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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
As far as consumers are concerned, that's what HP is. However as far as enterprise is concerned, HP is a best known as a major vendor of network, server, cloud, and storage appliances.
In fact, HP is actually in the process of splitting the company into two separate entities with two different stock tickers. One company will do the printers and other consumer grade crap, and the other will focus on enterprise grade technologies.
But yeah, other than that, they basically only bet on sure things these days, and are much more iterative than innovative.
Just from your description it sounds like your company started off as a small 1-5 person operation where you had to know most things and it grew from there. The problem isn't bosses like you who have been there. It is when someone comes in with their MBA having never dealt with the technology they are now making decisions about. I'm currently in one of those situations. Company was sold, old boss who had started the company is no longer, new boss has no clue about the technology, but he is the one making decisions on it.
One thing gets suggested to him by the staff, another gets suggested by the salesman. Sales guy throws a pitch at him about how what we suggest is about to become obsolete because their new gadget is so much better, of course the sales guy gets to sell his new gadget that doesn't really work for what we need and we are the ones that have to make due equipment not suited to the job.
Yes, it depends on the leadership, some cases they know to trust the people making things work over the sales pitch, unfortunately it seems the larger the business the more likely the person in charge is to listen to the sales guy and not the people doing the job.