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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.
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"
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.
In IT the only constant is change.
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.
It's not a matter of maturity. Many organizations hide behind the disclaimer "we are not an I.T. company", despite having sizable I.T. departments. And despite having this sizable department, which offers mission-critical applications and infrastructure, zero effort is made towards working smarter. Problems are fixed with mandatory overtime, cutting staffing/costs, and "quick-and-dirty" fixes to long standing problems.
I think some companies are starting to understand that their project management methodologies are flawed, but most cannot connect the concepts of "software debt" to decreasing marginal output in their I.T. efforts. An hour of work today is less effective than in the past because you are paying "interest" on your previous bad decisions.
I think that the 27% is reflective of companies that can connect the longevity and cost-effectiveness of I.T. systems to proper project planning, management, and I.T. expertise. Whether or not this is an upper-bound remains to be seen, because a lot of organizations simply don't understand that inventing your own project management ideas dooms you to repeating the same failures that have happened over the last 50 years.
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
It is strange, when you think about it, the way that the IT department tends to get segregated off from the rest of operations. You have companies where people do 100% of their work on a computer, where the company *can not function* when the Internet goes out, and yet IT is treated as an afterthought. The people running these companies think that running an IT department is as easy as "running out to Best Buy and picking up a computer," and then they get annoyed when their IT services are unreliable.
I would have thought that, with as ubiquitous as computers are in business, IT work would be considered valuable. It's as though you have a company that ships things across the country by truck, but they don't think their mechanics are important, and they freak out when the mechanics want to have proper equipment for fixing the trucks. And worse, they don't think any of their truck drivers need to know how to drive. When their drivers put the truck in a ditch, they complain that the mechanics haven't made the truck crash-proof.