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Most IT Admins Have Considered Quitting Due To Stress
Orome1 writes "The number of IT professionals considering leaving their job due to workplace stress has jumped from 69% last year to 73%. One-third of those surveyed cited dealing with managers as their most stressful job requirement, particularly for IT staff in larger organizations. Handling end user support requests, budget squeeze and tight deadlines were also listed as the main causes of workplace stress for IT managers. Although users are not causing IT staff as much stress as they used to, it isn't stopping them from creating moments that make IT admins want to tear their hair out in frustration. Of great concern is the impact that work stress is having on health and relationships. While a total of 80% of participants revealed that their job had negatively impacted their personal life in some way, the survey discovered some significant personal impact: 18% have suffered stress-related health issues due to their work, and 28% have lost sleep due to work."
Join the club. We meet at the bar after work.
Only 73% have considered quitting? The other 27% are lying to you, probably because they're worried that the survey is being snooped on by the corporate Barracuda firewall.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
Quit and do what, it's the same everywhere.
You just have to train those managers well and stick with it!
This just in "Do more with less and stay longer" causes emotional and psychological distress.
Film at 6 but it will actually take until like 11:30.
I used to share office with some sysadmins. They were constantly swearing because of people and machines. I guess neither of these two functioned well, and these guys had to take the responsibility of the problems.
When IT and computer/internet field in general settle down and become mature, things will get better.
Right now there's just too many new technolgies and buzzwords and platforms and architecture and paradigms popping up, and pointy-haired managers and VPs all want to implement this and that and oh by the way make it work with our legacy system and nothing better get lost or you're fired.
The sky is blue.
Picking your boss. If you're not up a creek looking for work, that interview is to let you meet your managers, talk to some workers about the managers.
When I started working it was "If I can just get in the door"
When I was in my 20's it was "What cool things will this job do for me"
Now That i'm in my 30's its "Will I be able to work with these people"
...jobs cause stress. More at 11.
How many of us work at a company where they laid off a large chunk of the technical workforce and told the remainder to hang tight while the economy recovered or hired temps? Now that the Dow is back at record levels mgmt turns around and says "nothing horrible happened when you were half staffed so you must have been slacking before".
Meanwhile hardware is not being replaced and software is not being updated. Hours are being wasted trying to breathe life into decades old tech which is obselete.
I'm an IT professional and more than once I've thought about quitting, especially when I was doing high-stress consulting. Clients treat you like meat, like "the help." They have no problem waking you up at 5AM with nonsense problems. If you don't answer and do it politely, they call your boss and then your job/livelihood is in jeopardy.
This isn't just a 9-5 thing where, when you leave the office, you're no longer on the hook -- it's always happening. Sometimes, you're at a bar at 10PM and you get an urgent call -- pick it up, and you in your tipsy state are now on the hook to resolve an important issue.
The fear of getting these calls has made me stay home sometimes when I could have been being social, and not travel away on vacation when I knew some action was going on I'd be needed for. It creates a lot of stress to be depended on so much, and now with telecommuting, you're expected to be responsive at all times wherever you are.
It's a lot of stress even in the best setup/most-redundant environments, and the job is not for everyone. And when projects come up that are difficult and highly user-facing, it's hard to avoid this type of a situation.
try "have quit". i quit years ago, not because of the stress caused by users/customers, but because of ineffective management and, specifically, a ceo (not a manager, but the ceo) telling you (a) in front of anyone in the immediate area, (b) in public, and (c) in meetings that you (literally) were a fuck up and didn't know what you were doing. it was a 100 employee company; she did that to most of the senior employees. most tolerated it (among them her management team). some of us didn't.
Working in IT (started as support drone, now admin and consultant) for 20 years.
Back to college right now. Just started Law School.
Most of my friends either gave up IT to just work in management, or are in the process of switching fields.
The comodititization of IT destroyed it.
morcego
Not that it isn't interesting or relevant or something to work on, but how does this compare to other office functions?
And in other news, when asked about their jobs, EVERY OTHER HUMAN ON THE PLANET likewise responded that 80% of participants revealed that their job had negatively impacted their personal life in some way, (and) 18% have suffered stress-related health issues due to their work, and 28% have lost sleep due to work.
Oh noes, sysadmins have tough jobs! Please.
-Styopa
It's not the 24/7 part that really bothers me, it's the not getting paid for it that really gets me going.
I'm honestly surprised that the budget thing is not a bigger source of stress. You may lose sleep every once in a while when something big crashes, but having to justify your existence every damn day to the $(C-level) && $(anyone with any authority over you whatsoever) is by far the biggest source of stress I've ever seen.
where you have to handle the typical asshole IT manager, who in turn has to handle his asshole manager and so on. I'm an admin in a small company, above me is my boss, and above him the owner. They just don't give a shit until everything works fine. So no, I don't consider my job extremely stressful, my users are software developers, they seem more stressed to me than I am. Not posting anonymously, 'caue I don't give a shit either.
.sig: No such file or directory
I'm replying to both you and the other guy: we don't care and minimize both of your rants as soon as we see them.
The more you try to fight the troll, the more you feed him.
Don't quit, just make another account. It's just a stupid user ID, get over it.
How much of that manager-induced stress is a result of managers who don't know how to lead?
If I'm the head of the department you work in, then my No. 1 job is to clear obstacles out of your way so you can do yours. If I'm the head of a different department that relies on you (as an infrastructure manager) to do its job, then my No. 1 job is to work with you to find the most reasonable way of making it happen.
On the other side of that, though, I've run into folks who think they're the gatekeepers just because they have the keys to the building. Any good manager should take "no" for an answer from IT if IT just can't do it, e.g., it introduces unacceptable security risk, the infrastructure just isn't there, etc. But an IT person who says it can't be done and won't explain why shouldn't expect to stick around very long.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/
The 24 part series by Jon6 is entertaining...
Boy, this post speaks the truth. Good IT Managers are extremely rare, most don't cut it. Ours is actually pretty awesome and actually has a technical background, but he's the first decent one I've every had (been working in the field for 15 years.) It all falls apart if the group isn't being led right and upper management's clueless.
I live at the office. When I buy groceries I put them into the office fridge. I only get 5 hours of sleep. I might need to file an extension for my taxes this year. I wouldn't even have the time to write up a resignation letter.
My company requires all IT administrators who still have hair to shave their heads weekly. It cuts down on the janitorial costs of floor cleanup.
We also have brown paper bags behind glass which reads, "Break here in case of hyperventilation."
In case you aren't actually the same person... Classic political maneuvering in a forum where it doesn't matter. Who cares if you're right? The whole thing is obnoxious, you're obnoxious, and we want you both to go away to reduce the level of irritation we experience reading the forums on a regular basis. You should be thanking the troll for all the free publicity and then going about your business... assuming either of you (if you aren't the same person) have anything else to do.
Quitting is also a viable option.
Boomers are retiring much faster than projected.
5 million in 2010 and 2011 instead of the expected 1.7 million.
Enough boomers will retire to completely cancel the unemployment rate by 2020.
Once labor gets the upper hand- it's going to have it for the next 19 years after that short of some kind of wonder automation/robotics.
And 460 million chinese are retiring over the same time period. More than the total population of the united states. Only 76 million united states boomers will retire.
The pattern is this:
-2012, about 2.5 million per year retired.
2013-2016, 3.3 million retire per year.
2017-2028, 4.5 million retire per year.
2029-2031, 3.3 million retire per year.
2032+ back to about 2.5 million until the baby boomer echo.
Only 1.8% of people make it to age 90 and I'm not likely to be one of them.
I expect to die by 2034.
And there is something else to consider. If you are a boomer and you've been saving- when the second parent dies (likely before age 83), their estate puts you well past your retirement goals instantly and you may be able to retire (well) before age 60. So there is a multiplier effect here.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Put in your consulting contract a call out fee of $1000 - i.e. if you pick up the phone your client is on the hook for $1000? When I was working full and went on holiday I told my employer that contacting me whilst on holiday would be at contractor rates. They never did... Or make your mobile number a premium rate number: $50 a minute might help concentrate their minds, but less blatantly
I used to just keep reporting it as spam. Over and over and over again - but apparently that flag does nothing, so I gave up.
Back in the seventies, I heard that Ma Bell employees used to "brag" about how many hours they'd worked that week.
Then, '95-'97, I worked for Ameritech, a Baby Bell, since swallowed by SBC (which then swallowed AT&T, and renamed itself to AT SBC is the true Evil Empire), and discovered what was going on: ludicrous deadlines, utterly unrealistic goals, and little sub-empires that, rather than looking for buy-in, got the authority to tell us how to make the Perfect World (tm), as Revealed by them....
Took about a year and a half, year and three quarters, before a psychologist friend gave a professional opinion that I was *this* far from clinical burnout.
All for well under $60k/yr.
And they claim they've got all these unfilled tech jobs, and can't find people to do them, so Congress, please let us bring people over who'll work for diddly-squat, and do 70 or 80 hour weeks with no complaint....
mark
You've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I've never had a job other than IT support, so I don't know how it compares to other work, but I have had different IT support jobs with wildly different stress levels.
On the low-stress side, picture a small shop. 50 to 100 servers, two or three admins. You know each server, what it does, what its quirks are, what external systems it talks to, you control not only the server but its storage and networking and backups, you're the dba, the webmaster, you know by name all the developers that write the code that runs on the servers, you know most of the users and all of the managers of the company by name... It's a lot of different hats, but with the limited number of systems you have enough time to pay each its proper attention. You can tweak each server individually. Only in extremely rare occasions like a failed controller on the SAN do you get called off-hours. This sort of job is fun and engaging.
The high-stress job is from being on a team that "owns" a few thousand servers in a global corporation with a poorly set up support model - but you only has access to the OS. No ability to work on the databases or SAN, no rights to the switches or hypervisor, and when it's your turn to be on-call you are guaranteed to get calls all through the night - calls ranging ranging from hung servers that need a reboot, to performance issues that take hours and hours to coordinate troubleshooting with the SAN team that swears it's not their issue even though its several systems all connected to the same controller, users on the other side of the world having whatever issue, on systems you don't know they first thing about except its a database server or whatever because of the naming convenntion. No sleep that week, no ability to go to a movie without fear of being paged... Pure stress for the week of being on-call, and dreadful anticipation all other times.
I was glad to have been laid off from a job like the latter during the financial crisis.
I'll take a job like the former, even with a micro-managing, cover-sheet-your-TPS-report, the-sky-is-falling type boss, over another one like the latter any day.
No, seriously, they are. Also inflammatory malfunctions such as IBD & Crohn's disease are specifically linked to:
1) stress
2) lack of sleep
I know this as an IBD patient who is *required* to see a psychologist as an integrated part of treatment.
I'd be curious to know how many of us in this world suffer from such things. Quite a large number in my immediate circle do. I suppose that could be circumstantial. Call it a hunch.
The people who are stressed about working in IT have a valid point. But this doesn't make you any different than say... a head chef?
Millions of blue collar workers have to survive on less than half what the average introductory IT job pays and many have to do it in an environment where they don't speak the language. Imagine going into work and having to learn the ropes your first day just by watching. I had to work in kitchens for ten years and I'm telling you the responsibilities don't end there. It's your night or day off? Too bad, the dishwasher called in sick and we have to put you in? Oh sorry we can't pay you overtime, we're just going to pay you in regular wage with cash. Oops, we're paying you too much cash because you're working too much. How about we just pay you the same ammount every month no matter how much you work? Sexual harrasment? Too bad, your boss, is the HR, your manager, and the mediator all rolled into one.
There are literally rehab centers built specifically for chefs because thouands of them burn out and start drinking on the job to deal the with stress. If everyone else wants to go home early, or the numbers arn't right that week, your boss will send everyone else home and you have to clean the kitchen yourself.
4% more IT workers want to quit because of stress? Boo fucking hoo. So does everyone else who has to work a shitty job with long hours. At least you're being compensated at a fair wage for the skills you've developed. You're probably being paid over time if you're by the hour and you can probably also afford to buy a house. Not to mention basic health if not full benefits. If I cut myself with a knife I have to pay cash for the 5 stitches it takes to sew it up.
Every job that takes skill and dedication looks shitty from the inside out. But seriously? Whenever I think about quiting my job or get angry about something trivial, I remember that I'm not dodging the secret police in North Korea or Bullets in Bosnia and I realize how lucky I am to even have a job. I wish I had the skills to be an IT worker so I could at least get paid a fair wage and didn't have to go home with dishpan hands every night. But this is what I get for playing more video games in college than doing actual work. Ultimately we're all masters of our own destiny.
Be the change you want to see in your life. I would have been a lot happier and probably drank a lot less if I was on an IT workers salary. But as far as I'm concerned, I read this headline as "NEWS FLASH, PEOPLE HATE THEIR JOBS!"
The Blade Itself
Having management listed as a top source of stress hit a chord with me. Until recently I was working in an medium office. Out of an IT staff of about six, I believe three of us ended up leaving due to stress or stress-related illnesses. The cause of the stress was often (though not always) management. Not necessarily our direct manager, but management in general. It was a very frustrating environment in which to work, not people of the work itself, or the hours, but because of the conflicting signals coming down from on high.
...I'm embarrassed that the top source of stress is (wait for it...) "management". Even users cause stress less often (16% vs 35%). Obviously, there are way too many PHB around. Hope I'm not already assimilated...
@KipBoyle
not across.
I'm not surprised. It can be bad enough when they actually know what they're doing, if they have no clue it can be terrible.
There is an amazing story on Reddit (in 23 short parts!) of an IT manager from hell destroying a workplace. It's frustrating just to read.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I quit after the following incident:
IT Auditor: Who has admin access to this? (question #30 of 50)
Me: Me, the lead sysadmin, the release admin, the IT director, and the one-man-shop "IT Manager" at a company we bought. ...(audit results come back)
IT Director: You told the auditors the computer guy at the subsidiary has admin, because you don't want him to have it, and you didn't like that I told you to give it to him! Now you've got to take it away from him and I've got to explain to my boss why he had access.
Me: Uh, no, they asked me who has admin, along with 49 other questions. I don't work like that, like everyone is out to get me. I'm not paranoid.
IT Director: I'm not paranoid, and you better not be spreading that behind my back!
So yeah, it seemed like a good time to move on.
If more admins started quitting, it would be easier for me to find a new job...
73% of meteorological scholars agree that the sky above the clouds appears to be blue.
This consensus is however disputed by the aforementioned 73% of IT folks thinking about quitting, seeing as how they haven't even seen the sky in a blue moon....LOL
-- L8R, guitardood
I've worked in various industries. But to me IT was the most stressful of the lot. The trend also seems to be: the more the pay, the higher the stress levels. From what I've seen, when it comes time to unwind and party; the IT guys tend to go more ballistic then people in other industries. I guess there is a bit of truth in the old adage: "work hard, play hard".
There is nothing worse than being stuck in digital serfdom, because the opportunities are not better than other industries.
I used to be the sysadmin for a high school, and I lasted three years. My primary job stress: faculty who considered themselves IT experts and went straight to the principal to set policies based on their own fabrication of the truth. Some of the biggest doozies:
- Users frequently tried to get me to stop using imaging and instead "diagnose and fix the problem", insisting they'd lose the contents of their U: drives. They weren't sure what they expected me to do, but they didn't want me to do the enterprise-IT trick of wipe/format/image, instead resorting to...Norton Spring Cleaning? SpySweeper?
- The math department head launched a war against my replacing inkjet printers with laser, because laser toner cost more than inkjet ink. Per-page costs were ignored, because departments treated their budgets like people living paycheck-to-paycheck, and couldn't look beyond the next week. Purchase of super-cheap printers and copiers behind my back was widespread, and I was stuck with the support when they broke after a few months.
- I lied to an assistant principal about being able to except one teacher from the GPO that locks the screen after an hour idle. One teacher felt like pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del and typing her password once per day was too much work, and went on a rampage about it.
- A user complained her Internet connetion was too slow, and blew $800 of her department budget to replace a P4/2.26 with a P4/2.8 to "solve" the problem (it didn't). She kept both PCs side-by-side so she wouldn't lose any of her work on her "old" U: drive. When I delivered the new PC, she demanded "Where's my flat-screen monitor?", to which I replied that it wasn't in the quote from Dell I had given her to forward to the bookkeeper. This incident in particular launched my get-another-job initiative.
I'm now the source-code-versioning/Perforce/Jenkins guy somewhere else, and I love it.
It's called "work", not "super happy fun time".
I run a managed services department (so essentially I'm an IT director), and I think it's probably one of the most high stress positions that I've ever held. I'm on call 24x7, there is always money on the line, and it's a highly competitive industry.
It was summer, and it started as just a weird burning/itching feeling along my right armpit, and I initially thought that I had gotten some poison oak/ivy/whatever on myself. I rubbed some calomine on it, and called it a day. Fast forward three days, and I had a incredibly painful rash that ran in a band from the center of my chest, under my armpit, and around the back of my shoulder. And holy shit did it hurt. Now I'm only in my early 30's, and for someone my age, Shingles really only has one source - stress. That particular week I had 26 customer facing engagements, and had worked 70+ for over a month.
It was definitely a clarifying moment for me, and was directly responsible for my current attitude where we overstaff our department a little bit to keep the workload manageable, and I keep an eye on peoples timecards, and start hassling them about flextime when they go over 50 hours. The extra work hours just aren't worth the risk of someone having a health meltdown of some sort.
-matt
Oh boo hoo, IT admins work a lot, they have stressful jobs, they think about quitting, blah blah blah. Yeah well, join the club called "Working for a living" and that club isn't just for IT people, its for you know, everyone who works for a living.
Whats next? A story about how a large portion of IT people don't like getting up early in the morning for work?
Stories (plural) of users folding 5.25 floppies to fit into 3.5 in drives? I haven't seen a 3.5 inch floppy in years, much less a 5.25 inch floppy. I am sure there are still some in use, but not enough to be a significant source of stories for IT people. Makes me wonder about the source of these statistics. I don't doubt that many IT people feel stress, just wondering where the authors of this study got their information. I didn't read the actual study, so maybe it was the author of the story just throwing some stuff in?
At least that's the way that most of the shops I've worked for are run...
Hmmm.... When I was making 6 figures and felt stressed I would plan out a vacation trip or go shopping for a new car and the stress went away.
Now that I'm barely scraping by, when I get stressed I think about buying a gun to put an end to it all. If I could afford one that is.
1. MBA managers that know nothing except metrics and processes (both of which can and often fail, a lot, in the real world)
2. Teammates that pander to this by playing the metrics and processes game instead of doing real work
3. Excessive meetings
4. H1B extensions. I get that bringing in foreign talent is a good thing for everyone everywhere, but the way the U.S. is doing it is just plain GREEDY. And before you try to call me racist, please know that I have friends that are H1B and colleagues that are as well that know their damn stuff and I'm proud to work with them. Doesn't change the fact the system IS being abused in other cases.
5. Because IT is a cost, I have to FIGHT for raises. This is not the case for the guys in marketing and sales; when they do their work right and do it well, bam, bonuses, raises, and other perks.
Makes me wonder why I haven't left the field entirely, tbqh. And I know I'm not alone in this. It's a goddamned sweatshop sometimes.
Been there done that, with the exact reasons sited.
Over 20 years of it. Granted some of them were awesome, with some incredible bosses and coworkers. But in the end, of constantly being "available", impossible dead lines, overwhelming work load, took it's toll. Premature grey hair, stress induced health issues, etc. I finally threw in the towel and walked away.
Now, I'm working as a receptionist at a hair salon. With select side computer work. I have to say life is awesome. I'm happy, and generally stress free.
If you want to make your admins day, just thank them for doing their job. Respect them like you would any other colleague. Realize that sometimes stuff just breaks, and it isn't anyones fault in particular. Support them in doing their job while they support the equipment that lets you do yours.
These simple things can go a LONG way in alleviating the stress of your modern day IT administrator.
I've been through a lot of sysadmin jobs over the years and I never really experienced much of above. I know none of it is a requirement for getting a paycheck at the end of the day, but the mental stress of being treated like a disposable tool to be hammered upon builds up after a while and gets old really quickly. I'm not sure why so many companies treat IT admins as inferior peons, but they do, and it's kind of sad.
I landed up quitting and never turning back because of this. I'm sure if even a few people found it in their hearts to say "Hey, thanks for busting your balls getting my problem fixed, I really appreciate it!" I might still hold one of my former titles. Nobody ever really bothered though, so I said enough was enough and left. After the Nth job experiencing the same thing I decided I was done with that particular career choice.
I now consult for VMware ESX/ESXi related virtualization (yeah, I know they call that crap the "cloud" today- it wasn't back then) and do some oddball jobs on a few ancient IBM mainframes just for fun (mostly self taught using Hercules 390). You'd be surprised how much people will pay for a COBOL or Fortran or JCL expert these days.
But what really gets me is that as a consultant, people actually listen to my opinion and intuitions based on prior experience. I actually get thanked for being paid to do a job more now then I ever did as an IT admin. I get to travel and meet lots of people who treat me as a "specialist" who knows what they're doing, and not a troll who lives in an unfinished room with no ceiling and a bunch of noisy computers and doesn't know anything at all.
So, seriously, if you want your IT admin to stay and do a good job- just thank them. Respect them, and they'll respect you. If they feel respected, then they'll be more opted to fix your problem ASAP or put in that little bit of extra effort when it's really required. It amazes me how so many people treat IT guys like trash, even though they're in charge of running the infrastructure that holds up the entire company.
Liars? How dare you suggest such a thing!
The survey was completely anonymous and I answered every question as honestly as I could, well except for the very end when it asked for your gender, age and the department you worked for. I might of fudged that a little. There's a 7 year old girl, who hates his boss but is really happy to be working in marketing right now. But I would have been totally honest, if my manager didn't keep stressing me out about completing the survey.
I now speak to users and IT on the phone and via remote connection software. Only 60K per year, but I telecommute 100% of the time now.
Well worth the change
Procrastination; I'll think of a sig tomorrow.
Repeat: and this is news how?? *LOL*. Yep, slave to the dollar.
--I do what I can, I work in the dark.
Go Milton!
A well set up network should be almost invisible. My last gig the 2 network admins pretty much had a cake walk. Rollouts, security issues, and hardware issues are the only time you should see the admins, outside of planning meetings.
Damnit, I wish they would quit. I could get my job done.
Sounds right.
I can deal with the PHBs, the MBA metric BS, theory X, theory Y, all sorts of management types with no problems. What really gets under my skin is the manager with some sort of side deal going on. They say, "You've got to improve your communications skills". I reply with, "If you've got something to communicate, put it in a memo. E-mail me. Leave a voice mail."
"Insubordination!"
When they want something done, but they can't leave any evidence, things get tense. And its not just in IT, but the opportunities are more abundant when upper management doesn't "get" rapidly changing technology.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is a big, well-known company, and there is a story related to it on the /. front page right now.
The problems:
- No network documentation whatsover.
- IT dept fragmented into multiple competing divisions, and each division was
sub-divided by device type. So there were no *network* engineers, there were
"firewall engineers", "router/switch" engineers, etc, even though everything
was interconnected. So no single network engineer could solve a problem, it
always required dragging people from multiple divisions/depts into an issue.
- Workload imposed on one person that should have been distributed across three.
- Engineers not allowed to make any engineering decisions whatsoever.
Nonsensical procedures mandated by management wasted huge amounts of time and
staff, but no engineers were allowed input into the system.
- Change control procedures that made it impossible to get the job done *and*
follow mandated procedures. Everything required many levels of approval,
but the approvers couldn't be bothered to approve in a timely manner,
(if at all), and 50% of the time the change was never fully approved, so the
only way to get the work done was to do it anyway and run the risk of getting
caught in a change audit.
- Clueless managers that believed every IT person is interchangeable and anyone
can be dropped into any role, regardless of education, experience,
certifications, or interest. e.g a network engineer with multiple Cisco
certifications was expected to be a software developer, and a Linux admin,
and not even allowed to work on Cisco equipment.
I turned in my resignation several months ago.
A stranger came to visit Chelm, together with his very old, very skinny cow. The mayor of Chelm insisted the stranger stay in his home during that time and even made room in his own barn for the cow. The stranger was a little worried about being in a strange town, so, he hid his gold in the straw in the barn under his cow.
The next morning, the mayor walked into the barn to care for his animals, and he noticed the gold in the straw. He figured out that this cow, unlike all other cows, gave gold instead of milk. He was very excited!! He called a special meeting of the Chelm Town Council and insisted that they buy the cow from the stranger. They collected money from all the citizens in town. The mayor asked the stranger if he would be willing to sell the cow, and he offered double the usual price for a good milk cow. The stranger started to protest that the cow wasn't worth that much, but the mayor misunderstood and increased his offer. The more the stranger protested, the more the mayor offered. Finally, completely confused, the stranger agreed to sell. The mayor gave the scrawny cow the best stall in his barn. He fed her the very best feed in town. The next morning, the mayor approached the cow to milk her. As he started, he was very surprised to find that the cow gave...milk! And not even very good milk!! The mayor was annoyed. The stranger had sold him a cow that gave gold, but all he had gotten was milk! He reported back to the Town Council. They were angry. When they told the townspeople, everyone was furious! They decided to track down the stranger to get their money back. They found the stranger in the next town. With everyone yelling at him all at once, he had no idea what was going on, but eventually, he figured it out. He turned to the mayor and asked, "Did you feed the cow?" The mayor answered, "Of course we fed the cow! Do you think we don't know how to care for a cow?!!" The stranger answered, "Did you ever have a cow that gave gold before? Didn't you notice how scrawny she was when I came into town? There's only one way to get her to give gold... You have to stop feeding her! But, it took me weeks to teach her to not eat. This is what you have to do. Every day, feed her a little less. At the end of three weeks, you should be able to cut her down to eating nothing. The next day, milk her, and she will give gold again." The Chelmites look at the stranger, embarrassed about their previous anger at him. They return to Chelm and start the feeding regimen that the stranger told them. The cow got skinnier and skinnier, and the mayor of Chelm was very pleased. Until, one morning, on the very first day she would have gotten no food, the cow was found dead in her stall.
The people of Chelm were, of course, very disappointed. But they always looked back nostalgically on the day when, if only their cow hadn't died, they would have been the richest town in Poland...
I worked for 9 years in the IT dept. of a car dealership with 17 stores, ALL IT done in house, 2 man dept, me as an "admin" and an "IT DIRECTOR" (self titled) with a god complex. We grew almost double the time I was there, and my pay actually decreased in gross the last 4 years I was there as they cut overtime, yet expected more work. I was a sysadmin, web developer, dba, cellphone trainer, and the personal repair tech to the 7 owners and their ungrateful privileged children. I finally said screw this, I am going to build furniture, being in the hospital 2 times a month for stress is not worth what the janitor makes. I was replaced with 2 people and half of my work was sent out of the company (all website work) it's all about the $$$.
Really? How much? I'm a zOS Systems Programmer with over 34 years experience.
Electrical and plumbing have apprenticeships and rules that some PHB / VP can't make you passover / not follow.
IT can do good with a apprenticeship system that let's people learn hands on and even give an manager if they take the same classes a much better view of the field then the CS theory based classes.
I think a large part of the problem is that geeks are almost never really jocks - they don't stand up for themselves and form unions of administrators or organize themselves. They just do what they're told.
It doesn't help that it's not a very mature employment sector. There's no precedent to define what an administrator is exactly. So employers can try and push tech support duties onto admins, especially these days.
no only engineers the workers on the ground also have levels of certification or accreditation standards, along with the professional ethical standards.
also the workers doing the work don't go years of theroy based learning with little to no hands on work as part of the classes.
At times engineers come up with stuff that looks good on paper but does not trun out that good on the ground level. (Still like that happens in IT they look at something and in theory it should work but on the ground level it does not or the ground level guys have to come up with hacks / workarounds to make it happen)
A very common complaint that I hear from corporate types is that the IT department only has one answer and it is NO. I have always thought that this is due to the unbalanced pressure put on the typical IT department where their primary genuine performance review only comes when things blow up. It could have been 3 years of 100% up-time but a glitch during some critical sales presentation suddenly has the head of marketing calling for heads to roll in IT. You also get other negative feedback when the IT people "suddenly" need $100,000 worth of new servers (to replace the 10 year old existing ones that support 2,000 employees). The reason these are the performance reviews is that any traditional audits are simply incomprehensible to the non-technically minded management.
This then also results in the IT staff assiduously avoiding taking on any additional risk. So when a department says, "we want BYOD" IT usually loses their minds as they know that even if they stand on their heads while explaining that they can not only not support 8,000 different types of devices but that there is a good chance that any given device might not work at all (Say the iPads not working with the 6 year old flash based timecard system). As far as the rest of the company is concerned this is just another strike against IT.
At the same time I have experienced many IT people who become so risk adverse that this becomes a genuine risk to the company. Years ago I worked for a company that was switching from the drying up business of military contracting to large scale web based systems. Over 50 employees were sharing a pair of 256K ISDN lines and being forced to put a bizarrely set up Novell system on all our computers. The IT guy had a wall that was nearly completely covered with all his Novell certifications. My most glorious moment was when he ordered an awesome Dell server from hell and couldn't get Novell to install on it. He was on the speaker-phone with a senior Dell support guy when he told our IT guy that none of their best servers were compatible with Novell and this was a good thing as far as he was concerned.
This is a very complex problem but without going into endless detail I have seen very unusual and creative solutions where both IT and the company can end up being a whole lot happier.
The only significant IT job I had (barring a small stint in tech support) was RTM tester (Release to Manufacturing) - basically a QA tester job.
If you want reasonable levels of stress, that's the way to go but you will have to find ways to desk warm or keep busy! Loved that job but sometimes I hated it when I actually had to do work like rip open a box, and reconfigure it, upgrade it, or carry out a s^&t load of testing in the fall for the Winter release candidates. A busy day would be putting new graphics cards into boxen, upgrading the RAM, and testing re-releases or new RC's, performing some CRC checks on cloned discs, and working late with bad free pizza. This was all pre-2008 of course!
Actual new knowledge learned there - pretty much jack s$%t but it was 2 years of low stress. Left before they restructured.
I support sales departments,'getting rashes like someone here said its stress. I drink 10 cans of beer a night just to deal, throw up blood in the morning, have a constant fight waking up as well. A co worker in his 40s just died of a heart attack a few weeks ago. I need the paycheck. I am thinking about suicide all the time as I am single in my 30s and have never had a social life. It is hell.
Really? This is "insightful"? Is slashdot, too, now filled with useless idiots?
The answer to your fucking question is "none." Systems provisioning and accounts management are automated, or else you're a shitty systems administrator. You're an inexperienced infant, and one day you will discover that systems administrators' real job is to keep promises made by programmers. If even a simple majority of programmers, DBAs, or busint people were worth a shit at their jobs, you wouldn't need systems administrators.
But that's not the case. We're the ones who make it work... and in the process, I make bank.
I'd rather get paid by the hour and have the option to do OT if I wanted to than to be on salary. It sure is a shame that I live out in the country where cellphone "Dead zones" are prominent and there's no cable or phone connections there either. tsk tsk... What a shame indeed.
lol, I love that i'm reading this while being stuck at work due to an intended release on Monday, and we aren't done working out the issues.
"have considered quilting"
My last job started out great and slowly degraded over time. Towards the end the "new" Chief Idiot Officer (CIO) had things on the brink of disaster and only through the skill that stuck around and sheer luck did things survive. I bidded my time while I looked for a job. After searching for a while and even expanding my search to neighboring states, I finally got the offer I was looking for. I was tempted to just toss my resignation to the HR lady, stop by the CIO. There I would tell him he's an idiot, that's what the "I" in his title stands for, and he can EABOD, GFY, and then ESAD. I didn't do any epic bridge burning because I didn't feel like it would have been right to do to my boss (not that he was perfect either, but he was ok) and the PFY. If my boss wasn't still there, I probably would have done that; the PFY can handle himself.
I walked out after pay cuts, verbal abuse and eventually getting boxes thrown at me by a Partner. Two years later they still have over $100k of equipment up and spinning and completely unused because said Partner never showed up for meetings he scheduled and he still won't let staff use this stuff until he has a meeting. This makes me happy.
I had a monster job, did great, burned out, crashed, smoldered, collected unemployment, regrew, retooled, thrived, got the monster job, did great, burned out, crashed, smoldered, ...
Larger, rinse, repeat.
Where do I get off the dharma wheel?
It helps
I would have put it differently. Bad management is not unique to IT. Neither is the stress directly due to the nature of the job (social work, or anything else that puts you in touch with disadvantaged people... medicine... just name it. Which by the way gets to the same conclusion: most X have considered quitting due to stress. I know several (non-IT) people who did quit due to stress.
Mostly harmless.
No expectations, no results. We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.
I'm a developer that is in the OPEIU union (http://www.opeiu.org/) I typically just work 40 hours a week. We get paid hourly and Saturday is time and a half and Sunday is double time. Benefits are great. We don't get stock options, but I've been burned by those so many times it is ridiculous. The job is much more relaxed, but we still get plenty of work done. Because the company doesn't like to pay too much overtime, we tend to spend more time on design up front which leads to a better software. Since we are not all stressed out, we tend to write less bugs than in other places I've worked too. Overall, it is a much better work environment.
Is when they ask you to implement something you had ZERO input into. Usually there are about 5-10 other projects that really need to be done before their request can be done sanely, but you have to find workarounds to make what they want work NOW and then you have to REDO it all AGAIN once the other projects are done. Planning? Ain't nobody got time fo dat. SHOVE IT IN and who gives a fuck if it's your ass on the line....we'll fire your ass because we asked you to do somethign we shouldn't. Ain't no wonder I frickin hate my job at times.
Plus then there's uptime. They want zero downtime but they don't want to actually PAY FOR IT. THA SUCK!
Gorkman
I would have to agree with the "Managers creating stress" factor. I left two IT jobs because the managers were severe micro-managers. All of my requests and questions were always followed up with the same corporate drone answer I had been fed for 14 years. I stayed at the one company for 14 years because I didn't know better to leave. I was entirely stressed out and underpaid. They were a fan of the new position / lateral move where you have newer more challenging responsibilities, but the same pay. I had to put together a small presentation as to why I deserved more money. It worked, but it still did not get me to the median point in my field. So I left. I needed a less stressful environment and more money. It can be done if you have the skills. I am onto my second IT company since leaving, and I couldn't be happier. You just can't stay in one place for too long.
Its so true, ive been doing this for quite a few years now, im still in college finishing up my CS/IT degree, and to be honest i have been seriously thinking about switching my major to something unrelated to CS or IT. Ive been working in the field for at least 5 years now, ive done work in data centers, tech support (in house and phone) and when i just started i worked in a computer shop fixing pc's. Im only 23 and i can barely deal with the stress and b.s. that comes with the job(s). Computers are what i know best and always have, but really because of the work environment and people you work with, I really don't think this is what i want to do for the rest of my life.
Bottom line is this...
a.) too many techies with titles and zero people or leadership skills masquerading as IT Managers or IT Directors
b.) too many social outcasts working as IT people because they now have "power" over their oppressors
c.) too many huge ego's in IT, plenty of backstabbing and people who will throw you under the bus to move their careers forward
d.) the lack of upper management's understanding that a single disgruntled IT employee can and will destroy your company by:
-- 1.) having full and unfettered access to everyone's e-mail, files, accounting systems, etc...
-- 2.) changing all of the admin passwords and shutting all systems down 2 minutes before he quits
-- 3.) dropping off a large stack of e-mails on the desk of the local newspaper editor
-- 4.) stopping by the local FBI office with backup media from the last full system backup
Too many companies don't realize how essential it is to hire a good IT Manager/Director with some sense of technical skills for the job - but isn't necessarily a technical wizard. Most importantly he/she will be a good leader that his or her subordinates will respect. Accordingly, this person will hire people with good people skills. Finally, no one person shall hold all the keys to everything. Giving your one and only "trusted" network administrator the admin passwords to everything is inviting disaster.
I've dealt with my share of asshole IT Directors and other management types above me with no sense of leadership or people management skills. Along the way I've thrown a few of them under the bus as I made my way out the door without losing a minute's sleep over it. They deserved it.
Bottom line - don't fuck with your IT people.
When I was a Sys Admin (long time ago now Sheesh!) I was working 13 hour days with the occasional 23 or 24 hours day (usually following each other with an hours sleep in between). I was treated like crap. The managers used to tell people I was lazy and never did anything (which caused some of the other workers on occasion to abuse me and call me lazy). Then when I took a lesser position in another department for more money they had to replace me with four people. When one of them threatened to resign over the stress they gave him a huge pay rise.
So, YES, managers are the problem. (Aren't they always?)
Hearing this just tells me that everything has pretty much remained the same.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
You get paid to struggle with broken failing systems. All of the projects/systems I have ever been paid to struggle with have eventually failed. The managers went on the better, richer failing projects. I took the money and moved on.
In the long run almost everything fails. If the last invoice was paid and the cheque cleared, it was a personal victory.
Entropy is a nice word to stick in here somewhere.
--
It was a dark and drunken night. Four shots called out -- drink me.
I was contracted in to a sysadmin position once. The position opened up as the previous worker had a massive coronary. As I walked to my 'cube', I noted that the rest of workers seemed haggard, overweight, and overstressed. The work itself was incessant. You kept getting these 'work orders' from a computer system that tracked your every move. The manager kept coming by reminding us of our lagging productivity, and that we'd be fired if we didn't pick up the pace. One time, I left the laptop unattended on the desk. Security grabbed it. When I went over there to retrieve it, they threatened my physically with a veiled threat. When asked if I wanted to go 'perm', I said no thanks. My body said 'Thank God' to me. At the end of the six months, I was out of there.
Most of the issues raised in the article resonate with me. I was downsized from an IT Admin job a while ago. I was partially relieved when it happened. By the time I was let go I had high blood pressure, headaches, and a damaged tendon in my arm from typing so many emails and reports for management and others (in addition to the daily IT support tasks). The main stressors for me was a non-technical IT operations manager who wanted a report on everything using no technical jargon, (and at least a 30-60 minute meeting after any unexpected outage), an unspoken expectation that you had to work extra unpaid hours to get the work done, an under-budgeted and under-staffed IT dept, and a few difficult users. The general view from upper management was that the IT Dept is not a profit center. Therefore it should be funded and staffed to the minimum. Some people in other departments said I had the most difficult job in the company.
Can you think of any other field other than IT where being willing to put in the long hours that excellence sometimes demands results in efforts to dock your pay - but not those hours? That is incredible to me...to deliberately attempt to destroy the motivation of some of America's best and brightest. The results are easy to predict: Just project the same miserly approach upon America's research and development...upon American innovation, which an apt analog as so much of IT's efforts are aimed at doing something "better".
The truth is the United States of America doesn't want to be the world's technology leader anymore...our nation's business leaders - and so their pets in Congress - just want to control the world through their control of the dollar.
That goal is, in my opinion, unusually asinine even for a people and society increasingly constrained by greed given that the dollar can be blown to kingdom come with the simple declaration "Sorry, we don't take dollars anymore." (With the caveat that the statement must come from somebody who has the industrial infrastructure and position as a primary supplier in global trade required to back the value of their proposed dollar replacement.)
That goal of controlling the world through the control of the dollar...it is an open admission that Corporate America's leaders and the politicians who represent them are aware that either they're too lazy or they lack the competence and talent to lead in any other way. Or both.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"