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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."
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.
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.
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.
You can't tell me it doesn't impact his life. Sleeping during the day is HARD. The body doesn't want to adjust to it.
Not all of us are day dwellers, some are night owls. Personally, I'm at my sharpest at night but then my family has been calling me "the nightwatchman" since I was about 8.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
IT Day Shift Workers: Fat and Undersexed
"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.
Reminds me of an often-told story around these parts...
It's the night shift in Master Control at a major national Cable TV Network. One guy has been there since pre-launch days, let's call him "Joe." Now, Joe is enormous, pushing if not over 300 lbs, sports a perpetual four-day stubble, is known for -- among many other eccentricities -- coming to work in his pajamas. Not that he was a slacker, oh no. Joe is a rock, a superman, the exact guy you want on duty should there be a crisis, or even if there isn't. He's the "Mayor of the Overnight," as the CEO once referred to him. So all Joe's compatriots in Master Control, they do their time, eventually move into daylight shifts, but not Joe. "Not interested," sez Joe. "Like it on the overnights just fine." New generations of Master Control Operators are hired, Joe mentors them, and THEY move on and up. And so his legend grows. Years pass, Joe's an industry icon, his fame grown even beyond his own company.
Then one day -- five years later? seven years later? ten years later? -- he finds he's become an HR Nightmare. See, Joe got top marks on every merit review, got maximum pay raises for his job class, every year -- and now he's making more money than a lot of suits 2-3 pay grades above him. "Can't have that," HR informs Ops. And so Joe is finally prodded and cajoled into the sunlight. Shiny suit, skinny tie, shave and a haircut, congrats Big Guy, Welcome to Management!
He lasted six weeks. Was never clear whose call it was ultimately -- the other suits who now had to deal with "That Fat Guy from Master Control," or the erstwhile Mayor himself who came to finally see first hand what he probably suspected all along, that making banks of machinery and automation systems play nice together was easy compared to any comparable accomplishment involving people.
But HR was happy. With Joe gone, everyone's paychecks once again fit nicely inside the boxes that had been drawn for 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.
Have you ever worked a night shift?
I let myself take an 11PM-7AM shift several years ago precisely because I considered myself a night owl. I was waking up in the afternoon anyway, I figured it wasn't really a big deal. Turned out, it was. Working nights pretty thoroughly sucks away your life-force, as nearly anyone who's done one can tell you.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
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.
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.
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.