
IT job satisfaction plummets to all-time low - edw519
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9143194/Surveys_IT_job_satisfaction_plummets_to_all_time_low?taxonomyName=Careers&taxonomyId=10
======
ytinas
This isn't surprising. Big companies see that their employees can't easily
leave so they take advantage of it. Of course when the economy picks up people
are going to leave, but this will be happening to lots of companies so they'll
have plenty of available talent to replace their losses.

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...

~~~
jrockway
Are employees really trapped? I changed jobs this year, and my company (a
large, household-name-type-place) is continuing to hire a lot of developers. I
think the team I'm on was about 2 people a year ago, now it's 10+.

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...)

~~~
angelbob
IT != programming

Programmers are in a very different boat, job-wise, especially programmers
with some experience. Recessions don't hit us as hard.

~~~
umjames
Do you think the article considers programmers as IT workers? I think so. It's
in the quote:

 _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.

~~~
jrockway
Dunno. I have to deal with poorly-documented vendorware (and Windows, from
time to time) and I have had to make websites that work in IE6. I would not
count either as "hell on earth". It's just stuff that needs to be done, and
people will pay a lot of money to have it done.

------
spokey
I'm not sure I buy it, but Scott Adams has an interesting theory that could
explain this at:

<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)

------
bdmac97
I wonder how much of that also has to do with people that simply chose the
wrong line of work? Back when I was in school it was coming towards the peak
of the dot com bubble and I know there were tons of new students in CS that
were there just to make money.

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...

------
wizard_2
Now I can pretend this isn't a personal problem!

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.

------
motters
I can imagine what the situation might be like at the company from which I was
made redundant six months ago, and it probably is fairly unpleasant with
whatever IT staff remain trying to support and maintain complicated systems
that they have little knowledge or expertise on.

------
joshwa
Probably related to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032875> (Tim Bray's
"Doing it Wrong" screed on enterprise software)

(ps edw519 I was waiting for you to chime in on that thread)

~~~
edw519
Hey joshwa, somehow I never even noticed that thread yesterday. Why? Because I
was up to my earlobes implementing a business intelligence/data warehouse
system in a very large SOX-compliant enterprise :-).

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 :-)]

~~~
tom_b
Yeah, I think about that enterprise software RFS as well. I'm working on a
data warehouse for a bioinformatics research center right now, so we are
somewhat playing in the same place.

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.

~~~
smokinn
I've been looking into it a lot as well. It really depends what your BI is
supposed to handle. Is it analytics with very wide but very flat tables that
you don't join much (or at all)? Is it complex queries joining many tables
together to respond to ad-hoc queries?

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.

~~~
tom_b
Believe it or not, Pentaho is what we have in place right now. For the ETL
backend, I think it is a really nice tool. Flexible, intuitive, and measures
up well to Informatica and other $$$ tools.

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).

~~~
smokinn
What database did you plug Pentaho into? Like I said earlier I was thinking of
using LucidDB but according to this benchmark:
[http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/01/07/star-
schema-b...](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/01/07/star-schema-
bechmark-infobright-infinidb-and-luciddb/) it seems InfiniDB might be a better
candidate.

~~~
tom_b
Caught this question only after a few days, sorry for the delay. We actually
are using Oracle (we have a site license).

------
antidaily
Helping my aunt download pics from her phone to Vista almost ruined my
Christmas. IT work has got to be hell.

------
icono
I agree, I've worked as a help desk person and a developer and I personally
enjoy development type work. A lot of satisfaction comes from working at the
right company too. I've worked at many companies and I finally found one I
enjoy working at. The company I work for is within Fortune's top 100 companies
to work for:
[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/fu...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/full_list/).
I'd suggest going through the list and trying to find one of those companies.
If you can't find one, make sure you do your home work during the interview
process. I believe Joel on Software has a good article about what to look for
when considering a new employer.

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.

------
dnsworks
This isn't too surprising. IT salaries have not even come close to keeping up
with inflation. It's even worse in the cities. In the Silicon Valley your
average engineer making $100k whose wife makes $40k and has 2-3 kids can't
afford to buy a home. Especially considering the 9% sales tax and the 9.3%
state income tax.

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.

~~~
jrockway
Sounds like people like this have made their own lives unhappy.

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.

~~~
dnsworks
Clearly you've never been to the bay area. Especially if you're working in San
Francisco, then you're looking at living in the outer richmond or sunset if
you want $2k to stretch out to enough space for a 5-person family. Expect to
pay more like $3k on rent, or $5k on a mortgage. Anybody spending more than
25% of their net-income on housing is living beyond their means.

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.

~~~
patio11
_Clearly you've never been to the bay area._

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...

~~~
bsaunder
The weather is nice...

~~~
rwhitman
Its COLD in July.

~~~
dnsworks
Depends on the neighborhood. Some neighborhoods are always cold. SOMA is
pretty sunny and consistent.

~~~
rwhitman
As someone who lives in LA your rationalization by neighborhood micro climate
is falling on deaf ears haha

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...

