Slashdot Mirror
Why Do So Many Tech Workers Dislike Their Jobs?
Nerval's Lobster writes: So what if you work for a tech company that offers free lunch, in-house gym, and dry cleaning? A new survey suggests that a majority of software engineers, developers, and sysadmins are miserable. Granted, the survey in question only involved 5,000 respondents, so it shouldn't be viewed as comprehensive (it was also conducted by a company that deals in employee engagement), but it's nonetheless insightful into the reasons why a lot of tech pros apparently dislike their jobs. Apparently perks don't matter quite so much if your employees have no sense of mission, don't have a clear sense of how they can get promoted, and don't interact with their co-workers very well. While that should be glaringly obvious, a lot of companies are still fixated on the idea that minor perks will apparently translate into huge morale boosts; but free smoothies in the cafeteria only goes so far.
The grunts know how things work and what's possible in the infrastructure.
Managers have an idea how things.
Directors don't know how things work.
C level has no idea what they even have.
--
Essentially if you're not on the front lines for long, you have no idea what is actually going on.
Look at all the freebies here, if you can find a break in your 80-hour work week, you'll totally dig them!
None of those perks? Seriously, is that really the standard?
I can't speak for anyone else, but most "tech jobs" I've held were with companies whose futures and business I had no stake in, nor interest in having stake in, and the work to be routinely uninteresting where creativity was actively discouraged (for good reasons, many times), individuality was suppressed, and I was treated as a replaceable cog (and I was). I'm fortunate in that I have many other outlets for my creative needs, but dealing with corporate bureaucracy, idiot bosses, etc does take its toll. The paychecks are nice and allow me to have a comfortable life outside of work, but I will say that after 2 decades, I'm ready to throw in the towel and do something else, even if it means downsizing again.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Cause so many workers dislike their jobs, or in the words of Deichkind, "Arbeit nervt" - "work is annoying"
... you insensitive clod.
Yes dammit I'm cranky but it's not because I hate my job.
Captcha: salaries
They work hard. They're always at work thanks to the evolution of communications technologies. And the brightest minds of a generation, as the quote goes, are being put to work devising new ways to get you to look at ads.
Let's face it. The vast majority of "tech companies" are worthless garbage, employing the technical and social equivalent of factory workers from the time of the Industrial Revolution. They're not making anything new and they certainly aren't getting to enjoy the fruits of their labor either thanks to the entire industry's stance on unions and collective bargaining (let alone transfer pricing).
2) Minion in large tech company. Here you have opportunity for advancement - but only by working EXTREMELY long hours for little pay.
3) Owning/working for a small start up. Same as Minion, only pay is far worse but you have a lottery ticket to make it big.
Basically tech jobs are closer to blue collar than white collar, despite requiring significant intelligence. Oh, and did I mention the risk of being outsourced to china/india?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Probably because they think they should be special and immune from the shit everyone else deals with.
Some places have no idea what a sysadmin or software engineer is supposed to do. They assume we are all one and the same. So you will be harassed for any problem that involves using electricity.
Some places refuse to follow or put in place process/policies/limitations and enforce them in order to make the workload manageable.
Some places refuse to see the value in our work; They only see it as a cost center to be minimized at all costs, morale be damned.
It is a thankless job (and who cares about being thanked, show me the money lobowski!), yes most place refuse to pay what the position should be paying. So you either end up with subpar employees or are forced to work with subpar employees that cause a lot of problems you need to cleanup.
And the list goes on and on.
So I can have a life. I work Monday-Friday 0800 - 1700. No nights, no weekends. I use Macs, Linux, Windows (very little), a little coding, a little networking, run the PBX, tweak the existing firewall, a little Exchange Server and AD, a little grunt work here and there. I don't get paid as much as I could, but I have my own office, a lot of down time whilst at work, a boss that leaves me alone for the most part. Not much to dislike, really. I cannot move up here, but I could keep this job theoretically for years to come.
i have no hookers on my desk.
if i had hookers on my desk, i would feel different. very much different.
For a second I thought the editors and community may have promoted this story to the front page because it was informative and insightful.
Then I saw it was from Dice, and I knew better.
Techies are creative types that got into the tech industry because the had a passion for hardware, programming, etc. Then they work like a battery chicken, putting up with some fuck wit manager making 'business decisions' on a piece of crap tech/software that they have no real interest in.
What a business considers 'exciting' and 'cutting edge' is quite different from how tech guys see it.
When you add job insecurity to the mix and office politics, then it kills the passion.
When you see a graph (from the first linked article) that shows 22% as THREE TIMES LARGER than 19% you know you are reading crap...
I'm a mechanical engineer but most technical people I know enjoy working if it's an important project and there is a plan to make it succeed. If you are working on something stupid forget it. If it's a great idea but no way to make it work (management, funding, politics) forget it as well.
I was put in a new project I thought was pretty cool. I spent 2 weeks doing an analysis which proved the optimal configuration based on the given requirements. I was told we are using the original less efficient configuration because it looks "innovative". I could hear the motivation leaving me.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
And if you like tech, you'll hate a tech job because it's often not about tech.
It's about what some MBA manager, salesman, and/or "visionary" CEO thinks should be done (despite no knowledge of the problem domain, or worse: miseducation of the problem domain) rather than asking the technologists to solve the technological problems.
Interesting problems require the kind of sophistication of thinking that often doesn't fall into the same demographic of people that end up becoming the managers of technologists. That's why they're managers, not technologists.
All the jobs I've had involve doing work.
Long signatures suck.
It is called being a grown-up. I don't recommend it. I actually tend to like my tech job, but make no mistake... it is still a job.
5000 respondents is a sufficient enough sample size to make generalizations... sometimes many non-generalizations. The size isn't the issue in as much the population it actually represents and if that population is representative of the whole IT sector. Not having read the article (who does?) but per the little in the summary, I think we are good on the sample size.
Anyway, I don't think a lot of companies are fixated on the idea that minor perks will translate to huge moral boosts. If they were, they would also understand that lack of said minor perks would result in the opposite. And I have yet to meet a client that thinks about either.
I think in IT, it is mostly the "no sense of mission" that depresses IT folks. There are "requirements documents" that aren't worth the pixels and Sharepoint storage they take up. Deadlines that assume that time machines have been invented. And "approvals" and "sign offs" that might as well be check boxes & a meeting attendee list because no one reads what they are signing off on.
All these end up with a mission path that keeps changing while not caring about the change costs. Its like taking a flight where the guys in business class keep changing where they want to land. Eventually they emergency land somewhere random or crash land somewhere or just crash and burn. Of course those business folks all have parachutes.
Whats depressing is that management is fully aware of the "reasons" why something went off rails, but continues to make the same mistake on all subsequent projects. We document lessons learned for the sake of write-only documentation and nothing more.
Every company that gives perks like that is only because they want you to stay all hours of the day and night. Sure, that is great and all and the money is wonderful at those places, I'm sure. However, the only thing that many of us care about is actual free time.
It seems like the whole culture is pushing this "Work your life away because it is the American thing to do" agenda. "40 hours a week is for lazy gits who will get nowhere in the workplace." Hell, where I work, don't work less than 90 hours a week if you want to make it through your next performance review. Most people start with at least 7 "use it or lose it" personal days and god help you if you actually try to take one. I am lucky because, as a contractor, they actually think twice about making me stay late as it is costing them. Salaried, I would never want to work there as that kind of environment is toxic to one's health and soul. This kind of shit is what makes tech workers hate their jobs.
Work to live and not live to work, words to live by.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
A lot of tech work is reactionary. And if all you have to do is put out fires, it isn't terrible. But you are usually expected to work at other things between fires. Which means the second you start doing one thing, you have to stop and go fix six other things. Always feeling like you are getting pulled in eighteen different directions sucks.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I've been in the software industry for a bit, and am appalled at what companies think attract great talent. It is so far off base today, that no wonder people aren't happy. Let's take a look at the things they believe are great:
Open office environment: What they say is it is great collaboration. What it really means is that you sit at benches back to back and face to face with your coworkers all wearing headphones. None of them talk, you have little personal space, and if you don't actually want to listen to music, you hear 3 different songs through the headphones. Never mind the Skype calls going on around you, or everyone's computer/phone./tablet all going off at the same time as the company wide email goes out. Good luck concentrating.
Game room/exercise room: What this means is more distractions for the young workers who already can't focus on their task for five minutes and get something done. Now they need to bug you to play with them and wonder why you say you don't have time as we are already way behind. So now you end up doing their tasks while they are shooting pool just to make sure the client gets what they were promised. Basically, more people NOT working while at work, forcing you into more hours to pick up the slack. BTW, how many hours a week does your company actually expect out of you?
Agile: A form of development co-opted by management and companies to micro manage you at every possibility, without actually establishing any direction. Yes, I know this is not how it is supposed to work, but after being in many companies doing it, it is all too often done this way. Everyone gets creative about 'what they did yesterday', and 'what they will do today', yet we still don't have a clear direction on 'what the heck we are doing'. That gets frustrating.
Unlimited vacation: What this actually means is no guaranteed vacation. You get to take it 'if you have time'. So the people who don't actually work take tons, and those who actually care about delivery get squeezed down. Reward is opposite to accomplishments
No Real WFH: Most places frown on WFH, as you are supposed to be collaborating. So you sit on your bench desk with trendy uncomfortable chair with said coworkers all plugged into their music not talking anyways. Why couldn't I work from home?
Quality of code: This one is debatable probably, but in the last three to five years the quality is so poor it is scary. People are rushed and rewarded for 'just getting it out' even though it fails all the time. How about rewarding people for putting something out that actually works and is stable? Could we actually teach proper coding in college?
What I really want is an actual office with walls and a window. Give me a door that I can leave open most of the time when people have questions, but I can close when things are crazy or tough. Give me co-workers that want to solve real problems, and care about unit tests, comments, and making a GOOD solution. Pay me for delivering quality, and more importantly, stop trying to figure out if I am operating at 100% efficiency all of the time. Define what the heck we are trying to accomplish up front, and then iterate rapidly on the solution. That would make me happy, anyways.....
Rant off.....
because you get courted at a young age, showered with gifts, presented with an amazing salary far beyond most working individuals in your country, only to find out that you're not, in fact, special, and the reason you're getting paid so much is that they plan on using you up as quickly as possible and replacing you with the next round?
...will do it, too. I don't doubt the accuracy of their surveys, but - Crikey! - look at some of the graphs they use! One shows a 5% delta as, visually, the difference between a ranch house and a skyscraper. Another shows a larger % difference, but visually much closer. Not to be too pedantic, but there's this great old book called "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". It'll make your job more satisfying...
"That's why it's called work," as they say. I laughed at the very misleading graph showing 19% of IT workers vs. 22% of non-IT workers saying they are very happy at work. That is a difference of 3%, but they made the graph on a scale of 19-22, so it looks huge. It's also not clear how much the authors cherry-picked data to support their thesis. On every measure cited, IT employees score poorly -- but do they score better in other areas that weren't reported? Why do they only report those who answered with a 9 or 10? How many answered with a 1 or 2?
ITIL, Six Sigma, Agile, I can go on for days...
Karma: Bad
Unhappy people tend to be unhappy with and in their "tech" jobs (or, just "their jobs).
It's a fact of being unhappy to start with.
Happy people will either stay happy or leave to be happy at another job.
That's what I've seen.
Good management may make non-happy people more like happy people but happy is an internal condition.
Much like cancer, happy/happiness will spread.
I did during the days of the Great Recession a few years ago. Brings a whole new perspective on what exactly is sucky :-)
On a more philosophical level for those reading this who hate their IT jobs then what would you all rather be doing? That is where I am at. I say not dealing with annoying users all day and more admin work but I could see that getting old and repetitive real fast.
Would being HR be more fun? How about boring spreadsheets and statistical analysis all day in accounting/finance?
I can't think of anything that doesn't suck sadly. I guess I come to the realization that they call it work for a reason and all jobs suck but it beats the alternative of no job at all right? I keep saying I will start a business but that is a pipe dream. No job is really a hobby. Hey, IT work pays ok and it beats most other work out there as my examples above.
http://saveie6.com/
Whats makes the best work environment for me is to have the respect and recognition of bosses and coworkers. All too often our input is ignored because "they don't understand our tech talk" and instead take the often disastrous advice of vendors and consultants because "they speak their business language".We are often used as whipping boys when things go wrong and completely ignored for all the hard work on everything that just works.
>> Why Do So Many Tech Workers Dislike Their Jobs?
Because of crappy posts like this cluttering up what used to be our happy place.
1. The illusion that making money will make you happy (eventually) -- This hooks the young and eager dudes to work 18 hour days for that carrot.
2. Everyone in every profession is unhappy (more or less)
3. Tech workers are in demand develop ego issues. They think they're special and when they aren't rewarded, they get angry and pouty (I was certainly a victim of this vice. Now adays, I'm less emotional and more pragmatic, but same idea)
4. Employees don't stay with companies because companies don't care about them and companies don't care about employees because as soon as you train them to be awesome, they go jump ship for more money, rinse repeat ad infinitum.
5. Your managers suck. Hire some better ones. Stop promoting retards because they didn't jump ship or that kiss your ass soo very well. Promote / hire managers that can... I don't know... LEAD!
6. An unhappy worker is most likely worked harder than a happy one, so company win!
There's probably a basket of 100 more thoughts I could scrape up, but those are some biggies.
Bye!
'nuff said.
The path to promotion is proving you can put up with the company's bullshit by not quitting.
Lately I've been supporting integration of healthcare IT systems. We have filled our nation with Indians with fake masters degrees faking there way through the day, relying on a small number of clue-endowed 'muricans when their pretending proves insufficient. One of these chuckleheads writes an application that marshals HTML form data — including a text box intended for lengthy descriptions — into POST URL parameters. When told that entering text in the 'notes' field causes problems because IE truncates stupidly long URLs this guy 'fixes' it by silently truncating the text field.
This field is just chock full of incompetent, fake IT people earning a living in IT because their fakery won't work anywhere else. It use to be other 'muricans; people with degrees in cosmology or wine tasting and whatnot. Now we import fake IT people because foreign fakers cost less than domestic fakers.
Oh, sure, it looks like the benefits are great. And they are if you're fresh out of college. I mean, at 25, who doesn't want to play video games in the cafeteria, get free soda, maybe even free food, foosball, have a lounge area, etc, etc?
The trouble is at 25 you're going to kind-of like any job you go into if the pay isn't shit. You're new at it all and having "big" paycheques is great. The fact those big paycheques require stupid numbers of hours doesn't matter because, hey, you were studying (LOL partying) 4 hours a day along with 8 hours of in class time before work, so who cares?
10 years later you realize the benefits are shit, but all the new people coming in don't care. You want a good retirement plan, great medical and dental coverage, lots of vacation, more sick/personal days, bereavement leave, new child leave, etc, etc. You couldn't care less about the foosball table, and by that age you don't give a shit about free soda. The video games are just an annoying distraction you'd rather play at home, and you'd trade all the free food in the world to pay for your daughter's braces.
But the company is having none of that because all their new 25 year old recruits want a slide from the second floor to the first floor.
When you look at other businesses, the kind of businesses that have mature adults working in them, the ones that want to attract good talent will make a big deal about retirement plans, solid vacation leave, and so on. Think working at a bank, large manufacturing company, government jobs, etc...
That's why I prefer to work tech at a company whose primary business isn't tech (but still needs solid IT staff to run smoothly). Sure, IT might be treated like the maintenance staff, but once you're older you really don't give a shit so long as they don't expect much outside of 40 hours, the paycheques are regular, nobody is getting laid off, you get to take 3 weeks off in the middle of summer, your retirement looks like it really will happen before 65, and when your teenager gets into a wreck the company covers all the medical costs. :) Those benefits are worth a boring-ass job when you're older.
Problem is, I think the tech crowd takes a while to figure out the best tradeoff for themselves. Thus, until they figure that out, they end up unhappy. Your buddy in construction figured out to stop loving the work and instead learned to love not having to worry about anything *else* a long time ago.
Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose: you'll be happy with your job to the extent it has these qualities. How much autonomy do most engineering jobs give you? Not much I imagine. How much mastery? Well you're certainly not going to be exploring many new skills, or even masterting particularly difficult ones on average; it's mostly repetitive scaffolding with glue.
Purpose is pretty much the only one that technology work has plenty of. Everything runs on information technology now, so if you're interested in tech, which you probably are, you'll find lots of purpose in developing or administering information systems. This only goes so far before the lack of autonomy gets to you, or you hit the mastery ceiling pretty quickly at any given job.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Constantly being treated like an unwanted expense might have a lot to do with it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I work for the State, a place where progress, innovation, unique thinking and independent action, go to die.
But man are the perks awesome. As is (in my case anyway) the pay, it's obscene. Especially compared to the amount of work I am allowed to do.
Most of the day I am in an office, handling systems remotely, but when the systems properly locked down and managed, very little goes wrong.
So I write, read, and generally goof off. Sounds great, no?
Not really, anytime there is an actual issue (like out NAS running out of space) I have to get 15 different people involved before I am allowed to make a decision, and then my decision is sent around for review.
I've been waiting for a larger NAS for 8 months so far...
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
People that are attracted to Tech in general are people that like to build stuff. They like to tinker and figure out how stuff works and make things better. So they figure why not make a career out of it and get paid to do things they like.
Then they enter the workforce. Chances are pretty good that your boss not only doesn't have a clue about programming, they probably look down their nose at you. The boss lives in a world of spreadsheets and project plans and deadlines. Their goal is to get it out the door and worry later about the bugs. With any luck it becomes someone else's problem.
This flies in the face of the programmer who wants to do it not on time but do it right. Programming is a creative process and sometimes it's hard to put a specific time frame on that. That's the first problem.
The next problem occurs when you take a look around you and discover that the ones getting the promotions and big raises are not the best programmers. They are the ones that have figured out how to game the system. To move into management you are expected to leave your technical skills behind.
Sure there are some executives that are technically skilled (Gates and Zuckerberg come to mind) but most of them are MBA types.
Maybe it has something to do with companies gleefully grinding down their employees with 80-hour work weeks before replacing them with an Elbonian who works for six cents a day. Or maybe it's related to the company-wide policy "No Dev Left Behind", where each programmer has his own clown car full of Pointy-Haired-Bosses to help him brainstorm and debug. It might even be the business language flooding tech meetings. "We're synergizing bold new paradigms for market leverage."
But if you ask me, the number one mood-killer for me when it comes to technology is from within. I'm talking about the 'elitist programming culture'. Hacker News is the perfect example of this. "You use an Object-Oriented language? Puh-lease. I write in a language so obscure and difficult to comprehend nobody has ever actually finished a program in it ('apps' used to be called programs, FYI)." Everybody's gotta fluff up the release announcement for their stupid web-based whatever with fancy technical jargon and a pretentious academic tone. Every program, product, and library must have a logo, a mascot, a "Philosophy" page, and a lower-case name with a random vowel omitted (Bonus points if you use the domain as part of the name, like .io). And last but not least, there's the bewildering tendency for tech-related stuff to get sucked into political horseshit now. "Are Tech Companies Excluding Women?", "Is Google's New Image-Recognition Program Racist?", "10 Tech Companies You Won't Believe Donated to This Candidate! Get Outraged!"
I like programming, but I really don't like the overhead it brings in. It's not about solving puzzles anymore.
1. Their contribution is not appreciated or valued. 2. They are not viewed as part of the team, just implimentors of brilliance born elsewhere. 3. Their skills are not understood, therefore they are seen as non-specialized workers.
Bluntly: my boss, the guy who sets the goals, is a fucking idiot. Honestly: they don't pay me enough for what I do, nor do they pay me enough to put up with my boss. But: I'm no spring chicken, and jobs are scarce (ok, basically nonexistent) around here. And: I have a home and family to support. There's no taking off for the horizons for me.
Jobwise, I consider it a textbook case of FML. But hey. Maybe my after tax income of ~$300/wk is fabulous, and I just don't know it, eh?
Funny fucking thing our bills are so hard to pay, though. :/
You want to know why I'm miserable?
Well, lots of reasons, let me iterate through them
1) people who don't understand what iterate means, is, or how to do it properly
2) managers who don't come from IT, don't understand IT, and yet have resumes which allow them to be hired on to manage IT teams or worse, hired on as an enterprise architect
3) Enterprise architects. You are the absolute worse piece of useless fluff an organization could ever hope to have. Your very existence means that the organization doesn't understand IT, and worse doesn't trust the IT people it's hired.
4) Trust. You don't trust us, and we don't trust you, we don't trust our hardware (which is inadequate), we don't trust other teams, and we certainly don't trust even our own software
5) Time. You don't give us enough to do the things we need to do, to do our jobs well.
6) Money. You don't spend it on the right things, and willingingly give Oracle 4 million for software that doesn't meet our needs, but won't spend $15,000 on software that will. And you definitely won't support free software, because like, it's free so it can't be good.
7) Quality. You don't care about it, especially if the software is from a vendor. You also don't reward good quality when you see it, and don't give two shits about any kind of QA, letting your one QA manager do whatever they do, but won't give them a team to do it (I never understood how a manager can have no one reporting to them).
I could go on and on, but IT in general is a completely thankless job, and the ONLY reason I do it is because I love the challenge, and the money ain't bad either.
Idiot bosses are probably the top reason for work-place dissatisfaction (at least outside of pay). I wish more organizations would pay attention to this issue, and seek more lower-level feedback and correctional measures.
As long as a given boss "looks" fine (or kisses up) to their superiors, they can get away with crapping on underlings.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm 6'3". When I got down to 120lb I started seeing doctors. I was terrified it was cancer. Lots of tests later, they told me I need to eat more. The lost muscle mass is really hard to get back. I'm starting to understand how people die from overwork.
If a tech worker performs their job flawlessly, well, that's what is expected, but heaven help you if something is not perfect. Essentially, perfection is expected as the minimum standard for performing a tech job. Anything less is typically grounds for discipline.
Plausible, possibly women have evolved an ability to put up with more stupid evil shit as a survival tactic to deal with the patriarchy?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I've certainly noticed that as we move into our mid-30s, a lot of my techie friends (who I've known since college days) are increasingly deeply unhappy with both work and home lives. Some of this might well be down to job-specific reasons such as pay, working hours, corporate culture and career advancement. But I don't think that can account for all of it.
Given that my friends have generally gone into techie jobs because they've had a passion for computing since their pre-teens, I suspect that a good deal of it is because they've eroded the barrier between "work" and "hobby". What they do for relaxation in their own time starts to look an awful lot like what they do for a living on the company clock, and the latter inevitably starts bleeding into the former. I've one friend who fought tooth and nail to break into the game design world and succeeded (getting past the entry-level QA and developer roles into one with a lot more meat to it) and who now takes no pleasure at all in actually playing games.
By contrast, I took a decision aged 16 that I wasn't going to do that. As a result, I'm in a field that I never for a moment imagined I'd end up in when I was 16, but while I can't claim that I wake up every morning brimming with enthusiasm for my job, I do generally enjoy it. The work's varied, it's intellectually challenging, being a niche (but in-demand) field the pay and conditions are fairly good and I mostly get to work no more than around 45 hours a week (with the odd exception, but I do get overtime for particular crunch periods). Plus I can go home in the evening and actually switch off from work and enjoy my hobby.
The educational establishment these days puts a lot of effort into persuading people to "follow their dreams" and "work on what interests them". I do think a more mature approach would be to help people realise that turning your hobby into your job doesn't work for everybody and that there's work of interest in a lot of fields if you're prepared to look for it.
The IT Department is like legal or accounting but is often not given that kind of status in the company. When they're not... they're asked to do impossible things, given no authority to do them and are treated like idiots by people that are bigger idiots.
And that creates unhappiness.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
One of the major problems with IT and engineering departments is that they are treated as an expense. They are something distasteful but necessary to the business, but the business would rather do away with it if it could. When you and/or your department are viewed like that, it's hard not to become cynical and annoyed with the other departments.
Often times IT is the gatekeeper of information and much like dentists and doctors, they are often times the bearers of bad news, even though they aren't the cause. They are just the messenger, but when you're told "No, you can't access Facebook during work hours," the IT department is often blamed, even though they didn't make the policy.
Engineering is seen as an impediment to sales and progress because they are the ones that have to keep saying "No, it's not ready yet." or "No, we can't do that." Engineering is like the police department... everyone hates them until they need them. Then when that need is over, it goes right back to hating them.
Seriously? It's an article from tinypulse.com, which tries to sell services to make "companies better" -- it may or may not be accurate, but it's suspect and I'm skeptical. Go ahead and poll me how I feel about this post. I like it far far less than I like my job, which I like a lot.
Young employees and these pollsters are both clueless.
You've been through 4 years of college and now you're doing what you studied for, what you presumably intended your life to be, and you want to be promoted out of what you like and what you're competent at? WTF?
What makes jobs pleasant are enough money to make finances not a problem in your life and decent management. Decent management means not jerking you around or playing mind games, insulating you from corporate irrelevancies and sticking up for you Decent management clears a pathway for you to do your job, provides guidance as required (but not more), and dispenses attaboys.
Decent management is consistent, doesn't lead you into dead-end projects that discard a year of your work. Decent management doesn't make false promises or bumble into situations that require you to work overtime for months, particularly if it's unpaid.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Things that are high on my work satisfaction list:
Work-life balance
Work-life balance
Work-life balance (did I mention work-life balance?)
Good working relationship with my boss
Good working relationship with my coworkers
Non-stressful commute
Things that don't matter:
Work satisfaction (it's work; I get my enjoyment from the part away from work; hence the supreme importance of work-life balance)
How well the company is doing financially (unless I'm going to be laid off soon or I own a huge amount of company stock)
Lunch or snacks (free or otherwise)
Promotion and titles (unless they come with financial compensation and I'm not yet adequately compensated)
Things that sort of matter:
Financial compensation (but only up to the point where it meets my needs, some wants, and savings requirements for retirement; past that it doesn't matter)
An office (cubicles and open space are horrible; I would trade an office for lowered financial compensation)
Even companies that have good reputations emphasize the lunches, cubicles, money, and work satisfaction but never mention work-life balance unless it's redefined to mean the exact opposite. Even here on slashdot, none of the moderated comments mention work-life balance.
There’s a reason companies have free lunchrooms stocked with food and snacks, workout with shower facilities and entertainment rooms – those companies expect you to live there! Even though it’s not written (nor could it be) institutional culture in those companies frowns upon not giving them your soul.
I’m in Seattle in the Tech industry. Everyone knows quite a few who have toiled in these chi siphoning golden palaces of despair – and the story is fairly universal. You either quickly burn out or borg out (99-1 ratio) – there is no happy middle ground.
One of the things that these companies are causing – that few are talking about - is the negative affect on social culture of the City. Seattle is traditionally quite liberal with very much an openness and acceptance of others (it’s one of the things that drew me here). However with the massive transplanting of so many young, single males – in addition to rampant gentrification, violence against some communities has increased in once kitschy areas. It’s quite sad to see hate crimes on the rise.
Technical work sucks because its important.
PR slipped their schedule on redesigning the logo? effect minimal.
Widget, software or service is shipped late? effect will be seen in stock price and may get CEO fired
Company needs to build widget, software or service. Company's financial future will be greatly affected by schedule and quality of widget, software or service. Therefore those making the widget, software or service will be expected to sacrifice for the common good and work in stressful situations for long hours. The managers who can't build the widget, software or service are free to walk around and crack the whip. Those not directly in the chain between CEO and front line workers don't have the stress because what they do doesn't really matter, they can be a day late and the company hardly notices.
Because they're smart. Working is for chumps
Stupid perks and gimmicks are easy things for bosses to implement in order to make it look like they're implementing their bosses' management "vision'. The bigger the company, the more politicians and beancounters they are. They are experts at looking busy and salesmanship.
Have you considers a career in truck driving? You can minimize your interaction with other people while listening to talk radio all day. Perfect echo chamber.
I'll summarize it in 2 points:
1) It isn't fun working for other people. You build their ideas and dreams while yours sit on the back burner.
2) It isn't fun working for morons. Over 95% of my managers/bosses in my 20+ year career were fucking morons. Due to how the business world operates, useless people get promoted while talented people get stuck working for them.
Plausible, possibly women have evolved an ability to put up with more stupid evil shit as a survival tactic to deal with the patriarchy?
Big Red sends her greetings.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
We're everywhere, you ignorant clod.
And FYI, being trans has nothing to do with sexual orientation. And the workplace can only benefit from fewer testosterone fuelled pissing contests and other juvenile crap.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The problem usually comes down to personal empowerment. Perks such as free food and other niceties while are perks comparing one company to an other. But the real issue is allowing employees to have control of their work and their careers.
People have different motivations. Sometimes it is just financial substantial raise, enough to change their quality of life. Sometimes it may just be less of a raise and changes in title where they may have will have more say in how things are done.
Promotions need to mean different responsibilities, responsibilities that are more unique to the organization, not just adding more work, or attending more meetings.
An environment needs to be made, so someone can feel comfortable expressing their ideas and know that they are considered fairly.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think part of the issue here is the assumption many people have is wrong -- that I.T. workers are HAPPIER than average in their jobs.
For years and years now, when I tell random people that I work in computers and I.T., they make comments or suggestions that it's a "good field to be in" and "sure beats working outdoors in the elements", etc. etc. I think there's a pervasive belief that I.T. is a relatively "cushy" job where companies can't afford to let you go, you get good pay and benefits, and you probably like what you do because you're one of those smart people who finds the stuff challenging and interesting.
Personally, I've been doing this stuff for a paycheck for so long now, I can't really imagine having to start from the very bottom doing something completely new/different that I have no experience doing. I've always liked computers and technology itself. But jobs I've had ran the gamut from "usually pretty enjoyable" to "hated almost every minute of it" . The big difference was always management and/or co-workers. And truthfully, it's about finding the work environment that fits where you're at in life too. (EG. When I was in my late 20's to early 30's, one of the big positives of going to work was knowing I'd be able to socialize a bit with people I considered friends, because we had so much in common as co-workers. In some cases, we never even set foot in each other's homes or apartments - yet we felt like we knew each other forever when we sat around drinking and talking at happy hours we attended almost every Friday after work. You can put up with a lot of corporate stupidity when you have a whole group of like-minded work buddies to blow off steam with on a regular basis.) With a family and now in my 40's -- a work environment full of people who always want to stay out late after work is more of a negative. What I crave these days is flexibility and no micro-management! I'd gladly take many thousands less in annual salary if the workplace just judges me based on if I get things done, vs. how often they see me occupying a seat at a desk in the office. I want to work from home when I know I can get things done that way, and maybe take a random weekday off in return for spending a whole Sunday in the office to work on servers while nobody's using them.
All the little "at work perks" are of little value, yet nice extras. If a company thinks that will retain good people, they're foolish. But at the same time, little things like a fridge stocked with goodies in a break area can be really appreciated in the right situation.
My current It job is basically "eyes on glass" situation management for a very large airline, plus a collection of other companies. I work an overnight shift, four 10's. I love my job, but that's mainly because most nights I don't actually do any "work". It's the best job ever; I have eight monitors and a 100mb net connection. All night I watch netflix / primewire. I've seen hundreds of zombie movies now, I sit and cruise the net all night. I remote back to my home network and configure my test servers. I have four weeks of vacation. My boss is awesome too; he's got 20+ years of hands-on experience and it one of the most knowedgeable people in this field I've met. When something does break, he knows exactly who to call to get it fixed, no matter what country their in or what time it is.
But I've worked some pretty horrible positions too, at the same company. The best was a Director who hired her lesbian (and married) lover and made her a manager...neither knew much of anything. One client had their Exchange servers go down; I was told "well they can just use OWA until their back up", not realizing OWA is just the web interface to those same non-responding servers. Eventually those two got busted, neither works there now. The Director was working for a month or so on a different team in the same area I am now; it was VERY amusing to see her almost have a heart attack when she walked in and saw me there...someone she had fired was still there at another position making 2x what I had before. I see it all as karma for working at a crap position and finally getting some kind of reward.
Users.
captcha: evoke
I work for a "mom and pop" shop, as you call it, and I can sympathize with what you're saying. But it goes both ways. We built an application for a company that I am sure you heard of. Let's call it "Acme Inc." One of the application's requirements was that it support SAML authentication. That's fine, we could handle that. All we asked for was some particulars about Acme Inc's environment.
Could we have a sample SAML token, to see what kind of assertions Acme would be requiring? Could we have the SAML version, 1 or 2, that Acme uses? The responsibility for providing us with any of this was "delegated" to people who already have too much on their plate, don't really know what is going on themselves, and who lack the mojo to get a quick response from the various systems administrators at Acme who could help. A couple of weeks later, the stakeholders at Acme are crying, "Come on, come on, come on! We want the product!" Of course, none of these preliminaries have been attended to.
Then, when the product is finally delivered, the guy at Acme charged with putting the product through its paces has no idea how SAML works, and is asking me to walk him through it. (Remember, this was their idea.) We come to find out that he has no test server to use as an "Identity Provider" (don't ask!), and he wants to know if can I help him there.
Granted, this is all ultimately a managerial screw-up. But, my point is that even if a mom-and-pop does code up an LDAP, who's to say the customer has it together on its end?
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Wow, after reading most of these comments I feel so lucky. Where I work the pay is excellent, benefits are great, I can take time off whenever I want, I rarely work more then 40 hours per week and if I do I get comp-time the following week, the business side actually asks for and listens to our advice on project proposals, and older workers are actually valued for their expertise. My boss has an open door policy where we can go in and talk to him about anything and everything, and my co-workers routinely joke around and socialize with each other. We're not afraid to share ideas or ask someone for help with something we are having a problem with, in fact, it is encouraged. Because of this our turnover rate is extremely low and our job satisfaction rate is high. The result of all this is that we routinely get awards for the superior quality work we produce that often meets or beats the deadlines and come in under budget. This is something that doesn't happen when you have disgruntled employees that quit mid-way though a project or do their best to sabotage the efforts of other employees or simply don't give a shit about the quality of work they are churning out. I really wish more employers would grasp the simple concept that if you treat your tech staff like human beings you actually make more money in the end.
Just pointing out the obvious. Some people like me pace so going to a gym onsite make sense. Same with going to get food. Geeks by and large don't like suits and having to take time to take it to a dry cleaner is a drag. Dry cleaning service motivates people to dress nicer.
I think one thing they can do for moral is install the expensive lighting that simulates UV exposure. Maybe going so far as to have it cycle brightness depending on the time of day.
We need to organize and unionize.
Then we'll get the respect we deserve and have earned.
Or at least license us, like a lawyer or doctor. We're that important.
Too many managers do absolutely nothing, in fact, they completely undermine us. Then they hire foreign workers who crap out code cut and pasted from Google.
They talk about shortages in tech, even try to get women more involved, when in fact they're just trying to feed the conveyor belt more bodies they can pay next to nothing.
Reasons I moved from pure tech / software engineering grunt roles to entrepreneur, startup co-founder, business owner, hedge fund manager...
* Non-tech workers are often in over their head: People without technology skills frequently end up as managers, executives and owners, and often don't have the skill to make business decisions that deeply involve or affect the underlying revenue-generating technology. Or they don't hire strong enough people under them. This is why Google and Apple are strong. The founders were technically strong, understood the needs of their customers, understood their products, maintained enough control, hired highly skilled tech people and consequently did quite well. On the other hand there are many companies founded by people who violate one of the biggest rules for creating a startup: "That a startup founder must deeply understand their business, customers, products and the competition." So many owners find themselves running a business or moving into a customer market they don't understand. So when the ship loses its rudder, morale gets bad, key people start jumping ship early, then the ship crashes spectacularly.
* Labor market supply/demand: Consider two facts: Tech is ultra competitive (lots of tech workers entering the work force). And most tech employees tend to be inward focused and may not realize the level of competition they face. By inward focused, I mean most tech workers convince themselves that: “Technology is my passion in life”, “I must find a job in tech”, “If I love tech and I work hard enough I'll be promoted and have an exciting career!”. It all seems logical. But they often don't look around at the world, realize that everyone else in tech feels the same way and fail to consider: “Will I be happier in a tech career versus a non-tech career versus a related career?” or “Is there so much labor competition in tech that wages are pushed down, jobs are miserable, hours too long, employee turnover is too high?” Most true tech workers I know (including some amazingly capable software engineers) are definitely inward-focused. Not management/executive material. They just want to write code. And that's why they are miserable. They never consider alternatives and never realize that tech actually sucks (some areas more than others obviously).
* The reality of the employee-employer relationship: Current-day expectations on the employee-employer relationship are all wrong and fly in the face of long-term history. Its especially rampant in technology. Today's tech workers have a view on employment extending from World War II forward, a time of unusually strong growth and prosperity (and substantially in the USA) and somehow expect this will continue, despite globalization. The reality is we are slowly reverting back to the exploitative capitalism that was seen in 19th / early 20th century industrialized England / USA and in recent decades in China. Employers require loyal employees while employers don't reciprocate and will fire/lay off/kill employees at the drop of a hat. And I mean kill as in overwork, burn out, ridicule, destroy careers, directly or indirectly (by encouraging bad lifestyle habits) Why should tech workers be treated any different than factory workers?
* Business risks: Many corporate attorneys advise corporations against awarding equity or controlling authority to employees. Until an employee demonstrates appreciation of all aspects of the business and is willing to be responsible (and maybe accept liability) and not just quit or litigate when bad things happen, employers will be hesitant to award real power (ownership, share of profits and control) to their employees (so the employees can help steer the ship and enjoy the rewards). This is partly why so many tech workers choose to become entrepreneurs and start and own their own companies.
Because tech is a thankless job, salary is slightly above average but not high enough to make any real difference in standard of living compared to that of non IT work, hours are long (often involve being on call 24/7 - in my experience it's usually expected), no career growth (what you do coming on board is more often than not what you will be doing when you retire or die, whichever comes first), you have to deal with idiots on a regular daily basis who have no clue what you are saying and often have to resort to things like "reboot your PC" or "the internet is down" to break through to them, you will have bosses who know nothing about IT managing you, in managers eyes - if you are good at your job you must be working on something that's easy, if you are struggling you must not be very good at your job, if you are a rare IT person with above average interpersonal skills prepare for your manager to hate your guts unless of course you are good at kissing major bum (managers like IT people to be seen not heard, it hinders their bull shitting tactics), when you save the company from a major problem that would have devastated the company nobody knows or cares, when you don't, better get your resume ready, IT related decisions will be made by non-IT people and you will be the one cleaning up the mess, executives look at you as a cost not an asset, I'm 90% certain you will end up in a cubical, better join a gym or be prepared to gain a couple more chins, paid lunches/game rooms/futuristic furniture/naptime/etc - that's just the media hype - unless you went to an ivy league school this probably isn't going to be your future - sorry. All in all work sucks regardless of where you work but this is what I'm good at so I deal with it and most importantly it pays the bills.
The primary reason is lack of sane hours. Period. Most of the ailments they have can be traced to lack of good sleep and exercise.
Basically tech jobs are closer to blue collar than white collar
A peer and I once made the same comparison. We called ourselves digital maintenance men, because by and large that's what it is.
Except, you effectively have at your command a lot of cheap robots with very limited intelligence. I suppose if affordable, remotely controlled, semi-automated janitor robots become available, the number of janitors will decline by a lot, and the job of robot controller, will require more skill, and make significantly more money.
I want to come to work at 8:30, take an hour lunch and leave at 5:30. During that time I work, I don't facebook, I don't surf the web, I don't IM on my phone. I don't need perks besides a quiet office environment with a comfortable chair. I really don't need lunge chairs in the lounge or a lounge at all or nerf toys or free snacks all day, and I don't want the co-workers those things attract
GOD, he has sent us
Once he told us from heaven:
You are all my Cows
Those "free lunch, in-house gym, and dry cleaning" benefits aren't really benefits. They're an attempt to take away any excuse you have for leaving the office. It's not surprising people who work really long hours aren't happy with their jobs.
1) lack of real status
2) open plan offices (see 1)
3) no job security (see 1)
Why Do So Many Tech Workers Dislike Their Jobs?
a. Pay (folks need to look at the hourly rate, not the salary! and you'll see why it's a valid argument)
b. People they report to (either airhead MBAs or egomaniac, micromanaging, passive-agressive senior-superstar techies).
Come on! I want to just cry. This: https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/443262/Graph_1-1.png?t=1441236482087
After looking at their graph, double 19%. Where should it be?
This is a joke right? (If you didn't click on the link, they are lying with their graphs. They are not to scale and not even close. Once you do something like that with any kind of sampling of data, as far as I am concerned, you are to be completely ignored. Why? You just lied to me. If it were an honest mistake, then your quality control is useless. Either way, you should be ignorned).
AC for obvious reasons. At the former hosting company I worked for. Management moved a good 1/3 of the techs over to non-technical work. They kept promising they'd give us the opportunity to do higher level work again. But, nope. We were doing less technical work than when I started(4yrs ago); and basically doing the work of scripts(check disk space,etc).
For comparison; it'd be like taking Doctors completely off the hospital floor, and giving them the sole responsibility of taking patient history. Not allowed to do anything further, but pass it off to another doctor. Even though you were specifically hired to provide treatment, and more.
Once that happened; tried explaining it to management and getting it fixed. But, they weren't having it. So, I had to leave; I just wasn't doing anything technical anymore. It might've paid well, and had some half-decent perks; but I was hired as a competent admin. Don't treat your employees like crap, and reduce the work they enjoy to hitting the enter key every 15 minutes.
Somehow, I'm always ahead of the curve but can't figure out how to get off of it. I was saying all of this shit 10 years ago and everyone was modding me flamebait and calling me a cynical ass. Fact is, bottom line - software engineers are BAD SALES PEOPLE. I used to be shocked when I found out that the people who wrote the code (the bright work) could and often made less than the dopey jocks that just push the products out the door. That was the old problem - we undersold ourselves. The new problem is that they're bringing in the foreigners who come from a lesser quality of life than most of us grew up with in the US. They're willing to work for less, sleep in bunk beds, and work long hours for shit pay.
The common theme here is that the weak minded ones bring us all down. If half the people are willing to bend to the wills of the unreasonable, then the other half of us are screwed, because we are either going to be treated the same or replaced.
The crazy thing is that half of the foreign workers that I've worked with can't code their way out of a paper bag. It's almost like - management can't understand them well and just assumes that they're doing bright dorky work because they're confused by them. Eventually I realized that engineering is so undervalued that they consider us mostly just a step above janitors. I worked my ass off for my EE degree - I said to myself, "Give me the hardest thing to do, because that HAS to be the most rewarding". Years later I realize my misunderstandings, but it doesn't piss me off any less.
Companies like to show off long lists of ( usually ) useless and cheap perks ( which are also tax deductable for the company ) as an alternative to real perks like higher pay, more vacation time, pensions, realistic work weeks, etc. etc.
When you see that kind of crap, run. It means the company will never recognize you as a professional, nor pay you what you're worth.
Good job putting in 90 hours last week Bob. The project came in on time and under budget since we don't have to pay you coder types overtime. Here's a pair of free tickets to next weeks game. :facepalm:
It started out as something amazing cool. It has devolved into a blue collar job. Remember those guys who worked on boilers and smelters and all the other equipment in a factory of the 60s and 70s? That's your IT staff now, because IT is frequently the "factory" in so many industries that used to push paper and now push bits. Shame. At least those guys who worked on smelters and boilers back in the 60s and 70s had a union and didn't have to work overtime if they didn't want to - and if they did, they got paid for it. Forget calling those guys at home at night or on the weekends too.
Tech work is for beta males.
You are all beta males, or you would have moved out of/never been in tech.
Thus, all your lives suck.
It is important to note that this would remain constant even if, say, computers did not exist.
Psycho managers and back biting culture do not a happy engineer make.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The Tao of Programming?
Because many people across many industries dislike their jobs? Seriously - most people are paid to go to work, for a reason. Sure, some people have the luxury of loving their job (or just liking it) but they're not the norm, they're the exception. Most people find the things they do at work, day to day, unpleasant.
IT workers have the added gripe that no one ever contacts us for good reasons. It's just one endless day of bailing out thankless users / customers. However I think you'll find many other industries feel the same way about their work.
We also have the negative that our work usually follows us 24x7, while many people just clock off at 5 and go do whatever it is they do. Other industries have this, true - but IT probably has this at a higher level.
Because most of them understand Sturgeon's Revelation even if they don't know what it is.
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
You log your hours and get paid for them. The company bills the government for those hours. The more you cost the company, the more they can bill the government.
Have you ever dealt with customers who have no clue how to manage their Email filtering systems... I do every day... let me tell you... there's enough stuff that breaks in horrific ways due to "environment" issues, network, other MTA, Internet stuff in general... Customers doing Dumb Things just makes it about 1000%s worst.
The best techs in these area's are generally miserable as well. Nothing ruins a good day like an user who gets pissed at you, not the maker, not the brand, because his $250 computer can't swim in coffee and live.
1) many states forbid protection from overtime for tech workers
2) forced holiday work
3) low company status
4) forced weekend work
5) forced night work
6) Sales force gets the glory even when tech does something tremendous to make the sale possible in the first place.
7) Told they are "not core business" and replaced by offshore workers (often doing tremendous damage to the business when all the business knowledge is shown out the door and people with no clue about the business replace them.
8) No training ("would make them leave")
But mainly it's the hours worked.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
blue collar: wash hands before peeing
white collar: wash hands after peeing
Simple, really.
The problem is as George Carlin said:
They want obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept it.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I think it's because a lot of people in tech are intelligent and it's exceedingly frustrating to be subordinate to people who know less about your job than you do.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Because they are spoiled and pampered, and aren't treated like the awesome tech royalty that they thought they would be by now.
Now get back to work, drones.
The free smoothies have gone about 60 pounds so far for me. It's one of the job perks I'm looking for in my next company: not getting free food all the time.
The Disney scandal earlier this year happens a lot, where it does not get into the mainstream news, I believe.
It's hard to enjoy a work environment, where each year increases the probability you'll be training your internationalized replacement (H1B | offshored | outsourced to a service company), then get a layoff. ...And finding a next gig, that has a decent set of salary and benefits, becomes that much harder.
In the ten years that I have worked from my current company, most of the data center staff have been replaced by IBM service employees. The EDI department has a large fraction of their workforce as offshore personnel. Scans of the internal job openings, that used to show needs for DBAs, programmers, and such, are almost non-existent for those now.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
This article is yet another useful point against encouraging children to get into tech.
Do we really hate our children so much that we want them to have a low satisfaction job with long hours and a high chance of being unemployed when they get over 40?
I'm willing to put my testosterone level as higher than yours Mr. Macho. What we need are less people like you who wanna play boys club at work.
The grunts know how things work and what's possible in the infrastructure.
Managers have an idea how things.
Directors don't know how things work.
C level has no idea what they even have
A long, long time ago, the grunts totally fell in love with what they do
And then the grunts got promoted, supervising new generation of grunts, and/or got out and formed their own startups
And then they either retire, or their companies got sold ... to the MBA types, whose umbilical cords are still attached to Wall Street / Harvard / Princeton
Most of the new generations of grunts don't get as much chance to get promoted, and the process of starting up their own companies got more and more complicated, again, thanks to the MBA types
I was among the grunts from the decades of yore - I still regularly wet my hands with the techno nitty-gritty, but I am a dying breed ... as many had simply disappeared, and some who are still making themselves available are big wigs doing their gigs in venues such as the World Economic Forum,
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Most tech workers don't get any opportunity to create something new, from scratch. Most of them simply build upon what is already existing or built by people before them, or worse, only fix bugs and do routine maintenance.
Very few - mostly at the Founder, or co-founder levels, would have the chance to actually CREATE. Creation inspires. Rest of the stuff is just drudgery to get the product roadmap completed.
Agile may also have a role to play here since all the product managers want the features to be released YESTERDAY otherwise they will lose X dollars revenue everyday. So obviously, engineers end up writing shitty code, get disengaged and basically feel miserable because all the design patterns and elegant coding practices just don't matter to the business.
Think I know why. Personally very satisfied with my IT job (but not living in the US). But I wanted to do computer science and got what I wanted. I see a lot of collegues even at good companies (including some people working at Google in California) that went into IT through a life accident. It was bright, they were promised fame and money, and they got in. Guess what ? It didn't work out exactly like that. First they discovered that tech hierarchy is essentially flat. While at most jobs you might go up the corporate ladder with a lot of steps (you don't gain that much power but you can say you were promoted), Tech company have like 4 levels of hierarchy. So either, you stand out or you'll stay at the start. To stand out, you have to "live, breathe and eat this stuff" (seen at an industry tradeshow). And on top of that, you need social skills. If you are not able to "eat live and breath this stuff", don't come into IT. If you love this but don't have social skills, you'll have to be really amazing. The focus on efficiency as a core value means that if you are not really good, you'll be treated as "replacable". Second, you might be considered a wizard in your hometown, but once you are in "premiere league", then you are just a developper. And you might not be as good as you previously tought. Every kid, knowing how to use a computer used to be venerated as "a genius". And well, it wasn't that hard to fix a computer. If you come working at Google, Twitter or any other tech company either you are very good and will work on prime stuff or you'll be paid to refactor code or other menial tasks. At all tech companies, you have the elite who define the infrastructure, they are very few, very well paid, and usually happy. But if you're not good enough to do that, you end up, using infrastructure other developped or worse, as a code janitor. Then, there's the value stuff. Well these companies do have values. They are those of the technical society (read Jacques Ellul to know better) which means : No values escept efficiency. Or, if it's more efficient, do it regardless of the consequences. I know more than one people at Google that were not easy with this. Most of them were outsiders from the tech fields. And they quickly were not at ease when they discovered when discussing with senior level people who where in transhumanist or other kind of geek dreams. In these companies either you dream if changing the world by making it more efficient or you are not considered to have a leading mindset. This is not a written set of values of course, but it is essentially that : Uber does not make it for values, or even money, they target the most efficient way to change the taxi industry. And it will take what it takes to achieve it. Society however favors people who make things efficient, so you get money doing it even if you are not after money. That's why you have companies with no business models : They know if they make things more efficient, money will come, so money is not a goal. Humanistic values are not a goal either. If you find pleasure in solving problems, making things efficient and watching how powerful you are then tech work is for you. If not, you should avoid tech companies. NB : And the worst is working in tech for a non tech company, then nobody understand nobody.
Looking back at a few previous employers, I could just shake my head at the practical test one had to perform as part of the interview process, but which tested skills (Java programming) not related to anything one actually did on the job. After some months on the job, you realize that to stay current, you will either need to do a lot of reading (hahaha - those play examples seldom scratch deeper than the surface of some of the stuff needed for actual worthwhile enterprise stuff) or work somewhere else (hahaha - it is likely that you will find out only some time after the interviews that this shop is actually more of the same old).
* EJBs? You mean that pesky indirection shell that we have between our back-end and our front-end (containing all logic, including anything resembling business rules), just because somebody read that one has to have a three-tier-architecture?
* Concurrency? Apart from all the application server constructs that all but hide that, never seen something like that used in the last decade or so.
* Streams, Lambdas, generics, foreach loops? You mean to tell me you actually got around to upgrading your "tried and tested" application server that "just works" to a recent version?
* Unit tests? Documentation? You mean like all that legacy outsource-generated drivel masquerading as code is so generously endowed with?
And come on, those things are still fairly run of the mill... As I passed the weeks doing freshman-level hacking at my new employer (spoken about in awe and envy even by recruiters who didn't try to place my there, and the company that tried very hard to have some sort of googlesque atmosphere by giving out free snacks, having generous free-drinks parties, and a conspicuous social media campaign extolling themselves as an employer of choice) only my frustration (and waistline) grew...
I think one of the best things an employer can do is make it's employees more employable (by exposure to practical experience, not theoretical learning only). As paradoxical as that may sound, that would probably make me less inclined to leave their employ. (But I'm only speaking for myself.)
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Besides not being treated like a peon, I'd say lack of upper management support is the issue.
I think in many cases, they are all about looking like they are actually accomplishing something when they are not, pushing BS until they can hop to their next position, leaving it for the next guy, and generally not really giving a shit about the actual future of the organization.
Instances of how you create "strategies", push whatever shiny technology that you can use buzz words in your next resume, reorg, transform, blah blah blah...
Where I work, there are pretty much three types of systems we support. 1) The most numerous by far are large legacy systems built in the 1990's when IT actually had a budget that despite our best efforts are slowly falling apart, mostly because business requirements keep changing, and they have struggled to keep up. 2) The second most numerous are the system built in the last 5-10 years where we didn't have the proper money or resources, many of which were supposed to be temporary "interim" solutions to be replaced by proper systems at a later date. They never were, and never are. Every time I hear the word "interim solution" in a meeting I cringe and just want to leave the room. All these systems take up a lot of resources to just keep them running as they are prone to either breaking, or were only half implemented in the first place so many things that should be automated either were not, or only partially so. 3) The last group are some larger core systems, that typically are funded all by themselves, and have a dedicated group that only works on it. These trundle forward more less in good shape, however there are only a few of them, and it is largely a factor of the amount of money at their disposal that they are.
We've been trying to replace the legacy systems for as long as I have been working here, and I have been involved in countless exercises of modernization and renewal, only to have the plug pulled at the last minute due to lack of funding support. Upper management expects to somehow replace multiple systems that cost multiple millions of 1990's dollars for nothing somehow and to do it within your maintenance and support funds which is laughable. My last director's big strategy was to kill one of my major projects which would have replaced a system for a fraction of what the original cost (still about a million bucks or so), which would have also set the stage for further savings due to technological efficiency for replacing other systems, in favor of trying to combine ALL of our legacy systems into one "Mega" system. The idea being that because of all the shared components and technology, you would save money that way. I tried to explain to anyone that would listen that you are simply trading multiplicity for increased complexity, and that while you might save in the reduction of one, you are going to increase the cost of the other... In other words, rather than building 30 different systems that each cost about a million bucks to replace, you are going to build a large 30 million dollar system... To think that somehow you are magically going to build the same for less is ridiculous. I even point out two other similar organizations that more less did the exact same thing, and as expected spent way more than they thought, and didn't get any of the savings producing 30-50 million dollar mega systems. Regardless, everyone jumped on that bandwagon, literally spend about half of that 30 million, creation another system that falls into category 2, that functionally didn't replace ANY of the systems it was created to replace in the first place. Now we are simply stuck supporting *another* system. That director has since moved on to another high paying job elsewhere, we are stuck no further ahead than we were, and in fact we are worse now, as the legacy systems keep getting older, we get more bs interim systems to support, and now this half finished Frankenstein of a mega system that does functionally very little...
So my meeting yesterday a *new* 5 year str
Worked an entire year, 200 hours a month on salary, to receive less than 3 whole days off one year later -- 19 hours of PTO to be exact. I'm not paid enough for this. Required to work Saturdays is the biggest slap in the face. Told my boss in January I'm committed to 9 hour days, not 11-12 which is what I worked last year.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I wanted to like my job. I really did. I loved software engineering and producing good solutions that saved the company money. I loved coding and solving problems all day. The problem is: I would never be payed for doing that well, I was just a commodity to HR, even if my solution was 100x more maintainable. You know this when you have co-workers and senior developers asking you to teach them.
The people above me were riding out legacy system maintenance form what they did 10 years ago. They weren't interested in what I had to offer, and were often hostile towards it. Further, my supervisor was someone who got promoted because at one point he raised the stock price. He was not an engineer in the slightest, but he was more than happy to have me lecture and promote practices that would save the company money, without a bump in my own pay, while I was still implementing.
This is the Sociopathic mentality that many engineers deal with:
1 Luddite seniors riding out legacy system maintenance till retirement
2 Flattering exploitative supervisors, that go silent when asked about pay
3 HR that could care less
IT people were 'saviors' a few years ago - You got my [spreadsheet, printer, internet] working again! Thank you!
Now IT is a cost center.
Night and day, get used to it.
Work. All jobs suck after a few weeks.
photosMy Photostream
(39 of them for pay) The zone is when you lose yourself in your project and the activity becomes effortless. I wouldnt say this happens all six hours of a work day (excluding meetings and such). But hopefully a couple hours a day at least. I get in to zone during long exercise, playing music, writing compositions too. The interesting thing about computers is there is always something new every year..
No, the problem isn't that people above don't know how things work, it's that they don't know what it TAKES to make things work.
The more code you write, the more code you support. Even if support, updates, etc on the average program is only 0.5% of your time, what happens after 10 years when you have written 100 programs that are in regular use by the company? Some are more complex and require more support/updates. Some are less. But even at 0.5% average each, you are now spending 50% of your time supporting your old software. Or worse, supporting someone else's software who has long since left the company.
So now you only have 50% as much time to code and test, but management still loads you down with work as if you had 100% of your time to code. So you have to code faster, test less in order to keep up, which means even though you are a much better programmer now, you write shittier code. Which requires more support...
At least 60% of my job is supporting changes and updates to my old code. Someone decides to change a server, or a database, or a reporting format? Suddenly everyone is bitching at me that my program doesn't work. I look like a dumbass because someone else did something without notifying me. Now I have to find and change source files, recompile, test, etc. We're making a new product that doesn't follow our old specs? Now I have to kludge that into the old code. Eventually the old code has so many kludges I have to create new models for my code and rewrite it. Management doesn't understand why working code (barely working) needs to be rewritten. Why do you need so much storage? Where is that data from 8 years ago? I need it now!
Could you expand on the "no database... in unit tests" part?
This guy does a kick-ass job of explaining it:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Crazy-Fast-Build-Times-or-When-10-Seconds-Starts-to-Make-You-Nervous
The point is, *PURE* unit tests don't touch anything but CPU & RAM. Anything else is an integration test by definition, and you have to viligently keep thier impact on your build at bay. Any way you can cut out network/database/filesystem from testing, DO IT!
don't have a clear sense of how they can get promoted,
I've never understood this. If I'm working side by side with 30 engineers on a project, how many of us can reasonably expect to get "promoted"? Does our company need 30 leads? 30 managers? Or do they think that tomorrow there will be 30 new companies for them to all become a manager at? The entire concept of climbing the ladder perpetually for every employee is a lie, has never existed, will never exist, because ultimately we only need so many people in charge. It would be unsustainable to have everyone able to progress their career in the same way and would end up with a company where everyone is a manager/director/vp. Good job guys, we all made it! I'm in charge and so are the rest of you!
First off make sure all the people in charge are technically illiterate. As a matter of fact it's better if they are laughably useless at even operating their own machines for even their small e-mail and spreadsheet requirements. To do it properly you don't have to actually be able to do the work hands on yourself but you have to have enough brains to do a technical job, make sure they are actual morons in charge. Moronic Bloody Assholes may be shortened to MBA on the resumes, those are the ones you want. MBAs who go around spewing idiocy like "You don't have to be technical to manage technical people" they are awesome for lowering morale. First of all it establishes that the company thinks you are less than this half-wit. It also keeps them from getting any ideas that they may one day get a meaningful promotion in their own field over someone who can't even use a computer. Since these explaining what the fuck is happening minute by minute to these people is a full time job they won't engage in any productive activities that would likely result in you having to give them a raise.
Make sure you over hype those tiny perks while their effective compensation shrinks due to frozen raises for the workers who have to handhold these morons in charge through their day. Give the counter productive morons big raises. In fact when they screw up so badly that you have to fire them make sure you give them a huge pay out. It has to be a larger payout for their fuckup than any technical person gets for doing their job in an exemplary fashion.
Take away all their workspace, storage space and privacy, while open concept half cubicles have been scientifically proven detrimental to productivity..fuck it do it anyway. Make sure junior people in other departments keep their work space.
When you lay off good workers make sure you keep the managers that made them noncompetitive and make them vendor managers. Get them to make training resources and work to train the unskilled foreign labour that will replace them. Make sure that people in other departments with less responsibility and lower performance get raises and promotions.
When they come strutting into your office for their annual review with a big pile of awards for the amazing work they did, give them an average for a rating, this works awesome when the person actually sets a company record. Give them a reason you made up by randomly selecting business jargon, "sure you saved the company a few million dollars but you were too vertically oriented in your approach to the interdisciplinary RACI Matrix".
ITIL, if spastic computer illiterate government accountants came up with an IT governance strategy..it would still be better than ITIL . If you like ITIL you probably wear a tie to work every day and someone should take away your computer before you hurt yourself.
Read the synopsis of a bunch of business books and throw around a bunch of terms from management fads. If they get on board and try to implement what you requested just switch to a different management fad and leave them twisting in the wind. We come up with management fads to get you to do things not to get us working together like it says in the manual..yeah we didn't read that manual.
The basic cycle is to get them to come up with cost saving measures, say you're going to implement them until the expensive prep work is all done and then change your mind for no logical reason, rinse, repeat.
When you waste all the money they saved in spite of you tell them they are a cost centre and cut their budget.
If they do anything but grin ear to ear about this whole mess, tell them they have a bad attitude.
Refuse to come up with any solutions or any vision, whenever someone comes up with a creative, cheap solution don't even give them the respect of a real reply just a blank imbecile stare. You may have to practice in the mirror but if you're from a business background chances are you have this one down pat.
This is a patent pending set of business processes. As soon as the patent comes through I'll be suing 90% of the corporations for stealing my technology.
I've worked at a bunch of places, around the country, though never the west coast, and I've *never* seen any of those kind of niceties. We're lucky to have lunchrooms with microwaves, and office coffee.
And why they dislike their jobs? No problem, let me start the list:
1. Upper management thinks handwaving is all you need to do to write code, even if the
idiocy they came up with isn't do-able.
2. Consider the phrase "whatever it takes", coupled with the idiots mentioned in 1)'s idea
of how long it will take to do that, or the "Great Improvement" they dreamed up last
night that will require rewriting half the code.
3. We need to cut your benefits to make us more cost competitive (but we *do* have to
also increase ROI for the vultures who own us).
Feel free to add more, folks.
mark
And companies don't like it if you have a life.
They want you to live at the office for 16 hours a day.
Have a work/life balance by using our on-site gym, and use our laundry service. We even feed you meals!
Which is basically propaganda for you never need to be home, we will do all those shitty chores for you.
There is this little thing called "life". I know, its going out of style what with cyborgs taking over the world any day now or something, but in the meantime we have these inconvenient biological chauvinists who feel they are entitled to "life" including things like, oh, I don't know, a viable family where "viable" includes replacement reproduction that they can afford. Replacement reproduction now costs so much (including an education to keep the next generation in the disappearing "middle" class) that there is emerging an elite in the upper east side of Manhattan who flaunt their wealth by having almost as many children as did the parents of the Boomers.
Disgusting, I know, that people who build the foundations of technological civilization might feel entitled to replace themselves in the next generation -- but there you have it.
Seastead this.
How can I be happy when I don't know if I will have a job next month? One of my greatest job experiences working in IT was having a regular, full-time, job in IT. Complete with all of the benefits that a regular employee gets (OMG, sick leave AND vacation time???) Then the company got acquired by a bigger company that laid off IT and outsourced everything to India and a local IT "services" company. I made some decent money as a private contractor getting called back in to fix everything the "services" company broke, but I will always be miserable without the security of a regular job.
Every time I feel a bit bummed about my job, I look around at the jobs that everyone else in the world is doing and I realize how fortunate I truly am.
If your tech job sucks, find enjoyment somewhere else. There are about 16 other, non-work hours in the day. You could be digging ditches, or serving burgers, or working at the mall.
Procedures, tickets, endless approval steps...
Means that you really only code 10% of the time, and the rest is lost time dealing with all of those pesky things.
Try it! Library of Babel
I've worked for some big companies (100,000+ employees) and some small companies (less than 150 employees) and I have seen the same problems when it comes to IT workers. Regardless of the size of the company, the non-IT folks don't know how to deal with the IT folks with their 'smug sense of superiority' when it comes to handling computer problems and many IT folks don't understand no non-IT workers can tie their shoes if they're stupid enough to call the computer tower a 'hard drive' or use the recycle bin to store files (yes I saw someone using the recycle bin to save files earlier this year, 15 years into the 21st centurary...).
We've all seen the fallout from this divide. IT people are fed up with telling the masses to not click those email links and having to tell the dumb user how to use the tools they have available to them, and the non-IT people are fed up with hearing about how they're doing things wrong or how 'smart' the IT people are when they don't know the first thing about the industry that the company competes in. As a result decisions get made without IT input and things break, data gets breached, and it's always IT's fault and responsibility to fix it.
The problem needs to be looked at from the top C-level down so it can spread throughout the company. While the C-level people known the ins and outs of their industry (finance, automotive, health care, etc) they'll still fail without a solid understanding of how to correctly use IT to move forward. That's that the CIO is for.
Just having someone with the job title is useless as well and unfortunately appears to be pretty common. They take someone they like (or don't like) with no IT understanding and put them there for political reasons and then wonder why nothing changes. The good CIO may not know the industry the company is in to the extent of the other C-level people, BUT will know enough to be able to help them make good decisions while understanding how IT works in that industry (and it's going to be different depending on the industry). In addition to that, the good CIO will listen to the IT workers and try and address their needs. If they are respected on both sides then the good CIO can get more IT people hired to let IT workers have normal work days, get IT workers included in the company picnics or other social events, competitive wages, etc, while balancing their needs with the needs of everyone else.
The not for profit I work for is pretty good about not totally alienating IT workers without having a CIO (we're included in the social events, get back office rewards when the front line staff exceed expectations, etc), but we're still pretty isolated and the internal politics and decision making still ends up with decisions being made without us that we have to somehow magically make work and still pass IT audits. While no CIO, I'm still happy there and unfortunately it's a very rare thing to find, but I can still see the need for a good CIO to fix the shortcomings we have to get caught up to what the non-IT people get.
Simple and silly example: HR brings in a game console for the lunch room, encouraging people to play on their breaks.
Every single person who used it for any length of time ended up getting talked to by their boss because they were "getting a reputation for slacking off". Basically, taking HR up on their "perk" was taken as a signal that you were a bad worker.
At the same time, even though "lack of communication between departments" is perennially at the top of the feedback from employees, and management insists that they want to "break down silos", heaven forbid you actually spend time talking to other departments - that's time you could be working!
Their graphs make me sick to my stomach.
Pick any other career that requires continuous unpaid study just to stay in the game with huge hours and no respect, plus unlimited competition from visa hires who work unpaid overtime and outsourcing ? The IT worker is on a par with a Truck driver (or Indian book-keeper, or short order cook), but probably earns less. Granted Lawyers have a horrible existence, respect is dropping, but pay generally increases as they get older. The top skilled ones make a lot! After 40 who is a has-been?
Name another career where people say they can do your profession? To be fair doctors cop a serve from know-it-all google patients, but don't face unregulated entry - but also do cop overtime abuse as apprentices.
Blah blah blah, relative to other jobs/professions, IT is the pits, and the 2nd worst job after illegal immigrants being exploited for pennies.
Besides IT workers, Electrical and Chemical engineers have also been blasted by visa imports. Tis a race to the bottom.
No, you're absolutely right about this. But most of the people lumping you into that broad category don't understand enough about what goes on in the field to make more of a distinction. (Well, I do think people generally grasp that software coding is one thing, and everything dealing with the hardware or cabling itself is another thing. But that's about as far as they can divide it down.)
On the flip side? You admitted you actually DID all of those different tasks before, so that implies you were capable of all of it under the heading of an I.T. worker!
"free smoothies in the cafeteria only goes so far", Says someone with a cafeteria AND free smoothies.
If you look at various forums of "kids" asking about jobs in tech, most of them ask questions like:
* What job/company pays the most?
* What job/company has the most prestige?
* What job/company can I make $200K a year in the first year?
The common theme: they are asking questions that NO techie who is any good or enjoys tech ever asks! They are the wrong people for tech. Tech is the wrong profession for them.
That's why they hate their jobs.
OP states, "Granted, the survey in question only involved 5,000 respondents, so it shouldn't be viewed as comprehensive." Statistically speaking, 5,000, if randomly selected, should be sufficiently comprehensive to get a good representation of the entire population.