6 ms·

IT job satisfaction plummets to all-time low

55 points by edw519 17y ago

ytinas 17y ago
This isn't surprising. Big companies see that their employees can't easily leave so they take advantage of it. Of course when the economy picks up people are going to leave, but this will be happening to lots of companies so they'll have plenty of available talent to replace their losses. The company I'm at made a huge profit last year. Half as much as the year before, but still a massive profit. In my year end meeting the manager who gave me my embarrassingly awful bonus check told me "we're lucky to be getting anything with the year we've had"!! Of course the CEO didn't get hurt much. It was pretty interesting. I never see anyone in the office after 5pm since that day...
- roc 17y ago
  Indeed, I'm sure many of us saw the same things happen when the dot com bubble popped. There is a silver lining to stressors like this: it helps people see fair-weather employers for who they are.
  - nwatson 17y ago
    The dissatisfaction is real but temporary. People hate their jobs because they feel trapped. As soon as the recession lifts, prospects for the old bonuses return, and they have more job options, most will stay instead of leaving as the article contends. Having options to leave improves job satisfaction immensely.
    - roc 17y ago
      I'm pretty sure the guys picking up work from their laid-off coworkers, pulling extra un-paid hours to cover it all and being denied bonuses/raises despite profitability are dissatisfied with something more than a feeling of being trapped. As soon as the recession lifts, the fair-weather employers will be forced to correct those inequities - which is why those who stay, will stay. You absolutely can not write off the objective ways people's working environments have changed and will change again, when you look at whether they leave or not.
      - swombat 17y ago
        I don't think nwatson wrote those off. He was probably referring to the fairly in-depth article, on HN some time ago, which discussed how "having options to leave" was a huge psychological factor for job satisfaction. I can't recall exactly how they supported that argument, but I think it was fairly convincing. What nwatson is suggesting is that along with improvements in bonuses and working conditions, there will be the improvement of once again having options - which is itself a very significant boost to morale.
        nwatson 17y ago
        Yes, I had read that article recently, and it must have been from the HN reference. A quick google search doesn't bring up an obvious HN link or the original article, I wish I could find it. edit: hmmm ... HN reader 'spokey' has found it, see [one of] his comments here.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Are employees really trapped? I changed jobs this year, and my company (a large, household-name-type-place) is continuing to hire a lot of developers. I think the team I'm on was about 2 people a year ago, now it's 10+. Maybe people right out of college are having trouble finding jobs, but I think anyone with actual programming experience is in high demand right now. (Just like always...)
  - angelbob 17y ago
    IT != programming Programmers are in a very different boat, job-wise, especially programmers with some experience. Recessions don't hit us as hard.
    - umjames 17y ago
      Do you think the article considers programmers as IT workers? I think so. It's in the quote: The folks at Apple Computer, I'm guessing right now, are feeling very purposeful at work Sure Apple has an IT department, but I'll bet that quote isn't talking about Apple's internal systems that its IT department maintains. I've recently learned the hard way, that IT does not really mean programming as those who frequent HN think of it. Programmers in IT, spend much of their time writing the necessary glue code that gets 2 or more other systems talking. Usually, at least one of those systems is a poorly-documented piece of vendorware. If your IT programming job includes the web, then add to that making things work in IE6. It's hell on earth.
      - jrockway 17y ago
        Dunno. I have to deal with poorly-documented vendorware (and Windows, from time to time) and I have had to make websites that work in IE6. I would not count either as "hell on earth". It's just stuff that needs to be done, and people will pay a lot of money to have it done.
  - marltod 17y ago
    From my experience it takes about 3-5 times longer to get a job now vs. 2004.
- vital101 17y ago
  In line with this, I recently have been trying to exit grad school. I applied with a large tech company (within the top Fortune 20), interviewed, and got an offer. The problem was that they offered 15K less than anyone else, and refused to negotiate. I feel like they took advantage of the economy and their name. I turned them down, but I can't help but wonder how satisified I wouldn't have been if I had taken that job.
motters 17y ago
I can imagine what the situation might be like at the company from which I was made redundant six months ago, and it probably is fairly unpleasant with whatever IT staff remain trying to support and maintain complicated systems that they have little knowledge or expertise on.
joshwa 17y ago
Probably related to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032875 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032875 (Tim Bray's "Doing it Wrong" screed on enterprise software) (ps edw519 I was waiting for you to chime in on that thread)
- edw519 17y ago
  Hey joshwa, somehow I never even noticed that thread yesterday. Why? Because I was up to my earlobes implementing a business intelligence/data warehouse system in a very large SOX-compliant enterprise :-). For current requirements, this solution is excellent. It is third party software, installed on top of an existing ERP system, that enables the users to extract whatever data they need and build their own reports without submitting a ticket to IT. Everyone loves the prototypes and is dreaming about the possibilities. So instead of beating up on enterprise life, let me just share a little bit of yesterday, one typical enterprise day: - A 3rd party build just stopped at 98% complete with no error message. - Another build crashed with error messages I had never seen, so I had to open another ticket with our vendor - We ran out of disk space on a volume we didn't know the software was using. - I had to add additional data cleaning functions to remove heretofore unknown control characters in the enterprise data. - I inadvertantly named 44 files with the vendor's own naming convention, so now no one can tell whose files are whose. We had to reset our standards and rebuild. - Although this vendor has hundreds of installs, oddly, none of them are SOX compliant. The controls, audits, and duplication of data needed will more than double the resource requirements. Worse, I'll have to do an implementation that no one has ever done before with this software :-) - Today we start writing our own tools to handle the SOX compliance and satisfy the auditors. Some fun. I can go on and on. You get the idea. And I haven't even touched upon the usual enterprise culprits: the meetings, the politics, and the lack of project management. It kinda sucks to have to do triple work to get the same thing done. So whose fault is all of this? No one's. That's just the way it is. Every time I think of a better way to get things done in a large enterprise, someone has 5 good reasons why they are the way they are. It's wasted energy fighting that. As I've mentioned in previous posts (one example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760704 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760704), I think the long term solution will be to eat away at the soft underbelly of the enterprise one bite at a time, with small apps, nimble software, and cloud computing that augments but doesn't replace (yet) current systems. I continue to ponder YC's RFS #6... [EDIT: I continue to ponder "Ideas We'd Like To Fund: Enterprise Software" whichever number that was :-)]
spokey 17y ago
I'm not sure I buy it, but Scott Adams has an interesting theory that could explain this at: http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/job_satisfaction/ http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/job_satisfaction/ Essentially, he argues that when jobs are plentiful cognitive dissonance forces you to believe your job is a good one, otherwise you'd get off your butt and seek a better one. When times are tough, you are more free to believe that you are unhappy at your job since the economy gets you off the hook for doing anything about it. (Of course, I'm pretty sure that in bust times jobs are objectively worse than in boom times--more work, less pay or hope for advancement, greater uncertainty and stress, etc. so I'm not sure a cognitive dissonance theory is needed.) (Edit: fixing typo)
antidaily 17y ago
Helping my aunt download pics from her phone to Vista almost ruined my Christmas. IT work has got to be hell.
bdmac97 17y ago
I wonder how much of that also has to do with people that simply chose the wrong line of work? Back when I was in school it was coming towards the peak of the dot com bubble and I know there were tons of new students in CS that were there just to make money. In the long run they are now finding out that money wasn't enough to make them happy since they don't really enjoy programming and are thus unsatisfied...
wizard_2 17y ago
Now I can pretend this isn't a personal problem! Honestly though, at my day job, IT work has shifted from setting up new systems and replacing bad ones, to making bad ones work, and telling people what they have isn't so bad. (This goes for workstations, servers, etc.) I'm all for being economical but I'm seeing a lot more of "penny wise, pound foolish" lately. New projects are also dead, even ones that wouldn't cost much money (if any). It seems that nobody wants to feel the cost of change even if it means finally replacing horrid excel based work flows. My satisfaction has gone way down. Thankfully I'm not in charge here. Lately I spend my work days "coding" half on day job stuff and half on my startup MacSupport.com. On busy days I can't wait to get out of work so I can work on work that feels important to me. I'm one of the last people who still has a separate full time job. I can't wait for the next few months, when hopefully I'll be able to make the leap and switch carers.
dnsworks 17y ago
This isn't too surprising. IT salaries have not even come close to keeping up with inflation. It's even worse in the cities. In the Silicon Valley your average engineer making $100k whose wife makes $40k and has 2-3 kids can't afford to buy a home. Especially considering the 9% sales tax and the 9.3% state income tax. Combine that with expectations to commute 10-14 hours a week, and put in 60 hour weeks. Why should they be happy? Throw in there the decimated banking system making it impossible to get a loan, and the American dream has been replaced with corporate wage slavery. It's a messed up system we're in right now. But hey, at least banks are seeing record profits, and we've spent 1 TRILLION DOLLARS ON TWO WARS IN JUST A FEW YEARS. Of course IT people are unhappy. Everybody is unhappy. Some executive at a large company whose compensation is 150x that engineer's meager salary wants him to work 60-70 hours per week? Fuck that.
- codexon 17y ago
  This is the natural state of the economy though and quite expected. Every business wants to reduce expenses, and if that means importing H1-Bs, then it is going to happen bar government intervention. Satisfaction obviously goes down because that's what it takes to compete with workers who are used to non-first-world living conditions.
  - dnsworks 17y ago
    The tech industry is designed to profit off of young, single, impressionable white boys who are more than willing to drink the kool-aid. As you get older, say 30-35, all of a sudden the world changes on you. Relationships happen, families emerge, and the same industry you gave your youth too all of a sudden just doesn't fit you anymore because you are no longer it's ideal employee demographic.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Sounds like people like this have made their own lives unhappy. I ran the numbers, and $140k/year is more than enough money for a family of 5 (even including the taxes you pay to that evil warmongering government). You can comfortably spend $2000/month on your house/apartment, which gets you a nice size space even in major cities. (This assumes $6000/month after taxes; a 50% tax rate. You get to save $1000 and spend $1000 on non-essentials, and still have $2000 for food and bills with this plan.) 9% sales tax and 9.3% state income tax doesn't really matter. 9% sales tax doesn't affect essentials, like food. It just means that your new flat-screen TV is going to cost $1100 instead of $1000. Big deal. In exchange, you get a free school system, free roads, police / fire / etc. Taxes are a fact of life when living in a developed society. Lop the 9.3% off your salary and forget that money was ever even yours -- it's an employer's expense, not your expense. Anyone making this amount of money can have a large living space 10 minutes away from work, savings, and plenty of money to pay your bills. And $1000 to spend on whatever-you-want every month. If this doesn't make you happy, I guess it's time to work harder, or something. Most people would consider this a very comfortable life, perhaps even "the American dream". But taxes, the government, and society in general is probably not keeping you down, as your post seems to imply.
icono 17y ago
I agree, I've worked as a help desk person and a developer and I personally enjoy development type work. A lot of satisfaction comes from working at the right company too. I've worked at many companies and I finally found one I enjoy working at. The company I work for is within Fortune's top 100 companies to work for: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/full_list/ http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/fu.... I'd suggest going through the list and trying to find one of those companies. If you can't find one, make sure you do your home work during the interview process. I believe Joel on Software has a good article about what to look for when considering a new employer. Finally, happiness is a choice. Go into your job each day telling yourself that no matter what happens you’re going to find something positive. It’s a lot of hard work to be happy.

55 points by edw519 17y ago

This isn't surprising. Big companies see that their employees can't easily leave so they take advantage of it. Of course when the economy picks up people are going to leave, but this will be happening to lots of companies so they'll have plenty of available talent to replace their losses. The company I'm at made a huge profit last year. Half as much as the year before, but still a massive profit. In my year end meeting the manager who gave me my embarrassingly awful bonus check told me "we're lucky to be getting anything with the year we've had"!! Of course the CEO didn't get hurt much. It was pretty interesting. I never see anyone in the office after 5pm since that day...

roc 17y ago
Indeed, I'm sure many of us saw the same things happen when the dot com bubble popped. There is a silver lining to stressors like this: it helps people see fair-weather employers for who they are.
- nwatson 17y ago
  The dissatisfaction is real but temporary. People hate their jobs because they feel trapped. As soon as the recession lifts, prospects for the old bonuses return, and they have more job options, most will stay instead of leaving as the article contends. Having options to leave improves job satisfaction immensely.
  - roc 17y ago
    I'm pretty sure the guys picking up work from their laid-off coworkers, pulling extra un-paid hours to cover it all and being denied bonuses/raises despite profitability are dissatisfied with something more than a feeling of being trapped. As soon as the recession lifts, the fair-weather employers will be forced to correct those inequities - which is why those who stay, will stay. You absolutely can not write off the objective ways people's working environments have changed and will change again, when you look at whether they leave or not.
    - swombat 17y ago
      I don't think nwatson wrote those off. He was probably referring to the fairly in-depth article, on HN some time ago, which discussed how "having options to leave" was a huge psychological factor for job satisfaction. I can't recall exactly how they supported that argument, but I think it was fairly convincing. What nwatson is suggesting is that along with improvements in bonuses and working conditions, there will be the improvement of once again having options - which is itself a very significant boost to morale.
      - nwatson 17y ago
        Yes, I had read that article recently, and it must have been from the HN reference. A quick google search doesn't bring up an obvious HN link or the original article, I wish I could find it. edit: hmmm ... HN reader 'spokey' has found it, see [one of] his comments here.
jrockway 17y ago
Are employees really trapped? I changed jobs this year, and my company (a large, household-name-type-place) is continuing to hire a lot of developers. I think the team I'm on was about 2 people a year ago, now it's 10+. Maybe people right out of college are having trouble finding jobs, but I think anyone with actual programming experience is in high demand right now. (Just like always...)
- angelbob 17y ago
  IT != programming Programmers are in a very different boat, job-wise, especially programmers with some experience. Recessions don't hit us as hard.
  - umjames 17y ago
    Do you think the article considers programmers as IT workers? I think so. It's in the quote: The folks at Apple Computer, I'm guessing right now, are feeling very purposeful at work Sure Apple has an IT department, but I'll bet that quote isn't talking about Apple's internal systems that its IT department maintains. I've recently learned the hard way, that IT does not really mean programming as those who frequent HN think of it. Programmers in IT, spend much of their time writing the necessary glue code that gets 2 or more other systems talking. Usually, at least one of those systems is a poorly-documented piece of vendorware. If your IT programming job includes the web, then add to that making things work in IE6. It's hell on earth.
    - jrockway 17y ago
      Dunno. I have to deal with poorly-documented vendorware (and Windows, from time to time) and I have had to make websites that work in IE6. I would not count either as "hell on earth". It's just stuff that needs to be done, and people will pay a lot of money to have it done.
- marltod 17y ago
  From my experience it takes about 3-5 times longer to get a job now vs. 2004.
vital101 17y ago
In line with this, I recently have been trying to exit grad school. I applied with a large tech company (within the top Fortune 20), interviewed, and got an offer. The problem was that they offered 15K less than anyone else, and refused to negotiate. I feel like they took advantage of the economy and their name. I turned them down, but I can't help but wonder how satisified I wouldn't have been if I had taken that job.

motters 17y ago

I can imagine what the situation might be like at the company from which I was made redundant six months ago, and it probably is fairly unpleasant with whatever IT staff remain trying to support and maintain complicated systems that they have little knowledge or expertise on.

joshwa 17y ago

Probably related to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032875 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032875 (Tim Bray's "Doing it Wrong" screed on enterprise software) (ps edw519 I was waiting for you to chime in on that thread)

edw519 17y ago
Hey joshwa, somehow I never even noticed that thread yesterday. Why? Because I was up to my earlobes implementing a business intelligence/data warehouse system in a very large SOX-compliant enterprise :-). For current requirements, this solution is excellent. It is third party software, installed on top of an existing ERP system, that enables the users to extract whatever data they need and build their own reports without submitting a ticket to IT. Everyone loves the prototypes and is dreaming about the possibilities. So instead of beating up on enterprise life, let me just share a little bit of yesterday, one typical enterprise day: - A 3rd party build just stopped at 98% complete with no error message. - Another build crashed with error messages I had never seen, so I had to open another ticket with our vendor - We ran out of disk space on a volume we didn't know the software was using. - I had to add additional data cleaning functions to remove heretofore unknown control characters in the enterprise data. - I inadvertantly named 44 files with the vendor's own naming convention, so now no one can tell whose files are whose. We had to reset our standards and rebuild. - Although this vendor has hundreds of installs, oddly, none of them are SOX compliant. The controls, audits, and duplication of data needed will more than double the resource requirements. Worse, I'll have to do an implementation that no one has ever done before with this software :-) - Today we start writing our own tools to handle the SOX compliance and satisfy the auditors. Some fun. I can go on and on. You get the idea. And I haven't even touched upon the usual enterprise culprits: the meetings, the politics, and the lack of project management. It kinda sucks to have to do triple work to get the same thing done. So whose fault is all of this? No one's. That's just the way it is. Every time I think of a better way to get things done in a large enterprise, someone has 5 good reasons why they are the way they are. It's wasted energy fighting that. As I've mentioned in previous posts (one example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760704 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760704), I think the long term solution will be to eat away at the soft underbelly of the enterprise one bite at a time, with small apps, nimble software, and cloud computing that augments but doesn't replace (yet) current systems. I continue to ponder YC's RFS #6... [EDIT: I continue to ponder "Ideas We'd Like To Fund: Enterprise Software" whichever number that was :-)]

spokey 17y ago

I'm not sure I buy it, but Scott Adams has an interesting theory that could explain this at: http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/job_satisfaction/ http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/job_satisfaction/ Essentially, he argues that when jobs are plentiful cognitive dissonance forces you to believe your job is a good one, otherwise you'd get off your butt and seek a better one. When times are tough, you are more free to believe that you are unhappy at your job since the economy gets you off the hook for doing anything about it. (Of course, I'm pretty sure that in bust times jobs are objectively worse than in boom times--more work, less pay or hope for advancement, greater uncertainty and stress, etc. so I'm not sure a cognitive dissonance theory is needed.) (Edit: fixing typo)

antidaily 17y ago

Helping my aunt download pics from her phone to Vista almost ruined my Christmas. IT work has got to be hell.

bdmac97 17y ago

I wonder how much of that also has to do with people that simply chose the wrong line of work? Back when I was in school it was coming towards the peak of the dot com bubble and I know there were tons of new students in CS that were there just to make money. In the long run they are now finding out that money wasn't enough to make them happy since they don't really enjoy programming and are thus unsatisfied...

wizard_2 17y ago

Now I can pretend this isn't a personal problem! Honestly though, at my day job, IT work has shifted from setting up new systems and replacing bad ones, to making bad ones work, and telling people what they have isn't so bad. (This goes for workstations, servers, etc.) I'm all for being economical but I'm seeing a lot more of "penny wise, pound foolish" lately. New projects are also dead, even ones that wouldn't cost much money (if any). It seems that nobody wants to feel the cost of change even if it means finally replacing horrid excel based work flows. My satisfaction has gone way down. Thankfully I'm not in charge here. Lately I spend my work days "coding" half on day job stuff and half on my startup MacSupport.com. On busy days I can't wait to get out of work so I can work on work that feels important to me. I'm one of the last people who still has a separate full time job. I can't wait for the next few months, when hopefully I'll be able to make the leap and switch carers.

dnsworks 17y ago

This isn't too surprising. IT salaries have not even come close to keeping up with inflation. It's even worse in the cities. In the Silicon Valley your average engineer making $100k whose wife makes $40k and has 2-3 kids can't afford to buy a home. Especially considering the 9% sales tax and the 9.3% state income tax. Combine that with expectations to commute 10-14 hours a week, and put in 60 hour weeks. Why should they be happy? Throw in there the decimated banking system making it impossible to get a loan, and the American dream has been replaced with corporate wage slavery. It's a messed up system we're in right now. But hey, at least banks are seeing record profits, and we've spent 1 TRILLION DOLLARS ON TWO WARS IN JUST A FEW YEARS. Of course IT people are unhappy. Everybody is unhappy. Some executive at a large company whose compensation is 150x that engineer's meager salary wants him to work 60-70 hours per week? Fuck that.

codexon 17y ago
This is the natural state of the economy though and quite expected. Every business wants to reduce expenses, and if that means importing H1-Bs, then it is going to happen bar government intervention. Satisfaction obviously goes down because that's what it takes to compete with workers who are used to non-first-world living conditions.
- dnsworks 17y ago
  The tech industry is designed to profit off of young, single, impressionable white boys who are more than willing to drink the kool-aid. As you get older, say 30-35, all of a sudden the world changes on you. Relationships happen, families emerge, and the same industry you gave your youth too all of a sudden just doesn't fit you anymore because you are no longer it's ideal employee demographic.
jrockway 17y ago
Sounds like people like this have made their own lives unhappy. I ran the numbers, and $140k/year is more than enough money for a family of 5 (even including the taxes you pay to that evil warmongering government). You can comfortably spend $2000/month on your house/apartment, which gets you a nice size space even in major cities. (This assumes $6000/month after taxes; a 50% tax rate. You get to save $1000 and spend $1000 on non-essentials, and still have $2000 for food and bills with this plan.) 9% sales tax and 9.3% state income tax doesn't really matter. 9% sales tax doesn't affect essentials, like food. It just means that your new flat-screen TV is going to cost $1100 instead of $1000. Big deal. In exchange, you get a free school system, free roads, police / fire / etc. Taxes are a fact of life when living in a developed society. Lop the 9.3% off your salary and forget that money was ever even yours -- it's an employer's expense, not your expense. Anyone making this amount of money can have a large living space 10 minutes away from work, savings, and plenty of money to pay your bills. And $1000 to spend on whatever-you-want every month. If this doesn't make you happy, I guess it's time to work harder, or something. Most people would consider this a very comfortable life, perhaps even "the American dream". But taxes, the government, and society in general is probably not keeping you down, as your post seems to imply.

icono 17y ago

I agree, I've worked as a help desk person and a developer and I personally enjoy development type work. A lot of satisfaction comes from working at the right company too. I've worked at many companies and I finally found one I enjoy working at. The company I work for is within Fortune's top 100 companies to work for: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/full_list/ http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/fu.... I'd suggest going through the list and trying to find one of those companies. If you can't find one, make sure you do your home work during the interview process. I believe Joel on Software has a good article about what to look for when considering a new employer. Finally, happiness is a choice. Go into your job each day telling yourself that no matter what happens you’re going to find something positive. It’s a lot of hard work to be happy.