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There is a severe workplace burnout problem in IT(especially MSPs); which when not addressed grows into bigger mental health issues and even literal sicknesses.

There is a severe workplace burnout problem in IT(especially MSPs); which when not addressed grows into bigger mental health issues and even literal sicknesses. There just isn't enough skilled IT people. The industry is immature and is bottom heavy. The top performers and seniors, are then overwhelmed with work and the business is unable to hire more senior people to reduce workload. Then the business keeps growing and eventually you get a death spiral of people quitting and making the situation worse. >I started asking myself questions like — "Even if the projects I'm doing succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, how would it affect people? IT is so inherently negative as well. In my last job 1 person and myself were the only people trying to stay positive. The other people in the office had succumb to the negativity and would even attack us for being 'mr happy'. They were literally so negative that they just attacked positivity. I had places where I would go onsite to resolve an emergency. I never caused the outage, I was there to help. I would still get death threats from clients. "The accounting files are the server, if you lost them I'm going to go to your office and kill everyone." My employer wasn't even their IT, their IT person quit upon discovered 2 drives dead on the raid 5 array and no backups.

jcadam 8y ago
> their IT person quit upon discovered 2 drives dead on the raid 5 array and no backups. Based on the rest of your story, he probably feared for his life...
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  Wow. I never made that link before. Makes complete sense.
ethbro 8y ago
Part of this is IT's fault. Any competent IT org should strive to balance crisis interactions with preemptive actions. Aka the package delivery person effect: 'Why does everyone like their package carrier? Because everytime you see them they bring a gift!' If you only ever see IT when your system melts down or an upgrade goes awry, you're going to hate them. Even if they're doing a wonderful job. So, please, if you run an IT department, give your troops some time to make house calls. "Just checking back in. How's the fix working?", "Anything troubling you?", etc. If not for your org, then for their mental health.
- madcaptenor 8y ago
  I like my package delivery person because they bring gifts. But I don't like my mail delivery person because they bring bills.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    That's why I didn't say mail person. ;) (And yes, package delivery people can deliver legal packages... but I assume everyone gets the point)
    - madcaptenor 8y ago
      I mean, if we're going to tear this apart, sometimes my mail person brings gifts, if they're small enough to fit in the mailbox.
pennaMan 8y ago
>I had places where I would go onsite to resolve an emergency. I never caused the outage, I was there to help. I would still get death threats from clients. "The accounting files are the server, if you lost them I'm going to go to your office and kill everyone." Isn't that a criminal offence?
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  Yes, but filing a police report against a client isn't good for business.
  - detaro 8y ago
    If good IT work is in high demand as claimed, that shouldn't be a problem. And "we make sure customers don't abuse our staff" should be the baseline of "how do I keep any good employees I might have", not a luxury.
    - mfoy_ 8y ago
      There's a perception among management that they need to remain competitive. The IT service truly isn't a oligopoly like telcos are. My company hasn't increased rates in over 4 years out of fear that we would lose business even though we have more business than we have the resources to handle.
    - sleepysysadmin 8y ago
      If anything my ex-employer would be pissed that they skipped the line on being abusive to me. I ended up getting fired within 18 hours after reporting harassment.
      - da_chicken 8y ago
        I mean, now you've got a strong case for wrongful termination and a report of retaliatory termination to your state's DoL.
  - da_chicken 8y ago
segmondy 8y ago
Perhaps there really is a severe workplace burnout problem in IT, but perhaps that's not the problem. There're ton of companies with burnout problems and worse turnover rates than IT. I personally believe that the issue we are seeing today is that most people don't know how to manager stress, emotion & energy. Most people are leading a very reactive life and constantly been pulled and pushed in all directions by "life" Stress happens when there's a large gulf between what you expect and reality. Most folks in IT are getting paid so well that they can bridge this gap better than most folks. All one has to do is freaking chillax. F material things, don't compare yourself or compete with others, learn to make do with what you have. Last but not least, do your very best at work, but detach your emotion from the outcome.
- sesteel 8y ago
  Detaching emotion from the outcome is key. I've heard it described as professional distance or professional objectivity and it is a key component of maturity. It is more prevalent in other industries, but tech has grown so fast that we have a serious mentoring problem. There isn't enough good mentors, people with decades of experience, to go around. I grew up in part of the industry where people had been working for 3 decades before I got there; their mentality is much different than what I've found in young companies with young (as in age) staffs.
  - mfoy_ 8y ago
    Reminds me of part of that poem by Kipling... "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:" (I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Not that long.) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if--- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---
    - sesteel 8y ago
      Thank you for sharing.
accnumnplus1 8y ago
"There just isn't enough skilled IT people." Does that reconcile with ageism?
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  Certainly an interesting point. In r/sysadmin there's a tongue in cheek comment of 'quitting IT to become a goat farmer' I actually personally place it really at 1 place. https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptions-or-special-rules/government-employees-and-professionals#section-3 https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio... The Ontario government(where I live) passed laws before the Y2K hoax removing: The right not to be forced to work 20 hour days. The right not to be called back into work 2 hours after a 20 hour day. The right to get 2 days off per week, they force you to work 7 days a week. The right to a lunch or breaks. The right to be paid overtime pay if you work alot. I've had 3 employers now that required me to work ~12-18 hour days everyday, no lunch, no breaks. At least I did get overtime; but I'd have to justify the overtime bigtime.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Y2K was not a hoax! It was the rare case of all the rhetoric making people do the necessary planning work.
    - Izkata 8y ago
      Plus, a problem was found anyway in NASA data (somewhere around 2006, I think) that was caused by Y2K; it just took a long time for someone to find it.
shade 8y ago
I've commented on this previously, but I think there's some aspects of the tech industry that really do lead to burnout, depression, and cynicism among the people who work in it - and this applies to both software dev and IT support. We spend so much time dealing with tools that tend to be extremely pedantic and detail-focused. We're constantly thinking about all of the stuff that's gone wrong with our applications previously, what new things could go wrong with them now, and how we avoid that. For building robust software, or robust IT infrastructure deployments, that's a good thing, but I personally find it somewhat difficult to turn this mindset off at the end of the day. I've been in the industry for 20 years now and this stuff still gets to me sometimes. The last year or two I've been trying to establish a consistent meditation practice just to help get out of my head a little bit and distance myself from some of the stress and cynicism, though I'm not sure how much it's actually helped yet.
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  I harness that mindset-spillover by playing board games as a hobby.
  - snazz 8y ago
    Playing some board games almost feels like meditation because it makes time slow down as you wait for the other person to complete their turn. It’s quite nice, really, although I found it mildly frustrating at first.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y ago
  > We spend so much time dealing with tools that tend to be extremely pedantic and detail-focused. This in combination with deadlines has caused my resting face to develop into an angry expression. As soon as I stop smiling and return to my “neutral” face, I look like I am angry, ready to kill someone. I now make an effort to smile while walking so people don’t get frightened.
  - president 8y ago
    You've just described my face since I joined my current company (about a year now). My old job was half the stress and I worked with people that were fun and respectful of each other. Now I work in a place with an unscalable pace of work with people that are angry and hate each other. My resting face is one of anger and despair even when I'm not working.
barry-cotter 8y ago
> There just isn't enough skilled IT people. The industry is immature and is bottom heavy. The top performers and seniors, are then overwhelmed with work and the business is unable to hire more senior people to reduce workload. Then the business keeps growing and eventually you get a death spiral of people quitting and making the situation worse. If you’re right you have valuable skills that are in high demand. As patio11 would say “Charge more” By all accounts charging more also generally leads to better employers/customers and in the cases where it doesn’t it gives you the security to increase your prices until dealing with assholes or the highly demanding seems worthwhile instead of a hideous necessity.
devonkim 8y ago
> The industry is immature and is bottom heavy. Depending upon your sub-sector of IT it can be completely inverted from that where there's far, far too many layers of management around maybe a handful of individual contributors. This is typical for most sub-fields of enterprise software that attract and retain a lot of non-technical people because the business requires interfacing with a culture of primarily non-technical-first customers. These companies tend to become the opposite of an IC-heavy IT shop - way too much positivity and a ton of stereotypical sales personalities (to be fair, the most common profession in the US specifically is salesperson). In fact, a lot of what the movie Office Space entails is what engineers at such an environment would go through in enterprise software and still does today, not what popular culture currently thinks of tech companies in the past 15 years.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
I have experienced everything you cited. Especially the death threats. Even when we shut off a customer for non-payment we would sometimes get them at my one job. The negativity seems to be pervasive at companies where tech is viewed as a cost center. At those kind of companies, IT tries to be proactive at first, but being proactive usually costs money, so it's often ignored. And then a failure happens as a result of ignoring that issue and then the tech people get yelled at. I've seen a major difference in attitude when the executives are involved/invested in the tech team. Even when things are really bad, failures happening all the time, it is still a positive environment and people want to help each other. It is stunning the difference it makes to just have everyone invested in the decisions from top-down so you don't feel all alone. As for IT being understaffed, I do think this problem could be improved if companies invested more in their employees (e.g. training). And maybe took more chances on peoples capability, instead of requiring 2-3 years of experience on a range of skills prior to hiring them.
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  >As for IT being understaffed, I do think this problem could be improved if companies invested more in their employees (e.g. training). And maybe took more chances on peoples capability, instead of requiring 2-3 years of experience on a range of skills prior to hiring them. I disagree. There are people who graduate with a 3 year degree and they know absolutely nothing. I've interviewed 7 CCNAs with 3 year degrees in a row who didn't know the command 'sh run'. I gave them # cli access and asked them to tell me about what the hardware is and does. They didn't know 'sh run'. They ask for a tip or something and I'd say 'show running-configuration' and they'd type out 'show running configuration' Sending them for 2-3 days of training isn't going to increase their skills to any legitimate degree when 3 years hasnt done anything. As for what do I think is the fix? Lawyers have the same problem; bottom heavy. Their fix? The way lawfirms work is that those senior staff are treated better and compensated very well. That's where IT needs to go.
  - reactor4 8y ago
    'sh run' doesn't show hardware information.
ratling 8y ago
It's bottom heavy because IT in 2019 is a joke. I left as soon as I could for operations and security. Better hours, fewer people, better pay, and I don't have to give a shit about your laptop. If you don't want to pay to keep your operations running properly I present to you the risks, mitigate as possible, and move on to the next item. If I think something is a time bomb I just leave for another company and get more money. There are no seniors because the seniors leave. That's why you keep seeing groups like Infosys, TATA, or MSPs getting tapped for this service (I would be very leary of working for an MSP unless the package was very appealing). That's why I won't take a position where I have to screw with physical hardware, AWS everything.
agumonkey 8y ago
Slight digression: how many thinks that there's also a strong "burnout" trend across the whole job surface ? health, teachers, programmers ..
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  These statistics exist and have been reconfirmed many times. For the last 10 years healthcare has been #1 burnt out. IT following up very closely. In the last 1-2 years IT has been showing up as #1 in the studies done. Up around ~65%. Major corps like Nvidia and Cisco being worse yet. ER was something like 90%. Nursing was 40%. Over 1/3 of healthcare has been diagnosed with depression. Whereas industries like Education is below 15%, hotels are below 10%. It's not literally all workers. In fact there's a negative relationship with burnout and unions. The unions make sure you're not being overworked. Teachers in Canada for example have below 5% burnout. The union is immensely strong. They get paid $140,000/year. They work 5 hour days and only 8 months a year. Their 'boss' the principal can't actually just show up and make sure they are working. That's not allowed. Basically no accountability as a teacher.
  - pickle-wizard 8y ago
    I was prepared to call bullshit on the Canadian teacher salary, but I just googled it. My 30 second Google search showed the average salary in Alberta is right at $100K. So I could see $140 happening for the more senior people. Maybe I need to move to Canada.
    - richardhod 8y ago
      Do remember that this is probably in Canadian $, so slightly less than you would assume. (today's rate: USD 1 = CAN 1.34)
    - ZeroFries 8y ago
      The problem is salaries are usually highly regulated, so you get capped pretty quick, and it's usually based on your degrees rather than your job performance.
ergothus 8y ago
> The industry is immature and is bottom heavy. I'm not entirely sure what "bottom" you refer to here. From what I see, there's a misalignment: Lots of senior people lose time doing work that doesn't require senior people, because there aren't enough non-senior people available to do that work. The solution to this is seen as hiring more senior people, which fails, because while there are lots of junior people, no one is making them into senior people. This results in very little hiring at all, and what hiring there is is focused on shuffling senior people between companies that does little to address the problems. Then you end up with a lot of people with "senior" titles, but their actual seniority of experience varies wildly. Lots of talented people fall to the wayside because the primary way of becoming "senior" (in terms of capability) is giving you time and seeing if you draw all the correct conclusions and lessons by yourself (which also requires the work you get to help teach you those lessons). So the industry (in terms of people experience) is bottom-heavy in the work pool. Places that can afford it are top heavy in talent+experience, and everyone else is bottom-heavy in low experience, and neither type of place is doing anything to really address their problems long-term.
- barberousse 8y ago
  >So the industry (in terms of people experience) is bottom-heavy in the work pool. Places that can afford it are top heavy in talent+experience, and everyone else is bottom-heavy in low experience, and neither type of place is doing anything to really address their problems long-term. When I came to my company I was a junior front-end engineer with no CS degree. A few months in or so in I'm apart of a post-work discussion near the keg where the IT Admin head is going off on how the programming industry is getting flooded with low-skill juniors and how it's bad for the industry. He seemed entirely shocked when I pointed out that: (1) The ubiquity and availability of the browser meant there was going to be a continued need, so the problem isn't just going to go away; (2) This problem is one of software engineering pedagogy being woefully underprepared, which it is. In that same range of time, on proffering a solution that seemed above my level, my technical lead, a much older former hi-frequency trading developer who prided himself on his C++ code (our team was Java/JS), inquired on how I got the idea, which had come about from doing reading/research on the subject. His reply was: "You read it out of a book?". Me - "Yes, [insert tech lead's name], that's how learning happens" As someone who was coming from a background in humanities academia and training and coaching high schoolers in competitive debate, it is very very apparent that the industry is dominated, perhaps not by a type, but by an _attitude_ that is presumptuous, arrogant, skeptical of difference, and just straight up missing a certain relationship to social reality. A year later, when said tech lead totally led us nowhere and quit, we had this rock star consultant come on who was making crazy money running the team and bucking all the organization's process in exchange for "results". Dude was rude and offensive to everyone who didn't lay before his eruditeness and efficiency. I remember his off-hand comment, given in an mentor-like role, on how it takes a certain type to excel in this village and how there are "too many guys who just like playing with symbols, they're usually into music or something to, it just doesn't work out". Like, wow, whole lotta absolutes coming out mouthes without much empirical basis behind it.
paganel 8y ago
> The accounting files are the server, if you lost them I'm going to go to your office and kill everyone. Pardon my French but: what the fuck? How can anyone in his right mind can make a death threat over some piece of technology not working? I mean, I’m sure those people do exist but I don’t understand their thought process.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  How do those people even expect their problem to get resolved? If I got a death threat from a potential client, I would immediately call the police and refuse to come onsite.
sigi45 8y ago
Have seen negativity as well also have been the source of it but luckily I realized it. But that's the problem: You are invested because you care and there is too much around you you can't control. Not caring is basically quitting inside. Is that better than negativity? Perhaps. Perhaps a new company would help but perhaps not.
- shrimp_emoji 8y ago
  You're retreading the exact thought process that great artists have put to song[0]. 0: https://youtu.be/hO0TuYMIsGg https://youtu.be/hO0TuYMIsGg
  - sigi45 8y ago
    I tried but i just don't get the lyrics.
collyw 8y ago
Interesting. I am in Spain and earn a lot less than the SF salaries that I see posted here. But I don't stress about work and earn enough for a comfortable lifestyle. (I have been stressed at work, but that was down to very poor management. It was easy enough to find another job). I don't feel so bad about the poor pay here after reading your comment.
watwut 8y ago
The overwork is purely organizational amd cultural issue. It has zero to do with lack of people.
otabdeveloper2 8y ago
> are then overwhelmed with work No they're not. Most are doing pointless non-work (or negative work) because businesses need to show 'growth', usually by inflating head and report count.

jcadam 8y ago

> their IT person quit upon discovered 2 drives dead on the raid 5 array and no backups. Based on the rest of your story, he probably feared for his life...

sleepysysadmin 8y ago
Wow. I never made that link before. Makes complete sense.

ethbro 8y ago

Part of this is IT's fault. Any competent IT org should strive to balance crisis interactions with preemptive actions. Aka the package delivery person effect: 'Why does everyone like their package carrier? Because everytime you see them they bring a gift!' If you only ever see IT when your system melts down or an upgrade goes awry, you're going to hate them. Even if they're doing a wonderful job. So, please, if you run an IT department, give your troops some time to make house calls. "Just checking back in. How's the fix working?", "Anything troubling you?", etc. If not for your org, then for their mental health.

madcaptenor 8y ago
I like my package delivery person because they bring gifts. But I don't like my mail delivery person because they bring bills.
- ethbro 8y ago
  That's why I didn't say mail person. ;) (And yes, package delivery people can deliver legal packages... but I assume everyone gets the point)
  - madcaptenor 8y ago
    I mean, if we're going to tear this apart, sometimes my mail person brings gifts, if they're small enough to fit in the mailbox.

pennaMan 8y ago

>I had places where I would go onsite to resolve an emergency. I never caused the outage, I was there to help. I would still get death threats from clients. "The accounting files are the server, if you lost them I'm going to go to your office and kill everyone." Isn't that a criminal offence?

mfoy_ 8y ago
Yes, but filing a police report against a client isn't good for business.
- detaro 8y ago
  If good IT work is in high demand as claimed, that shouldn't be a problem. And "we make sure customers don't abuse our staff" should be the baseline of "how do I keep any good employees I might have", not a luxury.
  - mfoy_ 8y ago
    There's a perception among management that they need to remain competitive. The IT service truly isn't a oligopoly like telcos are. My company hasn't increased rates in over 4 years out of fear that we would lose business even though we have more business than we have the resources to handle.
  - sleepysysadmin 8y ago
    If anything my ex-employer would be pissed that they skipped the line on being abusive to me. I ended up getting fired within 18 hours after reporting harassment.
    - da_chicken 8y ago
      I mean, now you've got a strong case for wrongful termination and a report of retaliatory termination to your state's DoL.
- da_chicken 8y ago

segmondy 8y ago

Perhaps there really is a severe workplace burnout problem in IT, but perhaps that's not the problem. There're ton of companies with burnout problems and worse turnover rates than IT. I personally believe that the issue we are seeing today is that most people don't know how to manager stress, emotion & energy. Most people are leading a very reactive life and constantly been pulled and pushed in all directions by "life" Stress happens when there's a large gulf between what you expect and reality. Most folks in IT are getting paid so well that they can bridge this gap better than most folks. All one has to do is freaking chillax. F material things, don't compare yourself or compete with others, learn to make do with what you have. Last but not least, do your very best at work, but detach your emotion from the outcome.

sesteel 8y ago
Detaching emotion from the outcome is key. I've heard it described as professional distance or professional objectivity and it is a key component of maturity. It is more prevalent in other industries, but tech has grown so fast that we have a serious mentoring problem. There isn't enough good mentors, people with decades of experience, to go around. I grew up in part of the industry where people had been working for 3 decades before I got there; their mentality is much different than what I've found in young companies with young (as in age) staffs.
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  Reminds me of part of that poem by Kipling... "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:" (I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Not that long.) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if--- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---
  - sesteel 8y ago
    Thank you for sharing.

accnumnplus1 8y ago

"There just isn't enough skilled IT people." Does that reconcile with ageism?

sleepysysadmin 8y ago
Certainly an interesting point. In r/sysadmin there's a tongue in cheek comment of 'quitting IT to become a goat farmer' I actually personally place it really at 1 place. https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptions-or-special-rules/government-employees-and-professionals#section-3 https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio... The Ontario government(where I live) passed laws before the Y2K hoax removing: The right not to be forced to work 20 hour days. The right not to be called back into work 2 hours after a 20 hour day. The right to get 2 days off per week, they force you to work 7 days a week. The right to a lunch or breaks. The right to be paid overtime pay if you work alot. I've had 3 employers now that required me to work ~12-18 hour days everyday, no lunch, no breaks. At least I did get overtime; but I'd have to justify the overtime bigtime.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Y2K was not a hoax! It was the rare case of all the rhetoric making people do the necessary planning work.
  - Izkata 8y ago
    Plus, a problem was found anyway in NASA data (somewhere around 2006, I think) that was caused by Y2K; it just took a long time for someone to find it.

shade 8y ago

I've commented on this previously, but I think there's some aspects of the tech industry that really do lead to burnout, depression, and cynicism among the people who work in it - and this applies to both software dev and IT support. We spend so much time dealing with tools that tend to be extremely pedantic and detail-focused. We're constantly thinking about all of the stuff that's gone wrong with our applications previously, what new things could go wrong with them now, and how we avoid that. For building robust software, or robust IT infrastructure deployments, that's a good thing, but I personally find it somewhat difficult to turn this mindset off at the end of the day. I've been in the industry for 20 years now and this stuff still gets to me sometimes. The last year or two I've been trying to establish a consistent meditation practice just to help get out of my head a little bit and distance myself from some of the stress and cynicism, though I'm not sure how much it's actually helped yet.

mfoy_ 8y ago
I harness that mindset-spillover by playing board games as a hobby.
- snazz 8y ago
  Playing some board games almost feels like meditation because it makes time slow down as you wait for the other person to complete their turn. It’s quite nice, really, although I found it mildly frustrating at first.
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y ago
> We spend so much time dealing with tools that tend to be extremely pedantic and detail-focused. This in combination with deadlines has caused my resting face to develop into an angry expression. As soon as I stop smiling and return to my “neutral” face, I look like I am angry, ready to kill someone. I now make an effort to smile while walking so people don’t get frightened.
- president 8y ago
  You've just described my face since I joined my current company (about a year now). My old job was half the stress and I worked with people that were fun and respectful of each other. Now I work in a place with an unscalable pace of work with people that are angry and hate each other. My resting face is one of anger and despair even when I'm not working.

barry-cotter 8y ago

> There just isn't enough skilled IT people. The industry is immature and is bottom heavy. The top performers and seniors, are then overwhelmed with work and the business is unable to hire more senior people to reduce workload. Then the business keeps growing and eventually you get a death spiral of people quitting and making the situation worse. If you’re right you have valuable skills that are in high demand. As patio11 would say “Charge more” By all accounts charging more also generally leads to better employers/customers and in the cases where it doesn’t it gives you the security to increase your prices until dealing with assholes or the highly demanding seems worthwhile instead of a hideous necessity.

devonkim 8y ago

> The industry is immature and is bottom heavy. Depending upon your sub-sector of IT it can be completely inverted from that where there's far, far too many layers of management around maybe a handful of individual contributors. This is typical for most sub-fields of enterprise software that attract and retain a lot of non-technical people because the business requires interfacing with a culture of primarily non-technical-first customers. These companies tend to become the opposite of an IC-heavy IT shop - way too much positivity and a ton of stereotypical sales personalities (to be fair, the most common profession in the US specifically is salesperson). In fact, a lot of what the movie Office Space entails is what engineers at such an environment would go through in enterprise software and still does today, not what popular culture currently thinks of tech companies in the past 15 years.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

I have experienced everything you cited. Especially the death threats. Even when we shut off a customer for non-payment we would sometimes get them at my one job. The negativity seems to be pervasive at companies where tech is viewed as a cost center. At those kind of companies, IT tries to be proactive at first, but being proactive usually costs money, so it's often ignored. And then a failure happens as a result of ignoring that issue and then the tech people get yelled at. I've seen a major difference in attitude when the executives are involved/invested in the tech team. Even when things are really bad, failures happening all the time, it is still a positive environment and people want to help each other. It is stunning the difference it makes to just have everyone invested in the decisions from top-down so you don't feel all alone. As for IT being understaffed, I do think this problem could be improved if companies invested more in their employees (e.g. training). And maybe took more chances on peoples capability, instead of requiring 2-3 years of experience on a range of skills prior to hiring them.

sleepysysadmin 8y ago
>As for IT being understaffed, I do think this problem could be improved if companies invested more in their employees (e.g. training). And maybe took more chances on peoples capability, instead of requiring 2-3 years of experience on a range of skills prior to hiring them. I disagree. There are people who graduate with a 3 year degree and they know absolutely nothing. I've interviewed 7 CCNAs with 3 year degrees in a row who didn't know the command 'sh run'. I gave them # cli access and asked them to tell me about what the hardware is and does. They didn't know 'sh run'. They ask for a tip or something and I'd say 'show running-configuration' and they'd type out 'show running configuration' Sending them for 2-3 days of training isn't going to increase their skills to any legitimate degree when 3 years hasnt done anything. As for what do I think is the fix? Lawyers have the same problem; bottom heavy. Their fix? The way lawfirms work is that those senior staff are treated better and compensated very well. That's where IT needs to go.
- reactor4 8y ago
  'sh run' doesn't show hardware information.

ratling 8y ago

It's bottom heavy because IT in 2019 is a joke. I left as soon as I could for operations and security. Better hours, fewer people, better pay, and I don't have to give a shit about your laptop. If you don't want to pay to keep your operations running properly I present to you the risks, mitigate as possible, and move on to the next item. If I think something is a time bomb I just leave for another company and get more money. There are no seniors because the seniors leave. That's why you keep seeing groups like Infosys, TATA, or MSPs getting tapped for this service (I would be very leary of working for an MSP unless the package was very appealing). That's why I won't take a position where I have to screw with physical hardware, AWS everything.

agumonkey 8y ago

Slight digression: how many thinks that there's also a strong "burnout" trend across the whole job surface ? health, teachers, programmers ..

sleepysysadmin 8y ago
These statistics exist and have been reconfirmed many times. For the last 10 years healthcare has been #1 burnt out. IT following up very closely. In the last 1-2 years IT has been showing up as #1 in the studies done. Up around ~65%. Major corps like Nvidia and Cisco being worse yet. ER was something like 90%. Nursing was 40%. Over 1/3 of healthcare has been diagnosed with depression. Whereas industries like Education is below 15%, hotels are below 10%. It's not literally all workers. In fact there's a negative relationship with burnout and unions. The unions make sure you're not being overworked. Teachers in Canada for example have below 5% burnout. The union is immensely strong. They get paid $140,000/year. They work 5 hour days and only 8 months a year. Their 'boss' the principal can't actually just show up and make sure they are working. That's not allowed. Basically no accountability as a teacher.
- pickle-wizard 8y ago
  I was prepared to call bullshit on the Canadian teacher salary, but I just googled it. My 30 second Google search showed the average salary in Alberta is right at $100K. So I could see $140 happening for the more senior people. Maybe I need to move to Canada.
  - richardhod 8y ago
    Do remember that this is probably in Canadian $, so slightly less than you would assume. (today's rate: USD 1 = CAN 1.34)
  - ZeroFries 8y ago
    The problem is salaries are usually highly regulated, so you get capped pretty quick, and it's usually based on your degrees rather than your job performance.

ergothus 8y ago

> The industry is immature and is bottom heavy. I'm not entirely sure what "bottom" you refer to here. From what I see, there's a misalignment: Lots of senior people lose time doing work that doesn't require senior people, because there aren't enough non-senior people available to do that work. The solution to this is seen as hiring more senior people, which fails, because while there are lots of junior people, no one is making them into senior people. This results in very little hiring at all, and what hiring there is is focused on shuffling senior people between companies that does little to address the problems. Then you end up with a lot of people with "senior" titles, but their actual seniority of experience varies wildly. Lots of talented people fall to the wayside because the primary way of becoming "senior" (in terms of capability) is giving you time and seeing if you draw all the correct conclusions and lessons by yourself (which also requires the work you get to help teach you those lessons). So the industry (in terms of people experience) is bottom-heavy in the work pool. Places that can afford it are top heavy in talent+experience, and everyone else is bottom-heavy in low experience, and neither type of place is doing anything to really address their problems long-term.

barberousse 8y ago
>So the industry (in terms of people experience) is bottom-heavy in the work pool. Places that can afford it are top heavy in talent+experience, and everyone else is bottom-heavy in low experience, and neither type of place is doing anything to really address their problems long-term. When I came to my company I was a junior front-end engineer with no CS degree. A few months in or so in I'm apart of a post-work discussion near the keg where the IT Admin head is going off on how the programming industry is getting flooded with low-skill juniors and how it's bad for the industry. He seemed entirely shocked when I pointed out that: (1) The ubiquity and availability of the browser meant there was going to be a continued need, so the problem isn't just going to go away; (2) This problem is one of software engineering pedagogy being woefully underprepared, which it is. In that same range of time, on proffering a solution that seemed above my level, my technical lead, a much older former hi-frequency trading developer who prided himself on his C++ code (our team was Java/JS), inquired on how I got the idea, which had come about from doing reading/research on the subject. His reply was: "You read it out of a book?". Me - "Yes, [insert tech lead's name], that's how learning happens" As someone who was coming from a background in humanities academia and training and coaching high schoolers in competitive debate, it is very very apparent that the industry is dominated, perhaps not by a type, but by an _attitude_ that is presumptuous, arrogant, skeptical of difference, and just straight up missing a certain relationship to social reality. A year later, when said tech lead totally led us nowhere and quit, we had this rock star consultant come on who was making crazy money running the team and bucking all the organization's process in exchange for "results". Dude was rude and offensive to everyone who didn't lay before his eruditeness and efficiency. I remember his off-hand comment, given in an mentor-like role, on how it takes a certain type to excel in this village and how there are "too many guys who just like playing with symbols, they're usually into music or something to, it just doesn't work out". Like, wow, whole lotta absolutes coming out mouthes without much empirical basis behind it.

paganel 8y ago

> The accounting files are the server, if you lost them I'm going to go to your office and kill everyone. Pardon my French but: what the fuck? How can anyone in his right mind can make a death threat over some piece of technology not working? I mean, I’m sure those people do exist but I don’t understand their thought process.

pavel_lishin 8y ago
How do those people even expect their problem to get resolved? If I got a death threat from a potential client, I would immediately call the police and refuse to come onsite.

sigi45 8y ago

Have seen negativity as well also have been the source of it but luckily I realized it. But that's the problem: You are invested because you care and there is too much around you you can't control. Not caring is basically quitting inside. Is that better than negativity? Perhaps. Perhaps a new company would help but perhaps not.

shrimp_emoji 8y ago
You're retreading the exact thought process that great artists have put to song[0]. 0: https://youtu.be/hO0TuYMIsGg https://youtu.be/hO0TuYMIsGg
- sigi45 8y ago
  I tried but i just don't get the lyrics.

collyw 8y ago

Interesting. I am in Spain and earn a lot less than the SF salaries that I see posted here. But I don't stress about work and earn enough for a comfortable lifestyle. (I have been stressed at work, but that was down to very poor management. It was easy enough to find another job). I don't feel so bad about the poor pay here after reading your comment.

watwut 8y ago

The overwork is purely organizational amd cultural issue. It has zero to do with lack of people.

otabdeveloper2 8y ago

> are then overwhelmed with work No they're not. Most are doing pointless non-work (or negative work) because businesses need to show 'growth', usually by inflating head and report count.