Slashdot Mirror
IT Night Shift Workers: Fat and Undersexed
wiredmikey writes "The results of a recent survey released today by Men's Health Network found that shift workers, people who work non-traditional hours including IT professionals working overnight shifts, report that these shifts are negatively impacting their health, work, well-being, and quality of life. The survey revealed that the majority of shift workers (79%) believe that they are negatively impacted by their shift work and voiced daily concern over their energy level (47%), weight (43%), and their sex lives (30%). Additionally, the survey showed that the average shift worker hasn't had a meal with their family in two weeks or exercised in 24 days. The results of this survey really shouldn't be surprising. While the survey infers that shift workers may be overweight, the issue extends far beyond and into the general population of the United States, including children. Childhood obesity is at an all time high in America, so this issue isn't just related to the night shift."
How many of these people are willing to work, or even seek out, these night shifts because their health, weight or quality of life is low?
I had more sex and was way more skinnier when I did work the night shift.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Damn.. that's pretty fucking harsh.
Let's just say that late night IT workers are under-exercised and over-masturbated.
So according to the article:
1: Fat people are best suited to work night shifts and work poorly during the day.
2: The USA has a majority of fat people.
Just solve the problem by declaring that from now on, business hours will be night shift hours! That will bring the USA out of the recession and the obesity problem won't be an issue anymore.
Also, why not expand on this study a bit? Does exercising at night also reduce obesity better than exercising during the day? Do fat people process food better at night? Do they see better, perhaps? Living at night certainly must have more than just one advantage for obese people!
The article doesn't appear to compare these statistics with non-shift workers in the same field. I'm sure that shift work has its own issues, but the gist of the article is that shift work also correlates to "voiced daily concerns" about fairly common maladies among office workers. How does the 43% who complain daily about their weight, for example, compare to non-shift workers?
Are you sure they determined the polarity of causality in this?
Because, really, it's the chubby, antisocial people with the bad self-care issues that tend to agree to take jobs that subject them to isolation and imposition for less money.
The fast food and inflatable doll industries extend sincere thanks to corpulent nocturnal IT workers across the globe.
My anecdotal evidence concurs. Working overnights fueled my divorce, furiously. I gained weight, more than I ever had before, even at my laziest. It wasn't worth doubling my income, not at all. It was a foolish move by a kid that didn't see past the dollar signs. Never again. Of course, I'm changing industries from Network Administration to Lab Science, should finish my coursework in about 2 more years, so I'll never have to worry about it again.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
People need it, shift workers don't get very much of it. Just the bit most get in passing going to & from work helps allot. Without it, people are in general a bit more unhappy & lethargic.
When I worked the Graveyard, I made sure that for my "lunch" I actually *left* the facility, often for a quick trip to the 24hr gym, and just as often went to a 24hr cafe. I made sure I had healthy snacks (I'm a serious snacker). I mean, you HAVE to take the initiative and think about how to create a healthy environment for yourself regardless of the time of day. In most cities, this is perfectly possible, you don't HAVE to spend your breaks sitting on your ass smoking and eating junk food.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Daytime IT workers are not overweight and have plenty of sex?
eat right, exercise and have sex on the floor of the customer service department with your coworker, it worked for me
I chose late night work because I am fat and undersexed.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Humans are designed to be conscious during the day. Working at night cuts down on social interactions with others including your significant other (if they are awake during the day). Not to mention humans need to sun to function. Seasonal depression anyone? Look at people in Alaska during the dark sessions and you will see what, lack of sun, can do to people.
Night shifts working in the old "cold room" computer rooms was an awesome job as a university student. In a average twelve-hour shift, there was maybe six hours of work if you really stretched things and did a little extra. Yeah, there were the panicky emergency nights where you're literally running around fixing stuff, but on average there was six hours of time to fill waiting for jobs to finish, printouts to print, and error messages to not pop up. Nighttime TV sucks. Nighttime radio sucks. There wasn't always studying to do or a paper to write. And couldn't be out of the room for longer than a longish bathroom break length of time (5 minutes maybe) just in case a problem happened. That meant plenty of time to:
Great job that I'm not sure even exists anymore. But I was the Buff Operator From Hell for those few years.
Well I'm only the "swing" shift so maybe this doesn't apply to me (from 2pm to 11pm). I get home around 11:30pm. I have trained myself over the last year to be able to shower and go straight to bed when I get home (asleep by midnight). No TV or computer games. That way I have the next day to take a walk in the sun and go grocery shopping. I also haven't bothered with any kind of cable TV. No point in that really. I mean if I had a PVR of some kind then I could what? Spend several hours every day when i wake up watching last night's TV? No thanks. In fact even things I could following on Hulu I've instead found other stuff to do instead. If I really want to watching something it's on Netflix like ST:TNG. I try to have a semi-normal time breakfast and lunch and dinner at work around 7pm. Just can't do anything with friends and family at normal times like between 5pm and 10pm. No WoW raids (not necessarily a bad thing) and no dinner visits with family (would be nice sometimes). I am actually really tired and generally lacking in energy but then I was like that when I had normal hours. At least going to bed at midnight I have the option of staying in bed until noon if I really feel like it...
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
Come on /. A Google search reveals Men's Health Network is selling Viagra and Cialis. How odd they suggest I need more sex.
IT Day Shift Workers: Fat and Undersexed
Back when I was younger and worked a night shift (4pm to midnight) the sex was great. Senior management couldn't be bothered to hang around and our shift turned into a big orgy*.
There's a valid argument about getting adequate sunlight. But that can be done on the 4-12pm shift. Just hit the sack when you get home. Wake up a bit later then the masses. You've got the day to yourself after the 9 to 5 shift folks have gone to the office. The stores, coffee shops and gym are uncrowded.
*If your staff isn't that hot, you've got the day off. With all the housewives. Studies have shown that the best time for sex is mid-afternoon. Forget stories about orgies late into the night. People who get it on late in the evening do so because of kids or crappy work schedules.
Have gnu, will travel.
cause its harder to see how fat they are.
"Crunch time" - it used to be exceptional. It's now not just acceptable; it's become the norm. This is because increasingly, clueless management simply can't manage resources properly, and substitutes crazy hours to make up for it because we let them. Your body needs 2 weeks to a month to fully recover from a single 24-hour shift of high-stress in-the-zone concentration. It's not worth it.
"But it's the only way we can compete!" No, it's the only way YOU can compete. If you can't get the work without abusing your employees, YOU have the problem. I quit.
We all have the point where we've had our fill of it. It wasn't this bad prior to the Internet, so take your "Internet Time" and shove it. YOU need it - I'd rather be broke than further ruin my health to make up for managements' inability to do their jobs properly.
I'm happier and a lot less stressed since I "took the pledge" and decided to never again take a job writing code. There are things worse than not making enough money. Working in I.T. has become one of them.
Come on, Slashdotters. I thought you cared about science. This "study" is awful.
1) Experimental controls. According to the article, lots of shift workers think their work impacts their lives, and are worried about their weight and their sex lives. Guess what? EVERYBODY hates their work, and is worried about their weight and their sex lives. How about asking people who *aren't* shift workers, and seeing if shift workers have bigger problems than the average Joe?
2) Conflict of interest. The summary says the study is by "Men's Health Network", but the linked article says it's by "Men's Health Network and Cephalon". Who's this "Cephalon"? Oh, they're a drug company. What sort of drugs do they make? take a wild freakin' guess.
So, congrats on sucking down free advertising from a drug company trying to turn your life into a treatable medical condition, without a single moment of skepticism.
Anyone who has ever lived with a shift worker doesn't need some fucking study tell them this.
I've been married for years to an RN, so I can tell you first hand that almost anyone who works shift, the first thing to go is their energy, and sex is an immediate victim. In fact, all of those issues related to a lack of energy.
I am not an IT guy by any means, but I am a swing shift worker in a factory. My schedule includes two days of 3-11, two 11am-11pm days and then two more at 3-11. Im off two days and go back in for 2 days on 11pm-11am. Then I turn around the next day and work 7am-3pm for 5 days. Then, off two days and go back in on 11pm-7am. Then its off for 5 days total then rinse ne repeat. Not a fun schedule, and the guys that get to day shift permaneantly typically lose 20-40 lbs when they quit rotating. I've found personally that the midnight shifts leave me feeling worst, depression, lonliness and general angst are my best friends during the midnight rotations. I've found it affects my family just as much if not more than me because I'm so fun to deal with. On a related note, it takes me several days off to recover from the feelings incurred on the midnight shift. I suspect it'd be easier working one permaneant shift. One more thing then I'll get off my soap box, the divorce rate with this kind of work is ridiculous! I suspect that maybe the schedule has a lot to do with it...
Not necessarily harder just very different and requiring the application of different skills. You could give the same anecdote in a manufacturing or military setting but people would be less likely to draw the wrong conclusion as you did above.
It should be obvious - the newbie in an unfamiliar environment is not going to shine. If you expect them to shine instantly you weed out everyone apart from those with a protective sheild of highly polished bullshit.
A "people person" out of their depth in a technical environment can be as much of a problem as an isolated technical person that suddenly finds they do not have the required management and communication skills. It takes knowlege, observation and experience before you can get up to speed in a very different environment.
I used to be a Database admin for Interpoint, in Redmond. Before that, I worked in porn for IEG in Seattle - code monkey work.
I now work for the Air Force at McChord Field, I make slightly less but I'm 7 to 4, Mon - Fri, I can go to the gym 3 hours a week *ON THE CLOCK* in addition to my one hour lunch, and I'm a member of a union.
I've never looked back except to wonder how people put up with the bullshit they do.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
But if a company can only survive by treating its employees like battered wives, they deserve to die. And then to be exposed by using this wonderful thing called the Internet.
They're not going to sue if you expose them (though they may threaten it like all heck) - they know what the Streisand Effect is like. And don't worry about your NDA and non-disclosures. Most of them are SO illegal it's not a joke - and you can ignore them when they are signed in bad faith.
Since I quit in February, my blood pressure is back to normal - without any meds, thank you very much ... my eyesight is better than it's ever been in my life (it's the first time ever that I can watch TV without glasses, and it's all good except for one little blotch that is slowly going away now that one of the underlying causes of the retinal bleeding - stress-related hypertension - is gone, and I expect that blotch will also disappear over the next few months), and I have time to work on my tan, cycle, and actually visit people I haven't seen in over a decade.
If I *ever* do overtime again, it will never be for less than 5x base pay. Even for a lousy 30 minutes. More than 10 hours extra in a week? 10x. Otherwise, bite me. Or hire someone else. Or figure out why management needs overtime (hint - it's your bad planning and not listening and trying to "negotiate away" the time required when we give our time estimates, and your insistence on taking shortcuts and using your stupid latest buzz-word methodology. Go buzz yourself!)
People should ask themselves if the quality of their life was better before they started in I.T.
Sorry, but, fuck you and holding yourself high. Maybe not you individually, but we're all nobodies who won't dare stoop down to anything withing a stones throw of what Chinese labor norms are, but in the first world here we'll be the first to complain about the 'crunch time.'
Shift workers ... okay ... okay ... Wat?
Sex life, bad
THink of the Children!!
Legalize and regulate prostitution in the US. Then books like "How to Lose Weight Through Sex" can be put into practice. I bet French IT workers aren't undersexed.
...an absolute shitload of money to get me to do shift work. Hell, I refuse to even do on-call anymore.
A few years ago, $BIGCORP tried to get my team to do shift work for an indeterminate period. They wouldn't tell us how long it was for, and also wouldn't tell us what sort of overtime pay we'd get for it. They even had the gall to say they would be "disappointed" if no-one took them up on the offer. Funnily enough, no-one did.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
We're only "nobodies" if we let ourselves be treated that way. The comparison to Chinese labor conditions is a false dichotomy, and the sort of cowardly thinking that management drones use.
Are you that beaten down that you have to say to yourself "at least it's not as bad as in China" to justify working conditions that your parents, and most of your friends who don't work in I.T., would look at and say "Are you sick?"
There's life after I.T.
They call it the graveyard shift for a reason, ya know.
"What would men be without women? Scarce, sir. Mighty scarce."- Mark Twain
I can attest to the IT field as contributing to weight concerns and general health issues, for sure!
I've worked in IT ever since I graduated high school. I'm close to 30 now and develop web apps for a living.
So here I am today, still doing stuff behind a computer. I struggle with keeping my weight in check and while I do a good job at it, it is hard to keep it going everyday, mostly because of the mental requirements of maintaining a physical routine.
Here's what I do: I *try* to run about 5 miles every other day, but it usually pans-out to be 2.5-3 while I walk the remaining.
On these same days, I also work-out. I do many exercises (especially when I'm up for it), but usually, I do about 3 sets of 24 side-crunches, about 3 sets of 24 standard crunches, about 12 "pikes" (where you raise your ass up and down on one of those blow-up balls; it kicks the shit out of your gut), and finally, I try to do a variable number of arm crunches. On the days I feel great, I'll try to do some swimming, too. All of this changes with a given season as well, meaning, I'll change things up during the winter, summer, etc.
Another key to all this weigh crap is managing your diet. This is REALLY hard, especially if you gun for an all-water kind of diet with frequent (and espcially, smaller) portions of food. Eating smaller portions with increased frequency increases your metabolism which helps you lose weight faster (or at other times, increase muscle mass).
So at times, you'll exercise a lot and notice an increase in weight. This isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes, it can mean you're getting buff!
In any event, the IT field has indeed suffered much from the weight front. It sucks with this in mind, but every profession has it's cons. Hell, I'd bet that any office worker in general struggles with this kind of stuff, so IT field or not, it's all relative.
Most days it's not like what I mention above. Most days, it's less due to simply being worn out. Either way, the key to this weight crap for me has been a dovetail solution of working out in a set schedule each week while increasing my metabolism through consistent intake with a primary emphasis on lower portions.
Out of all this stuff, though, you have to change how you think about things. This is the ultimate key. You have to believe in yourself and maintain the fact that the results will not happen overnight.
(Okay, I'm done now with the whole coach talk. Sorry for the soapbox guys / gals.)
Come over to Europe. We need good coders and we treat them well. Our programmers arrive somewhere between 8 and 10am and go between 3 and 5pm. Mo-Fr. Occasionally (read: about twice a year) they might be asked whether it would be possible that someone could come in a Saturday for a launch so we can make sure everything's running smoothly. You get 1.5 hours of time off for every hour invested in such Saturday.
The work permit should be trivial if you're good.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Or as I like to say:
The good news is, you get health insurance. The bad news is, you're gonna need it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Got a specific opportunity? I'm an excellent coder and I'm eager to move myself and my family to a more progressive country.
Perhaps this study only applies if you aren't a natural night owl. The amount of stress I'd undergo if I had to work dayshift or even swingshift as opposed to my beloved nightshift would result in my quitting this job and or punching someone. As a female I tend to not punch people directly-I prefer ranged magic :) My desire to punch people rises in direct proportion to the number of clueless administrative and managerial types in proximity. People who aren't suited to working midnight shift do definitely undergo stress when forced to do so. Dayshift people are just different animals-not even animals, there are more robotic people on dayshift. So much more rigid. In my experience nightshift people are more laid back, inventive, happier, more fun, more interesting, and tend to be more intelligent over all. The type of calls I get at night are much more serious overall. Much more interesting stuff. I have much more time to work on my plans for total world domination without having to deal with people who don't know how to drag their windows taskbar back to the bottom of their screen or how to turn on the power to their speakers.
I'm reaching that point, myself. My boss gave me today off because of extra time I've been working a lot of O.T. lately. He called me at seven this evening to work a scheduled outage tonight.
Sigh...even when I get a day off, I can't get a day off.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Bears: Shit in Woods
Because of this kind of debates. Somewhere, somehow, somebody has to sell something, and that does not have to be a commodiy. It might just be a propaganda idea. And what is even better - the moron spreading the news sincerely believes in whatever he or she sells. Here we have the drum of obesity which is pretty much the same war as the Apocalypse sold by Muslims and Christians alike. By the way have you wondered that althogh they play in opposition both Muslim Fundamentalists and Christian Right venerate the same god of hatred? Anyway, back to the subject. Here, a moron lead a pointless and irrelevant poll. These are the concerns of the people who answered, which happen to be working nights. Now, some other imbecil takes that and speaks of the problem of obesity. At this point it is somehow, magically related to the sex drive and not low wages and no self-esteem, thus linking two effects as cause-effect. There is no connection whatsoever with the culture of consuming more, but it is implied that IT should have some relation.
Some other moron would be able to take this article, mix it with a drunken teen declaring on TV that she is high because of the sugar in her soft drink and there you have a case against Coca Cola. And a nation of imbecils.
Let me explain this little thing I learned from working a couple of years in Portugal (neverending crunch time), then Holland (8h a day and your manager tells you to go home if you're still in at 5:30 pm) and then England (overwork as norm).
Your total daily productivity working on a norm of 8h/day is significantly better than working on a norm of 10h/day - to put it simply, if you pace yourself and work fewer hours you deliver more.
This is because:
- Working more than 8h/day causes chronical tiredness
- Chronically tired people in intellectual professions make many more mistakes (that also includes managers, who will take the wrong decisions).
- The cost of fixing those mistakes far outweights the gains of working those extra hours.
To put things in software development terms:
- If you constantly work longer hours you're constantly tired. If you're constantly tired you make more bugs. Bug fixing consumes a lot more time than doing things right the first time around (often by a factor or 1000x if the bug ends up in Production), so the increase in bugs means a HUGE increase in time spent in bug-fixing. More time wasted in bug fixing means that the project starts to run late, which means clueless managers demanding even more overwork. In other words, a feed-back loop.
So how did I solved it:
- Well, in England if somebody tries to get me to overwork is say "No" (I will, however, do a little extra in the last couple of days before a release if needed).
Surprisingly (or maybe not if you read what I wrote above), by working just 8h/day I still manage to deliver more than any of my colleagues that overwork. At the end of the day, in the vast majority of places results are what counts, so managers still keep me around (and I'm a freelancer, so easy to get rid of) and I have almost universally good feedback from all managers I worked with.
What country are you speaking about? Certainly that's far from my experience in the UK... but then again, the UK is only in Europe nominally (spoke as something of a Europhile). We seem to be desperate to suffer everything our American cousins do!
I concur. I work in the Financial sector as a web developer in the UK. 35 hours a week Mon-Fri is all I work. Maybe the very occasional weekend on release weekends (every two months) 35 hours is pretty much the norm in our financial industires in my experiance.
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
This last experience was the limit - I simply cannot face the thought of writing code as a 9 to whatever job. And everyone I know is at that point - it's pretty bad when a minimum wage job where you just do your work and go home at night and your time is your own looks appealing.
I've had co-workers quit because even delivering pizza sounded better, others that were suicidal because they were treated with contempt every day (management would wait until I had left for the day, then they'd gang up on him - and tell him that if he told me about it, he's fired), and others who figured out that the best way to get ahead was to do nothing all day (they'd sleep at their desk, then check out someone else's code and put their name on it, and check it back in) and then brown-nose like crazy.
What do you do when the situation is so toxic that one of your coworkers comes to you in tears because the boss has rejected every idea for getting her job done - from everyone - insisting she do it the boss's way, and every time it fails, blaming her, and she knows she's going to be fired because she's failed, and I'm the only one she can talk to about it because I have a door to my office, and not a cubby? And the boss is a misogynistic s.o.b. who in meetings, if the suggestion came from a woman, he ignores it? And another boss ^W^W two other bosses who swear they will never hire another woman because "it interferes with the guys getting their work done and I can't scream at them because they're women and they're probably lesbians anyway so what's the point"?
And people wonder why so few women stick it out in I.T.
.
His action was a form of passive-aggressive behavior. Give him a taste of his own medicine.
Don't go. If it's a scheduled outage, it's not an emergency. You're at a party and someone kept filling your glass when you weren't looking and now they've taken your keys away because friends don't let friends drive drunk.
And next time he schedules an outage, he should actually schedule it, and not just throw it at the wall and hope it sticks. Even restaurant owners know how to schedule people better than that.
So what's the purpose of work? What's the purpose of an economy....how should we, as individuals, judge its success?
Its purpose is to produce the highest welfare possible for its citizens given the resources its got. An individual's welfare is mostly about how he spends his time - money and physical stuff gives you more options, but it's not the goal. If career achievements are fulfilling for you and you have a good working environment then that's great, but making your life miserable in order to be macho is not (and you won't work well, either). It's not a pissing contest to see who can make the most or lead the shittiest or most orderly life.
Western economies are very successful, historically and compared to many others. Why would you wish them to be less successful, like China?
I remember back in middle school hearing my social studies teacher explain how much the poor suckers of workers in China were. He explained that if they did not meet their quota they would be punished (stick) but they had a goal where they would get bonuses for rising that far above the quota (carrot). If they got their carrot that would become the new quota they always had to meet.
Jump ahead 1.5 decades and what I am hearing a near identical thing from U.S. workers.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
I have a wonderful 10 mile bike ride to work during the sunset and a wonderful 10 mile bike ride home in the morning. I love my night shift and can't find anything about it that correlates with fat and lack of sex. lazy people get fat and have bad sex. night owls stay up all night. I'm a night owl
Ok, the title of this one was enough to get me laughing this morning. Thanks.
And then people wonder why there's such a high turnover rate in the industry here. Simple - why hire one person who knows what they're doing when you can get PAID to take on 5 for free, and hope that they'll muddle through, and if they do or they don't, either way it cost you nothing.
That sort of rot makes employers skeptical of the quality of all freelancers after 15 years. Crazy, isn't it?
Come over to Europe. We need good coders and we treat them well. Our programmers arrive somewhere between 8 and 10am and go between 3 and 5pm. Mo-Fr. Occasionally (read: about twice a year) they might be asked whether it would be possible that someone could come in a Saturday for a launch so we can make sure everything's running smoothly. You get 1.5 hours of time off for every hour invested in such Saturday.
The work permit should be trivial if you're good.
This is actually something I'm working on. I'm a dual citizen (US/UK) and getting my UK passport soon just so I can more easily do this. I just need to work out if I want it to be more of a permanent move. Things like this along with the better health care systems over there are very enticing.
Homer: I'm looking for something loose and billowy, something
comfortable for my first day of work.
Salesman: Work, huh? Let me guess. Computer programmer, computer
magazine columnist, something with computers?
Homer: Well, I use a computer.
Salesman: [quietly, to self] Yeah, what's the connection? Must be the
non-stop sitting and snacking.
[more audibly] Well, sir, many of our clients find pants
confining, so we offer a range of alternatives for the ample
gentleman: ponchos, muumuus, capes, jumpsuits, unisheets,
muslim body rolls, academic and judicial robes --
Homer: I don't want to look like a weirdo. I'll just go with a
muumuu.
-- Homer, inconspicuous, "King-Size Homer"
Watta ya' live under a rock?
Was Abe Lincoln too honest?
Do woodchucks chuck wood?
Do dogs chase cats?
Or, when it gets that bad (I got a phone call 4/5 days on vacation once...) don't answer the phone.
Ok, this is like 20 questions... um, I'll take the first guess. Are you a poll dancer?
I8-D
I worked a swing shift for years, and it was GREAT! I never needed an alarm clock, always has plenty of time before work and many hours after work. Shopping during the day before work gave me plenty of sunshine and was far easier than it is now (having to wait for weekends or hoping businesses are open late). After work was quiet and I could get a lot of hobby things done at home before hitting the sack, or do on-line gaming for hours. I had more energy, was more fit and generally enjoyed the heck out of it.
Now I'm a day-shift worker. I wake up to an alarm, I feel tired, have breakfast and leave for work. I come home, I feel tired, have dinner, check email and want to head to bed. It's like my life left me. If I could do the job I'm in today, on a swing shift, and I could talk my boss into letting me do it that way, I would be soooo much more into it.
Wow! Talk about a new discovery!
Who would have thought that fat geeks don't have sex as much as normal people with normal bodies do....
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Wait?!?
I always thought it was "whoever dies with the most stuff wins!!"
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I was going to mod this down, but thought, at this is not bad as Digg so I let it go... :)
Surprisingly (or maybe not if you read what I wrote above), by working just 8h/day I still manage to deliver more than any of my colleagues that overwork. At the end of the day, in the vast majority of places results are what counts, so managers still keep me around (and I'm a freelancer, so easy to get rid of) and I have almost universally good feedback from all managers I worked with.
I think that really depends on the place. In my experience at my current job as well as talking to others, from management the only thing they care about is hours, they dont give a crap about results because hours are the only quantifiable things they can see. Which always seemed odd to me, this being a engineering house and all. Ive been here for 5 years, and for the first 3 I was always getting in trouble for not putting in 40 hours, yet my direct reporting manager said he really didnt care since I got any jobs I had to do done quicker and better than the other guys, but that he had to say something since the only thing upper management sees are hours. Ive heard similar stories from many people
That being said, I definitely agree, I know I am way more productive just doing 8hrs or less, working full steam, than knowing I am there for 10 hours and getting burned out
The UK health care system is BETTER than where you're now? The US is in a creek THAT deep?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It seems like the only good reason for these issues would be, being up when most people are not, and sleeping is hard when most people are wide awake. I think that we should basically just decide, screw it, our days are actually 24 hours. Its already going that way after all. Plus we'd have like a bazillion new jobs without much new cost, and people who like being up at night can do so rather than people who prefer being up in the day.
http://i56.tinypic.com/29vcwnn.jpg
His action was a form of passive-aggressive behavior. Give him a taste of his own medicine.
It certainly looks that way, but in all honesty, I don't think he was being passive-aggressive. First, he's not passive anything, lol. He speaks his mind, and if you don't like it, tough. Passive-aggressive is definitely not his style. Second, he's a pretty good guy and a pretty decent boss; I've certainly worked for far worse. Third, there's only two of us network admins in the office, him and me, and we're under the gun from our parent company due to a number of external factors, so any pressure to work this outage came from his higher ups. If I have a beef with anyone, it's management in the parent company; my boss is just as burned out as I'm getting (if not more so). Fourth, he was on the conference bridge working the outage with me, so it's not like he was like, "Hey, I don't feel like doing this, so even though you're off today, here ya go!"
Don't go. If it's a scheduled outage, it's not an emergency. You're at a party and someone kept filling your glass when you weren't looking and now they've taken your keys away because friends don't let friends drive drunk.
I probably should have been a little more clear. He, and the admins from the parent company who are a client on the network that was having the problem, scheduled an emergency outage for later in the night. It was scheduled in that they put it off until later that night because they planned to do intrusive troubleshooting (rebooting network cards, etc.) and didn't want to impact other customers on the network in the middle of the business day, but it was an emergency in that this particular customer's traffic on the network was severely degraded.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Doesn't make it such less for you, of course ...
I don't really know where you are in the world or what industry you're in, so I can't really comment.
Where I am (Software Development, Finance, London, UK) freelancers (aka contractors) make about 2x as permanent employees. From what I've heard from people I know, the ratio is more or less the same in IT inside companies in other business domains.
In Holland, IT Contractors made about 3x as permanent employees.
As far as I know, certainly in IT, in Europe freelancers are always paid better than permanent employees. This is probably because freelancers have almost no rights, while permies get things like paid sick-leave and vacation days. Also, the "premium" that freelancers get seems to be related to how hard it is to fire a permanent employee (hence it was higher in Holland than it is in England). Lastly, going freelancer seems to be a natural career evolution path for those of us who are experienced, above average techies who don't want to move into management, so while it's hard to find really experienced people who are permies and willing to move, it's a lot easier to find those as contractors.
Personally, after having gone through the fallout of the end of the Internet bubble (number 1, we seem to be heading for a Web 2.0 bubble) I realised that job security was an illusion anyway and you're better off ditching illusionary job-security in exchange for a faster rate of filling-up your war-chest of savings so as to be ready for the next time the brown mater hits the rotary impeller ...