IT job satisfaction plummets to all-time low
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
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...
There is a silver lining to stressors like this: it helps people see fair-weather employers for who they are.
Having options to leave improves job satisfaction immensely.
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.
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.
edit: hmmm ... HN reader 'spokey' has found it, see [one of] his comments here.
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...)
Programmers are in a very different boat, job-wise, especially programmers with some experience. Recessions don't hit us as hard.
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.
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)
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...
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.
(ps edw519 I was waiting for you to chime in on that thread)
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), 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 :-)]
[redacted - list of gripes]
(realized it's easy for my employer to find these posts. Trust me, they were funny/sad. And involved a certain company out of Armonk.)
Re: YCRFS 6: do you mean #5 on this page? http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
If you hit on anything good and need a hungry hacker with enterprise experience, you know where to find me. :)
Can you share what third party software you're using? I'm looking at some of the BI platforms now and comparing that with a ruby/sinatra backend hooked up to a decent jquery based web frontend developed in-house. And, I'm using this experience to decide if I can come up with something that would be worth submitting to YC's next round. It would start with the users building their own reports without needing IT, but there is some other stuff more on the backend with data mining and correlation that I think would be the real win.
Oh, seeing joshwa response, I might fall into the hungry hacker category myself.
I recently needed to support the first case and found that one of the best cost/performance solutions for us was infobright given that a lot of our existing base and reporting can stay as-is since we used heavily partitioned mysql myisam tables but it was getting slow (and crashy) and even slower every day.
In the near future I plan on supporting the second case because I'm getting a little tired of having to write up new reports myself. I've automated pretty much all the frontend stuff so that generating new reports is mainly a question of plugging in the proper sql queries and massaging the resulting data appropriately (which may be why I find it so boring) and it'll only take me a day or two to write new reports on a new part of the business but I'd much rather pass that off to marketing and teach them how to do it themselves.
For the second case, what I think is very promising and will be prototyping very soon is a combination of LucidDB and the Pentaho BI Suite. (Check out a demo here, it's pretty impressive: http://demo.pentaho.com/pentaho/ )
Truly complex predictive reports I'll still have to handle myself but those are interesting because they at least require problem solving. The rote historical analysis reports I'd prefer handing off for good and the other departments would love to handle it themselves since they wouldn't always have to wait until I had time to get them their data.
But the reporting model, with the designer/xaction dev/publish quirkiness just bugs me. I find myself editing the XML definition files when I want to change stuff rather than firing up the tools. The documentation is a little lacking as well, but I have demanding standards there.
I also don't particularly care for how business models show up in the GUI for user-driven report building. To be fair, that is probably somewhat related to a poor model without proper dimensional design put in place. First pass efforts (before my time here) basically copied the operational system schemas into the data warehouse (shudder).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Add in $700/month in food, $300/month in insurance premiums, $1,000/month for a car (between car payments, gas, insurance, average of 10 parking tickets per year and $200/month for a garage parking spot). All of a sudden you're living paycheck to paycheck.
My point is, executives in that article are complaining that they are unable to coerce engineers into giving their companies an extra 50% of their time for free. I'm not saying it's poverty, but I fully understand how the life of a corporate wage-slave is stressful enough to induce unhappiness and an unwillingness to go the extra mile.
The past decade has been a loss for the economy. IPOs are gone in exchange for M&As which only benefit the founders and investors in any signifiant way. Yet startups still dangle football of IPO-induced wealth to hoodwink engineers into working themselves into an early grave in order for the founders to become marginally wealthy. And the big companies who would like us to work ourselves to death would gladly outsource our jobs if they could overcome the lack of talent and communications issues of workers abroad.
And in the end they're still renting, and not able build wealth of their own.
Apparently dating sucks, IT careers suck, housing sucks, transportation sucks, (... list continues ...) if you've been to the Bay Area.
I have an alternative explanation which is quite a bit shorter...
I have never been more consistently disappointed by weather than that of the bay area. Personally I'd rather have a snowy winter than be greeted with 58 degrees and overcast every single morning all year long, but maybe thats just me...
And honestly I can't think of a city I've lived in that you could comfortably live with 3 kids for $2000/mo on rent/mortgage alone. You wouldn't be living in CA, NY or DC thats for sure.
Places like Fremont/Newark/Hayward are 45 minutes to everywhere. 45 mins with BART to SF, less than 45 mins (w/ traffic) to Mtn View/Palo Alto/Sunnyvale, and 45 minutes to San Jose. That's a perfectly reasonable commute.
If you really want to raise a family of 5 in the Haight, than that's awesome, but don't cry when your 140K household income isn't enough to give each kid a room AND still have a covered spot to park the M3. Moving to the Sunset is just kidding yourself, since the commute to downtown is going to be just as it would be if you moved to the 'burbs.
I spend 1700$ a month on a nice 780 SF one bedroom apartment just outside of DC. If I want an hour long commute each way I can drop that down to 1200$ a month. (More if I move to a sketchy area.)