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Is IT Work Getting More Stressful, Or Is It the Millennials?
dcblogs writes: A survey of IT professionals that has been conducted in each of the last four years is showing an increase in IT work stress levels. It's a small survey, just over 200 IT workers, and it doesn't account for the age of the respondents. But some are asking whether Millennials, those ages 18 to 34, are pushing up stress levels either as IT workers or end users. The reason Millennials may be less able to handle stress is that they interact with others in person far less than other generations do, since most of their social interactions have been through Internet-based, arms-length contact, said Billie Blair, who holds a doctorate in organizational psychology. This generation has also been protected from many real-life situations by their parents, "so the workplace tends to be more stressful for them than for others," she said. Others are wondering if Millennials are more demanding of IT workers. Millennials are also expert users, and "are no longer in awe of technology specialists and therefore demand higher service levels," said Mitch Ellis, managing director of executive search firm Sanford Rose Associates in St. Louis.
Millennials are also expert users...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Bad example, this was written just before the collapse of the Athenian empire, so the guy had a point. Socrates himself was tried and executed by the invading forces.
Some highlites:
I had one who wouldn't answer his phone. He insisted that he be texted. I put up with that for a few days, but eventually told him he had a choice of responding to my phone calls, or I would personally pay him a visit every time I needed to interact with him. If a person cannot interact except with text, he needs to get a job that requires only yes or no answers.
Another who would panic every time I spoke with him. This guy was bizarre. I can tell a person to go to hell in such a nice way that they look forward to the trip, but he just couldn't interact properly.
Another guy who went batshit nuts on me when I pointed at his laptop screen. He's busy screaming about "Dont touch my screen! I'm not going to tell you again!" I was so shocked at that inappropriate outburst that I was actually silenced for a few seconds.
Then there was the young lady who we hired, and immediately after getting hired, she goes on a month and a half vacation (unpaid of course) during the year she worked with us, she went on around 3 and a half months vacation, spent most of her time on Facebook, and wouldn't interact with anyone unless absolutely necessary. She quit after a year to go live at home because she found work too stressful.
There were other experiences, but those were the most unbalanced ones.
In general though, they have a tendency to come into the workplace with some overblown expectations, expecting very little interaction to people other than "their friends", and those via texting or facebook updates. They also have a rather exaggerated opinion of their own technical prowess, most believing that anyone of their parents age or older have very little clue about anything, and none whatsoever about computing. At best, we were there to provide support for them.
Amazingly enough, most were looking for a promotion and big raise after a year
The two who we the exception were both young ladies, who were simply incredible. One who was a talented illustrator, and also had a great work ethic. The other was simply amazing, who would finish her work, accurately, on time or sooner, and then ask if there was anything else she could do. I expect to see both as leaders some day.
We might ask why this happens?
One of the biggest culprits IMO, is the self esteem movement. Children were and are being told they are special (and they are) and taught to think very higly of themselves. from an early age these days.
What could be wrong with that?
One of the first things is that people with real self esteem issues tend to have those issues no matter how much "uplifting encouragement" they get. Its a neurosis.
Then we have the rest of the children. Its good not to hate yourself, and no doubt. But real self esteem comes from accomplishments, and not being told how special you are at every chance. High esteem with no real accomplishments is not a good combination. It tends to make you think that life is a sprint, and not a marathon.REal self esteem comes from doing good work and accomplishments, not being told you are special all the time.
Then we have the parents. Parents want the best for their children, but since the rise of the helicopters, and especially the dreaded blackhawk mother, (this is the one who does their children's homework for them so they can take their special classes out of school) We have parents who simply refuse to allow their children to grow up. Ever see those diaper commercials showing 6 year olds? Helicopter fodder.
So now we have the cellular//smartphone. The helicopters can now keep in constant contact and control of ther children. It's completely insane on college campuses now. These children are physical adults, but not at all mature. A friend who is a cou
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I have a few thoughts of my own on the subject, based on my own work situation, and they don't quite line up with theirs.
First off, yes... I would say that at least for our workplace, stress levels in I.T. have generally increased over the last few years. (I work as part of a 4 person I.T. team for a marketing firm that has several locations strategically placed around the country, close to the majority of clients they have or want.)
Marketing is definitely a business where lots of millennials are hired. Our I.T. group and upper management are really the only people in the company of an older generation than that, other than a few random exceptions.
But to claim the I.T. stress levels are correlated with the millennial generation's lack of in-person communication skills? No... at least for our industry, that's not the case at all. You can't be successful working in marketing for us if you're not an exceptionally good in-person communicator. I know I'm far less comfortable chatting up random people in social situations than any of the millennials we've got working as creative directors, producers, designers, etc. Maybe we're constantly hiring the exceptions to the rule because of the nature of the business ... but regardless, that's the situation for the people our I.T. group supports.
Where I see stress levels climbing has more to do with people expecting more and more from the computerized tools they're given. For example, when I started working for these guys, several of our offices literally spent 90% of their day buried in Outlook. Everything revolved around email correspondence and scheduling meetings or appointments. Sure, they had the occasional need for the rest of the Office suite (especially PowerPoint or Keynote for our Mac users, if they were preparing a presentation for a client), but the vast majority of support calls or issues were "Why did my email bounce?", "It says my mailbox is full!", "I can't find this message I know I saved someplace in here earlier today.", or "So and so received my calendar invite 3 times in a row for some reason." Stuff like that, along with trouble opening various email attachments they received.....
Looking at how things have evolved now? We ran into issues where some of the huge Word templates they use regularly to produce client proposals got too big to keep editing reliably inside Word. (Lots of copy/pasted graphics in them and all that.) So we now paid for a cloud based service designed just for such proposals. Instead of constantly filling mailboxes with email attachments getting shared around, we set up DropBox for Teams so I.T. creates any of the "top level" folders anyone requests and makes sure the proper folks are given read or read/write access to those shared resources. As we've grown, the Finance department required better automation so they could process all the invoices in a timely manner as offices generate them. So they put in dedicated scanning stations at each office with document capture software that goes to "watched folders", with special software that can toss them into their accounting system as it sees new ones appear. The original few, designated office people with copies of Adobe Acrobat (full version, not reader) kept growing as more users saw the benefits of being able to actually edit a PDF document on their Windows PC (or saw Mac users doing it natively with Preview and asked why they can't have the same capabilities). So that led to buying Creative Cloud with user accounts I.T. again has to manage.
On top of that, one of the offices is trying to get more serious about offering in-house video rendering capabilities instead of outsourcing it all the time, so now we're starting to build and support a rendering farm and high end video packages on the clients.
What we haven't done is hire a single new I.T. staffer to help with any of this.... We push for it all the time (especially when one of us is out sick or on vacation and the pressure is really on). But at the end of the day, manag
They seem to feel "owed" by society a job, and to be treated nicely and fairly.
These are reasonable expectations of a functioning society. That these expectations are considered to be ridiculously entitled is a reflection on society rather than the people who hold them. To look at it another way, if we don't aspire to a fair and just society where people who want to work can find work, then we've really lost the plot. Not to mention that work was easier to find back in the day, and perhaps we are the entitled ones, begrudging the younger ones wanting what we had on a plate.
I didn't always get congratulated JUST for trying
Noticing children's effort rather than results is better for producing successful adults, as it instils perseverance rather than a sense that your skills are innate and immutable.
In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible. - Ursula Le Guin
HOWEVER, this latest generation has been more coddled and has more of an entitlement attitude than previous generations.
It's the other way around. The baby boomers have a massive sense of entitlement. How often have you heard phrases like "I worked hard all my life"? They are the ones who had it good, who now own a house with no mortgage and maybe another one to rent out to some poor millennial, while the younger generations can't even get on the ladder.
Young people are stressed because they are screwed. They work long hours for little money, and pay ridiculous rents because houses are unaffordable. The baby boomers feel that they have earned those 4 bedroom properties so why the hell should they downsize and give up their spare bedrooms where they do all their hobbies, just because younger people need a place to raise a family? Why should house prices come down, when houses are valuable assets and are going to pay for their retirements?
It's the older generation that feels entitled. They just want what is best for them, screw everyone else. They set themselves up, saddled the young with the debt and the environmental damage, and are now blaming them for being lazy and weak. They seem to forget that when they were young one person working full time could afford a house, a car and a family.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The point being made here is that there is nothing new under the sun. People pissing and moaning about *how times have changed* are full of it. Nothing has 'changed' except the pace of events.
You are having a forest and trees moment. Yes nothing changes, but the point is that when a society gets to the point that self-indulgence *greatly* exceeds a sense of duty and obligation to society then that society falls. Things sometimes change for the worse. And certain behaviors are a recurring theme prior to such changes.
I'm not saying we are there. For example many of those of the current generation who went into the military got past the coddling and fake trophies and perform as well as any other generation. And some have faced the hard realities of the present and learned to deal with it, getting past their upbringing. Maybe its more a matter of the current generation needing more time to adjust to reality since they were kept farther away from it.
From what I've experienced in the last few years, IT _is_ getting more stressful.
I left a job that I had liked alot until I started being worked to death. They wouldn't replace people and they kept piling H1B garbage on top of us, all during a pay freeze. Since then, I've seen an incredible amount of incompetence that is bad enough on its own but even worse because it's institutionalized. At interview time you're expected to have a ton of skills and experience but after hiring it all goes out the window in favor of blind obedience. So the boss, who is stupid, forces everybody to be stupid, and then when the project fails because of that stupidity, guess who the blame falls on. It's almost a relief to be fired.