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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.
When it comes to older generations thinking younger generations are whiney, lazy, idiots sample size doesn't matter.
Old people almost always think that. I am not sure if it is a product of getting old, jealousy of the young, or what.
But you can read newspapers from 100 years ago that had the same articles in them.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I think some of it is the demand that everything work, all the time, without any room for maintenance while at the same time not being willing to pay for the resources to deliver systems that can provide that.
During the recession, many firms cut jobs and made 10 people do the work of 15. That saves money and resulted in no quantifiable loss in productivity of the group, so the firms never rehired the people they got rid of. How would this not be a more stressful work environment?
"Do more with less, and with fewer coworkers with less experience. You have four weeks of paid vacation, but no backup (fewer coworkers, less experience), so if there's a problem, you need to fix it on vacation, so your vacation needs to be a stay-cation." -New corporate management motto.
morale = morale - 4
Except for a few top guys and the occasional person who wins the lottery in life pay is what is was 20 years ago after 20 years of inflation. Companies are merging left and right and everytime they do it's another round of layoffs. Offshoring and onshoring (via H1-B) are nuts. If you work in IT you're probably seeing something like a 70% Indian workforce with only the occasional American to fill a spot when they ran out of visas. Meanwhile it's a statisical fact that productively is way way up, meaning you're doing more work. Even if the tools are better it still means you're responsible for a hell of a lot more. How the hell would that _not_ be stressful?
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And for the record, we who have been in the industry long enough to remember a time without all these resources - we who are decidedly not "Digital Natives" - we're the ones who created FaceBox, YouScreen and WhoBook et. al. And we still have a much older word for "Digital Natives" - we still call 'em "n00bz".
The latest generation works harder, for longer hours, with higher productivity, than any other generation before them and is the first generation in history to be worse off than their parents.
They're stressed because they're being fucked AND blamed for it at the same time.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
When I was a kid, we didn't have any of those sissy antibiotics. When we got sick, our grandmothers would perform extreme unction on us and then leave us on the roof overnight. If we were strong enough to climb down in the morning we got breakfast. If not, we got buried. It made us learn the meaning of a dollar, because for a dollar my sister would bring me a snack up there and leave the ladder against the side of the house. And there was none of this mp3 youtube nonsense. If we wanted music, we had burn the barn down and dance to the crackling fire. I can still beatbox a three-alarm blaze. And sex? We didn't have sex. We just set the women folk up on the roof and if they had the strength to climb down in the morning, grandpa would take them out to the barn and make them pregnant. And that also taught us the meaning of a dollar, because for a dollar, he'd let us hide under the hayloft to watch for Zeus to appear in the shape of a bull to impregnate the females. And if any of us showed any visible signs of arousal, we got beaten with a sickle and our parts were left on the roof to die.
The kids these days don't know how good they got it with their quarter million dollar school loans to prepare them for jobs that don't exist or go to internet scammers in Bangalore. They don't realize how lucky they are not to have to worry about privacy any more, because by god there is none. They make me sick, with their rising sea levels and paint thinner in the water supply and multinational tech companies tracking their every movement. Because when I was a kid, my total lack of self-awareness convinced me that I got where I am today only because of my hard work and talent.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.