Slight digression: how many thinks that there's also a strong "burnout" trend across the whole job surface ? health, teachers, programmers ..
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.
I've read all of your comments here with great interest, thank you for sharing all of that.
In what follows, I'm not doubting or challenging what you said. It's just that my professional experience has been really different.
I've been getting paid to do what I guess is called 'IT' since 1993. The first few years, it was extremely broad work, everything from installing new desktops (Windows 95 Beta!) to writing web apps to installing and configuring Cisco routers.
Starting in the late 1990s, my work focused on and has pretty much remained on what is now called devops or SRE. Working with apps teams and writing code to automate all the things.
I have worked at a > $250billion USD (revenue) company, and a 35 person startup, and a big tech company based in Germany (from California), and two different companies in the 'FAANG' group, and several in between.
I not only have, overall, really enjoyed my work, but most of the people I worked with have as well.
Not perfect; lots of different kinds of bullshit, and many frustrations.
More objectively, I've never seen a lot of turnover.
So...a question: is the 'IT' you've been in fundamentally different than the 'IT' I've been in?
Thanks!
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-604-x/2018001/t/tblc....
One of the stronger public teachers unions is in Ontario. For Ontario the pay starts out at $51,904 and tops out at $95,794, which is some distance from $140,000.
The best for teachers is Northwest Territories, likely teaching in remote fly in/out communities. Teachers in NWT start at $78,600 and top out at $111,883.
Weighted averages for all of Canada based on the number of educators getting the salary gives a pay scale from: $53,163 - $88,746
Maybe I need to move to Canada.
Or people feel locked into union workplaces because they don't want to give up their seniority and the benefits that come with it. "I hate my job but I have X more years until I've worked here Y years and my pension jumps to Z% of my pay" may as well be the official motto of the state employees union (in my state at least). They may be burned out but they keep their jobs because the cost of actually quitting is higher.