Slashdot Mirror
Why Do So Many Tech Workers Dislike Their Jobs?
Nerval's Lobster writes: So what if you work for a tech company that offers free lunch, in-house gym, and dry cleaning? A new survey suggests that a majority of software engineers, developers, and sysadmins are miserable. Granted, the survey in question only involved 5,000 respondents, so it shouldn't be viewed as comprehensive (it was also conducted by a company that deals in employee engagement), but it's nonetheless insightful into the reasons why a lot of tech pros apparently dislike their jobs. Apparently perks don't matter quite so much if your employees have no sense of mission, don't have a clear sense of how they can get promoted, and don't interact with their co-workers very well. While that should be glaringly obvious, a lot of companies are still fixated on the idea that minor perks will apparently translate into huge morale boosts; but free smoothies in the cafeteria only goes so far.
The grunts know how things work and what's possible in the infrastructure.
Managers have an idea how things.
Directors don't know how things work.
C level has no idea what they even have.
--
Essentially if you're not on the front lines for long, you have no idea what is actually going on.
Look at all the freebies here, if you can find a break in your 80-hour work week, you'll totally dig them!
I can't speak for anyone else, but most "tech jobs" I've held were with companies whose futures and business I had no stake in, nor interest in having stake in, and the work to be routinely uninteresting where creativity was actively discouraged (for good reasons, many times), individuality was suppressed, and I was treated as a replaceable cog (and I was). I'm fortunate in that I have many other outlets for my creative needs, but dealing with corporate bureaucracy, idiot bosses, etc does take its toll. The paychecks are nice and allow me to have a comfortable life outside of work, but I will say that after 2 decades, I'm ready to throw in the towel and do something else, even if it means downsizing again.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
2) Minion in large tech company. Here you have opportunity for advancement - but only by working EXTREMELY long hours for little pay.
3) Owning/working for a small start up. Same as Minion, only pay is far worse but you have a lottery ticket to make it big.
Basically tech jobs are closer to blue collar than white collar, despite requiring significant intelligence. Oh, and did I mention the risk of being outsourced to china/india?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
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.
All the jobs I've had involve doing work.
Long signatures suck.
Every company that gives perks like that is only because they want you to stay all hours of the day and night. Sure, that is great and all and the money is wonderful at those places, I'm sure. However, the only thing that many of us care about is actual free time.
It seems like the whole culture is pushing this "Work your life away because it is the American thing to do" agenda. "40 hours a week is for lazy gits who will get nowhere in the workplace." Hell, where I work, don't work less than 90 hours a week if you want to make it through your next performance review. Most people start with at least 7 "use it or lose it" personal days and god help you if you actually try to take one. I am lucky because, as a contractor, they actually think twice about making me stay late as it is costing them. Salaried, I would never want to work there as that kind of environment is toxic to one's health and soul. This kind of shit is what makes tech workers hate their jobs.
Work to live and not live to work, words to live by.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
A lot of tech work is reactionary. And if all you have to do is put out fires, it isn't terrible. But you are usually expected to work at other things between fires. Which means the second you start doing one thing, you have to stop and go fix six other things. Always feeling like you are getting pulled in eighteen different directions sucks.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I've been in the software industry for a bit, and am appalled at what companies think attract great talent. It is so far off base today, that no wonder people aren't happy. Let's take a look at the things they believe are great:
Open office environment: What they say is it is great collaboration. What it really means is that you sit at benches back to back and face to face with your coworkers all wearing headphones. None of them talk, you have little personal space, and if you don't actually want to listen to music, you hear 3 different songs through the headphones. Never mind the Skype calls going on around you, or everyone's computer/phone./tablet all going off at the same time as the company wide email goes out. Good luck concentrating.
Game room/exercise room: What this means is more distractions for the young workers who already can't focus on their task for five minutes and get something done. Now they need to bug you to play with them and wonder why you say you don't have time as we are already way behind. So now you end up doing their tasks while they are shooting pool just to make sure the client gets what they were promised. Basically, more people NOT working while at work, forcing you into more hours to pick up the slack. BTW, how many hours a week does your company actually expect out of you?
Agile: A form of development co-opted by management and companies to micro manage you at every possibility, without actually establishing any direction. Yes, I know this is not how it is supposed to work, but after being in many companies doing it, it is all too often done this way. Everyone gets creative about 'what they did yesterday', and 'what they will do today', yet we still don't have a clear direction on 'what the heck we are doing'. That gets frustrating.
Unlimited vacation: What this actually means is no guaranteed vacation. You get to take it 'if you have time'. So the people who don't actually work take tons, and those who actually care about delivery get squeezed down. Reward is opposite to accomplishments
No Real WFH: Most places frown on WFH, as you are supposed to be collaborating. So you sit on your bench desk with trendy uncomfortable chair with said coworkers all plugged into their music not talking anyways. Why couldn't I work from home?
Quality of code: This one is debatable probably, but in the last three to five years the quality is so poor it is scary. People are rushed and rewarded for 'just getting it out' even though it fails all the time. How about rewarding people for putting something out that actually works and is stable? Could we actually teach proper coding in college?
What I really want is an actual office with walls and a window. Give me a door that I can leave open most of the time when people have questions, but I can close when things are crazy or tough. Give me co-workers that want to solve real problems, and care about unit tests, comments, and making a GOOD solution. Pay me for delivering quality, and more importantly, stop trying to figure out if I am operating at 100% efficiency all of the time. Define what the heck we are trying to accomplish up front, and then iterate rapidly on the solution. That would make me happy, anyways.....
Rant off.....
"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?
Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose: you'll be happy with your job to the extent it has these qualities. How much autonomy do most engineering jobs give you? Not much I imagine. How much mastery? Well you're certainly not going to be exploring many new skills, or even masterting particularly difficult ones on average; it's mostly repetitive scaffolding with glue.
Purpose is pretty much the only one that technology work has plenty of. Everything runs on information technology now, so if you're interested in tech, which you probably are, you'll find lots of purpose in developing or administering information systems. This only goes so far before the lack of autonomy gets to you, or you hit the mastery ceiling pretty quickly at any given job.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
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%.
I work for a "mom and pop" shop, as you call it, and I can sympathize with what you're saying. But it goes both ways. We built an application for a company that I am sure you heard of. Let's call it "Acme Inc." One of the application's requirements was that it support SAML authentication. That's fine, we could handle that. All we asked for was some particulars about Acme Inc's environment.
Could we have a sample SAML token, to see what kind of assertions Acme would be requiring? Could we have the SAML version, 1 or 2, that Acme uses? The responsibility for providing us with any of this was "delegated" to people who already have too much on their plate, don't really know what is going on themselves, and who lack the mojo to get a quick response from the various systems administrators at Acme who could help. A couple of weeks later, the stakeholders at Acme are crying, "Come on, come on, come on! We want the product!" Of course, none of these preliminaries have been attended to.
Then, when the product is finally delivered, the guy at Acme charged with putting the product through its paces has no idea how SAML works, and is asking me to walk him through it. (Remember, this was their idea.) We come to find out that he has no test server to use as an "Identity Provider" (don't ask!), and he wants to know if can I help him there.
Granted, this is all ultimately a managerial screw-up. But, my point is that even if a mom-and-pop does code up an LDAP, who's to say the customer has it together on its end?
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.