Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the stuff-to-think-about-it dept.
richnut writes "Here's an interesting LA Times article on the negative side of being a well-paid techie in today's industry. "
Talks about burnout, stress, boredom, restlessness, and all
the other things that so many of us get used to before quitting
and moving on. Been through that twice...
Re:This is exactly why I got an MS in CS
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5
The "real meat of a CS degree"? That is funny! I hear this from folks all the time, yet, those same folks tend to be the ones who talk but cannot do. I do not question your skill or your acheivements, but a degree in CS has VERY little to do with skill these days. Everything moves too fast. Teach yourself or die. I don't argue that theory has its place, but in most schools a degree in CS is a good way to waste 4 years and spend lots of $$ drawing flow charts and state diagrams for useless code.
Did you ever notice how those that value the diploma more than all others generally are those who have no clue? (Usually ending up as managers because they are not capable of perfoming technically.) And, they are the ones that assume that everyone should waste their life away at work. I know plenty of folks that live for their meaningless job, and most have a degree. It is not weather you have a degree or not, it is what you will put up with that shapes your quality of life.
I am a college drop out, yet my life is great. I work about 40 hours a week as a network engineer/programmer, and spend most of my time with my wife and son. Yet, I am a highly skilled and respected employee. How did I pull it off? Priorities. Nobody seems to have them in ANY field these days. Those that are willing to put up with the garbage-life culture make things harder and harder on those who won't. So people jump from job to job, companies treat them like interchangeable cogs, life comes last and cash comes first, and in the end most people burn their life away without ever questioning what is hapening, or why the average quality of life today is so poor compared to that of only a few decades ago, or why kids are increasingly less human, or why they had everything and yet were never fulfilled. Religion is not what is missing, plain old value for human life is what is missing. People don't understand that life without quality is worse than death.
-Paul "Rant-O-Matic" Hirsch
First comment? Why Open Source...
by
Frank+Sullivan
·
· Score: 4
Why is Open Source doing so well? Because software SHOULD be emotionally as well as financially rewarding. Programming can be a high art form, in the right environment. Writing free software is a chance to care about our code, not our paychecks.
-- Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of identification with this story, and I'm no different -- at least in terms of environmental stress. But how I react is, I think, a little different and a little more constructive.
I've been in the professional ranks for ~10 years, and just ended a four-year salaried stint at a big telecom monolith, back to consulting (hourly). The new place is the most politicised, disorganized, ugly environment I've seen since I left my short stint at MS, but I'm more positive and upbeat. Why? Because I'm in control of my situation.
I'm in control even when I should be powerless. I keep reminding myself that 10 years ago I was jobless and homeless, living in the back of my van in the woods near where my girlfriend was going to school. So, even if I'm fired, I quit, and every other support structure in my life falls to pieces, I have faith that I can get back on my feet.
With this bit of knowledge in my back pocket, I can walk into my place of work every day and say to myself "If they genuinely want the work done, I will do my best effort, consistently and creativly. If they want to fuck with me and use me, I'll roll with it and use it to my advantage -- consistently and creatively." Call it flexible ethics, but I will do unto others as they do unto me. At the previously mentioned telecom monolith, I put in three years of solid, dedicated, hard work. Then they started to jerk me around, promise promotions and then fail to deliver when the prerequisites were reached, yank my projects, and use me as a political pawn. I turned around and made a conscious effort to make my boss (and his boss) look *very* good. That made me valuable, which enabled me to request and receive training "to try harder for that promotion" (read: "to make me more valuable"). Every time they jerked me around, I smiled and used it to my advantage. When I walked out the door, they lost a significant resource, and I added another major digit to my yearly salary.
Why do I have no problem with this seemingly amoral behavior? Because I know that my soul belongs to me, not to any company. The adage is true -- what doesn't kill you makes you stronger as long as you are conscious of it. Noone can take knowledge, skills, dedication, achievement, or experience away from you. However, you can certainly surrender any of these, and you are often encouraged to do so. Some of the best companies try to instill a sense of teamwork or community without realizing that what they're really trying to do is convince individuals that they can only truly achieve in a company-sponsored group or community. Somehow you're supposed to believe that great things can be achieved by collective use of mediocre skills. (And of course, your skills are mediocre by definition, because they are not yet associated with the power of teamwork... feh.) It's bullshit, and most of them don't even know why.
The real power is in the strength, knowledge, and leadership of the individual. The structure of most IT and development organizations is designed to squash/coopt that. You have to resist it with all your might, or you will find yourself just as this article describes -- overworked, undercompensated, lonely, and stressed out. Maybe you can't change the reality of your job requirements, but you can change everything about yourself: Use every opportunity to educate yourself. Use every task as an opportunity to learn. Study and remember everything you can, even if it's just whatever is visible on the boss' rolodex today. Register for whatever classes your employer will pay for or you can afford (even if they have nothing to do with your job). Take a foreign language. Sign up for vocational tech classes (I am a decent cabinetmaker and blacksmith, among other things). Paint. Sing. Write kernel code. Help your coworkers; get them to think of you as a resource. Don't play paintball, hit a punching bag, let loose primal screams, drive fast on the way home, or take things out on your mate, even if it makes you feel better. These things are temporary at best, and you could use that time to develop something in yourself that is lasting.
Focus on the strength, and the worst you can do is make yourself happier and more self-confident.
Jon xeno@wolfenet.com
-- I think not...(*poof*)
It's all about priorities
by
bobdehnhardt
·
· Score: 5
I've been doing sysadmin-type work for almost 20 years now, and I've nearly burned out a couple times (like when I was the only PC support tech for 240 users). But I have very clear priorities in my life, and I made them clear to my bosses when I was hired. I put my family first, then God, then country (okay, I'm a patriot, so sue me), and then career. I would be flexible, working weekends and evenings when it didn't conflict with other plans, but I would not sacrifice my Life for my Job.
Sure, it's caused problems sometimes. I had one boss that constantly rode me because I wouldn't stay late - I had to leave in time to pick up my kids from daycare. I eventually left that job for one closer to home. I probably have missed out on some promotions and raises along the way because I wasn't putting in the extra hours.
But, it's all worked out just fine. I'm currently employed at a company that is thrilled with the amount and quality of work I've been doing. They are paying me well, providing me with excellent career opportunities, and giving me interesting and challenging projects to work on. And they totally agree with and support my priorities in life.
As an example: My Dad was going in for some minor surgery, and I had wanted to be with Mom during the procedure. As I was getting ready to leave, we had a major server crash. I pitched in to provide some services on other servers while we ressurrected the original system. My boss noticed I was still there, stopped me from what I was doing, and said "We can handle this. Get out of here." Now at the time, her staff was a contractor that had been on-site for about a week, and a junior admin that had been hired two days earlier. It took them twice as long to get things back up and running without me. But she respected my priorities, as did her boss (the V.P. of I.S., who was in the server room when she kicked me out).
The Times article is true in many cases. But it doesn't have to be. It's all about establishing your priorities, amking them clear to your employer, and accepting that there may be consequences.
I'm interested every time I see an article claiming that restlessness is particular to the tech industry; it implies that there are people out there who aren't restless... an idea which to me is incomprehensible.
Restlessness is simply a fact of life. I'm relatively lucky; I have a strong emotional commitment to the product I work on, and I check in while on vacation not because I'm required to, but because I _care_... but there is still always a restlessness in the background, a thought that there must be more to life than this. I quit my job and travelled for six months, and that luzlled the restlessness into a sort of quiescence, but it's still there, lingering, building pressure, waiting to come out and reassert itself in the future.
Is this because I'm a tech industry worker? Am I a tech industry worker because of this restlessness? Or is there something about life in our culture, the modern consumer culture, which encourages restlessness and angst?
What is important in life? What truly leads to happiness? My parents didn't know; I've never learned it in school and my friends and colleagues don't know... and i live in a fast-paced world where the entire universe can literally change overnight, where I feel like I am always responding to events not driving them, even when I'm making the decisions. When do I have time to sit back and learn the things i've never learned?
I love my job. I love my friends. I live in a city that seems like paradise whenever I describe it while I'm travelling. I'm more or less content. But I'm not happy, and the worst of it is, I don't know why.
After 18 years at this, I've figured out that it has nothing to do with where you work, but everything to do with the attitude you bring to work. I used to put in 100+ hour weeks, saving the company. I got burned out and left several companies, and you know what, the companies somehow survived!;-)
Now I don't carry a pager, work 9-5 M-F and make 3 times what I did when I was killing myself. I speak up when schedules are unreasonable or when designs and specifications are flawed. As a result, I meet deadlines with well designed products, rather than some of the 'night before the ship date' builds I used to send out.
Lots of techies seem to have problems dealing with management, but do little to improve the situation. The suits don't want to lose their staff, or be known as the manager of a failed project, so unless they are complete idiots, I've found most will listen to reason. It's up to us to speak up though!
I work for one of the Big Three telcos (AT&T, MCI-WorldCom, or Sprint -- won't say which, for reasons which I hope are obvious). I'm currently doing QA work on mainframes, analyzing and approving software written in COBOL and JCL designed to run under TSO.
Nevermind the fact that my background is in UNIX, C/C++, Java, networking and security. This is where the corporation "needs me", so here is where I am.
On the next floor there are eight openings for C developers in an AIX environment. I applied for a transfer, only to have the project lead up there tell me that although he had openings, he had no budget with which to pay me. There goes that opportunity to escape from the hell of IBM Big Iron.
When I first started here, the work week was 37.5 hours. The policy was that "we work hard all week, so everyone gets Friday afternoon off." On top of that, there was a liberal flextime policy. I accepted a $38,000/yr job here over some mid-$40K jobs elsewhere due to the great corporate policies and benefits.
After six months, policies changed.
It's now become a 48-hour-a-week-minimum shop. We've been told that, due to the upcoming Y2K bug, that no vacations will be approved for the rest of the year. (And what if, like me, you were planning on using your vacation for your honeymoon? Forget it. You get married, you show up at work the next day or else your job won't be here when you get back. And if you don't use up your vacation by the end of the year? Sorry -- no carryover.)
There's increasing pressure on us to put in more and more hours. 60-hour weeks are now standard in my division. We've been told that come the end of June it'll revert back to a 40-hour week; we don't know whether or not it's true. I imagine it's not.
We're losing people due to the awful work conditions. A friend who's a couple of cubes over has accepted employment elsewhere. He's trying to convince me to jump ship, too. I'm giving it a lot of thought.
After all, layoffs are on the horizon, too.
60-hour weeks, no vacations, reduced benefits, and the threat of impending layoffs just do wonders for employee morale.
Slashdot Mirror
The "real meat of a CS degree"? That is funny! I hear this from folks all the time, yet, those same folks tend to be the ones who talk but cannot do.
I do not question your skill or your acheivements, but a degree in CS has VERY little to do with skill these days. Everything moves too fast. Teach yourself or die. I don't argue that theory has its place, but in most schools a degree in CS is a good way to waste 4 years and spend lots of $$ drawing flow charts and state diagrams for useless code.
Did you ever notice how those that value the diploma more than all others generally are those who have no clue? (Usually ending up as managers because they are not capable of perfoming technically.) And, they are the ones that assume that everyone should waste their life away at work. I know plenty of folks that live for their meaningless job, and most have a degree. It is not weather you have a degree or not, it is what you will put up with that shapes your quality of life.
I am a college drop out, yet my life is great. I work about 40 hours a week as a network engineer/programmer, and spend most of my time with my wife and son. Yet, I am a highly skilled and respected employee. How did I pull it off? Priorities. Nobody seems to have them in ANY field these days. Those that are willing to put up with the garbage-life culture make things harder and harder on those who won't. So people jump from job to job, companies treat them like interchangeable cogs, life comes last and cash comes first, and in the end most people burn their life away without ever questioning what is hapening, or why the average quality of life today is so poor compared to that of only a few decades ago, or why kids are increasingly less human, or why they had everything and yet were never fulfilled. Religion is not what is missing, plain old value for human life is what is missing. People don't understand that life without quality is worse than death.
-Paul "Rant-O-Matic" Hirsch
Why is Open Source doing so well? Because software SHOULD be emotionally as well as financially rewarding. Programming can be a high art form, in the right environment. Writing free software is a chance to care about our code, not our paychecks.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of identification with this story, and I'm no different -- at least in terms of environmental stress. But how I react is, I think, a little different and a little more constructive.
I've been in the professional ranks for ~10 years, and just ended a four-year salaried stint at a big telecom monolith, back to consulting (hourly). The new place is the most politicised, disorganized, ugly environment I've seen since I left my short stint at MS, but I'm more positive and upbeat. Why? Because I'm in control of my situation.
I'm in control even when I should be powerless. I keep reminding myself that 10 years ago I was jobless and homeless, living in the back of my van in the woods near where my girlfriend was going to school. So, even if I'm fired, I quit, and every other support structure in my life falls to pieces, I have faith that I can get back on my feet.
With this bit of knowledge in my back pocket, I can walk into my place of work every day and say to myself "If they genuinely want the work done, I will do my best effort, consistently and creativly. If they want to fuck with me and use me, I'll roll with it and use it to my advantage -- consistently and creatively." Call it flexible ethics, but I will do unto others as they do unto me. At the previously mentioned telecom monolith, I put in three years of solid, dedicated, hard work. Then they started to jerk me around, promise promotions and then fail to deliver when the prerequisites were reached, yank my projects, and use me as a political pawn. I turned around and made a conscious effort to make my boss (and his boss) look *very* good. That made me valuable, which enabled me to request and receive training "to try harder for that promotion" (read: "to make me more valuable"). Every time they jerked me around, I smiled and used it to my advantage. When I walked out the door, they lost a significant resource, and I added another major digit to my yearly salary.
Why do I have no problem with this seemingly amoral behavior? Because I know that my soul belongs to me, not to any company. The adage is true -- what doesn't kill you makes you stronger as long as you are conscious of it. Noone can take knowledge, skills, dedication, achievement, or experience away from you. However, you can certainly surrender any of these, and you are often encouraged to do so. Some of the best companies try to instill a sense of teamwork or community without realizing that what they're really trying to do is convince individuals that they can only truly achieve in a company-sponsored group or community. Somehow you're supposed to believe that great things can be achieved by collective use of mediocre skills. (And of course, your skills are mediocre by definition, because they are not yet associated with the power of teamwork... feh.) It's bullshit, and most of them don't even know why.
The real power is in the strength, knowledge, and leadership of the individual. The structure of most IT and development organizations is designed to squash/coopt that. You have to resist it with all your might, or you will find yourself just as this article describes -- overworked, undercompensated, lonely, and stressed out. Maybe you can't change the reality of your job requirements, but you can change everything about yourself: Use every opportunity to educate yourself. Use every task as an opportunity to learn. Study and remember everything you can, even if it's just whatever is visible on the boss' rolodex today. Register for whatever classes your employer will pay for or you can afford (even if they have nothing to do with your job). Take a foreign language. Sign up for vocational tech classes (I am a decent cabinetmaker and blacksmith, among other things). Paint. Sing. Write kernel code. Help your coworkers; get them to think of you as a resource. Don't play paintball, hit a punching bag, let loose primal screams, drive fast on the way home, or take things out on your mate, even if it makes you feel better. These things are temporary at best, and you could use that time to develop something in yourself that is lasting.
Focus on the strength, and the worst you can do is make yourself happier and more self-confident.
Jon xeno@wolfenet.com
I think not...(*poof*)
I've been doing sysadmin-type work for almost 20 years now, and I've nearly burned out a couple times (like when I was the only PC support tech for 240 users). But I have very clear priorities in my life, and I made them clear to my bosses when I was hired. I put my family first, then God, then country (okay, I'm a patriot, so sue me), and then career. I would be flexible, working weekends and evenings when it didn't conflict with other plans, but I would not sacrifice my Life for my Job.
Sure, it's caused problems sometimes. I had one boss that constantly rode me because I wouldn't stay late - I had to leave in time to pick up my kids from daycare. I eventually left that job for one closer to home. I probably have missed out on some promotions and raises along the way because I wasn't putting in the extra hours.
But, it's all worked out just fine. I'm currently employed at a company that is thrilled with the amount and quality of work I've been doing. They are paying me well, providing me with excellent career opportunities, and giving me interesting and challenging projects to work on. And they totally agree with and support my priorities in life.
As an example: My Dad was going in for some minor surgery, and I had wanted to be with Mom during the procedure. As I was getting ready to leave, we had a major server crash. I pitched in to provide some services on other servers while we ressurrected the original system. My boss noticed I was still there, stopped me from what I was doing, and said "We can handle this. Get out of here." Now at the time, her staff was a contractor that had been on-site for about a week, and a junior admin that had been hired two days earlier. It took them twice as long to get things back up and running without me. But she respected my priorities, as did her boss (the V.P. of I.S., who was in the server room when she kicked me out).
The Times article is true in many cases. But it doesn't have to be. It's all about establishing your priorities, amking them clear to your employer, and accepting that there may be consequences.
I'm interested every time I see an article claiming that restlessness is particular to the tech industry; it implies that there are people out there who aren't restless ... an idea which to me is incomprehensible.
... but there is still always a restlessness in the background, a thought that there must be more to life than this. I quit my job and travelled for six months, and that luzlled the restlessness into a sort of quiescence, but it's still there, lingering, building pressure, waiting to come out and reassert itself in the future.
... and i live in a fast-paced world where the entire universe can literally change overnight, where I feel like I am always responding to events not driving them, even when I'm making the decisions. When do I have time to sit back and learn the things i've never learned?
Restlessness is simply a fact of life. I'm relatively lucky; I have a strong emotional commitment to the product I work on, and I check in while on vacation not because I'm required to, but because I _care_
Is this because I'm a tech industry worker? Am I a tech industry worker because of this restlessness? Or is there something about life in our culture, the modern consumer culture, which encourages restlessness and angst?
What is important in life? What truly leads to happiness? My parents didn't know; I've never learned it in school and my friends and colleagues don't know
I love my job. I love my friends. I live in a city that seems like paradise whenever I describe it while I'm travelling. I'm more or less content. But I'm not happy, and the worst of it is, I don't know why.
After 18 years at this, I've figured out that it has nothing to do with where you work, but everything to do with the attitude you bring to work. I used to put in 100+ hour weeks, saving the company. I got burned out and left several companies, and you know what, the companies somehow survived! ;-)
Now I don't carry a pager, work 9-5 M-F and make 3 times what I did when I was killing myself. I speak up when schedules are unreasonable or when designs and specifications are flawed. As a result, I meet deadlines with well designed products, rather than some of the 'night before the ship date' builds I used to send out.
Lots of techies seem to have problems dealing with management, but do little to improve the situation. The suits don't want to lose their staff, or be known as the manager of a failed project, so unless they are complete idiots, I've found most will listen to reason. It's up to us to speak up though!
I work for one of the Big Three telcos (AT&T, MCI-WorldCom, or Sprint -- won't say which, for reasons which I hope are obvious). I'm currently doing QA work on mainframes, analyzing and approving software written in COBOL and JCL designed to run under TSO.
Nevermind the fact that my background is in UNIX, C/C++, Java, networking and security. This is where the corporation "needs me", so here is where I am.
On the next floor there are eight openings for C developers in an AIX environment. I applied for a transfer, only to have the project lead up there tell me that although he had openings, he had no budget with which to pay me. There goes that opportunity to escape from the hell of IBM Big Iron.
When I first started here, the work week was 37.5 hours. The policy was that "we work hard all week, so everyone gets Friday afternoon off." On top of that, there was a liberal flextime policy. I accepted a $38,000/yr job here over some mid-$40K jobs elsewhere due to the great corporate policies and benefits.
After six months, policies changed.
It's now become a 48-hour-a-week-minimum shop. We've been told that, due to the upcoming Y2K bug, that no vacations will be approved for the rest of the year. (And what if, like me, you were planning on using your vacation for your honeymoon? Forget it. You get married, you show up at work the next day or else your job won't be here when you get back. And if you don't use up your vacation by the end of the year? Sorry -- no carryover.)
There's increasing pressure on us to put in more and more hours. 60-hour weeks are now standard in my division. We've been told that come the end of June it'll revert back to a 40-hour week; we don't know whether or not it's true. I imagine it's not.
We're losing people due to the awful work conditions. A friend who's a couple of cubes over has accepted employment elsewhere. He's trying to convince me to jump ship, too. I'm giving it a lot of thought.
After all, layoffs are on the horizon, too.
60-hour weeks, no vacations, reduced benefits, and the threat of impending layoffs just do wonders for employee morale.