IT Job Satisfaction in a Rut
It’s getting tough out there for IT employees facing long workdays, short tempers and limited career options.
Computerworld — The Jet Blue flight attendant’s dramatic de-planing last week says a lot about workplace frustration, a problem that may be increasing in IT.
A few days before flight attendant Steven Slater released a rear chute and exited his career with a couple of cans of beer in hand, an organization of IBM users meeting at the Share conference in Boston held an informal discussion entitled “The Mythical 40-Hour Week.”
It wasn’t a gripe session as much as a chance to share notes about what’s going in IT workplaces since the Great Recession. What emerged was an insider’s view of the frustrations building among tech workers as work days lengthen, pay remains stagnant and career growth appears thwarted.
Those taking part in the discussion asked that their names not be used so they could speak frankly.
“You don’t know how many hours you work – it’s all about getting the job done,” said one IT worker. “There are lots, lots of people in IT who are expected to work far more than a 40-hour week,” said another. Sixty hour weeks are common.
Yet another worker described bosses who expect their employees to work late into the night if need be to fix problems and then be on the job the next day at the usual time. Even vacation time is no longer sacrosanct: one person said he expects to be contacted “more than a half dozen times” during his time off.
Even if companies are getting more unpaid hours from their workers in today’s climate, the companies themselves may be getting hurt in other ways, according to the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) in Washington, D.C. The CEB conducts ongoing behavioral surveys of employee attitudes, and many of its clients are Fortune 500 firms.
The willingness of employees to “exert high levels of discretionary effort” — or put in the extra effort to get a job done — remains at low levels, the CEB found in its most recent survey, completed in the second quarter.
This willingness to put in extra effort fell from about 12% of workers in 2007 to about 4% last year. It was the lowest level in 10 years. The latest CEB survey of nearly 20,000 IT workers said that percentage had changed little and is now at 4.6%.
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IT Departments: Bridging the IT Generation Gap
Older generations learned tech. The younger generation lives it. Organizations that want to succeed need the skills of both.
InfoWorld — IT pros who grew up in the Baby Boom are dinosaurs who just don’t get it. Generation Y is full of Facebook-happy slackers with an exaggerated sense of entitlement. But beyond these broad generalizations lie some real differences between the generations of geeks who do tech for a living, from Boomers to Generations X, Y, and the Millennials.
“Today’s generation was born into a world where technology is about interaction, whether it’s playing video games or using social media,” says Larry Johnson, age 62, co-author with daughter Meagan (age 40) of “Generations, Inc.: From Boomers to Linksters — Managing the Friction Between Generations at Work” (Amacom, 2010). “They spent hours at it, the way I spent hours watching ‘Rin Tin Tin.’ So their brains are structured to interact with technology in an entirely different way.”
[ Looking to get the most out of your IT investments, see InfoWorld’s “20 more IT mistakes to avoid” and “16 ways IT can do less with less” | Find out which of InfoWorld’s IT personality types best fits your tech temperament. ]
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IT Staffing: IT Hiring Continues to Improve, According to Surveys
Hiring for IT jobs continues on the upswing in the U.S. and Canada as recessionary gloom gives way to cautious optimism, according to various recent polls of employers, who cite networking, security, virtualization and database skills as among the most sought-after.
IDG News Service — Hiring for IT jobs continues on the upswing in the U.S. and Canada as recessionary gloom gives way to cautious optimism, according to various recent polls of employers, who cite networking, security, virtualization and database skills as among the most sought-after.
“Overall, employer confidence is improving,” said Tom Silver, senior vice president, North America, at Dice Holdings, which operates Dice.com, a technology and engineering careers website. “We hear that as we speak to our customers every day.”
The most recent edition of The Dice Report, which heard from 600 respondents across the U.S. who hire or recruit technology professionals, found that 71 percent expect to add more employees in the second half of the year than they did in the first. More than half of that 71 percent expect to hire 10 or more new IT staff members. Likewise, CDW’s IT Monitor has had similar findings in its surveys across the U.S. and in some areas of Canada.
The IT Monitor recently found that 37 percent of IT decision makers at large companies expect to hire more IT staff in the rest of the year, which is up 11 percentage points from a year ago — the size of the increase was “a much faster jump than I would have expected to see,” said Matt Troka, CDW vice president of product and partner management and acting CMO.
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Business Intelligence: Stupid Questions at the Help Desk
We’ve all heard the tale of the clueless computer user who is told by the Help Desk to press any key and responds by asking, “Which one is the ‘any’ key?” And then there’s the newbie who thinks the disk-tray on his PC is a cup-holder. I’ve always supposed that these chestnuts and others like them were apocryphal stories, meant to make us feel better about our own sometimes-tenuous grasp of technology. But what if these users are real? SysAid Technologies, an Israeli IT service management provider, asked IT managers around the world for true and bizarre service requests. The company distributed a list of memorable responses, some of which appear below. Did these anecdotes really happen? The ones with names attached carry more weight with me than the anonymous entries, but you can decide for yourself. It may be that the high percentage of incidents involving women indicates the persistence of the old, misogynistic IT culture. Got a story of your own? Send it along, and we can create our own list.
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Software Engineers Vs. Programmers
In the US, there is no universally-recognized, formal certification process required to be a programmer. Some programmers are graduates of CIS (Computer and Information Science) programs, some are engineers and many are neither.Novell and Microsoft have tried to create proprietary certification with their CNE (Certified Network Engineer) and MCSE (Microsoft Certified System Engineer) training.
Many states have made using such titles illegal because they mislead the public on who is really an engineer. Graduates of CNE & MCSE training are not required to have an ABET-accredited engineering degree or a PE (Professional Engineer) license so they cannot be called engineers.
This effort is in the public interest because software impacts public safety. By way of information, Ohio has rendered the MCSE and CNE titles unusable unless you are an actual engineer. Nevada also has strict engineer title laws.
The “science” of computer science has a long way to go. Few truly useful software development paradigms exist and the graduates are not adequately trained in their use or are even aware of their existence.
The professors themselves are ignorant of current software development practices and have little to offer their students in the way of helpful suggestions.
Having been a Computer Engineering professor at a large university, I can personally attest to the appalling lack of understanding of software engineering issues on the part of a few of my former colleagues. Scary, really.
Some organizations, such as Carnegie-Mellon’s SEI (Software Engineering Institute) are combating this widespread ignorance. Local SPIN groups (Software Process Improvement Network), an outgrowth of CMU’s SEI, are also assisting in this effort.
However, as long as time-to-market issues dominate software development (rather than safety or correctness), there will be little incentive to change.
Software engineers, on the other hand, have a lot more science and technology background than do programmers or computer science majors. Because they are degreed engineers, they have the ABET-approved engineering core which includes physics, chemistry, math, thermodynamics, material science, engineering design, etc. Software engineers, at the graduate level, also learn project management and other business aspects of the software design and production process.
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