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Tech Professionals' Aggravations Rise, But So Do Salaries (dice.com)
Nerval's Lobster writes: Despite some concerns over the stock market and whether the so-called "unicorns" will survive the year, it's apparently still a good time to get into tech: New data from Robert Half Technology suggests that salaries for various tech positions will increase as much as 7 percent this year. Which is good, because tech professionals have confessed to a host of aggravations with their lives, including too-expensive housing, lengthy commutes and gridlock, inability to achieve work-life balance, and a disconnect from their jobs. It's neither the best nor worst of times, but the money could be pretty good.
WTF is with this thread? Is Dice paying people to generate fake comments now?
I took a trade, job security for health. I took on a role as sysadmin despite being a sr dev. I also agreed to 24/7 on call.
Long, long story short my health took a holy hell of a beating. Days and at one stretch weeks at a time not getting a full nights sleep (and of course no fault of my own).
I did it for the job security I told myself. I also did it for a pittance. I figured it would buy me browny points.
I am now unemployed, fired roughly two weeks before xmas. My boss is a cunt. I am a sucker. Replaced by my lacky. I documented my work well.
I took a solid month off after that, I feel a LOT better health wise now. And mentally.
I'm 40 now. Been doing this 20 years. I never Learn. Yet I'll say it one more time.
Never. Again.
Back in the 1990's during the "Tech Bubble", "Economy 2.0". Tech workers were treated like gods, High pay, large benefits, and easy jobs. Anyone who was around during that time was lucky. A lot of people skipped college and went straight into tech, as "Web Developers", with an increase of people going to college in degrees that they really didn't care for but because it made a lot of money and was an easy job.
So what happened it created a glut of bad employees, lazy tech workers, who were over paid. Well new immigration laws, and the rise of Free Software allowed these business who realized that "Economy 2.0" was "Economy 1.0" in a market bubble needed to switch to more profitable entities. So they outsourced to cheaper countries for many of these easy jobs at a much lower rate, and kept raising the bar until, they found a happy medium.
So Tech workers who are employed in the US today have to be the following to be competitive
1. They need to be at a particular skill level, if not they will need to work harder to compensate. I am sorry but in my 20 years of professional experience, I have found the person who is working past 50 hours a week is either new at the job, and is working up experience, or just not technically savvy enough to get the job done right and on deadline.
2. They need to know how to be professional. This means a degree of people skills, not being insulting. Also knowing a bit how to deal with politics, how not to take blame for every problem yet willing to work on a solution to fix it. Also if you are to point blame you need to be professional about it, and make sure it isn't too sharp of a point.
3. They should understand the business they are in. There isn't a "Tech Industry" No one works in Tech, Apple make Consumer Product that happens to be computers. Google/Facebook/Twitter... are advertising companies with interesting software to keep its viewers engaged. Your technology skills should be used to benefit the business they are supporting. Medical IT work is different than Industrial IT Work, which is different than Government IT work... Know the business is important.
4. Know your place. In tech we tend to work across the organization, so we get high level glance at every job, and try to improve it with technology. This sometimes makes us think that we know how to do all these peoples jobs... You do not. You can make the best hammer in the world, but it doesn't make you a good carpenter, but your hammer may make a good carpenter better.
Yes today we tech workers have to be like the rest of the middle class staff. We are no longer treated as gods having the skills unknowable by mere mortals. We are not expected to produce, and be part of the team.
Now my experience, I don't work in metro areas, I have worked for startups, large and small orgs, Governments and industries. I found for the most part I found my aggravation is from my own pride being stomped on by reality, not from The Man who is trying to keep me down. Much of IT work is very creative, however working as part of the team means your creativity is limited to the needs of the group. So you will not get your own way.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Your post really hit home with me, mainly because I'm almost the exact same: I'll be 39 this month, been a *IX SA since 1991 (and add NA since roughly 1999). I did graveyard NOC jobs for almost 9 years to make ends meet, which took a massive toll on my body and mind: I've developed severe IBS, I have difficulty sleeping, generalised anxiety, minor long-term memory loss, and in the past year or two have noticed I can't multitask effectively as I once could. I have to work entirely from home as a result (which also makes finding salary positions difficult).
I was paid well (at peak, US$140K/year not including benefits or stock), but I never did what I did for the money nor did I want it. I'd ask my bosses after annual reviews "is there any way I can exchange this pay raise for more time off?", and the answer was always no. I quit my last job, which was in DevOps, after being there for little more than a year (my job prior to that was at a company for almost 8 years; I prefer stable work). I couldn't stand the "fix the problem with the least amount of effort, and stop trying to figure out how all of this works from top to bottom" mentality. I've been living off savings and spending frugally since May 2015, and doing that in Silicon Valley is difficult to say the least.
When I started seeing SRE and DevOps terms show up circa mid-to-late-2000s I became concerned with the direction my field was heading. SA/operations folks have always worked with developers, but we do and think about very different things: I can code in a multitude of PLs but I'm in no way a professional programmer and couldn't tell you how to implement a complex algorithm if I tried; in contrast, software developers don't have decades of operations knowledge and procedure, good design, or know the importance of application of KISS principle (especially in systems architecture). Like good programming style/approach, these are very hard to convey quickly and effectively. How do you instil over 20 years of knowledge into someone in 10 minutes? You can't. But companies today want the quick-and-easy solution (oh, and it needs to be cheap too. And efficient. And it needs to do our laundry. And herd cats. By the end of this sprint).
I've been wanting out of this line of work for the past 7 years, but especially within the last 2-3. The storage industry is where I'd like to go, as I find things like ATA protocol and doing data recovery quite enjoyable. The problem is that the storage industry is very... "niche" (some might stay stale). Finding someone to give you a chance and open the door for you is very rare.
Many of my friends and colleagues in systems/operations today share the exact same view I do -- there is something "shallow" (I would use the term moronic) going on when it comes to systems/operations. Any time I hear the phrases SaaS, agile or waterfall, DevOps/TechOps, cloud (context here depends), or scalability (outside of appropriate context) I cringe. Like me, my friends are trying to get out of this field, but because our skills are pretty much honed in one area switching to a new career is nearly impossible: companies acknowledge you, but upon seeing your work history go "oh wow, you have lots of operations knowledge, there's this opening we have in DevOps..." and not want to pursue any other discussions. It's like a curse.
Did I choose poorly? No -- I chose doing something at the time (early 90s to early 2000s) was incredibly exciting, rewarding, and enjoyable. But what the job role is *today* is not what it used to be (and what it should be, IMO). The rebuttals I get are "yeah well, adapt or get out" -- adapting doesn't work (a frontal lobotomy might work?), and getting out is almost impossible without taking up, say, giving everything up and flipping burgers.
Long story short: is the money worth it? The answer, 98% of the time, is a big fat NO. The 2% exception is if you know you need extra money and you know the thing you're doing is brief (say, under 6 months). It's never worth it long-term. I just wish companies would embrace this fact already; I'm still unsure if the millennials have.
Wow, very well said. Please mod up. (Millennial by about 6 hours and 2 minutes here.)
"Shallow" is a very good way of putting it. My job has become more and more digital burger flipping without satisfied customers. Actually, I think I got more recognition when I used to flip burgers. People can understand burgers. However, it's been more and more glaringly obvious that nobody understands what I do or even why I should do it. They just use me for no particular reason--just because they can. The work is all meaningless. It's like I show up at 8 am, and someone starts shooting at me saying "dance!" so I dance, and I dance mad. Then at 5, I go home, and I've contributed nothing to the world except perhaps entertainment for 5 or 6 individuals.
I mean, granted, I used to keep dancing mad into the night because I thought it'd keep them happy. Now it's just 8-5, because I don't care anymore and they've given me no reason to care anymore other than to keep the paycheck coming so that I can get myself out of the stupid financial situation I got myself into thinking I had a career ahead of me.
Flipping actual burgers is the way to go. Somebody's always going to cuss you out over something, but I felt a deep satisfaction when I used to flip burgers for a living because, well, burgers make people happy by and large. What I do now makes nobody happy. It's a mine field, and there's no point to it at all. People give me tasks just to see me fail at them because I didn't notice some stupid detail five forwards down in an email.
I mean, literally! I'm currently implementing an API which is a Rube Goldberg machine to work around a piece of shitty proprietary software, and I know it will never be used.
When I cook somebody a burger, I can see them eat it and be satisfied. When I'm done cooking this API, it'll be thrown straight into the trash the moment the cocaine-snorting assholes who wanted it have their next cocaine-induced vision, which will happen just as it gets ready, and then that next one will be thrown straight in the trash as well.
It's like a restaurant full of people all ordering absurd burgers, complaining that they're starving to death but they just need a mayonnaise sushi burger with Worcestershire sauce made with ground duck and half a bell pepper so they don't starve to death, and when it's ready, they just throw it in the trash and demand another absurdity.
My commute is pretty long - nearly 25 miles one way. I naively moved to this area when my wife was pregnant with our first because it was a better school district, but I've regretted it ever since... but we're just not in the financial condition to move, unfortunately, and my wife does freelance work now at a number of places near where we live.
Anyway, I've tried a number of things that the company seems to conspire to make not work for me, despite their "green" initiatives and advertising alternative schedules for "work life balance."
I tried a compressed work week - came in an hour earlier and left an hour later for four days (M-Th). It was good because traffic was better earlier and later, and then I had a three day weekend. You think "great, I get to spend extra time with the kids because of the three day weekend," but what happened was I left for work before they got up, came home when they were going to bed, and within a couple of years they were both in school on Friday anyway. So I was seeing them less. My jackass of a boss would then keep scheduling private meetings with me on Fridays, and it was obviously just to f#@k me up, because I'd come in on Friday and wait all day, then he'd say "I don't have time, let's meet on Monday." And yes, I'm certain it was intentional.
So I tried work from home (and still do). Hey, if you can work one day a week at home, that automatically cuts out 20% of the weekly aggravation from commuting. And if everybody did it (I know they can't), and the days at home were spread evenly through the week, then everyone's commute every day would be 20% better. But it doesn't work that way, and I can't do it when people schedule meetings or I'm working on a project that requires me to use resources at the office. But on the whole it works pretty well.
Alternative hours - this is where I get aggravated. So I manage to get my ass out of bed before five; the gym at work (at least we have that) opens at 5:30. I work out, shower, and I'm at my desk at 7:00am. Work eight hours (lunch at my desk, typically), I can leave around 3:00 or 3:30. Traffic is a dream at those times. Unfortunately, a lot of the artists I work with don't even come in until 10:00am or so. They schedule meetings at 3:30 and 4:00. To make matters worse, I work in television production and write playback interfaces for on air graphics. I'm not a graphics operator, but we're not union, so when all the graphics operators are booked, they ask me to do it. It's a nice change of pace... but the show we do is at night, so my schedule is shifted by almost exactly 12 hours.
So one of the keys to good health is keeping a regular schedule, and they make it impossible... I might go for a week or two, but then something always happens. Sure, there's a few special events I need to deal with every year, which might take me away from home for a week, but it's the constant interruptions in your daily schedule all throughout the year that lead to health problems. Frankly, I don't know how the graphics operators do it, because when they're not doing live shows, they're in during normal work hours to prep.
I have an unusual position, though, and it does pay well (although I haven't gotten a decent raise since they could blame the recession... all the while boasting publicly how well the company is doing and posting increasing revenue year after year). I also like my job, on the whole, because it's different, and the work is constantly changing. So I don't know what I'm supposed to do, but if a bunch of money fell into my lap right now, I'd quit for sure, and I'd take less money to work elsewhere. But my job is so specific, it's hard to find decent compensation anywhere else... few companies need someone with my talents.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
.. industry, PLEASE DON'T.
There are far too many people working in IT who simply shouldn't be, and they just make stuff harder.