anything out of the box. Sysadmins, consultants, and IT workers were worth their weight in gold -- because that wasn't any other option.
Now... IT is mature. Hardware is cheap and reliable. Linux is ubiquitous. Linux admin experience is not rare. apt-get or yum can deploy massive amounts of useful, nearly preconfigured software in minutes that would have taken sysadmins WEEKS or MONTHS to build, deploy, patch, etc in the past.
When I first started in IT, building a server was an *ART*. Each one was unique -- from the hardware to the disk layout to the partitioning, to the OS, to the locally installed software. Building a server was like building a Stradivarius.
Now, building a server is like stamping a kazoo out of tin. I can make 500 kazoos a day. They're all the same. I don't even need to log into them once.
In the past, general IT folks were quite often the white hat security experts who learned by doing/experimenting. Now... most companies have security teams an intrusion detection systems that sound alarms if anyone runs nmap on nessus.
Your average IT guy USED to have endless opportunities to be a hero by introducing opensource software options that almost nobody else in the company knew about. Linux in the mainstream has changed all that.
A *GOOD* IT worker used to have almost magical abilities to do orders of magnitude more work. Now, large scale admin processes are much more widely understood, there are many more tools, and those magical processes are well documented and demystified so that even the junior IT folks can do them.
How many IT jobs today involve compliance? How rewarding is compliance-related work? I bet that some of the lack of willingness to suggest process improvements is somehow tied to the process baggage of IT compliance.
I still like my job, but it's changed a lot. I don't *just* do IT. I add value to my company. Today, IT needs to be much more closely integrated with the business. IT needs to be a business partner. I doubt any businesses today would hire a BOFH.
Meanwhile, I didn't buy a home I couldn't afford, and for some reason no one wants to just give me money.
Hah! Don't you feel foolish now.
My father once said, to paraphrase.. "you can be one of those complaining about the people getting free cash.. or you can be one of the people getting free cash."
+1 insightful, in retrospect.
If I didn't do it as a job, I'd do it as a hobby
And that is the problem. I am a "veteran" as well (20 years working on the field) and what I can see is that people is always too willing to engage, forgetting about what they should be getting back.
By nature, our work involves a lot of learning and a lot of looking at how things are done and trying to improve them, making procedures more efficient or finding new ways of achieving goals. If you ask me this is quite close to the kind of work executives do.
More and more, companies depend on IT both for efficiencies and for competitive advantage. This is not only on "Tech" companies like it used to be, but in most of the big ones, and it is starting to spill on the medium size ones as well. TFA acknowledges this.
We manage a critical part of their operations, yet many of us enjoy work so much that we are happy with giving economic rewards a secondary position. That is a mistake.
I went freelance consultant and the economic rewards are much better, but you know what? respect for my work also went up, and so did working conditions. Now I feel like if someone wants me on his organization they'll have to provide far more than what they are offering to cubicle workers.
If more IT people would take this view where you have to be rewarded for everything you do for your organization, things would be quite different. It works for salespeople and MBAs really well. They don't move a finger without getting something back. Either money or better working conditions.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."