
I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs - jerryji
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.762361
======
menloparkbum
I used to read the Joel On Software forums. The awful life of an IT drone was
a common theme, it would show up about twice a week. The sad thing is that I
recognize some of the posters' names and it's the same people who were posting
the same complaints 6 years ago. If you're still complaining about your career
after six years, the problem is you, not your job.

I would rather not draw that crowd over here, or have their stories reposted,
or even links to that forum. That sort of negativity is boring at best and
poisonous at worst.

~~~
jerryji
I voted you up.

But I don't fully agree with you. Maybe you didn't mean it but your tone
sounds a bit too condescending to me -- like some Wall street rich guy saying
if you were poor and still are poor, then it's your own problem, just get out
of my sight -- not everybody has a dream job at a dream work place, in fact, I
would argue most don't, regardless of industry. Should we care why many IT
workers are not happy even if some individuals can't escape the blame?
Shouldn't we be a bit more tolerant and listen more so that hopefully we will
make the IT a better industry to work in?

Last but not the least, the Joel on Software crowd is not really drawn here
with similar submissions, even though I will probably refrain from submitting
similar moody articles here, wherever they are from.

~~~
menloparkbum
My comments are specific to the Joel on Software forums.

IT can be a crappy job and complaining from time to time is a good way to blow
off steam. But consistently venting about the exact same thing for 6 years is
pathological. It also set a pretty lame tone at the JoS forums. Certain people
would show up in nearly every thread about anything to snipe it down and
remind everyone that life sucks and then you die, that's just the way it is
kiddo, you picked the wrong job and there ain't nothin' you can do about it
now. We just don't get any respect! It was like a Rodney Dangerfield sketch on
repeat, except it wasn't supposed to be funny.

One of my theories is that in addition to providing an alternative to sites
like ExpertsExchange, Joel Spolsky joined up with Jeff Atwood to start Stack
Overflow partially because his own forums got spoiled by a bunch of bad apples
who wouldn't leave.

------
edw519
I absolutely _love_ what I do and can't imagine doing anything else.

 _However_...I have had very few jobs where I was happy. I think there are 2
primary reasons.

1\. I want to work on what I want to work on. When I work on anything else,
all I can think about is what I really want to work on. In a job situation, I
rarely work on what I want. (OTOH, a job that has me working on what I want is
usually a great job.)

2\. I want to work when I want to work. Sometimes, 8 to 5 works, often it
doesn't. We were simply not meant to sit in cubicles without windows all day
long. Enough said.

There are lots of other things most of us don't like (difficult people, crappy
code to maintain, poor management, difficult deadlines, etc.), but those are
all part of the territory. I could live with them if I could work on what I
want when I want.

------
strlen
I wonder why so many happiness complaints in Joel on Software forums always
talk about working in "IT" (as opposed to "engineering")? I've never been
referred to as "IT", but I've only worked in companies where producing
software/Internet services was the core competency and either as production
operations engineer (i.e. customer facing systems, not internal systems) or as
a software engineer.

Is the case with these posters that they're working in places where making a
technology-oriented product/service is _not_ the core competency (or if it is,
they're not working in the departments that are responsible for core
products/services)? Why do people stay in these environments, if they
have/want to have any sense of _passion_ about what they do (rather than
merely think of their job as a way to make money)?

The other big factor is that I _am_ based in Silicon Valley. Could this be
another factor, that outside of SF Bay Area/Seattle/Los Angeles and select
other metropolitan areas anything computing-related is referred to as "IT" and
treated as a cost center vs. a core competency?

Seems like there's several conclusions:

I. These people are passionate about a subject, but are working in an
environment where passion is _not_ expected or even appreciated.

II. Either for some reason they're unwilling to switch to a field or
environment where their passion will be rewarded (pay/hours/benefits?), or
that option is not available to them (due to geographic locale?)

~~~
mattmcknight
Your 2nd paragraph is dead on. Working at a company where you are viewed as an
overhead expense, rather than as an R&D cost is no fun. It's the third tier
software job, but there are a lot of these jobs out there. I'd put working for
a company that sells software as tier one and working for a software
consulting company as tier two. This is why those jobs are so subject to
outsourcing, if you bring in another company to take over those functions, at
least the employees of that company are working towards their core competency.

One "solution" to this is to get more involved in the business or mission of
the organization you support. Of course, the bureaucracy may resist this sort
of move.

------
TomOfTTB
I think he confuses unhappiness with annoyance. Let me give a real world
example.

Almost everyone has been in line for an ATM at one time or another and been
stuck behind someone who clearly can't comprehend the machine. It's very
annoying. If you talk to a person waiting in line under those circumstances
they will seem like an unhappy person. But talk to them once they are on their
way and they'll not only seem happy but probably hold no ill will towards the
person who couldn't grasp the machine (because they realize the person had no
malice they just couldn't do that paticular task).

To me that's a little what IT is like. You catch someone in the middle of
fixing a few seemingly stupid mistakes or after a day filled with them and
they'll seem unhappy.

Same with programming. Nothing's more annoying then spending a half hour
tracking down a problem only to find someone didn't increment in a loop (or
some other stupid mistake). But given time the rational mind kicks in,
realizes everyone makes mistakes, and is back to being happy with their job.

------
roc
It's a living-to-work vs working-to-live question, really.

As it turns out, far more people choose to compartmentalize their work-life
into an annoying, necessary evil than to dial back their standard of living
while dramatically increasing their work responsibilities.

And this is true of more than just programmers. I've heard similar from
accountants, lawyers, cooks, bank reps -- basically everyone I've ever worked
with.

They'd all much rather do the sort of work they're currently doing, but at a
smaller company or on their own. They just never make a change because, in the
end, they value the increased leisure time and higher standard of living more.

(To be fair, in the US some aspects of our economy also have a big impact on
that choice. Namely, retirement and insurance opportunities that don't really
exist for the self-employed and small businesses.)

~~~
patio11
I think small businesses get about the sweetest retirement packages in the
United States which do not involve backstopping by the taxpayers of
California. With the SEP plan (one of a few options) you can sock up to,
essentially, $5k + 25% of salary (capped at a very generous number) in a tax
advantaged retirement account. It is like the IRAs available to regular wage
employees, except superior in just about every way. (You lose out on employer
match, you gain on sickening tax efficiency.)

Another fun option, especially for young entrepreneurs, is the Roth IRA, which
is such a good deal it ought to be illegal. Pay taxes now at your low "I do
not make much money rate". Watch investments compound for a few decades. Then
it is yours, tax free, allowing you to avoid the significantly higher rate
you'll be facing when you're significantly wealthier, and also letting you do
some fun tax structuring if you also have taxable investments and/or income
during retirement.

If you start saving young, $1 put in a Roth IRA today buys you $1 in tax-free
income a year, for perpetuity, starting at retirement.

~~~
Brushfire
I might be wrong, but Ive always though $1 in my business is worth a lot more
than $1 in any sort of retirement account I wont need for 40 years.

Business-exit is my retirement fund.

~~~
kragen
Maybe diversify a bit, just in case?

------
pasbesoin
Someone recently commented, here on HN or elsewhere, that IT is often viewed
as a cost center, not a profit center.

Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in corporate life knows
what happens to cost centers. They are at best "tolerated" and are squeezed as
hard as they can be. Anytime the bottom line needs a bump, the first thing
requested is a list of "cost centers".

(I typed a bunch more, but I think I'll leave it at the above, for our mutual
benefit.)

~~~
gaius
That was me :-)

~~~
pasbesoin
Cheers! (From the voting, I think I owe you a few upmods! :-P )

------
rajeshamara
Unless you are passionate about programming you are never going to enjoy
programming. I have been programming for the past 19 years. I am a fanatic
programmer. I have to code every day (learn new frameworks, try out different
algorithms, come up with problems and write code which solves those problems,
optimize your earlier code, redesign or rearchitect, try out code project
samples etc). Again you will really enjoy if you are going to do what you
wanted and that to solving challenging problems. I can code even when I am 70.

~~~
stcredzero
I can understand that. But really, truly braindead code _hurts_. There's
interesting sifting and recombination of details. Then, there's such wrangling
of concepts which is just drudgery!

------
biotech
I can't seem to link to an individual comment, so I'm just going to repost it
here. It's by Katie Lucas. Begin Quote:

 _The problem with IT, generally, is lack of respect. Because it's something
that looks easy and looks like something anyone could do, people don't respect
experience and talent.

For some reason this just doesn't work in other fields. While everyone feels
they can put a sticking plaster on a cut, they go to a doctor for more serious
stuff. Any fool can build a garden wall, but if they want a tower block one
hires an architect and a construction company and lets them do decisions.

Whereas, it's quite common in IT for micromanagers to overrule the
professionals.

It doesn't happen in building. Managers simply aren't allowed to say things
like "Oh, I don't think we should RSJs in those load bearing walls". If the
architect says they're needed, then they go in. We also don't hire doctors by
picking the tools they'll use. When you want a doctor to take out an appendix,
you want a qualified general surgeon. You don't ask them whether they prefer a
#3 or a #4 handle on their scalpels.

And yet it's pretty common to see projects which have picked a technology
first ("Oh we're going to use J2EE for this") and THEN hire the team around
that ("Wanted, tech arch, 5 years exp with J2EE, C , C++, JAVA, Perforce,
Apache, Perl, Python.") and only at that point produce the spec. And then if
the job isn't one the technology is suited for, that ends up being the
developers fault and they're the ones who work overtime to put that square peg
in the round hole.

It's scarcely surprising that a) almost nothing works properly, b) there's
constant chaos and that therefore c) almost no-one finds their work rewarding
in ways other than money.

I freely admit that a lot of my time, I feel like some sort of thief. I sit in
projects which are doomed. They're more doomed than a plane that's lost both
wings and is on fire. I see the people around the project running about
setting more of it on fire as it hurtles towards the ocean and removing more
control surfaces and making it worse. And I watch developers switch in and out
of seats as we trail wreckage and smoke down. And it's always been like this.
The project is a free-fall disaster before I join and after I leave and
there's just nothing, nothing, nothing I can do to rescue it at that point in
time. And yet I'm being paid to be there.

And I feel bad about that. I feel that I ought to be being paid to achieve
something. But usually I'm just being paid to sit in a seat in a vehicle
performing a ballistic trajectory straight into its crash site. And even if I
quit then the next thing will be the same and whoever takes my place in this
seat will be in the same situation.

And this is not how I wanted to work. I wanted to build things that people
wanted. Not turn up at an aircrash and fill a seat in it for a while. And
while it's financial fulfilling, it's not very emotionally fulfilling.

Most bridges don't fall down. Most patients don't die. Most IT projects are a
failure in one way or another. It's like being a surgeon back in the days
before anaesthetics or antibiotics. Most of our patients die... and that's got
to be bad for morale.

And I can't help but think that this really has its roots in the fact that
people think software is simple enough that they can exercise control over it
at a level they ought not to be and that they also don't want to pay what it
actually costs. Architects generally don't compete on price and you don't get
to tell architects that their idea of how strong structural steel is is an
underestimate you can feel you can ignore in this project. But people time and
time and time again pick the cheapest option for software, design it like
they'd design a tin shack and then act surprised when the end results turns
out to be flimsy tin shack instead of a tower block. Katie Lucas Thursday,
June 25, 2009_

~~~
anthonyb
Reversed engineered the HTML with firebug:
[http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.762361#...](http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.762361#discussTopic762411)

------
jswinghammer
It's weird because I have met very, very few IT workers who aren't happy with
their jobs. Maybe they'd rather be working for themselves or would change
something about the process that's used but most people I know fundamentally
love the work. I'll admit though in these times when I feel like I have
slightly fewer options I tend to feel more upset about little things that I
would otherwise let slide but I try to keep that in check. I can't speak for
other professionals inside the IT umbrella but I love programming and most
other programmers I know love it too.

------
rbritton
I consider IT to be the systems maintenance and administration role --
programming is another occupation. While I love the technical stuff, I can
tell you very specifically why I hate my job:

1\. Constant interruptions. I cannot accomplish anything of any degree of
complexity when I get nipped at at all sides for a piece of my attention.

2\. Micromanaging boss. My boss has this peculiar trait where he insists on
observing everything I do that he doesn't understand. He still doesn't
understand it when I'm done, but somehow he thinks being there helps me.

3\. Idiotic end users. There is no semblance of any sort of competency
requirement for an employee of the business and computer usage. I've received
calls before on broken computers only to find the computer was OFF.

In my experience, this is pretty much pervasive in the industry.

~~~
gaius
_I consider IT to be the systems maintenance and administration role_

Even programmers often consider the sysadmin/DBA/network admins to be "mere
technicians". Infrastructure is a) at least as complex as software and b) if
we screw up we don't have legions of QA to catch it 6 months before ship date,
it takes the system or the site down there and then.

------
blhack
I'll admit that I am _very_ unhappy with my current job.

Part of this is whining, I know, but just hear me out.

One major, major, major problem with my job is that I work for a small
company, and am the only person here that knows tech at all.

This was really great for me at the beginning. I am very proficient in BSD and
Linux, so everything (mailserver, file server, FTPs, VPN, firewall, etc.) was
built on one the two. I've had the opportunity to work on some really fun
projects. One of my favorites was building access points out of soekris boards
and ubiquiti wireless cards (this was before ubiquiti started offering their
own, vastly superior, vastly cheaper solutions).

I'm also pretty proficient at python and perl. Because of this, I've had the
opportunity to build some really fun in-house stuff that people have loved. I
built us a contact management system on python, and I've built countless
extraction tools (grrr...text files) on perl. Currently, I'm working on a
content management system for our marketing department. This is all really fun
and great, but remember how I said I'm the only person here?

My typical day involves arriving here at 8:00 (or so, my commute is an hour
long), then sitting in front of my monitors for about 9 hours, until 5:00
rolls around.

During the day I CANNOT get anything done. I'll end up reading HN, or working
on my own website. (errr..this is inaccurate. What I mean is that I don't get
any of what I consider _real_ work done. Just managing the little problems
that the users have)

Why is this?

Well, a major part of it is the almost constant flow of interruptions from
people who's computers are "broken" (I am "the I.T. guy" [a title that I
despise], so every problem from a phone cord with a loose connection to a user
that has pressed the insert button on their keyboard and now how a "broken
email" gets handled by me). I'm sure that every coder here can relate to the
frustration of getting halfway into a problem, then being rattled out of it by
something like somebody not being able to figure out a numlock key and why,
after they press it, their "numbers don't work". The overwhelming majority of
code I have written has been done from the comfort of a barstool sitting at a
local bar that I like. For some reason, I can get more work done there, or
sitting in my backyard in a camping chair in my pajamas playing fetch with my
dog, than I could ever even DREAM of getting done while actually sitting where
I am now, at my desk.

But that is just one part.

Another part is that I am the the _only_ person here who has even a basic
understanding of computer systems. Remember the wireless network that I
mentioned earlier? Here is how it works. It lives on a physically separate
switch from the rest of the network. On this network lives an openBSD machine
running openVPN. If a client on the wireless network wants to connect to
anything on the "other side" of the openBSD machine (which has three
interfaces, one of them on the private lan, another on the wireless lan, and
another virtual interface that is a VPN tunnel between the two) it has to
authenticate with openVPN.

Pretty cool, huh? (maybe not, but I think so).

Nobody here understands this. Is this narcissistic whining? OMG THEY DON'T
APPRECIATE ME! Yes. Yes, it probably is, but it is difficult to get motivated
to do anything when there is no payoff of "good job" from the boss. (judge if
you would like). The only thing that gets noticed is that things aren't
broken. Holy hell though, when they are...

There was one time. One of our T1s went down (there are two, one of them for
our private LAN, another for the internet lounge that we offer to our
customers). My solution to this was to take an OpenBSD machine that I had
sitting in my office, put it on both networks, and make it act like a gateway
for our private lan so that we could route outbound traffic through it, and
out the working T1.

This wasn't a problem, but it took about an hour (at first I was going to try
and do it without NAT, the problem was getting the router on the public LAN to
route traffic destined for our private subnet back to my new gateway).

Nearly the entire hour was spent in front of a terminal in our server room
with my boss standing over my shoulder going "what are you doing? Why isn't
this working yet? Blhack, we REALLY need this to work RIGHT NOW! I don't think
this is going to work. We really need to think about another way to fix it,
can't we just use the wireless (the public LAN has a wireless network
available, I hope I do not have to explain why this would not work). Can't you
just try it this way? (this person does not even have a basic understanding of
routing, or what it is), have you tried rebooting it. Here, I'm going to
reboot it. Just unplug it and let it sit for a while!"

 _sigh_

I apologize for the stupid senseless whining here, guys, work can just suck
sometimes when you're the _only_ one here, ya know? Gets kinda lonely :(

Thank the gods for HN.

~~~
spudlyo
Let me get this straight. You intentionally built out a custom DYI enthusiast
IT infrastructure out of a random collection of OpenBSD and Linux boxen and
then complain that nobody but you understands it? Unless you've completely
documented how everything works and fits together you've made it very
difficult for anyone else to maintain it. That's one way to ensure job
security.

~~~
blhack
What are you talking about here?

The mailserver is Postfix, the file server is samba, the FTP daemon is VsFTPd,
imap is courier imap.

Are you a microsoft rep or something? None of this stuff is even remotely
"enthusiast".

The Contact manager is just a web-frontend that I made for that sits on top of
(and supplements) an existing system (as/400 green screens that they hate).

I'm sorry, but this is kindof insulting. What do you mean "enthusiast DIY"?

~~~
spudlyo
My apologies for offending. DIY is "do it yourself". An enthusiast (like
myself) would prefer to use OpenVPN or FreeSWAN instead of a Cisco ASA, would
rather use iptables on a Linux box than a commodity firewall, would rather
slap a wireless card into an OpenBSD machine rather than to buy a commodity
access point, etc. This is cool and all, but it makes it harder for other
folks to deal with. Let's say your on vacation and there is a problem with the
wireless. If you had used a commodity access point, somebody could have just
reset it, as opposed to have to log into the OpenBSD box and unload/load the
kernel driver, or frobbed it with ifconfig, or whatever.

~~~
skorgu
Small companies and large companies have entirely different time/money
tradeoffs and it can be hard to make the transition. At my previous employer
it was fine to spend a week making something work by cobbling together
existing projects with some glue code. It was fun and I learned a lot.

So when I started this job (working with _large_ companies) helping out with a
co-worker's task I started trying to solve a particular problem the skinflint
way, ok we can repurpose this box here to serve a filesystem while the other
box is down for the vendor to swap the firmware and then...

My co worker (rightly) pre-empted me and recommended $20,000 of SAN equipment
to replace the problematic device.

Neither way is _better_ in the absolute, it's a question of what variable
you're optimizing for.

------
alexgartrell
I was having a conversation with my mom the other day, and she mentioned how
the software her company bought wasn't as good as the old off-the-shelf stuff
and how all those "Computer People" in the IT building should get off their
lazy asses and fix it.

This, gentle(men|women), is why I will never work outside of tech

------
radu_floricica
I'm a freelancer, and I have 2-3 long time clients. For several reasons this
year I haven't looked for new ones, so work is not much.

A couple of months ago I did something between risky and impolite. I started
insisting, as hard as I could, that they only used phone/ymess for
emergencies. Normal communication like feature requests of bug reports should
be either by mail, a bug-reporting app or monthly face to face meetings.

It was ugly, to say the least, and at one point I thought I would have to
choose between the policy and one client, but it worked out in the end. It
helped that I was always very prompt with the owners of the businesses, but
they had little time to call me anyways.

Anyways, why did that do my job better? For one thing, I am much less
stressed. I barely get one phone call per day. Second when I start working on
a project I don't solve just one bug at a time anymore, so I'm a lot more
productive and a lot less prone to mistakes. And third, a lot of problems
which were false alarms don't even get to me anymore. Writing a mail is
apparently different enough from grabbing a phone that even the total number
dropped (which is made up in the face 2 face meetings, when I press them for
bugs and features).

Anyways, even if it made their experience worse (at least for a while), I
think it was well worth it. I don't know how this would work if you were
employed, but I'm guessing obtaining 2-3 hours per day of closed
phones/messengers/emails from your boss would make a lot of difference.

------
tybris
Health care eventually recovered from quackery. It's bound to happen in IT.

------
jsz0
Like anything else the vocal minority shouldn't be allowed to represent
everyone. I like my job a lot. Even when I was just getting started and doing
technical support and desktop support I liked it because I knew it wasn't a
long term thing -- just a stepping stone to something better. I think in any
career some people get complacent and don't want to work to move up but
somehow want their current job to become more satisfying, pay better, and get
them more respect. It's not going to happen unless you invest the time and
energy into making it happen.

------
troystribling
I have met very few IT workers that I consider engineers. Most consider it
their job and have the same attitudes as others who have a job.

------
nazgulnarsil
the reality is that engineer types are often conditioned to be spineless and
that is what leads to the attitudes by management that you always hear about.
if a company will fire you for standing up for yourself then you shouldn't be
working there. you have to establish the rules of the relationship early and
be consistent.

------
msluyter
I like the thinking part of my job. It's the sitting and typing that I find
(literally) painful.

------
msie
Maybe some of those IT workers are unhappy with their life rather than with
their job. Or their job is not great enough to compensate for the rest of
their life. Or their identity/self-esteem/life is wrapped up too much in their
job...

------
alphazero
Workers in any field that requires creativity, yet is subject to industrial
production and economic realities, will likely air the same sentiments.

------
mynameishere
Fuckers need to try cleaning chemical reactors.

~~~
rw
Could you go into more detail? That sounds pretty interesting.

~~~
mynameishere
Depends on the size. Small ones might be removed from their housings, and a
worker basically crouches inside cleaning it manually with gloves + gasmask.
The one advantage of work like that is seeing yourself accomplish something in
a known unit of time. The disadvantage is that it is horrible work, compared
to sitting and typing and having a vague sense of ennui.

