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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.
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"
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.
I interviewed at a place that had some of that, like an air-hockey table. I didn't see anyone using it. Maybe it got some use over lunch break, but stuff like that seems like a waste because if you use it, then you're obviously not working, and that isn't going to look good if you use it too much. You could use it after work in your off-hours, but who wants to spend their spare after-work time at work? By then you're ready to get home and eat something.
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.
I've never worked for a company that had a significant manufacturing component, but I kind of wonder how the blue/white collar split works there for the people who setup, maintain and manage seriously complicated factory systems. I think they might have been called millwrights at one time.
Are they treated like blue collar people (probably, if the job involves any serious mechanical tools), or because of the sophistication of the equipment (all computer driven and complicated) are they treated like dirt, like other blue collar jobs, with all the usual management/labor hostility, clock punching, etc.
And why do "office" jobs seem to escape a lot of that labor/management hostility? Even the lowly marketing associate seems to get treated better than the most skilled blue collar worker. I've known some electricians who were really intelligent and used to sort out cabling issues in my data center better than I could, even though he didn't know how to configure the equipment. He'd make suggestions via some kind of intuition that never dawned on me.
This. When a salesperson gets downsized, they get two weeks to tie up loose ends, 1-2 months of severance.
A tech person? You don't even get to clean your desk. Security escorts you to the door, and there is a good chance that your car likely got towed because it is an "unauthorized vehicle".
A few years ago, One small company I worked at got bought out and "merged" with an offshore place.
Well, the day the shit hit the fan, my cube was in the middle of a row. A ruckus was starting at an end row, where some guy was getting into people's faces. The dialog went like this, from cube to cube:
"You are fired. Leave at once."
"Are you threatening me?"
"SECURITY!"
*two guards rush in, jam a stun gun in the poor schmoe's back, other guard twists an arm, drag the person away*
When the fourth guy on the row was having his face used for decoration on the carpet by two rent a cops, I got the Hell out of there, out an emergency door and to my vehicle. I was ready for a three day weekend, so had my pickup truck + truck camper parked in the street. It was lucky I did, since I found out later that the company towed every single employee vehicle in the garage.
To boot, the guy called up a few weeks later demanding $1000 because I "didn't follow proper procedure when exiting a secure building". I mentioned in very terse words that that won't happen anytime soon.
CAPTCHA-"confront". Quite apt.
Snarky, but that really hits things on the head. Simply put, people smart enough to be in IT can do far better in other jobs (money, social level). Western civilization simply doesn't value engineers (except maybe for Germany).
Agile...without actually establishing any direction.
That's the point of Agile! If you can't do it in one sprint then you cannot do it. We've promised a lot of features to customers that development could not work on because they can't be completed in two weeks. Agile has made my life much easier. You only plan and work on one small, well-defined task at a time. In the six years since our board voted to require Agile and hired a certified scrum master, the work we've done has all been very well-defined and we have met every single sprint deadline for every single developer. We have completed 120 sprints with around twenty developers on average. That means we succeeded 2,400 successful dev-sprint units, and with an average of 2.5 user stories completed per sprint per dev, we're at over 6,000 completed user stories all delivered on time! It makes the developers and management look awesome. The only downside of Agile is that we've lost our three largest customers because we can't deliver, and it looks like we're going to have to layoff most of the team before the end of the year.
Yes. The only difference between tech and other jobs is that tech people think the C-suite SHOULD know how the IT stuff works while other professions accept that it is their job to make sure the next person up the chain knows enough to do their job. The C-suite, whose job is to guide the company strategically, does not need to know how the hardware and software works on a detailed level, or at all really.
The idea that the C-level guys don't need to know any technical details is exactly what's wrong with businesses today and why so many projects turn into multi-million dollar clusterfucks.
At one time, most companies were run by people who had a tech background and actually knew the details of what was going on. It's not surprising that most tech jobs suck when the company is run my some clueless dolt who views developers as nothing more than glorified secretaries (Hey, it's just.typing, how hard could it be).
This. Lots of tech workers spend 60 hours at work, get paid for 40 of them, and do useful work for 30 of them, mainly because of mental fatigue.
An ideal tech company would split the company in half—a M–W shift and a W–F shift. Employees would work 24–27 hours per week, and Wednesdays would be spent on meetings and other soul-sucking tasks that require everybody to be present at the same time. It would then pay 60% of the salary for 60% of the work. Workers would be happier because they would have more free time, and the company would be happier because actual work per dollar spent would increase by up to 33%.
> The only downside of Agile is that we've lost our three largest customers...
My last startup was Agiled out of existence like it sounds like yours is headed to. We had a sixty person team between devs, product, project management, and QA. To story point every task, it usually took us longer to explain and estimate about 1/4 of the tasks as it took to do them. That meant instead of spending one man-hour to do a task, we spent sixty-man hours. For example, most of the web-related web tasks, like changing a stylesheet or wording, took about twenty minutes to do and test while they took at least five minutes to explain in sprint planning. That means a simple task takes about 5.5 total man hours instead of 0.5. At $100 per hour per employee (including benefits and other costs and since we're in the Bay area), that meant, for example, changing the size of text on a web page cost us $5,500. Agile is a great way to waste time and money.
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.
Ouch! Hot button issue with me.
The diversity push is one of the more irritating things I've experienced in my career. For several years we have had to interview someone who is a minority or female before we can hire anyone. Sounds like a simple way to improve diversity, doesn't it? 'Course, unless you can get a "diversity candidate" to apply, you can't hire anyone. We love when a "diversity candidate" applies, because we can finally hire someone. It's even better if the "diversity candidate" is the best-qualified candidate, because then we don't have to argue with HR about not hiring the "diversity candidate".
BTW, the "diversity candidate" phrase came from HR.
Yeah, this is why all this push to get women into IT is annoying as hell. Has anyone actually *asked* them why they're not interested?
In the Take our sons and daughters to work da Activities I participated in for many years, we did poll the young ladies - and the "sons part of that was only added after some sexism complaints, but we all knew it was really about the young ladies.
STEM wasn't at all n their radar. They were interested largely in becoming veterinarians, Doctors, MBAs, and a low but still surprising number wanted to be entertainers. These were sons and daughters of engineers, scientists, technicians and programmers. People who largely encouraged and told their daughters they could be anything they want ot be. The part of my demonstrations that was well recieved was 3-D animation and photography. Computing and database work? You could see the girls eyes glaze over. They simply were not interested, not one little bit.
And there were no mentions from parents regarding how their daughters were being ostracized or sexually harassed by the boys. They just were not interested. in that kind of career.
One thing that some of us came up with was that the young ladies might have seen their fathers coming home late at night after going in early the morning before, and on and on and on and on while they were growing up, maybe missing out on a trip to Disneyland when their classmates did, because dad or mom was working on some hot project. Then another hot project, than another.
Considering that my son saw the many all nighter's I did, the 60 - 80 hour weeks, the many canceled vacations - I canceled many more vacations than I ever took - and decided "Fuck that shit!"
I was sort of lucky in that while I worked my ass off, I was well respected. Pay was good also.
But both of those were the exception, and I did many different things, pretty well. Most of the IT folks were looked at as rather lowly.
I'll bet the poor reputation of the career (as you point out) is one big, big reason. You have to know all kinds of arcane crap, you have to go through hard degree programs in college, the pay isn't all that great, workers are laid off all the time, and the social factor sucks. Women are usually much more social than men anyway (especially compared to IT/engineering men), so why would they be interested? If a woman's smart she'll probably go into finance, law, or medicine instead.
Hehe, I started commenting before I read your whole post, and look how the polling results I posted line up very well with your comments!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No freelancer and no contractors. We never needed them or, really, wanted them. I'm sure you're great and all that - that's not the problem. The problem is that it's not a jail and you can leave any time you want. The reason they don't want to leave is because we paid well (I'll touch on that below) and had great benefits.
I think I'll touch on both of those and remember to say thank you for the compliments - I appreciate it. From the sounds of things, you'd have fit right in. I just wouldn't have given you an incentive to leave.
For starters, well, in my industry we paid more for hardware and software than we paid for employees. Yeah, and we paid the best in the industry though I suppose you could say we were, at the time, pretty much the only ones who did what we did. (Traffic modeling, both vehicular and, eventually, pedestrian but "on a computer.") I don't know every industry out there but I can say that labor is absolutely one of the lowest expenses a business has. If your boss says they can't give you a raise call them a liar. We spent more money on Xerox (I kind of hate those pricks) than we spent on a single employee. (We did a lot of printing.)
I wasn't really expecting much of a response so I hadn't thought this through or anything. Hmm...
We weren't a "family." We were all friends. I'll try to give an example? I'm not the most articulate.
The office shut completely down on a number of occasions. At one point we had a guy in the server room who lost a good portion of his family in an accident - a wife and his two kids. The office was a ghost town and stayed that way for a couple of days and was completely closed during the day of their funeral. We did miss a client visit during that time, sort of. They called me on my personal cell phone (they were bigger back then) and I listened politely, explained the situation in some rather vulgar terms, and the rep actually sent flowers and food - lots of food. It turns out that the money was from their own pocket, the client was a state government and would not have paid for it.
Things worked out well. I posted another reply above to another AC.
I guess my point is that you'd probably have hung up your freelancer hat and stuck with us. Well, assuming you fit in and enjoyed the work. I think that pretty much everyone did both the fitting and the enjoying. I'd like to think they did and would actually feel like a bit of a failure if they didn't. My greatest assets were luck and the willingness to shut the hell up and listen.
I don't know everything - not even close. It's up to you to tell me what I need to do and, importantly, why. I'm not an idiot - you needn't explain it like I am five but making it overly complicated isn't going to help you convince me either. I will stop you and ask you very specific questions and we can waste both of our time extracting the information from you or you can just tell me - it would save some effort and time.
Except DB admins, seriously... Have you ever met a DB wizard who was, you know, not just a little odd? I don't know what those guys do, I mean I know what they do but not really, but they make stuff work and when you're crunching a TB or two of data then you REALLY want a good one. I don't care that he was gay, vegan, or had a habit of not talking to anyone for weeks at a time - and then saying something profound. What I care about is that he constantly looked like the guy who was going to snap and bring an AR-15 to work - and we were NICE people. I was more worried he'd use it on the hardware than on a human.
Anyhow, I eventually was offered an absurd amount of money to sell my child. The parent company does almost nothing except niche fields that fill government contracts. You probably know who they are, actually. They do everything from food to security to information services. I do kind of giggle at the idea that they now have a Human Resources department. I think a distinction needs to be made. Humans aren't resources, they're assets and, more importantly, humans.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."