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.

Comments

Major disconnect from layers

[mwfischer]

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.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Anonymous Coward]

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 assumption of intellectual superiority of the IT worker is the problem. The problem is that IT workers are on average "smart", younger than average, ambitious, etc. Management exploits perks as a recruiting tool and then... depression... work is still work, even with a ping pong table. These kids would be just as depressed without perks but management needs to compete.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[HornWumpus]

In other words most tech workers are whiny bitches.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[taustin]

I'd be more inclined to limit it to "all young people." The older they get, the more jobs they get fired from, the less likely they are to continue to same behavior (though some never learn).

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Archangel Michael]

I am assuming you've never had a C type person make huge IT decisions without having even consulted with IT.

In my 30+ years of experience, I've seen enough clueless C types make clueless decisions because some dude in a suit with a briefcase sold them a nice fat lie.

In our case "All it will take are a couple IP addresses and a server. No other IT is required" If it takes IP addresses and a server, it requires IT support. And in this case, the product was so fucking horrible that it requires regular (several times a week) IT support, just on back end crap from a product designed so bad that it just breaks every two weeks from design flaws.

Or this, "We've already bought it, you WILL support it" (with no additional IT funding for more IT help) multiple times over.

Or buying a mom and pop application with no Enterprise class requirements in its design. "What do you mean you don't do LDAP for authentication. There is no fucking way I'm entering 16,000 users by hand"

The issue with certain people is that they want "Shiny Pretty Technology" without caring, or wanting to know about what it actually takes to run. And it happens in enough organizations that I know that it is not an exceptional experience.

You're right, the C types don't know shit, which is why they should stay out of shit that they have no clue on. Yet they think they know better than the people who REALLY do know whats going on. In short, IT is a bastard child in most organizations, one that has more power than most of those C types actually know.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[plover]

It's a huge problem when the CIO isn't an engineer. That's simply a disaster in glorious slow-motion Technicolor. Look at the time-lapse downfall of HP from a respected engineering company to one that's known today only for selling printers that are cheaper than their overpriced ink. (Thanks, Carly, I'm sure this country could use a genius of your caliber at the helm.)

But the more common source of discontent happens when developers are tossed a pile of requirements and told "shut up and make this X." Every developer I've known will have serious questions about those requirements, because they're always filled with errors and inconsistencies. In most cases the flaws are not evident until after development has progressed beyond the Rubicon. Being able to discuss the requirements with the stakeholder, to make suggestions on how to improve the product, to develop the best possible X to further the business, that's what developers crave. Give them that, and a steady paycheck, and you have happy people with satisfying jobs.

And if you tell them "hand this coding over to Haich WunBee over at Outsorcery, Inc.", don't be surprised if satisfaction drops.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Qzukk]

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.

And yet, I'm pretty sure Boeing's CEO doesn't order the employees to start building planes without wings (I don't care, just do it! You're the engineer, you make it work or I'll find another that will!) Something tells me he knows planes a bit better than "not at all, really".

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Archangel Michael]

It isn't insane. I don't expect different results. In fact, after 30 years, the moment I think I have seen everything, some user does something completely unexpected.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be more inclined to limit it to "all young people." The older they get, the more jobs they get fired from, the less likely they are to continue to same behavior (though some never learn).

Biased opinions like yours regarding millennials is what discourages younger generations from respecting those who are: already established, who didn't have to worry about a great recession caused by the previous generation that is constantly threatening the potential job and stock markets, who didn't have to be concerned with competing against off-shore, who knows that they will at least be able to collect Social Security, who is the generation that put little to no effort in raising their children (these now millennials) other than shoving a TV in front of them while said parent is partying in a garbage can downing beers and listening to Sting.

Biases are bad generalizations as you can tell: Don't use them. Each individual should be treated uniquely.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[knightghost]

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).

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[ArmoredDragon]

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.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[rudy_wayne]

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).

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[wyHunter]

And, it's why so many European companies that sell engineered products (German cars, anyone?) so frequently eat the lunch of American companies doing a similar thing. If you do not know the products your business is building, you do not know your business.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[TWX]

You can physically look at a plane. You can touch the plane. You can even conduct real-world experiments like windtunnel tests with smoke introduced to observe with the naked eye how the machine might fly, and you can grab the wings and pull them in different directions to see if the fuselage cracks.

With computers and telecommunications equipment the bulk of what actually makes it special is in the abstract. You can see devices and cables, but what actually makes the processing and traffic flow function properly cannot be touched, and in some cases isn't well-represented even when data is captured and plotted, and worse, seemingly small changes in this abstract layer can have far-reaching consequences.

That's the problem when someone that doesn't understand the technology dictates technological decisions for IT, they have no idea what it takes, so they cannot evaluate if their IT people are honestly telling them of the minefield in front of them or if the IT people actually are lazy; they fall into MBA-whip-cracker mode to make it happen, and the IT workers are left with the stress of being between the unstoppable force and the immovable object.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Shadow of Eternity]

Saying C-level guys don't need to know how their shit works is like saying the people in charge of subways and railroads don't need to know how trains work, and then wondering where the problems are coming from when you get a boss that expects two head-on trains to "move sideways" instead of colliding.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[drinkypoo]

And yet, I'm pretty sure Boeing's CEO doesn't order the employees to start building planes without wings (I don't care, just do it! You're the engineer, you make it work or I'll find another that will!) Something tells me he knows planes a bit better than "not at all, really".

Sure, but he doesn't actually need to if he's smart enough to listen to the people who work for him. You ask your engineers about engineering changes. You ask bean counters about counting beans. A company the size of Boeing does a feasibility study before they change toilet tissues.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Xicor]

while the people above us may not need to know how to do our jobs, they consistently end up either making, or not making decisions that really arent up to them. if we propose a change to one of the systems that we use for programming, it shouldnt be up to the management on whether or not we switch... but they will consistently decide that it IS their decision and then just sit on it for months and MAYBE say no or yes, but often they just sit on their hands.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[taustin]

I'm an asshole. It says so on my character sheet.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[thinkwaitfast]

http://phys.org/news/2011-06-a...

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[KGIII]

I owned my own company for a long time. Eventually I was kicked out of my own server room by people I paid to do a job. You know, I listened. I could do the job well enough but they could do it so much faster. Eventually I no longer even maintained my own code. "Code comments go in the code and not on a pile of coffee soaked index cards, asshole." Again, I listened. Sure, I could do all those things effectively - efficiently if you don't count my time but I paid experts because, well, they were better at the job than I was.

I suppose you could have called me a CEO, I mean I technically was, but we weren't real big on titles. Hell, my company paid me less than some of my employees made (of course I had the cookie jar).

I guess my point is that not all bosses think they know everything. My understanding is the new parent company has kept the culture much the same. It was not entirely uncommon to see a curious look when I admitted I did not know something and would like to consult with someone who did before making choices. I can only surmise that the behavior is due to ego.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[jsrjsr]

The one I really like is -- "We bought that company for their technology, so figure out how to use it in a product!" when the company already has several other products shipping that do the same thing as the new technology.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[ArmoredDragon]

To be honest (and my employer probably wouldn't like to hear this) I'm not a big fan of HPs enterprise solutions. It mainly comes down to them typically eschewing standards that everybody else uses (such as IPMI) and then slaps a fee on top of it (their ILO feature.) And then to make things worse, you have to have an active service contract in order to get firmware updates, even if they're only security related.

This might be fine for a big IT shop, but if you're a small to medium sized business (which most IT purchasers are) then HP is a terrible choice, because your shiny new servers may very well be doomed to the trash heap after 3 years unless you're willing to spend more than you can afford.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[mjwx]

No, HP is pretty much dead in the enterprise as well. Their hardware is now lacklustre and only seems to exist as a part of selling their overpriced consulting services under HP Enterprise Services (Formerly EDS).

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[TheGratefulNet]

article about HP worker asking for help from the government: http://www.businessinsider.com...

yeah, like the government has fought for the rights of the worker over BigCorp in the last 20 years. yeah, right. dream on!

companies don't care about you. government (US) does not care about you. we have no unions in our field and so we have zero power. where it really matters, we have no one to speak for us.

do you guys think this has gone on long enough? and if not, what will it take to finally convince you that we need collective bargaining, just to level the playing field?

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[jafac]

And yet, I'm pretty sure Boeing's CEO doesn't order the employees to start building planes without wings

In fact, they did. See: the X-37.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[jafac]

It is true: that "engineering types" often don't have enough background in business to make smart business decisions. The idea that you can shoehorn an MBA at the top, and still have innovative spark that the founding engineering principals gave it, is absolute horseshit. Maybe there's some envy in there. The MBA-types think that the magic formula is to toss out some stock options, and pump-n-dump the equity, and that will motivate the employees as much as their former roles in creating a technology innovation did before the "professional management" took over. In fact, a lot of low-level engineers are fooled by this, and they continue working their 80 hour weeks. Only to get fucked over when the MBA's cash-out with millions, for inventing precisely nothing.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Qzukk]

Goes to show that I don't know enough about planes to be the Boeing CEO :)

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[multimediavt]

An example of your point would be Lotus Notes. Users loved it. Admins hated it with the fire of a thousand white hot suns.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a big IT shop, our annual spend with HP is probably at least a million dollars, and it very definitely isn't fine for us either. None of us, not one of us in the entire company, is able to download any of the paywalled firmware updates because no-one is able to tell us what our "entitlement number" is, including our account manager. Searches for downloads that aren't paywalled go in a circular loop from "go to the HP Enterprise site!" to "you need to log in for that" to "actually you need to go to the HP site for that" to "go to the HP Enterprise site!". Round and round it goes.

Our previous service contractor for our datacenter hardware had a four-hour SLA for a spare part for broken kit but they've been half forced out of business because they're no longer allowed to perform firmware fixes. The new HP contract we were essentially forced to take out as a result ostensibly has a four hour SLA too but as an example we currently have a ticket open for some new kit that was DOA; HP are insisting we run an exe (or indeed anything) to fix the BIOS when the problem is BIOS is so fucked that the board never makes it to POST. They're refusing to replace the hardware until we've run the firmware upgrade and their call center staff are either so dunderheaded they can't understand this or they've been outright told "no-one is allowed to authorize a hardware replacement until firmware has been updated". Because of all the hoops our engineers now have to jump through with hardware problems, repairing hardware has now gone from "gets fixed same-day" to "might be fixed tomorrow, or next month after seventeen hours of our time have been wasted". We've been lucky so far in that none of the afflicted hardware sits in our tier 1 section but it's only a matter of time and when we get SLA burn time on our important shit as a result of HP's intransigence you can expect our bosses to go fucking nuts.

This constantly unfolding train wreck has been going on for months now. HP are is complete disarray and we're looking at other vendors.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[dunkelfalke]

It is not a plane, it is a spacecraft. And it has wings.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[tigersha]

I live in Germany and I can ensure you that the people I work for do not value Software Engineers.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked for someone like you multiple times (as a freelancer). I just have to say: Thank you so much! If you need something, be sure to call. I'll drop other clients just to be with someone who knows how to get things done in this manner.

If anyone finds a boss like this, latch on the position and never let go.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[KGIII]

Eventually... I started off with a contract large enough to support two of us. At the end there were about two hundred with offices in five states - two being "dummy" offices which were used when we needed additional staff in the area as we needed a lot of human interaction and those offices were only partially staffed. We grew and it was never a "family" but it was always "tight knit friends."

I learned a lot from having great people around me. I don't think any of the people who were there the first ten years or so still actually need to work? When I sold the company I made sure they were all well rewarded for having given me the chance to grow. Yet work they do. They're geeks (and a few crazy folks) and I don't think they were ever in it just for money. We paid very well but, more importantly, we had true benefits.

Sure, we had stuff like health care, 401k (eventually) or a pension - up to you, and all that crap.

You get drunk the night before? Yeah... We've been there. You've got choices - just be honest. One of us would probably take the rest of the day off and go out drinking with you so you could finish up your run. If there were no clients expected in the office then there may have been a pool table in the back and probably some alcohol. I'm not admitting to anything but - if that happened - it often resulted in a day off for a few people (including me).

We were a bunch of mathematics geeks, CS geeks, some IT geeks, a strange prick who was a DB admin (those guys are wizards - and freaks), and a half dozen oddball folks who didn't really do much. Oh - and no HR but we did have two secretaries. I eventually decided I needed someone to man the phones full time and I eventually needed one of my own.

The turn over rate was unbelievable. We had one person quit, a couple retire, and a few left when I left. They had the chance to try other things and did so. I still maintain contact with a few of them as well as a number of people who still work there. Once in a while they actually call me up and I go in for some contract work but I've not had to do that in a while and I'm not sure I would again, should they ask.

When I do return it is a little harder to leave every time. Ah well... I'll type some more to the other AC below you.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[KGIII]

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.

Re: Major disconnect from layers

[ChrisGombola]

As it should be.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[tehcyder]

Biased opinions like yours regarding millennials is what discourages younger generations from respecting those who are: already established, who didn't have to worry about a great recession caused by the previous generation that is constantly threatening the potential job and stock markets

Oh fuck off, 2008 wasn't the first, or worst recession during my lifetime. You get one about every ten to fifteen years, but if you're twenty you can't remember the last one and think you're uniquely cursed.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[RabidReindeer]

Biased opinions like yours regarding millennials is what discourages younger generations from respecting those who are: already established, who didn't have to worry about a great recession caused by the previous generation that is constantly threatening the potential job and stock markets

Oh fuck off, 2008 wasn't the first, or worst recession during my lifetime. You get one about every ten to fifteen years, but if you're twenty you can't remember the last one and think you're uniquely cursed.

Absolutely. And the offshoring thing - which is relatively new - hits older workers just as hard as younger workers. The difference being that older workers get hit harder finding new work since then, but younger workers have the pleasure of seeing it hard to find work for their entire lives. Or at least until the Western countries sink down to Third-World levels.

Re: Major disconnect from layers

[BVis]

Why do you hate America? Clearly playing golf with the right people makes you more qualified to make technical decisions than the guys who do actual work implementing the shit ideas you insist they use.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[BVis]

Or the engineers see what a pile of horse shit management is at most companies and just NOPE their way away from any management training or experience. I've been offered positions that have a management component, even if it's just supervising 2 or 3 devs. I've turned them down; ain't nobody got time for that. I just want to code. Unfortunately, for some insane reason the next step in my career path requires that I manage people. I can't manage people. I'm shit at it; I've tried. I just don't have the patience, skills, or attitude that is required of a manager.

"Training managers" makes me think of trying to teach a pig to sing. It's not only that most managers either aren't smart enough to understand IT, or that they lack the interest or motivation to really understand the issues, it's that by the time you finish training up the manager, the computing environment has changed and the training is largely irrelevant. Even if you do manage to get relevant training into their heads, chances are they'll use that knowledge relatively rarely and won't become proficient. I happen to have a manager who codes (poorly), but that's because he was hired as a developer, but then was basically told by middle management that he could take the manager position or he could find another job.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[plover]

It's actually the same root cause for both -- incompetent management. Having an idiot in the C$(x)O suite forcing competent engineers into supervisory roles for which they are extremely unqualified does as much damage as having him force the engineers to follow Waterfall development methodology.

And it's absolutely not a matter of training. A CIO who isn't an engineer and who hasn't spent at least part of their life actually doing engineering can't be "trained" to be a competent engineer; not without giving up the CIO gig and becoming an actual hands-on engineer for a while.

By the same exact logic, you can't take a random engineer out of the pool, send him to manager school, and then stick him in a corner office. The day-to-day tasks of scheduling and spreadsheets and budgets may not be technically difficult, but managing is all about handling people, and many engineers won't have the schmoozing abilities needed to make them comfortable in that role. Ever take a Meyers Briggs test? Ever notice how the managers' results are generally distinct from those of the engineers? There's a clue.

Just like someone chooses to go into engineering, some people choose to go into management. The office of the CIO is best served when it contains someone who naturally has both talents.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[BVis]

That's the new American Dream. It used to be "work hard, play by the rules, you'll get a middle-class existence and the chance to provide better opportunities for your children". Now it's "Get some socially inept chump to break his back without paying him overtime and keep all the money for yourself".

Re: Major disconnect from layers

[cayenne8]

Screw the perks.

Just give me tons of money..the more the better and I"ll be happier.

If they can let me work from home....even better!!

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[KingMotley]

I live in the western civilization (USA), and where I work, they definitely value engineers.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[KingMotley]

Sounds like you did everything right, and your company likely had a much higher chance of succeeding because of it.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Ryanrule]

Tech knowledge should be as much a requirement of a ceo as an mba.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Ryanrule]

the mba was designed to go to the qualified engineer, so they can lead. instead it goes to the business bro, so they can douche.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[KGIII]

I'd like to think so. But... Well, no. Not everything, not even close. Though I learned from mistakes and already knew when to ask for help. I think a big thing is knowing your limits and being honest with yourself where those limits are? I can only guess, really. I also didn't chastise people for making mistakes, for a variety of reasons. What I did do is get a bit unhappy with someone who thought they were capable and then made mistakes instead of asking for help. It was usually a very short and brief problem - we fostered the idea of being able to ask for help.

Nobody knows everything and knowing your limits is essential. I mentioned earlier that employee salaries are actually a really tiny percentage of the expenses. If you worked for me and needed help then we will hire help - we will find the best out there and pay them what they truly are worth. If you really wanted then we'd send you back to school to get additional education - and those percentage points were still fairly trivial. If your boss tells you the business isn't making enough money to give you a raise they're a liar. Or, well, the business should probably be in receivership.

I don't know... I guess I type out these long replies because there's some hope that there are others who can and will do. I also hope that those who are in crappy situations get the hell out. Do you know what I learned? It seems pertinent at this time. If you give a person their desired salary when they start and tell them to just come ask when they feel they deserve a raise - they'll go YEARS without asking for a raise. Sometimes they do crazy stuff like try to decline a raise - you have to convince them to take it. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but it's very true. If they know they're appreciated and they're making enough money they are content. They might even be happy.

Finally, absolutely true. The company would certainly not have survived without the people who worked to make it happen. It was a very successful company, it still is really. The people who were there in the beginning probably don't have to work any more but a number of them still remain with the new parent company. I made sure that each individual was truly aware of how much appreciation I had for their talents, their willingness to work long hours if we got too busy - because I'd screwed up and not properly bid something, and their ability to just be open and honest humans. I asked a lot, was given a lot, and have tried to show how much it mattered.

Maybe someone will see this and a light will click on. There's even a few former co-workers that hang out here and this may make them smile. Too many people have jobs they are not happy with and, really, there's no need of it.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[cthulhu11]

Huh? iLO implements IPMI just like any other BMC. iLO also doesn't cost money, though as of a couple of years ago some functionality -- mostly fluff -- required a for-pay license. Not much different from anyone else's and I don't remember having to pay to get firmware components. I stopped buying Soracle gear some years ago, but recall that they had also restricted access to firmware updates. That said, HP has always been known for nickle/diming -- this parody has been around for ~30 years: http://incompetech.com/gallima...

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[Falos]

No, that's the definition of chance, luck, random, statistics, etc.

Like, a disturbingly accurate definition. As if some twit a few decades back hijacked it and wrote "insanity" over the label with a marker.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[tingentleman]

Thank you. I'm in a fairly similar situation myself (though not handling it as capably as you I'm sure) and it is reassuring to read your approach and justification. Did you find that this type of management is so alien to some - it's not "professional" or simply just not how you're "supposed to do things" - that they try almost subconsciously to change things to a more traditional way of working?

Also, re: the master thread - I would hate to run (or join) a company with ping-pong tables, internal slides etc. Since taking a trip to Google a couple years back, the superficiality of it was summed up by the pristine (and clearly unused) in-office band practice room.

Exactly.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[tingentleman]

One company will do the printers and other consumer grade crap, and the other will focus on enterprise grade technologies.

From my corporate experience, anything "enterprise grade" is so shitty it wouldn't pass master with consumers

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[geoskd]

I thought that was the Baby Boomers. They're going to be the ones that cause the Federal government to implode under the massive amount of debt racked up by Social Security.

To be sure, it was the Tail end of the boomers that supported the reagonomics, but the younger generations who were getting screwed by the whole thing had abdicated their responsibility with some of the lowest voting turnouts of any generation. If Gen X had stood up for themselves and their children and forced a balanced budget instead of allowing the politicians to strip mine social security, we wouldn't be in half the fiscal trouble we are in today. By nearly any measure, the cut and spend economics is good for older generations and royally screws the younger generations. The only permanent fix is a constitutional amendment banning deficit spending.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[fuzzy2k]

In other words most tech workers are whiny bitches.

Most workers are whiny bitches, and most jobs are legitimately the suck. There isn't anything wrong with hating your job. People have been hating their jobs for as long as there has been employment. It's not as great as when you have a job you love, but not a lot of people have those jobs. Most of the people who think they have those jobs are not that self-aware.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[KGIII]

Almost every employee was younger than I and, for a number of them, it was their first real job or job outside of academia. I think there was an anticipation of other things but, by the time we were actually serious about hiring people we made sure that we hired those who knew the culture and would fit in. I think the most "shock" was from interaction with other groups that were heavily bureaucratic. As the industry moved towards automation we managed to poach quite a few people. I have no moral qualms about poaching employees.

For all you or I know, you're doing better than I. I'm sure much has changed and the only things I can say for certain is that it worked for me and that I'd not have wanted it to be any other way. It's great that they retain much of the culture though I understand there was some sort of row over them needing an HR department and mandatory drug screening to the point where some had threatened to tender their resignation. I am, of course, not privy to that information but that is what I have heard through the grapevine.

We did some things that would be taboo today, I expect. We didn't "vote" on hires but interviewing was conducted by anyone who felt they would be working with the coworker enough to justify being able to decide if they would be hired. It was informal and there were candidates who did not make it. You could call it a cabal or something if you wanted to be pejorative but. really, anybody was welcome to opine. So, I think there might have been some discomfort at first as we certainly were not "normal." They got over it.

We ended up with great diversity but that wasn't a goal or anything. We just wanted the best and those who fit in best. We were all smart people and I find that smart people tend to be a little different by default. As an aside, I have finally decided the difference between eccentric and crazy. I've mulled this over for years and only figured it out recently. It's a matter of wealth, not degree. Elton John is eccentric while the guy on the corner screaming about how Jesus is an alien is crazy. Both may be very smart. Being misguided isn't limited to the unintelligent and a curse of being smart seems to be thinking you're always right - which is kind of my point.

Since you didn't ask but alluded to being receptive, to put this in the common tongue, shut the fuck up and listen when one of your employees is telling you that you're doing it wrong - they might be right. If you've created an environment where that doesn't happen due to fear or culture then you've failed. From the way I read your post, you're already doing that. I'm sure it is appreciated. I'm truly sure it is - however, take some employees out for a beer after work (or whatever) and figure out how they really feel and if they're being honest about it. If they don't appear to be being honest - the problem may be you. Make sure to do it with lots of employees and often.

Finally, I think a slide is silly. We did have an awesome break room but we actually insisted that people took breaks. One of our geeks had managed to get Quake to run on some older, by then, 'big iron.' That was fun though I am not much of a gamer. We didn't have slides, we didn't have a daycare center, or anything like that. We paid well enough so that you could easily afford those things. We might have had a semi-stocked bar and a pool table around the back though such would have been technically mine if, you know, it existed. *whistles innocently* It was not in constant use but it did see plenty of use. If such existed then I can say there certainly is nothing left of it today.

Don't strive for perfection - you can't achieve it. Strive to be willing to make mistakes and willing to learn from mistakes.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[goose-incarnated]

Biases are bad generalizations as you can tell: Don't use them. Each individual should be treated uniquely.

Respect is earned, it cannot be given, even by Mommy and Daddy. That includes self respect.

GP fully misses the irony - if everyone is unique, then no one is. I agree with parent; snowflake syndrome is much more prevalent than it used to be.

The GP's position is that respect is the default, and actions can change that. Parent (and my own) position is that no-respect is the default, but actions can change that.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[kaatochacha]

it's not offshoring that's killing jobs. It's automation. Look up the stats, it's just where it's going.

Re:Major disconnect from layers

[RabidReindeer]

I think it depends on what the job is. They've been trying to automate software design since mainframes, and the best they can ever do is badly-trained offshore people misusing IDEs.

Manufacturing, on the other hand, gets so cheap when fully automated that it's actually often less expensive to bring the jobs back to the USA. Not to re-employ US laborers, mind you, but because once labor costs become negligible, it's cheaper not to have to ship products around the globe or deal with international complications.

Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at all the freebies here, if you can find a break in your 80-hour work week, you'll totally dig them!

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

We tech employees are expected to give up our lives in exchange for "maybe the project will be finished on schedule so our manager will look good and get his bonus. If you're lucky, you won't get downsized once that primary work is done."

Re:Heh

[hey!]

One thing I've noticed is someone who is very good at a tech job isn't just twice as productive as someone who is lousy at it; the discrepancy could easily be 10x; or it could be that he produces positive progress and the lousy guy produces anti-progress. This is clearly true for software developers, but I've seen it happen with network administrators too: small cadres of happy, super-productive admins outperforming armies of miserable tech drones.

But the thing is if you don't understand anything about (a) the technology or (b) human beings, how do you get a worker to be more productive? You make him work longer.

I'm not talking about striking while the iron is hot. When opportunity produces the occasional 80 hour work week, that's a totally different matter than having no better idea of what to do than setting unrealistic goals and leaving it to workers to make it up through sheer, unsustainable effort. Too often in the latter case you end up producing the semblance of progress. Yeah, I finished the module but someone's going to have to throw it out and rewrite when it blows up in the customer's face.

Re: Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how pay has been cut - one of the ways - inflation is the other.

When I started, you could work a 40 hour week - less, we took long lunches with our boss there.

Then, after the dot bomb crash, there were a LOT of tech workers running around, so we had to take pay cuts to work - at least we younger guys. The older guys - 30 something's - were left in the dust.

Then, we had to work more than 40 to make dwadlines.

Then it turned into if you got your work done in 40 or less, you don't have enough work. But if it takes you more than 40, it's because you are not smart enough to get it done on time.
Catch-22.

And, over the past decade, pay has gone down, back in 99, a C programmer around with 5 years of experience made about 80k.
Now it's 65 and in 00 money, that's 40k.
So, we're working much harder for half the pay - and food is on us.
And the poor bastards who were let go after 09 were never hired because businesses figured out that they can just their current workers work harder. Don't like it? There's a line behind you.
There is no shortage of STEM workers. Obama needed to stop listening to tech industry lobbyists.
Read here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/college-calculus

Re:Heh

[Grishnakh]

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.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Heh

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

What are these "off-hours" of which you speak?

I've always thought that aside form the lack of respect you get, the every job can cost you your job, the working out of the basement, and the meh pay, that one of the impediments of IT for women is the insane hours that are demanded of you.

But other than that, it's the best damn job in the world - who could hate it?

Re:Heh

[thinkwaitfast]

The most fun I ever had on a job was 80 hour weeks (70 mandatory). I was a zombie after a few months and it nearly killed me, but still it was a lot of fun. I wish I was young enough to do it again.

Making rockets is fun!

Re:Heh

[jsrjsr]

We joke about working "half days" to get the project done on time. A "half day" is twelve hours long.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Heh

[Grishnakh]

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? 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.

Re: Heh

[TheGratefulNet]

I was in the $140k range for a number of years; then the downward slope hit and the 'new range' seems to be around $120k, if you are lucky. for a short bit I was hitting over $160k as a contractor but when bossman finds a way to outsource you, that's it - you're done.

that may seem like a lot of money, but for bay area middle aged professionals who live in a house, its not at all a lot of money! and going from 150 down to 120 is a HUGE step backward, let me tell you; especially when your healthcare is omitted, you have no sick time or vacation time and there WILL be big gaps between your gigs since companies actively avoid hiring locals unless they are absolutely forced to.

at least I'm not at HP where folks are being told they must leave HP, join some other company at half their pay and lose all seniority and benefits. man, the companies are outright declaring war on the middle class worker. if it has not hit you or someone you know, it will. don't be smug about your situation, as the greed and hunger for more power WILL find you and your job will be at risk like so many of the rest of us.

we can hang together or we can hang separately. yes, I'm pro-union even though I know that our own kind (software) won't ever man-up to admitting that we need help in balancing the power base against the corporations.

Re:Heh

[Ol Olsoc]

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!

Re: Heh

[ProfBooty]

Thats why you go into work that requires a security clearance and get out of the bay area.

Re:Heh

[Grishnakh]

Yep. Although one thing seems to have changed since your kids were subject to you spending too much time at work: the stability. At least 20+ years ago it was a stable career (esp. 30+ years ago, it seemed to start having a lot of problems in the early 90s). So it's even less attractive as a job prospect now. Yeah, it's a better career than flipping burgers I guess, and maybe law (I hear law kinda sucks these days), but being a veterinarian sounds like a much more interesting and rewarding career to me for many reasons, so I can certainly see why girls would be drawn to that: you get to work with cute animals, people actually appreciate you, you don't have some shitty boss telling you to work 90 hours/week to meet some arbitrary deadline for some shitty project that's not going to sell anyway (like a Windows Phone) and which no one will care about, ...

Re:Heh

[multimediavt]

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.

People didn't use the air hockey table because after the first day someone came out of their office and unplugged the damn thing because it was so loud and annoying no one in the vicinity of it could get anything done over the ridiculous amounts of noise. I know. We had one in our house for about three days before it went back to the store. It's about as useful to a harmonious workplace as a drum kit in a library!

Re: Heh

[tehcyder]

going from 150 down to 120 is a HUGE step backward

According to the cheerleaders on slashdot, you should just be able to move up to 200, there's plenty of work available if you're any good. Apparently.

Re:Heh

[tehcyder]

The most fun I ever had on a job was 80 hour weeks (70 mandatory). I was a zombie after a few months and it nearly killed me, but still it was a lot of fun. I wish I was young enough to do it again.

Making rockets is fun!

People like you bring your problems on yourself. I've never had so much "fun" working that I wanted to do it 7 days a week, 12 hours a day.

Re: Heh

[Cederic]

Assaulted in the office with a stun-gun, with witnesses? Lawyers would be queuing up to work on a no-win-no-fee basis.

Re: Heh

[operagost]

Yeah... I'm not buying this. Or the towing thing. Why would a company open itself to trouble like this? It's enough to escort people to the door peacefully and let them go, so why tase them and face a lawsuit? Who ever heard of towing their cars so that they can't leave?

Re: Heh

[LWATCDR]

I am a developer and at my company the encourage a 40 hour max work week. They treat everyone well. They pay well. My coworkers are all really talented and over all pleasant.

Re:Heh

[BVis]

What's actionable here? Employment is terminated, employee becomes trespasser. Trespasser is ordered out of building, refuses. Security forcibly removes trespasser from premises.

No, it's not right, but as far as I can tell they're within their rights to do this.

Re: Heh

[BVis]

That's because it isn't about how much work you do at all. It's about control. Your employer wants to exert as much control over you as they can; requiring arbitrary butt-in-seat time is one example. If they have more control over you they can make you do the work of 3 people for 75% of a salary.

Re:Heh

[BVis]

Isn't it awesome that "computer professionals" are specifically exempt from overtime rules?

Re: Heh

[V-similitude]

If you're good.

Most who think they are, aren't.

Re:Heh

[agm]

I'm working on a fairly large project as the lead architect. My hours sometimes hit 200 a month (it may not sound like a lot, but it is when the average is 160). The only reason I don't mind is because I get paid the same amount for every hour I work, and not for any hours I don't work. Working and not getting paid for it is for chumps.

Re:Heh

[agm]

People like you bring your problems on yourself. I've never had so much "fun" working that I wanted to do it 7 days a week, 12 hours a day.

I could think of a number of jobs where working that much would be awesome. None of them are in IT.

So what if you work for a tech company that offers

[Anonymous Coward]

None of those perks? Seriously, is that really the standard?

Because it's soul-killing, uncreative shit.

[Rinikusu]

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.

Re:Because it's soul-killing, uncreative shit.

[LessThanObvious]

Agreed %100. I'm not sure why companies seem to think engagement in your work just happens naturally. If I have no reason to care about the continued existence of a company and care nothing about the why behind anything they are trying to accomplish, it's just about making money for someone else. That doesn't interest me in the slightest. More than anything I'd like to work for companies where there is a good reason to be passionate about the company's mission.

Re:Because it's soul-killing, uncreative shit.

[taustin]

That's no different from any other industry. The only thing different in IT is that IT people tend to be younger, and more naïve, which is to say, clueless enough to expect better. In other industries, people learn fast that most jobs are shit, and if you don't like it, get another one and move on, and keep moving on until you find a decent place to work. (I've got 22 years on the same job, and still get up in the morning looking forward to going to work. Yes, in IT.)

Whining only reduces your chances of getting a better job.

Re:Because it's soul-killing, uncreative shit.

[eulernet]

Whining only reduces your chances of getting a better job.

Whining just helps people to discharge their frustration.
In fact, it encourages people to remain at their job.

When you stop whining, you start seriously to seek for another job.
Since you stopped complaining, you don't have a distorted view of the reality, so it's easier to detect problems when your mind is clear.

Re:Because it's soul-killing, uncreative shit.

[freeze128]

IT workers are younger? Yeah, but how long do you think that will last? Personal Computers have been around a long time now (since the 80's). A 20-something who got into the field at that time would be in his 50's now.

Cause work sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause so many workers dislike their jobs, or in the words of Deichkind, "Arbeit nervt" - "work is annoying"

Re:Cause work sucks

[mjwx]

Cause so many workers dislike their jobs, or in the words of Deichkind, "Arbeit nervt" - "work is annoying"

I like my work.

Its the people I have to deal with that I find horribly annoying.

Re:Cause work sucks

[tigersha]

I don't want to work all day but the bank says pay, pay, pay

Three main types of bad jobs.

[gurps_npc]

1) Tech in a non-tech company. Here you have little to no opportunity for advancement. The bosses think of and treat you like janitorial staff - cleaning up their messes. At JP Morgan, you are more likely to go from Mailroom to CEO than from Server Admin to CEO.

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?

Re:Three main types of bad jobs.

[swb]

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.

Re:Three main types of bad jobs.

[tehSpork]

> A peer and I once made the same comparison. We called ourselves digital maintenance men, because by and large that's what it is.

Myself and a friend of mine frequently refer to ourselves as code janitors, we are both well educated and work for Fortune 100 companies.

Unfortunately this is an easy position to get socked into. Companies generally want to make money, this generally requires staying on schedule, this means you get to inherit this lump of awful code/infrastructure $lastGuy left and beat on it until you meet your deadlines. No idea why $lastGuy left, he probably got a job at a competing company for $salary*1.2 where he will beat on some similar, yet different code for a while before moving again.

Re:Three main types of bad jobs.

[Notabadguy]

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.

Definition Disclaimer:
Blue Collar: Hourly / Manual
White Collar: Salaried / Office

I do work for a company that has a significant manufacturing component. Craftsmen, Millwrights, Machinists, Welders, Operators (CNC/Lasers), report to Cell Leaders responsible for their area of the shop. That's the blue collar line. Cell leaders report to their operations manager, who reports to the plant manager. In parallel, materials management/inventory, engineering all report to the plant manager, with the lowest levels of those functions being blue collar (except engineering).

Re:Three main types of bad jobs.

[wienerschnizzel]

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.

Manufacturing does not have many traditional blue collar workers anymore. Nowdays manufacturing means one of two things - either you are controlling automated systems that are assembling mass produced products (like cars or toasters) or you are assembling really complicated and expensive pieces of technology by hand (like MR scanners). Both of those require high amount of expertise and are well payed.

The few simple manial jobs that are left are disappearing - if your work does not require empathy, creativity or good analytical thinking, you will be replaced by a machine sooner or later

Re:Three main types of bad jobs.

[Simulant]

Alternatively...
1.) Tech in a non-tech company. Everyone loves you and thinks you can do anything. As long as things function properly, you can do what you want while at work. You may not be making Silicon Valley wages but you are well above the national average and can afford your mortgage.

In my experience, the real reason so many tech workers hate their jobs is that they blithely assume everyone around them is an idiot because they don't know what alt-tab or some-such is....

I used to be like that. I'm much happier now.

Re:Three main types of bad jobs.

[BVis]

Basically, I think it's a pack mentality. It's assumed that everyone wants to take the next step in their career after being at a particular level for 3-4 years (depending on industry). Junior dev wants to become senior, senior wants to be lead, lead wants to be architect/principal, etc. The trouble with being a lead/architect is that there's a management component to it, and as such, I want nothing to do with it.

The trouble comes in a job interview when you have to explain why you've been a senior dev for 6 years instead of moving up to lead/architect or whatever. It is assumed that everyone wants to move ahead. So, you might be happy at the level you are at and not seeking "advancement", but to a potential employer, it's a red flag. It can mean one of two things:

1) You're a shitty dev and haven't had the option to move up, or
2) You lack ambition and are therefore lazy.

I'm perfectly happy at the senior dev level. But, if and when I interview for another position, I will have to explain why I've been at this level for X years. At my age, it's very suspicious to not have made lead/architect, or moved into management. I'm perfectly happy writing code. It's what I want to do. I don't want to manage people. An honest answer would be "I'm happy where I am and have no interest in moving up", but that's a death sentence in a job interview. That either sounds like "I'm lazy and have no ambition, so I'm going to coast along where I am for as long as someone will pay me", or "I'm actually really bad at my job, but I'm going to take the inverse sour grapes route and say I'm happy where I am". I can't think of an answer that wouldn't be awkward or an outright lie.

So, you say, why interview? If you're happy with the job you have, why would you look elsewhere? Three words: "two percent raise". The only way to get a raise of any significance (>10%) is by switching companies. Plus, at some point your current employer is going to become suspicious of your perceived lack of ambition and either try to force the issue (like what happened to my manager, he's bad at it and doesn't want to do it), or curtail your opportunities for growth until you're unmarketable, and therefore they can treat you like shit.

Employers hate it when you're comfortable. You're much easier to manipulate when you're stressed out.

Re:Three main types of bad jobs.

[volmtech]

I worked as a tech at a produce packing plant that was transitioning from total manual operation (hand hung bags and spring scales with a dial needle) to automated weighing and handling machines. I was working with an electrical and mechanical genius. He had worked for the DoD servicing ballistic missals. We helped the manufacture devolve the software and improve the pneumatic mechanical parts.

We were responsible for almost everything except sales. Building maintenance, receiving check in, all production equipment, electric and hydraulic, plus cooler refrigeration and packing floor AC.

That job was blue collar but before that I ran a family farm for 25 years so I was always looking at things from a management standpoint. Mostly it was asking my coworker why we were doing things the wrong way. The answer was always that is how the owner thinks it should be done. The owner had worked his way up from a farm hand to the owner of a 10 million dollar business and still thought he was the smartest person in the building. Self made millionaires are infuriating to work with, as are geniuses. Having to work for both a millionaire farmer when I had failed at farming and with a genius who was also bigger and stronger than me was humbling and very tiring. I just collect my SS check and troll the inter-webs now.

Re:Three main types of bad jobs.

[gurps_npc]

Sick time is limited by the far majority of companies. If you exceed it, you either have to use up other time off (Vacation, "personal", etc.) or don't get paid for the time you don't come to work. I have a co-worker that had to come back to work a week after a seizure because he had no sick time left. His doctor wanted him out for another week, but he didn't have the time.

Special

[mobby_6kl]

Probably because they think they should be special and immune from the shit everyone else deals with.

Re:Special

[dhasenan]

I think I'm special and everyone should be immune from that shit.

Re:Special

[houghi]

This. They even think the question "why do tech worker ..." is a valid one. The first thing I thought was: compared to what? US Predidents? Politicians? Factory workers? Accountants? Call Agents?

Most I see think that the company would not run without them. And to be honest they are right, because otherwise they would not be there, just like everybody else. The janitor is needed, because if he wasn't, he would be fired. Yes, this goes for the managers as well. It might not be applicable to each and every person.

If you think that managers are not needed, start your own company without them. Do not give them different titles, just do not have them. Not even yourself and see how well this works out for you when there are more than 2 people in the company and a decision has to be taken.

There is a meeting for people who hate their job. It is every day in the bar and the group is called EVERYBODY.

Re: Special

[BVis]

GP is telling you that you don't have to accept an unhappy situation. You are perceiving millenials as entitled, selfish spoiled brats because they DARE to question why they have to accept the corporate cock up the ass in order to continue to eat. You've got Stockholm Syndrome. You're making all kinds of excuses in order to deny the fact that our corporate overlords do everything in their power to keep us docile and willing to accept the treatment they're giving out. Millenials are demanding fair treatment from their employers; things have been so shitty for so long, "fair treatment" looks like a ridiculous thing to seek by comparison. I say more power to them. They've realized that the system needs them just as much as it needs overpaid C-level executives. Without young workers the economy falls apart.

If everyone demanded fair treatment from their employers, they would have to give it to them or go out of business for lack of talent, to be replaced in their markets by companies that don't actively complain that they can't chain their workers to their desks (something about slavery being illegal or some other anti-business socialist fascist Kenyan nonsense). That's the free market. Millenials (supply) have something their employers need (demand). When you control the supply, and demand remains constant, prices (general treatment, not just salaries) are supposed to go up. The difference with this generation is that they are a hundred times more connected with their peers than any other before them. If someone's boss is an asshole, a hundred people know about it before the asshole's tirade stops echoing. If a company treats its people badly, thousands of people know by the end of the day. They know that their employers are lying to them when they tell them they're treated better than their contemporaries in other companies. They know that the salary they're being offered is 25% below market. They know when their workload is ridiculous. They know when there's a better job available (and that job is actively seeking them out). They know that the way workers get treated in this country is abusive as compared to other industrialized nations (no guaranteed vacation, no sick pay, no maternity leave, at-will employment that makes job security a fantasy). All this knowledge puts employers in a weaker position, and as we all know, that's anti-American. When they apply this knowledge, they are seen as "demanding" and "entitled" and "spoiled", when really what they're asking for is to not be lied to.

The problem isn't that Millenials are being too demanding, the problem is that previous generations weren't demanding enough.

There are many reasons.

[dablow]

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.

Re:There are many reasons.

[pr0fessor]

So you will be harassed for any problem that involves using electricity.

I had an exec ask me if I could fix the plug-in and lamp in his office once, I jokingly asked if he was promoting me to "stuff that uses electricity dept". He thought it was so funny that he started introducing me to people as the "VP of Shit that uses Electricity"

Re:There are many reasons.

[BVis]

It's probably not a significant motivator because they're not being paid enough to be motivated...

Re:Losing at capitalism 101

[TheGratefulNet]

it most certainly IS factory-style work here in the bay area.

95% h1b, from 2 countries (guess which; neither is US). all are under 40. most are under 35 yrs old.

as soon as you grow and get experience, you have eaten the forbidden fruit and you know how you should NOT be treated. at that point, they dispose of you and from then on, you will have nothing but 'short stays' if you are even lucky enough to get short term contracts.

tech work is mostly just unskilled labor, banging out bullshit code, full of bugs to never be fixed and replaced with some new buggy shit. lather rince repeat.

I'm fed up.

I work for non-profits on purpose

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I work for non-profits on purpose

[Anonymous Coward]

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%.

Re:I work for non-profits on purpose

[tigersha]

The last non-profit I worked for was a corrupt, badly run political horror. I left because I caught the boss committing tax fraud. She then gave me a bad review.

  I mentioned to the board that I am a bit unhappy that I was penalised by the CEO considering that she is committing fraud. The board member asked me "she is committing WHAT??".

CEO lost her job. I still have a bad reference though.

That said, I sometimes do contracting for the new CEO and it IS a pleasant place to work, yes.

Re:I work for non-profits on purpose

[cmdr_klarg]

Couple this with some kind of Basic Income and I think we have a winner

Re:I work for non-profits on purpose

[toddestan]

That's the problem. They'd rather have one person working 60 hours a week than two people working 30 hours each as the latter causes more overhead. That, and they only pay the first person for 40 anyway.

duh

[xmousex]

i have no hookers on my desk.

if i had hookers on my desk, i would feel different. very much different.

Re:duh

[xmousex]

also because i went into doing all this full well knowing the wide range of incredible possibilities. but now im locked into the very limited range of little things i do at my job doing it for people who are complete dog shit. not imaginative pioneers in the industry, but money starved accountants desperate to just get their numbers good enough by end of year. year after year after year.

Basically I have the power of a genie, and im granting wishes for idiots.

Re:duh

[Archangel Michael]

if i had hookers on my desk, i would feel different. very much different.

that feeling is called an Itch. You need to have a doctor look at it.

Re:duh

[tigersha]

I once did a sysadmin job for a, em, gentlemen's club. It was a script controlling an emergency button that wiped out the entire server if the cops arrive.

Thanks, Dice!

[DoofusOfDeath]

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.

Shamefully biased...

[mgoheen]

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...

Important work and plan is key

[trout007]

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.

Maybe becuase

[John Napkintosh]

All the jobs I've had involve doing work.

Re:Maybe becuase

[phantomfive]

So many people enter the tech industry because they want money, not because they like tech.
If you're a programmer who doesn't like programming, that's basically like you wrote down on your college application, "Hello, I want to be sad for money."

Maybe you should have studied welding.

Re:Maybe becuase

[ArsonSmith]

Screw that, I do tech work because it makes me good money, and I mostly hate it. (actually the devops movement within development and operations has reinvigorated me over the last 2 years but that's a cultural thing and i digress) I weld at home as a hobby because I enjoy it. If it was all I did all day every day I would hate it. Just like most of my hobbies that I think I could do this for a living, then I would hate doing it.

Re:Maybe becuase

[BVis]

"Hello, I want to be sad for money."

That's probably 99% of all jobs out there... They say there are mythical people who enjoy their jobs, but I haven't found one yet.

Re:Maybe becuase

[phantomfive]

You need to see what Mike Rowe has been up to. Check it out. He talks about how to find a career and be happy (including finding a guy who picks up roadkill of the road and whistles while he works).

Re:Maybe becuase

[BVis]

Mike Rowe makes a lot of sense to me. He's absolutely right about infrastructure and the skilled trades. If one of my boys said to me he'd like to go to a trade school for plumbing, or electrician training, or whatever, instead of going to college, I'd be all for it. College will be there if he wants to do it later. Or he can go to college, get a business degree, and open his own general contracting business. A good tradesman is worth his weight in gold to a homeowner.

But he's right that we've made blue-collar work out to be embarrassing, We denigrate people who get their hands dirty making our lives more comfortable. And that's not right. A carpenter does work equally or more valuable than the work I do sitting in a comfortable office.

Re:Maybe becuase

[phantomfive]

College will be there if he wants to do it later.

That's a good point.

Most people hate their job

[netsavior]

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.

Re:Most people hate their job

[Grishnakh]

Most fast-food workers and other low-level workers probably do hate their jobs, and for good reason. They're called "work" for a reason.

But we're supposed to be highly skilled professionals here. Do most doctors hate their jobs? I sure hope not, or else we'd have all kinds of problems in the healthcare industry (and I don't mean the insurance/payment side of things). Can you imagine a surgeon hating his job? That's a recipe for disaster.

So no, I'm sorry, I don't buy this "everyone hates their job" tripe. For shit work, sure, but not for highly-skilled work. I think that's mostly unique to tech workers.

Re:Most people hate their job

[coldsalmon]

Many other commenters have pointed out that one factor is thinking you're special when you're really not. There are a whole lot of highly-skilled people in the world, and it's not really special to be highly-skilled anymore. Lawyers are highly-skilled, but they are among the least-satisfied of workers. As a society, we have learned how to make highly-skilled laborers interchangeable, which yields productivity gains. In the top echelons of every profession, there are those who work creatively and enjoyably, but the vast majority are doing routine tasks. Doctors perhaps have slightly higher satisfaction, but keep in mind that they are at the top of a highly-regulated and stratified industry; a more apt comparison would be healthcare workers in general vs. IT workers in general. It is possible to be high-skill and low-level.

Re:Most people hate their job

[tehcyder]

Professionals like lawyers, accountants, architects or whatever hate the same sorts of things that people in tech jobs do: having to do uninteresting work to make the company money, and having to manoeuvre round their bosses and co-workers.

Re:Most people hate their job

[Grishnakh]

Doctors don't have those problems. They have to deal with annoying insurance issues, but they have staff for that. I should hope they actually enjoy the doctoring part of their jobs. How many tech workers really enjoy dealing with all the shitty technologies they work with (it's not like they get to pick them)? And doctors don't have bosses usually; they run their own offices, frequently as partners in a small group with other doctors.

A lot of accountants run their own independent businesses.

A lot of lawyers, likewise, are partners in a small firm, or have their own firm.

How many engineers have their own small firm? Almost none.

5000 Respondents is enough

[orlanz]

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.

Free Time is the only currency worth a damn

[captjc]

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.

Re:Free Time is the only currency worth a damn

[Krishnoid]

If they really wanted you to stay, they'd offer an on-site laundromat with wi-fi and free dinner for you and the family.

Re:Free Time is the only currency worth a damn

[orlanz]

Work-life balance is a horrible term. It means, the company gets your time outside of business hours. You are available 24/7. In return you can have flexible work hours, work from home, or take off 1-2 office hours for the official work you did late into the night. Overall the concept isn't all that bad. Until you start crossing 60 hrs/week. At which point those 9+ hours of work every day can really cut out family, friends, and sleep time.

If you sleep & eat 8 hours of the day, you only got 16 hours left. 60 hrs/week would normally mean 14 hours work/commute, 1 hour lunch break, and 2 hours for fun. Plus you got your weekends. Imagine those 9hrs/day spread across 2 or 3 sections of the 16 hours. Exactly what are you going to do with your short free time slots and no weekends? Sacrifice your sleep to extend your free time so you can atleast enjoy your Friday night?

Work-life balance is pretty good as long as the hours stay below 45 per week... which is extremely rare in IT. Above that, the company starts winning out and it should be called "24/7 availability". If HR says they offer work-life balance, understand that they are nothing special, they are just like everyone else. You should ask what they offer that others don't. What makes their company special compared to the rest? HR rarely knows how to answer that. Understand that you probably won't get the job if you do ask that.

Re:Free Time is the only currency worth a damn

[Bob the Super Hamste]

HR rarely knows what your job actually is now days. Personally I hate their mandatory training, especially the company wide diversity training. For my job it could be summed up in one line:

Don't be a dick

but instead it ends up being something that takes a couple of hours to complete because for some reason I need to know all of the laws about discrimination and how to effectively hire and fire people in a race/gender/religion neutral way. Then there is the ethics training, which again is just as bad and for people in my position could be summed up as:

Don't steal shit

.

What I don't like

[transporter_ii]

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.

Re:What I don't like

[transporter_ii]

This exchange from Buffy the Vampire Slayer seems to fit tech work so well:

Buffy: Mom, I hate that these people scared you so much. And I-I know
that you're just trying to help, but you have to let me handle this.
It's what I do.

Joyce: But is it really? I mean, you patrol, you slay... Evil pops up,
you undo it. A-a-and that's great! But is Sunnydale getting any better?
Are they running out of vampires?

Buffy: I don't think that you run out of...

Joyce: It's not your fault. You don't have a plan. You just react to
things. I-i-it's bound to be kind of fruitless.

That's tech work. Problems pop up, you undo them. There is no plan, and yes, it's kind of fruitless. :)

Re:What I don't like

[labradore]

Except that it's not fruitless.

IT keeps systems running so that everyone can get their jobs done without armies of clerks and acres of file warehouses. Development either makes a product or designs the systems that IT operates (or both).

As for the rest of the company: hopefully, whatever they're doing to make the money is a net positive for the rest of us.

People really want things like being recognized, making a difference or being liked (or just having power). It's the nature of IT in large organizations that you will get less opportunities for many of these things. Development usually has more opportunities.

In sales, in production and in many other types of jobs you're likely to be working a deal or making a delivery. You have tangible results and direct contributions to the results. IT makes indirect contributions. It's not fruitless. It just feels that way.

You're going to have to get creative to find ways to feel and to show up to others as a valuable contributor. It's usually completely against the grain for thing-oriented introverts. If you really value how you and others feel about your work, you'll find a way or find another line of work. Good luck.

Re:What I don't like

[Kjella]

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.

Actually that part is not so bad. The bad part is when you're not allowed to do anything more than run around with a fire extinguisher. I mean if the electrician told you the wiring is from last century and needs to be replaced, you'd do it. Same if the plumber said your sewer and water pipes are shot. But the more of a clusterfuck an application is, the harder it seems to replace because nobody understands it, it operates on no standards and the documentation is non-existent. The kind of application that have you tearing your hair out because it will fail in surprising, spectacular and entirely irrational ways and fixing it is like an acid trip through Alice's Wonderland, never knowing what you'll unleash next. Once I discovered a bug where totally unrelated functionality used the same locking table, but only one checked the object type. So you'd pull a string on one end and another part of the application fell apart. Oh joy.

Re:What I don't like

[ArsonSmith]

As much as recruiters have relegated it to mean sysadmin, some of the core DevOps philosophies are made to react to just that. Automation, testing, release early and iterate. If you are fixing the same thing over and over then you're doing it wrong.

Companies don't get it....

[clifwlkr]

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.....

Re:Companies don't get it....

[phantomfive]

Unlimited vacation: What this actually means is no guaranteed vacation.

Take your vacation, man. You're shirking your duty if you don't. When someone says, "you have unlimited vacation," they are trying to take money from you. It is in no way rude to take the money back.

If you aren't sure if you'll "have time," plan your vacations several months in advance. Even if you stay at home for your vacation, you'll feel better if you take them.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[J-1000]

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.

I'm with you on every point except your agile comments. Yes many companies get it very wrong, but many companies get waterfall just as wrong. For me, coming from a massively waterfall environment to an agile environment has dropped my stress level considerably. Here is how agile (Scrum, specifically) is supposed to benefit you:

• Gives you clear short-term (one sprint) goals.
• Divides work (backlog items, tasks) into manageable chunks.
• Offloads vague, stressful long-term goals to the Product Owner. They are responsible for measuring velocity, and planning accordingly. They are responsible for cutting features in order to make a deadline.
• You commit to two weeks worth of work. The work is not committed on your behalf, and you can and should refuse unrealistic goals for each sprint.
• Gets management out of your face. Want to know my status? Attend the standup meeting. Want to know our status? Look at the burndown chart, or ask the Product Owner.
• Allows room for input on and interpretation of requirements. "Acceptance criteria" bullet lists are intended to give you just enough requirement detail, but not so much that stakeholders are attempting to be engineers.

If you have been using Scrum, it sounds to me like your group is in desperate need of retraining. You need an effective Scrum Master, an effective Product Owner, and team members who understand Scrum.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[TheGratefulNet]

you have it 100% right on all issues.

sigh. our lives do suck. and its NOT getting better, guys, its getting worse each year. open-office, why did you have to mention that? ;( I see nothing BUT that, in the bay area, and I frown each time I see it.

damn.

this field is broken. some people have it well, but the majority are taken for a ride, played as chumps and they don't realize it until its too late.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[Kjella]

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?

Dunno, but if it's X whether I play a game of pool or not.... I'm playing pool. It sounds like you're playing Sisyphus, if the ball is always rolling down hill why is it your job to push it back up? Sounds like you want to be the hero that saves the day, but as long as you're just covering for other people all you have are a few youngsters who think you're grumpy and don't see the problem because the deadlines are met anyway. Find a way to let them crash and burn, without you getting too singed and you might find yourself more appreciated.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[clifwlkr]

As I mentioned, yes, Agile as a methodology is not a bad thing. It just is so easy to get wrong. Most places I see focus on the JIRA like aspects of it and the day to day ceremonies of the scrum process without actually looking at any long term goals. I agree the work items should be broken down to two week (or whatever) intervals of work. But you still have to have some idea of where the heck you are going and what the goal posts are at the end of the day. That doesn't mean it can't shift, but the iterations should be getting you somewhere, not just wandering in circles like seems to happen.

I agree that Agile methodologies in their many forms can be great. It just seems so few people get them right. At least in waterfall (I am definitely not advocating for that) it was readily apparent nobody had a clue early in the process and people would just get stuck before they got going. Now, we just have a way of delaying that forever.

That said, I work on enterprise scale big data systems, not web UI type stuff. I think you can wander around a lot more on UI/UX stuff and not sink the ship. You can't really do that with the stuff I work on or the project fails miserably.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[clifwlkr]

Unfortunately, that is my job as the lead. I get the flack if it doesn't get done, and I answer to the customer. They do not. That said, everyone understands what is going on, they talk to them about it. Then they promise to do better, but since the market is so crazy and we are never going to actually do something punitive to anyone, it starts all over again. At the end of the day I do care that the customer sees I can deliver. Eventually I just want to shuck this whole mess and do my own consulting with a few really good guys and call it good. Having those network connections that know you are the guy that comes through is actually important.

So in short, it's my personal reputation on the line here, and I do the best I can to create accountability but we have no effective people management in place to hold people accountable. I just try to roll them off the project as soon as I can, then they sit on the bench and don't make bonus. Hopefully when no one wants them on their project, and they get the crappy projects, they will learn. The problem, though, is almost all of the new hires are like this and someone DOES eventually have to help you, and we have found a few gems.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[Kjella]

I'm with you on every point except your agile comments. Yes many companies get it very wrong, but many companies get waterfall just as wrong. For me, coming from a massively waterfall environment to an agile environment has dropped my stress level considerably. Here is how agile (Scrum, specifically) is supposed to benefit you:

Is there any way to do waterfall right? I mean in theory it could work if people knew exactly what they wanted, but I haven't run into it yet. Usually when they see it implemented it turns out that's not actually what they meant or they had a lot of other conditions and features too that it turns out wasn't in the spec. That said, at least with waterfall you have a real plan, where you sometimes have to cross a desert where there's fucking nothing of value other than getting to the other side. Sometimes there's just not any quick wins, you need to make something big that solves a lot.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[Anonymous Coward]

> > 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.

This, this thissitty this.

Fuck GP and fuck his Agile.

We were profitable. Net, not gross, margin over 50%. Then our fuckwitted senior managers decided to hire a bunch of cockgobbling Agilistas. We fucked up the culture and while we kept our customers, we drove away the people who actually did the work. The company is no longer profitable despite having grown revenues, because all the profits are now going to a fat, bloated layer of fucknobs whose job it is to tell the few of us remaining how to do our jobs. But hey, a few people got to become webdevs. A few more got free training on JIRA. And the rest of us, those of us with options that were in the money and looking forward to an eventual exit or a continued cut of the profits, well, we got fucking nothing. We lost. We got nothing, we weren't agile enough, good day, Sirs, the agilistas said "Good Day!"

Now it's a lifestyle company that will operate at breakeven in order to provide lifetime employment for the managers whose job it is to masturbate over burndown charts until the last customer migrates away and the founder turns out the lights.

/but I'm not bitter.
//okay, maybe I'm still a little bit bitter.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[pla]

I mean this in the nicest way - You count as your own worst enemy.

You feel some sort of sense of duty to your job, you feel that you need to cover for your coworkers' shortcomings, you (want to) feel that your job "matters" so much that the company can't keep going without you. Reality check - If the company doesn't value a project enough to give you adequate resources to get it done, you should value it exactly as much as the company does - Not at all. It will get done when it gets done. Bonuses, you say? Yeah, they don't exist in the first place. I theoretically get an annual bonus - That depends 0% on my performance, and 100% on the performance of people entirely outside my department. The salesmen rule the world, simple as that. Hell, even my annual "performance" evaluation depends less than 25% on my actual performance. I could literally score a perfect "C" without getting a single one of my formal duties done.

Put bluntly, as long as upper management can get their email, your success or failure means nothing to the company on the short term. Yes, your project may well make the company more in the long run than even its core business - For which you will get zero thanks, because the C-levels have no clue what you do.

Make no mistake, I give my employer a fair day's work. But from what you've written, you would hate working with me, because I care about my job exactly as much as my boss, and his boss, and his boss' boss, all the way to the top of the food chain, do. If they make success possible, I will succeed. If they expect "Scotty the Miracle Worker" on a shoestring, you've already failed, don't waste your time fighting it..

Re:Companies don't get it....

[orlanz]

HUH.... I think you just answered which of the two groups you fell into.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[orlanz]

Interesting? Why isn't this modded funny? Clearly the poster is tongue in cheek with all the useless statistics and pointless accomplishments. The end result of which is losing customers and firing devs. It was hilarious.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[orlanz]

*Focus your testing on driving good design and executing at the UNIT level (e.g. RAM, CPU, fuckall else - no database/network/filesystem bullshit in 'unit' tests!).

That one is new and interesting. Didn't know that. Could you expand on the "no database... in unit tests" part? And honestly, #1 and #2 on your list are the hardest part :(.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[LordLucless]

We've promised a lot of features to customers that development could not work on because they can't be completed in two weeks.

WTF? Has your "certified scrum master" never heard of breaking down a task into sub-components?

Re:Companies don't get it....

[LordLucless]

According to Agile, you cannot do a 40 so we're stuck if the task can't be broken down.

There's no such thing. Every task can be broken down. That's what programming is - you break tasks down into smaller and smaller components, until they're able to be represented as sequences of bit manipulations.

If your company has some anal-retentive policy about which tasks are/aren't allowed to be broken down, well, that's stupid, but it's nothing to do with reality, or agile.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[iTrawl]

It reminds me of "shaky chair" collaboration I had to put up with at one point... It involves a guy shaking my chair because I was wearing headphones while I was focusing on some algorithm. He used to do this several times a day for "quick questions", and at one point I wanted to just pull a machete out and stick it into him. Management said I had to help this guy and also focus on my task. Management were ex-bankers and claimed they did this all the time in their youth (getting interrupted frequently while working on a task that required a lot of focus, that is). I think my idea of focus and their idea of focus are two different things.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[clifwlkr]

Except I do work with the CEO, he does know who I am, and I do get incentive bonuses for pulling our butts out of the fire and making the customer happy. We are a consulting company, and work is noticed. So I appreciate your feedback and understand where you may be coming from in some cases, as I have worked in large companies buried in the ranks before, but it is not the case here. I actually don't expect my coworkers to work 60+ hour weeks, and I try not to myself. I just wish they would put in their honest 8 hours a day and not spend a quarter of those 8 hours goofing off while we fall behind. So I am talking about a very different situation here.

Re:Companies don't get it....

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Hell I make it a point to take my vacation and when I am on vacation I have made it very clear that I will be unreachable for most manages definition of reachable. I had one dickhead manager who wanted to know if I could get a hold of me when I was on vacation once. The fact that I would be out of cell range was lost on him. Finally when he insisted that he have a way to contact me in case of emergencies I told him where I planned on leaving my car and walking into the north woods of Minnesota. Then I told him to start there then hire a trained tracker and a team of dogs.

Having to show the dumbest graphs in existence....

[GerryGilmore]

...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...

So does everyone else.

[coldsalmon]

"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?

Why???

[bobthesungeek76036]

ITIL, Six Sigma, Agile, I can go on for days...

Well go substitute teach in inner city

[Billly Gates]

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.

Re:Well go substitute teach in inner city

[Billly Gates]

I think the root of many problems is people not having any control over what they do.

Sure you do! If you do not like your job QUIT. Go get some training, go back to school, ask for a new assignment at work, go update your resume, etc. You have options. The question is why and what for? Where to run to?

If yo don't ... then that is on you. Go work at your job for 2 years and build references. THen move on if you have gaps.

People are scared of changed too much. My take on this is what do you fear more? Being stuck with a dead end job you hate for the rest of your days? Or fear taking a risk with something new? To me the former is scary than the later. If you decide not to take that jump then you need an attitude adjustment and a kick in the butt and appreciate the job you have. After all you made that choice so make it the right one etc

Re:Well go substitute teach in inner city

[Ol Olsoc]

I can't think of anything that doesn't suck sadly.

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

- Henry David Thoreau

Re: Well go substitute teach in inner city

[cyber-vandal]

That's fine if you only have yourself to support and no bills to pay.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T Find out what it means to me

[Dorianny]

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.

Because Dice.

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Why Do So Many Tech Workers Dislike Their Jobs?

Because of crappy posts like this cluttering up what used to be our happy place.

Well lets see...

[ADRA]

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.

Workers quit when there's no path to promotion?

[aaron4801]

The path to promotion is proving you can put up with the company's bullshit by not quitting.

Re:Workers quit when there's no path to promotion?

[Qzukk]

Yeah, right. And you're going to give them a raise for putting up with your bullshit? No? That's bullshit then, and I'm not putting up with it.

Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose

[naasking]

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.

No one wants to pay for you

[fluffernutter]

Constantly being treated like an unwanted expense might have a lot to do with it.

Blockades

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

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...

Here's my take on it

[erp_consultant]

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.

Re:Here's my take on it

[Enigma2175]

Sure there are some executives that are technically skilled (Gates and Zuckerberg come to mind) but most of them are MBA types.

Gates and Zuckerberg aren't executives, they're founders. They aren't people who's life goal was to run a company and manage people. The professional executives that think that running a tech company is the same as running any other kind of company tend to diminish their companies, like John Sculley at Apple or Meg Whitman at HP.

Re:Here's my take on it

[jafac]

Gates deferred to his bully MBA friend, Ballmer.

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hmmm

[benjfowler]

Upvote parent. Underrated.

My own bugbear, is prima-donna lead developers who can spin enough bullshit to con the managers into letting them goof off on company time. We had a cluster of these hyperactive bozos at my last gig who thought it would be fun to crank out shoddy rewrites of GridGain, Mongo and SpotFire, because they wanted to waste company resources fucking about reinventing (badly!!!) existing free off-the-shelf products. FML.

Simple

[i58]

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.

Because you don't trust us, and with GOOD reason..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I love my job...

[OrangeTide]

It's not the job, it's the people.

Idiot Bosses

[Tablizer]

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.

Re:Idiot Bosses

[BVis]

There's a reason those idiot bosses have the jobs they do. If they weren't management, they'd have to do actual work . The reason they don't do actual work is because they're rubbish at it, so they were moved to a role where they can do less damage. Peter Principle, I think; you rise to the level of your incompetence.

Last job I had, I saw 3-4 people quit because of our idiot asshole CTO who they reported to. This guy was not only bad at his job, he had no idea about any tech that has come into usage in the last 10 years, and was singlehandedly responsible for the fact that we were running a mission-critical data store on software written by a company that went out of business 20 years ago. The app was keeping them on Windows XP because apparently anything newer had a command line that didn't work with the product. Yes, it was a DOS app. No, I'm not kidding. If we'd lost the application server and we couldn't restore backups, we'd be fucked, because we wouldn't be able to re-install the product; he'd lost the install media years ago.

Plus, he was a shit manager. He'd yell, backstab, kiss up, hoard knowledge, not answer questions, not return email, and generally do anything he could to protect himself (usually at the expense of his reports). I heard through the grapevine that they'd been trying to fire him for more than a year but couldn't make anything stick, or get enough information out of him to sanely replace him.

Re:Idiot Bosses

[Tablizer]

Some managers are good at managing, some are not. You don't even have to be a top tech wizard to be a good tech manager. (Although, zero tech experience is usually a recipe for disaster.)

And "old stuff" is not necessarily bad stuff. It's often road-tested by time and more reliable than newer stuff. For example, our ASP Classic stuff has proven far easier to migrate to different servers than ASP.Net. ASP.Net is config-picky.

Perhaps because because ASP Classic is a "dead" language, MS doesn't bother changing it every version. It's similar to the reason Latin is used in science: nobody's fiddling with it because it's a "dead" language, which makes it stable.

Re:Idiot Bosses

[toddestan]

Plus, he was a shit manager. He'd yell, backstab, kiss up, hoard knowledge, not answer questions, not return email, and generally do anything he could to protect himself (usually at the expense of his reports). I heard through the grapevine that they'd been trying to fire him for more than a year but couldn't make anything stick, or get enough information out of him to sanely replace him.

Sounds like they just need to grow a pair and fire him. I've seen this kind of situation, and while getting rid of someone who has managed to hoard a lot of institution knowledge will hurt, the only thing worse is letting them stay on so they can continue to dig themselves in deeper and continue with driving away the employees they need to keep. Unfortunately it seems management often just won't do what needs to be done.

Re:Not enough transgenders and women in tech

[OrangeTide]

Plausible, possibly women have evolved an ability to put up with more stupid evil shit as a survival tactic to deal with the patriarchy?

Another possible cause

[RogueyWon]

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.

Re:Another possible cause

[tehcyder]

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.

Most non-tech people figure this out by the time they're about eighteen.

Re:Another possible cause

[RogueyWon]

Or possibly not. Don't let the facts stand in the way of your grumpy-old-fart prejudices, though.

Many organizations don't give them status

[Karmashock]

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.

Treated as an expense, not an asset

[NitroWolf]

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.

Re:Treated as an expense, not an asset

[__aaclcg7560]

I ran into this problem a lot when I was video game tester and lead tester for six years. Programmers, producers and managers got bonuses, but not testers because the QA department doesn't contribute to the bottom line. Of course, those bonuses were always tied to unrealistic schedules. I pissed off more than a few people when I told that I didn't care about their bonuses.

One developer was so desperate for their bonuses that they hacked the bug database password, marked all their bugs as fixed, and tried to get the producer to set up a code release meeting. That stunt didn't fly well with management. We spent the next six weeks testing all 3,000 bugs in the database as we weren't able to rollback the changes. Everyone lost their bonuses.

Re:Treated as an expense, not an asset

[tehcyder]

One of the major problems with IT and engineering departments is that they are treated as an expense.

Well, that's because unless you work in an IT or engineering company and develop IT or engineering products, then you are an overhead expense, just like HR, finance and building maintenance.

Shill article...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The real story

[ChrisMaple]

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.

Work-life balance

[larryjoe]

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.

Re:Work-life balance

[dgatwood]

I mostly agree, except for this one:

Things that don't matter: Lunch or snacks (free or otherwise)

I'm currently working for a company that feeds us three days a week. I'm very grateful for that, because we moved from an area that had a few restaurants within easy walking distance to a new location that has none. At our exit off the 101, there's one restaurant that's kind of like a Denny's (not fast at all), one Mexican restaurant, and that's it. None of them are within walking distance (okay, so there's one Mexican food truck, but...), and the shared parking lot for those two restaurants is always full. Other than that, there's no food until you get all the way to the next exit off the 101 in either direction.

Worse, when you do go one exit away in either direction, you similarly find only two or three restaurants, also with inadequate parking. Most of the time, I end up driving three exits north on the 101 to where there are enough restaurants to actually be practical (including a few with drive-thru windows), but that means burning about half of my lunch hour just driving to and from the restaurant.

So yes, it doesn't matter even slightly whether an employer provides food for free, or even provides it on-site, but it matters a great deal whether there is ready access to food within a reasonable walking distance. If there isn't, and if the employer doesn't provide food, it can get rather annoying. :-)

Re:Work-life balance

[tehcyder]

Where I've had to work somewhere in the middle of nowhere like that, I just learned to take a packed lunch in. But I would choose not to work there in the longer term.

It's one of those "hygeine" elements of a job, i.e. things that can make you not want to work somewhere, but whose opposite doesn't really make you want to work there. .

Re:Work-life balance

[dgatwood]

Pretty much. There are a lot of other things that also kind of fall into that category for me—salary, for example. I'm not likely to jump ship for a higher salary (in the absence of other reasons to leave a company), but if you stop paying me a salary, I'm not likely to stick around. :-D

community impact as well

[sdinfoserv]

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.

Re:community impact as well

[epyT-R]

Apparently, it's only replacing a culture that stereotypes 'young single males' negatively. Unhappy people lash out, regardless of skin color and genitalia.

Re:Why? WHY???

[taustin]

Bluntly put, your boss is not all bosses.

And even more bluntly put, if all your jobs suck, perhaps you should consider that the jobs aren't the problem.

Technical work is important and thats why it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

My two cents

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Losing at capitalism 101

[Ol Olsoc]

Have you ever worked in a unionized environment before?

Ther are now a lot more people with apocryphal hate stories about union their experiece than there are Union employees.

They are damn near gone! You were successful. You killed them. Crack a beer and celebrate.

But no, we're going to hear a lot of "first hand personal experience" stories for the next hundred years.

So celebrate your crowning achieveent that your employercan fire you for wearing the wrong color shirt. Or for the LULZ for that matter.

Because one thing is for certain. union or not, the employee remains the number one enemy.

Re:Not enough transgenders and women in tech

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

Re:Why? WHY???

[ShanghaiBill]

Honestly: they don't pay me enough for what I do, nor do they pay me enough to put up with my boss.

It is obvious that they do, or you wouldn't still be working there.

Pro-tip: Bad attitudes are highly correlated with low pay. If you can't find a better position in today's job market, the problem is with you.

Re: Not enough transgenders and women in tech

[BarbaraHudson]

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.

Empowerment.

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:Losing at capitalism 101

[Anonymous Coward]

You know there is more than one bay in the world, right? It's pretty arrogant to think that everyone knows where the fuck you're talking about when you just say "the bay area".

Graph might be misleading, but still ....

[King_TJ]

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.

Re:Graph might be misleading, but still ....

[cbhacking]

I'd like to take this moment to point out that "I.T. workers" is a bullshit category. It makes as much sense as putting theoretical mathematicians, rocket scientists, and accountants all in a category because they all "do math", or (house) architects, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, and landscapers all in one category because they "make houses".

Here's a partial list of things I've done for work as part of an "I.T." job:
  * Website design
  * Malware removal
  * User account management on a Windows domain
  * Physically cannibalizing one rack-mount server for parts to put in two others
  * Writing code in a programming language (not to be confused with writing HTML/CSS)
  * Go through crash dumps in a debugger to figure our what happened
  * Black-box test web applications for security vulnerabilities
  * Review design documents for security risks in the designed software
  * Research new test tools and make recommendations
  * Write reports (on a computer!) related to the above

No two of those things are the same skill set. I'm not including things that bridge some of the gaps, like writing scripts (coding!) for automating some test tools (black-box testing!); those things may require skill in two different tasks, but the tasks themselves are mutually independent. I'm not even including things that every field has to deal with that aren't really the core skill, like interviewing people, managing project schedules, interpersonal communication, etc. I'm also leaving out a lot of fine-grained differences in things, like the difference between worrying about performance in a driver (where you want memory and CPU efficiency, avoiding long blocking operations, etc.) and performance in a web app (where you want scalability through parallelism, caching, offloading work to the client where possible, etc.). Some of these items might be broadly categorized as being in the same kind of field ("Tech Support" or "Software Security" or "Development") but even there the skills needed, aptitudes an individual will have, and interest levels vary wildly between tasks.

I love my current (sixth, counting college internships) job overall, but that doesn't mean I enjoy the report writing or am good at network pen-test just because I can find XSS in damn near any web app and can reverse engineer phone apps. My second and fifth jobs were disasters for very different reasons, but both boil down to "I wasn't doing what I was hired to do, and was being told to do things that I had no knowledge of and/or interest in" and poor management (one wouldn't define objectives, the other didn't understand that you can't just have two people do the work of five, without the deadlines changing, simply because the other three quit). So yeah, sometimes you can group the jobs meaningfully and compare the specific instances (jobs five and six are similar, though there are a lot of differences even so). But it doesn't even make sense to group jobs two and five (beyond "was working on software-related stuff") any more than it makes sense to group a theatrical stage lighting director with an electrician (even though they both work with light bulbs).

Re:Losing at capitalism 101

[losfromla]

Unions work well for Germany, maybe if we had Socialism at all levels like they do we also would be awesome?

I guess I'm just lucky

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

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.

Re:I guess I'm just lucky

[tehcyder]

I have four weeks of vacation

Only someone from the US would say that like it's a massive perk instead of a bare minimum requirement.

"Mom and Pop"

[mariox19]

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?

Re:"Mom and Pop"

[Archangel Michael]

mom-and-pop does code up an LDAP, who's to say the customer has it together on its end?

You see problem, I see opportunity. I see an excellent opportunity to expand your companies services, and earn additional revenue.

"We've coded our application so that you put your authorized LDAP query user name here, password here, the sever address here, the LDAP scope here ... Fairly simple process. If you don't know how to do that, we can send one of our consultants over and help implement LDAP in your organization, please see our Technical Sales group to define the scope of that project and get a quote together for you"

Damn, is it really that bad out there?

[raxtich]

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.

Those perks keep you in the office longer

[BlueCoder]

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.

Re:Losing at capitalism 101

[KGIII]

If you don't know where that is then, perhaps, this is not the site for you and the communique was not intended for you to be able to understand.

Some huge reasons

[FeatureSpace]

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.

Re:Why? WHY???

[Anonymous Coward]

About 3 years ago, I had problems with some video editing software that IT had installed. I rang IT to get it fixed.

The IT manager dumped my request for a fix, rang my boss, and asked why I hadn't fixed it. My boss, puzzled, came and asked me why the hell the IT manager would think I could fix it.

Turns out, the IT manager knows I've got a Bachelor in CS. I don't have the admin passwords, I'm not paid for IT support nor have I ever worked in this particular kind of enterprise support nor have I been specifically authorised by the business to act in a support capacity (I could be dismissed for doing so). I don't have anything beyond write access to the servers, either, but when it takes 2-6 hours to transfer a 1.5 gig file between two machines that are side by side (as opposed to on the other side of the nation) that's also my problem to solve.

Managers will exploit you, thinking your skills are theirs to use, no matter how far outside your job description their requirements are. They will steal everything they can from you, then present their awesome management skills to their superiors and ask for bonuses and career options for themselves.

lack of sane hours

[epyT-R]

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.

manchild and thier nerf toys get real

[johncandale]

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

Re:manchild and thier nerf toys get real

[freeze128]

OK, You got it! ...All except the quiet office. You have to work in a madhouse.

Re:Losing at capitalism 101

[TheGratefulNet]

I understand. but 'the bay area' DOES mean san francisco area. like it or not, this is the label and the fact that you didn't know that - well - you know it now.

I spent time in the boston area and its also a 'bay area'. so is maryland. but 'the bay area' is silicon valley. I did not make the name up; don't freak out at me for using a standard name that you happened to not be aware of.

Not really benefits

[tsotha]

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.

I was saying all this 10 years ago btw

[Pro923]

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.

I've been in the business for 40 years

[ChesterRafoon]

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.

Re:I've been in the business for 40 years

[FrozenGeek]

Concur. I started in the industry 29 years ago (dang). It was cool. It was fun. We actually got to build interesting new stuff. And, yes, there were boring patches, but a lot of the time I actually woke up Monday morning thinking "I get to go to work today."

Now, we struggle to get permission to implement best practices. Instead, management wants to perpetuate the mistakes we've made for the past N years.

Actually, the biggest issue I seem to be encountering is "me, me, me". I used to encounter a team ethos among most, if not all, of my co-workers. Now, nobody seems to care about the team or the mission. It's all about them, and if things don't go precisely their way, they do their best to make everyone miserable. What scares me about this is that I'm afraid of becoming like them. Maybe it's time to spiff up the resume. Any good SW development firms in Canada (Ontario and Quebec excepted)?

Obvious

[Tough Love]

Psycho managers and back biting culture do not a happy engineer make.

Re:Losing at capitalism 101

[thinkwaitfast]

Why work in the bay area then? I did tech for 30 years and only went to SF to get drunk.

Ever heard of, or read ...

[mikein08]

The Tao of Programming?

Because most people do?

[Gumbercules!!]

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.

Easy.

[Psyko]

Because most of them understand Sturgeon's Revelation even if they don't know what it is.

Re:Nelson: Ha Ha.

[dgatwood]

Maybe pay is a problem for IT, but it usually isn't an issue at all for programmers. For example, here in the Bay Area, at roughly $90-$150k per year, the hourly rate would still be better than most jobs even if it required working 80-hour weeks. The problem is that most people can't survive an 80-hour work week for more than a couple of weeks, and even a 40-hour week is horribly inefficient and, frankly, exhausting at times.

The 40-hour work week is optimal for menial tasks that require very little thinking. For a technical workforce that spends most of their day thinking and trying to solve complex problems, workers are most efficient when working six or seven hours per day, not eight, and certainly not 12. Long before they reach the 50-hour mark, they're actually getting less work done per week than somebody working a 35-hour week, because they have less energy and are less focused. In fact, I rather suspect that the optimal work week in tech is somewhere closer to 20 hours, and that even a 35-hour week involves significant loss of efficiency.

What we need is for employers to hire twice as many people, pay them half as much, and work them half as long. Doing so on a broad scale, however, would require some serious changes, particularly in the way we try to attract people to the field. But it should be done, not just because employees would be happier with a better work-life balance, but also because employers would be getting what they paid for instead of only about two-thirds of it.

Don't forget front line and tier 2 support.

[amberdalan]

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.

Why? Mainly the hours but...

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

George Carlin

[Neo-Rio-101]

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.

My suspicion

[Lord Kano]

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

Re:My suspicion

[tehcyder]

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

That is true about any other professional job too. Bright young lawyers have to work for dull senior lawyers, same with doctors, soldiers, teachers or anything else that's not a minimum wage job.

Smoothies do go far

[dhasenan]

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.

Aggressive outsourcing

[mrflash818]

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.

So why do we try to encourage STEM?

[ET3D]

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?

Re:Losing at capitalism 101

[el_chicano]

Unions work well for Germany, maybe if we had Socialism at all levels like they do we also would be awesome?

Gee, you are a regular Einstein...literally!

Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein

Once upon a time ...

[Taco Cowboy]

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,

Most tech employees are not techies

[franckyred]

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.

Re:Most tech employees are not techies

[franckyred]

Would like to add that the efficiency stuff is why most womens don't want to get into IT. They care more about some human values than efficiency. They are interested in CS (and good at it) but don't want to work in an environement where only efficiency gets valued (at the expense of everything else).

Re:Losing at capitalism 101

[franckyred]

No, you enter the industry when young. Then either you prove yourself very good (and you are in premiere league so you better really be amazing) or they dispose of you. It's like a long trial period. And like in football, a lot of people want to work in tech. But very few will remain in the field after the trial. In other fields, school is supposed to have prepared you. Since most school don't teach you to create technology, then the first years at companies is your training. Either you are good at it, or you're out. And most of us will be out at some point.

Career advancement

[codeButcher]

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.)

Re:Why? WHY???

[tehcyder]

If you can't find a better position in today's job market, the problem is with you.

Oddly, every time I check there just aren't that many jobs offering a million a year for two days a week with twenty weeks holiday, and most positions are broadly similar to what I'm doing now.

I'm sure I'm just not trying hard enough.

Re:Why? WHY???

[BVis]

Not everyone can just walk away from a job because they think they're underpaid. Underpaid is better than not paid at all, especially when you're the sole source of support for your family. And not everyone is in a market where jobs are plentiful; this guy could live in East Asshole, Flyover State, USA, where there are more cows than people and you have to drive 45 minutes to buy groceries.

As far as bad attitudes correlating with low pay.. Does the bad attitude come as a result of the low pay, or does the low pay come as a result of the bad attitude? Either way, a raise will most likely improve things; however, I'm guessing that his employer doesn't give a fuck about his well-being and happily uses his "bad attitude" to deny him raises and promotions.

Re:Why? WHY???

[RabidReindeer]

I'd be more inclined to limit it to "all young people." The older they get, the more jobs they get fired from, the less likely they are to continue to same behavior (though some never learn).

And the less likely they are to say "If you don't like it you can just go get a job somewhere else".

Re: Why? WHY???

[BVis]

No, management is paid to get the most work out of you for the least pay. "Motivating" people to work these days frequently takes the form of "work harder or we'll fire you", instead of something constructive like making the employee feel involved, or valued, or anything else but a greedy lazy interchangeable cog.

And I don't see where GP mentioned unions. He mentioned "job descriptions", which are difficult (or, frequently, impossible) to enforce without a union. This should not be the case. If I get hired to write code, and the first day of work I get told I'm going to be doing sysadmin work instead, there's not much I can do about it except quit. If job descriptions were enforceable, I would have the right to say "That is not what you hired me for. Make my job duties line up with the description that I accepted or face large fines." Employees should not have to suffer for management's incompetence or lying.

Re:Indians

[tehcyder]

At some level all these foreigners with fake degrees must actually be doing some useful work, unless you believe it's all some massive global job creation scheme organised by the Illuminati or something.

The fact is that everyone thinks free market competition and a global economy are great until it impacts on their own job prospects.

Lack of Support

[DarthVain]

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

What's a perk?

[jsepeta]

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.

Re:Why? WHY???

[Faust6]

Utter bullshit.

Re:Why? WHY???

[KingMotley]

No, but you can find a position that allows you to work on things that you think actually matter, have coworkers that aren't a drain on a project, a manager that is supportive and part of the team rather than one that views his position as a slave driver, and a work environment that sparks creativity, individualism, and a sense of teamwork. Pay is about average, time off is average, perks are average, but it does have the ability to work from home at a moments notice a dozen or so times a year.

You can find it. I'm there.

Re: Why? WHY???

[KingMotley]

Because holding on to experienced knowledge workers is often the best way to achieve a better work/cost ratio than throwing away years/decades of knowledge and experience to achieve minor short term goals. Often, mistakes are very costly and reproducing them over and over because you've let the ones who already made them and learned from them leave is more costly than minor changes that produce happy employees. Seen it time and time again, and poor management that doesn't understand why they are failing even though "productivity" is up. The easy to measure productivity that doesn't include the cost of avoidable errors had they not driven good employees away.

It all comes down to a four letter word.

[alfredo]

Work. All jobs suck after a few weeks.

after 45 years of coding I still get into the zone

[peter303]

(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..

Re:Major disconnect from WHAT the job entails

[boristdog]

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!

Re:Why? WHY???

[blue9steel]

And even more bluntly put, if all your jobs suck, perhaps you should consider that the jobs aren't the problem.

Well, there are significant problems with our socio-economic system but that's out of scope for this discussion.

How to demoralize your IT staff

[Atrox666]

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.

Life

[Baldrson]

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.

Re:Losing at capitalism 101

[losfromla]

Unions work well for Germany, maybe if we had Socialism at all levels like they do we also would be awesome?

Gee, you are a regular Einstein...literally!

  Why Socialism?
by Albert Einstein

Thank you, very much. Although I am literally a Mexican-American who is not of Israeli descent and so it would be quite hard for me to be literally Einstein. I do agree though that Socialism fights the destructive nature of capitalism which we see _literally_ occurring in the United States of America. High imprisonment rates, obscene income and wealth inequality, destruction of the environment, wholesale removal of our rights, etc.

Beats a real job

[dave562]

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.

RED TAPE

[Toshito]

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.

Re:Why? WHY???

[tompaulco]

Pro-tip: Bad attitudes are highly correlated with low pay.

That's true. I used to be happy-go-lucky, but years and years of no bonuses, raises or cost of living adjustments gave me a bad attitude.

Re: Why? WHY???

[HornWumpus]

No duh.

I know of a business that gives employees 'demerits'. If they go a month without one, they get to go to a pizza lunch.

I would flee so fast their would be an implosion sound from where I had been standing.

Re: Why? WHY???

[Gob Gob]

In Australia your employment contract is a summary of your real "on paper" contract and the subsequent verbal changes and acceptance of those changes. This is basically if you accept changes to your verbal contact by not rejecting the duties and taking payment for them then it forms part of your contract.

Picture a dev who is asked to set up a few email accounts while the sysadmin is away. Sysadmin comes back and she passes on all email user management to the dev.

1) The dev accepts the work and it forms part of her employment contract - rejecting it in the future breaches that contract
2) The dev rejects the work citing that it is not part of her duties (saying "contract" is confrontational at that stage)

You can always tell your boss - "You know when you brought me a coffee were you just being nice and helping out or is it part of your duties/contract?"

Re: Why? WHY???

[Gob Gob]

No, management is paid to get the most work out of you for the least pay

Totally wrong. Management is paid (as part of their budget) to deliver business outcomes with the fiscal and human resources at their disposal. The reason why HR always has a seat at the executive table is because fundamentally every business that does not the well-being of their people as a high priority is destined to fail.

Once you have an offer and acceptance it would be nice if all employees treated their colleagues up/down or adjacent with respect.

If you are truly working in an environment of "..most work out of you for the least pay.." then get the FUCK OUT OF THERE. In my experiences any workplace hostilities are because of individuals not because of a corporate structure designed to enslave you. If you feel that way then solve your problem by finding a career/life that is free of such things.

Where are the GOOD CIOs?

[Zeekort]

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.

Perks don't matter if you can't use them.

[anyGould]

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!

Exaggerati

[Lauriy]

Their graphs make me sick to my stomach.

Re: Why? WHY???

[BVis]

Enlightened, highly successful companies find other ways to motivate their workers besides fear of termination.

Re: Why? WHY???

[BVis]

You can't do anything about that.

Bullshit. That might be the status quo now, but throwing your hands up and saying "there's nothing I can do" is the worst thing you could do.

Re: Why? WHY???

[BVis]

Management is paid (as part of their budget) to deliver business outcomes with the fiscal and human resources at their disposal.

Management has incentive to use as few of those resources as possible, so they need to get as much work out of you as they can. They have a vested interest in working you to death, so that's what most do.

The reason why HR always has a seat at the executive table is because fundamentally every business that does not [value] the well-being of their people as a high priority is destined to fail.

HR is at the executive table to ensure that the company does not break the rules badly enough that terminated workers have a legitimate case for a wrongful termination suit. Their job is to minimize risk. Sometimes treating the workers well is how they do that, sometimes pulling sleazy tricks is the best strategy. Again, they represent the company's interests, not the workers'. And the company's interests are frequently served by treating the employees badly.

Once you have an offer and acceptance it would be nice if all employees treated their colleagues up/down or adjacent with respect.

Yes, it would be nice. In the real world, sociopathic assholes are the ones who move up by stabbing people in the back. The current employment environment rewards that behavior. It's hard to put a number on employee satisfaction, so it's hard to make a case to the powers that be that they should treat their employees better. If you have a number, you can demonstrate a trend, and make a case for a policy that raises employee satisfaction because it saves money. But, since employee satisfaction does not show up on a balance sheet explicitly, nobody in the executive suite gives a fuck.

If you are truly working in an environment of "..most work out of you for the least pay.." then get the FUCK OUT OF THERE. In my experiences any workplace hostilities are because of individuals not because of a corporate structure designed to enslave you. If you feel that way then solve your problem by finding a career/life that is free of such things.

Like it or not, companies that treat their employees well cannot compete with companies that work people to death, because they have lower costs. It's business 101. The hard part is finding the point at which morale becomes so low that revenues start to drop and stopping just short of it. There are a few exceptions (Costco comes to mind) but making employees happy is frequently hard (read: expensive).to do, and not financially useful.

Re: Why? WHY???

[BVis]

Because holding on to experienced knowledge workers is often the best way to achieve a better work/cost ratio than throwing away years/decades of knowledge and experience to achieve minor short term goals.

This quarter's numbers are all most companies care about. Experienced employees are expensive and payroll is a cost to be minimized.

Often, mistakes are very costly and reproducing them over and over because you've let the ones who already made them and learned from them leave is more costly than minor changes that produce happy employees.

The losses due to repeated mistakes are hard to quantify, because nobody has a crystal ball. Treating the employees better costs a quantifiable amount of money RIGHT NOW for sure, so that's more significant. Yes, it's short-sighted and gives the bean counters enough rope to hang the company, but the MBAs making the decisions frequently have no vision beyond the numbers and can't think in terms of years instead of weeks.

Seen it time and time again, and poor management that doesn't understand why they are failing even though "productivity" is up.

Again, a lack of vision and ability to see the picture beyond the balance sheet. SOP for management in this case is to continue the beatings until morale improves, or offer useless "perks" like discounted movie tickets or an ice cream social a couple times a year.

The easy to measure productivity that doesn't include the cost of avoidable errors had they not driven good employees away.

This is the problem. How does one determine an "avoidable error"? How do you know that that mistake would not have been made by an experienced employee? You don't. Things like that are impossible to foresee with a level of accuracy that would be significant to management. No, it's much easier to call the worker who made the error stupid or lazy and threaten their job if they make the mistake again, so that's what they do. Errors are always the fault of the people who do actual work, not management's incompetence.

Re: Why? WHY???

[BVis]

Employment contracts are rare and unenforceable here. You will do what management tells you to do or you will be fired.

2) The dev rejects the work citing that it is not part of her duties (saying "contract" is confrontational at that stage)

The dev's manager then has the dev fired for insubordination, to be replaced by someone cheaper and more compliant. In any case, most JDs here include the phrase "other duties as assigned by management", so they can do whatever they want and there's nothing you can do about it except exercise the only real right workers have in this country: You can walk out anytime you want.

You can always tell your boss - "You know when you brought me a coffee were you just being nice and helping out or is it part of your duties/contract?"

And your boss will say "You know the part where you still work here? That can go away if I decide to not be nice, so shut the fuck up and get my coffee."

Re:Why? WHY???

[HornWumpus]

The difference between 'underpaid' and 'think they're underpaid' is another job willing to pay you more.

If you can't find a job that pays better, you are fairly paid, all things considered.

Re: Why? WHY???

[HornWumpus]

And you answer back honestly: 'I can have four offers before you have one qualified replacement'.

If that's not true for you, you have a problem. Your problem, not your bosses.

re: I.T. workers as a job category

[King_TJ]

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!

Sigh.

[kaatochacha]

"free smoothies in the cafeteria only goes so far", Says someone with a cafeteria AND free smoothies.

Re:Why? WHY???

[toddestan]

I like to think of it in terms of how much they would have to pay someone to fill my position should I leave. If it's more, then I'm underpaid. Even if it's the same, I may still be underpaid as otherwise my years and experience with the company are being valued at $0.

Another way to look at it is if I resign and they try to counter, then I am definitely being underpaid.

Not Comprehenive? Incomprehensible.

[pfg23]

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.