Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Anxiety and IT?

Posted by timothy on from the nervous-holiday dept.

An anonymous reader writes "During these long breaks from work, it's refreshing to not have to worry about your job. Unless you work in IT, in which case you're salaried and constantly on the clock. To all the server room monkeys and desktop admins, do you suffer from anxiety? How do you deal with it? Does the crushing worry of a businesses IT infrastructure (and the rest of the business) coming to a screeching halt make IT occupations prone to anxiety?"

14 of 347 comments (clear)

  1. Chill out... by bagboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Get on the treadmill, go for a run, etc... Stop stressin' dude.

    1. Re:Chill out... by Abstrackt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's pretty much the answer: physical activity relieves stress. Do some sort of activity that gets you outside and away from all the blinkenlights for a while regularly and you'll feel a hell of a lot better.

      --
      They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
    2. Re:Chill out... by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It depends on your personality. Some people (my wife is one, a guy I work with is another) just seem to let the stress take over. My wife has this client who was pushing her to deliver work on an impossible schedule so she is up to 3 AM working on CAD drawings and wrecking herself in the process. I keep saying its not worth killing yourself over it. Life will go on without that client. But she keeps trying to deliver.

      Other people know when to let the breaker trip, and go home to sleep.

      --
      http://michaelsmith.id.au
    3. Re:Chill out... by Abstrackt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I disagree. I regard myself as a low stress person and I ride a bike to work, That may be a correlation but I don't think its causative. Some people wind them selves up on stress. Panic and stress feeding on each other until there is nothing else. Telling them to go for a swim or something won't help. They have to look outside the job they are working on.

      To be fair, I don't know anyone who relaxes on the trip to work. ;) As for looking outside the job you're working on that's why you need regularly scheduled activity, so it forces you to step away for a while.

      I think the problem with IT, or any knowledge-based jobs, is that you don't produce anything tangible so no matter how much you work it rarely feels like there's something to show for it. That's why I recommend physical activity.

      --
      They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
    4. Re:Chill out... by Yvan256 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.

    5. Re:Chill out... by windcask · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's people's answer to everything these days.

      Me: "I'm constantly tired and irritable. What should I do to help?"

      Society: "Get more exercise, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, and sleep eight hours a night."

      Me: "I constantly have the urge to stab my girlfriend in the face, and I see clowns in the toilet whenever I pee. What should I do?"

      Society: "Get more exercise, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, and sleep eight hours a night." /me solves all problems evar

    6. Re:Chill out... by Stephan+Schulz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm on call 24/7...

      If you are on call 24/7 I hope you charge them 168 hours per week. Seriously. If not, find a reasonable schedule. Being on call a day a week is ok, but being on 24/7 is only acceptable if you are on the C-level and get paid accordingly - and then you need to be able to fully control your own working hours.

      Otherwise, remember, it's not your company. If the server is down, its down. If it cannot be fixed quickly, the company is losing money. Too bad. They should have bought a better server solution and paid an additional IT guy. The people in charge need to live with their decisions. It's not your responsibility unless you are in charge.

      --

      Stephan

    7. Re:Chill out... by mug+funky · · Score: 4, Insightful

      that may be borne of the fact that the average person in the western world does not get enough exercise or fruit/veg/vitamins

  2. Weed by SkankinMonkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most people I know that work in IT smoke egregious amounts of pot.

    1. Re:Weed by Nyder · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And we wonder why software fails so often... You get the munchies, forget what you were doing, assume it must have been good because it seems to work!

      no, we have crappy software because management doesn't smoke weed. they want software done yesterday with all the ideas they will tell you about tomorrow.

      --
      Be seeing you...
  3. The difference between managers and workers by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The workers care about the stuff that they do, and get anxiety about it. Managers don't give a rat's ass, and have no anxiety.

    The hallmark of a good executive, is that he can turn his problems, into yours.

    --
    Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    1. Re:The difference between managers and workers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Spoken like someone new to the workforce.

      It's not that simple, actually. As a lower-level worker, you definitely want time to unplug and get time away from the front lines. And there's always the stress of trying to patch something under fire, or deal with rickety systems that have gone completely sideways at the worst possible moment. It's completely stressful and can be a total nightmare.

      As a manager, especially those of us who have manage departments of former co-workers, or departments that we would have previously worked in, that is never far from mind. The last thing I like to do (truly) is call at an inopportune moment on a weekend, a holiday, or after a long day. Those calls come after exhausting every other option -- is this really a 10:30 PM/Saturday/company holiday problem? Can it wait until the next morning? Is there a patch coming? Is there a workaround in the meantime? Do we have someone on hand who can patch it that ISN'T on a weekend or a vacation?

      Unfortunately, sometimes that call has to be made. And in those cases, there are actually dollars on the line. I have the impression that you've probably heard "dollars on the line" and think it's a lie - there are always dollars on the line, right? Well, yes. And "dollars on the line" - or "account on the line" or whatever variation thereof means, "loss we cannot realistically sustain at this point". Subtext: "We are all in a really bad position if we don't do this."

      When I can run interference or manage expectations, I can. But I know that the last thing you and I want is for me to jump in on systems that I'm, at best, a couple years foggy on (or only algorithmically familiar with) -- you really don't want me jumping in where I'm totally unfamiliar with the nuances. (Nor does QA). So in those situations, I can only hang around and answer priority questions, scope reduction questions on the problem at hand, etc. If we're in the office, I'll gladly buy you a drink, dinner, whatever.

      But for the love of god, don't think I don't have anxiety. I have just as much as you - it's just a different type.

      The best thing for all of us to do is to try and unplug as much as possible when we're out of work. Don't let the time off be tainted by "I could get an email" or "I could get a text", etc... yes, you can, but time off spent worrying about that is not truly downtime. If the call or email or text comes, the call or email or text will come, and worrying about it will not have made that moment any less stressful. I wrestled with that for ages and you really just have to do whatever you can to make it like a switch - off at the end of the day, and if an emergency crops up, on again. It's exceedingly difficult and sometimes you need to have the burnout moment where you realize the job just isn't worth it... some people have to go to therapy to be able to build that separation. Whatever it takes, it's critical to figure out, because it will eat you alive if you don't.

      And remember... in most cases, I got a call before you, and I did everything possible to *not* have to call you.

      But today - I'm not checking my work email. If the world blows up, Tokyo or London will deal with it to the best of their abilities. If they can't and NY or Chicago can't, then it will come to SF and LA. And we'll do what needs to be done. Even though it sucks. (Because the alternative in those cases sucks pretty badly for all of us.)

  4. All the usuals + Meditation by cplusplus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've gotten a lot more disciplined in my exercise schedule, and have always eaten good foods, but I've started going to weekly mediation and have been going for about a year now. The exercise just helps me feel good (hooked on endorphins!), but meditation helps bring awareness and focus and has given me the ability to slow down and pause during the day, let my thoughts all line up, and then focus on one at a time. Having the ability to focus on one thing at a time is nice.

    --
    "False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
  5. Re:The best way to avoid all that anxiety ... by Spad · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well that lost a paragraph somewhere...

    This (especially the bit about being too good - fake the occasional mail flow issue if you have to).

    Make sure hardware is under warranty and your 3rd party software is supported with good SLAs in place. Set up server and systems monitoring so that you know when things are going wrong, rather than finding out when they have gone wrong. Hire competent staff to work with and under you that you can trust to set things up properly and fix them when they break. Never agree to support systems that you don't have the knowledge to fix within your team (unless they have reliable 3rd party support, see above).

    Above all, know your infrastructure inside out, take good backups, test your backups and have a DR plan with SLAs for each system and agree it with your business so that people can't turn around in an emergency and demand that you fix *their* system right now because they suddenly decided it was important.

    If you're stressed about the bits of your job that are under your control then you're doing it wrong; if you're stressed about your job due to other factors outside your control, you've got a job.