The negativity seems to be pervasive at companies where tech is viewed as a cost center. At those kind of companies, IT tries to be proactive at first, but being proactive usually costs money, so it's often ignored. And then a failure happens as a result of ignoring that issue and then the tech people get yelled at.
I've seen a major difference in attitude when the executives are involved/invested in the tech team. Even when things are really bad, failures happening all the time, it is still a positive environment and people want to help each other. It is stunning the difference it makes to just have everyone invested in the decisions from top-down so you don't feel all alone.
As for IT being understaffed, I do think this problem could be improved if companies invested more in their employees (e.g. training). And maybe took more chances on peoples capability, instead of requiring 2-3 years of experience on a range of skills prior to hiring them.
I disagree. There are people who graduate with a 3 year degree and they know absolutely nothing. I've interviewed 7 CCNAs with 3 year degrees in a row who didn't know the command 'sh run'. I gave them # cli access and asked them to tell me about what the hardware is and does. They didn't know 'sh run'. They ask for a tip or something and I'd say 'show running-configuration' and they'd type out 'show running configuration'
Sending them for 2-3 days of training isn't going to increase their skills to any legitimate degree when 3 years hasnt done anything.
As for what do I think is the fix? Lawyers have the same problem; bottom heavy. Their fix? The way lawfirms work is that those senior staff are treated better and compensated very well. That's where IT needs to go.
When I did a lot more router work (Cisco, Juniper, Ciena, Broke-aid!), my previous employer forked RANCID and wrote extensions for every router. From there, we then sent all the configs to a SVN server every hour. None of the fork was upstreamed, since it also had a ton of tie-ins to other inhouse infra.
The idea was that we had hourly backups of every router. And if bad happened, we could run RANCID in reverse and populate the configs in SVN to the router.
also I would ask for a scope of how many devices you want to know about. if you have more than a few I would either script an expect with python netmiko to do the "sh ver" or do SNMPget in some kind of loop against the IPs
"show run" (aka sh run) is about the first command anyone commits to muscle memory on a Cisco - if they have done absolutely any real work with them whatsoever.
But doing my degree, I knew several people who hung out at the computer lab and relentlessly pestered people to do their work for them. And now people routinely pay for school essays.
I'm pretty sure there are a large number of people who invest enough effort into cheating that they could have learned the material.
Reminds me of a line I heard once, can't remember where but it was definitely in the very context you mention here, it goes: "When people realize they can't reliably work with you, they start looking for ways to work around you"
We spend so much time dealing with tools that tend to be extremely pedantic and detail-focused. We're constantly thinking about all of the stuff that's gone wrong with our applications previously, what new things could go wrong with them now, and how we avoid that. For building robust software, or robust IT infrastructure deployments, that's a good thing, but I personally find it somewhat difficult to turn this mindset off at the end of the day.
I've been in the industry for 20 years now and this stuff still gets to me sometimes. The last year or two I've been trying to establish a consistent meditation practice just to help get out of my head a little bit and distance myself from some of the stress and cynicism, though I'm not sure how much it's actually helped yet.
I really feel this. I'm supposed to be half coding and half support but the support has expanded to fill all my time and I don't write anything more than 30-line kludges that only I will see any more.
That's partly just the nature of support always taking up all the time, but also I feel really paralysed when it comes to coding, because I just think of all the stupid corner cases I've been bitten by and how bad it felt to lose data or cause downtime or just look stupid.
And yes, the answer might be "write more test cases, code review" but that little voice in the back of my head goes "you thought you'd caught all the edge cases last time, and it still did a dumb thing you'd never thought of". I find it really demotivating, and start to put things off until I feel cleverer (which I never do), and then my lack of productivity depresses me, perhaps to the point you'd call "burnout" even.
Well, glad I'm not alone. Any tips on thinking my way around it welcome.
What I’d do in your situation is bring these issues up with the team and think of what if anything you can do to help reduce the amount of support tickets coming through.
I’d look at reoccurring support tasks and prioritise the proper fixing of these based on the frequency these tasks come up.
I’d raise specific bugs that have come about recently and ask if you as a team could have prevented these in any way. What lessons do these have for the future?
Maybe you can get a “story sign off” from the product owner once tasks are done you demonstrate that the feature works as expected.
Another thought is to write up more formal acceptance criteria with various scenarios in story cards “As a, I would like, so that”, “Given When Then” kinda stuff. Might need to google on that one.
Anyway, I think if you take the actions you can take and maybe reframe the way you think of bugs, you can rest a bit easier. Just remember it’s a team effort, and hopefully your team members can help pitch in to help solve these with you.
This in combination with deadlines has caused my resting face to develop into an angry expression. As soon as I stop smiling and return to my “neutral” face, I look like I am angry, ready to kill someone. I now make an effort to smile while walking so people don’t get frightened.
Indoor exercise bikes are super cheap. I pair mine with noise canceling headphones and a tablet and I can exercise comfortably while being entertained.
The best cure for my brain by far (that or riding a motorcycle -- another experience that puts your conscious firmly in your body).
I'm not entirely sure what "bottom" you refer to here. From what I see, there's a misalignment: Lots of senior people lose time doing work that doesn't require senior people, because there aren't enough non-senior people available to do that work. The solution to this is seen as hiring more senior people, which fails, because while there are lots of junior people, no one is making them into senior people. This results in very little hiring at all, and what hiring there is is focused on shuffling senior people between companies that does little to address the problems.
Then you end up with a lot of people with "senior" titles, but their actual seniority of experience varies wildly. Lots of talented people fall to the wayside because the primary way of becoming "senior" (in terms of capability) is giving you time and seeing if you draw all the correct conclusions and lessons by yourself (which also requires the work you get to help teach you those lessons).
So the industry (in terms of people experience) is bottom-heavy in the work pool. Places that can afford it are top heavy in talent+experience, and everyone else is bottom-heavy in low experience, and neither type of place is doing anything to really address their problems long-term.
When I came to my company I was a junior front-end engineer with no CS degree. A few months in or so in I'm apart of a post-work discussion near the keg where the IT Admin head is going off on how the programming industry is getting flooded with low-skill juniors and how it's bad for the industry. He seemed entirely shocked when I pointed out that: (1) The ubiquity and availability of the browser meant there was going to be a continued need, so the problem isn't just going to go away; (2) This problem is one of software engineering pedagogy being woefully underprepared, which it is.
In that same range of time, on proffering a solution that seemed above my level, my technical lead, a much older former hi-frequency trading developer who prided himself on his C++ code (our team was Java/JS), inquired on how I got the idea, which had come about from doing reading/research on the subject. His reply was: "You read it out of a book?". Me - "Yes, [insert tech lead's name], that's how learning happens"
As someone who was coming from a background in humanities academia and training and coaching high schoolers in competitive debate, it is very very apparent that the industry is dominated, perhaps not by a type, but by an _attitude_ that is presumptuous, arrogant, skeptical of difference, and just straight up missing a certain relationship to social reality.
A year later, when said tech lead totally led us nowhere and quit, we had this rock star consultant come on who was making crazy money running the team and bucking all the organization's process in exchange for "results". Dude was rude and offensive to everyone who didn't lay before his eruditeness and efficiency. I remember his off-hand comment, given in an mentor-like role, on how it takes a certain type to excel in this village and how there are "too many guys who just like playing with symbols, they're usually into music or something to, it just doesn't work out". Like, wow, whole lotta absolutes coming out mouthes without much empirical basis behind it.
> how the programming industry is getting flooded with low-skill juniors and how it's bad for the industry.
>(1) The ubiquity and availability of the browser meant there was going to be a continued need, so the problem isn't just going to go away;
> (2) This problem is one of software engineering pedagogy being woefully underprepared, which it is.
I get that the self-reliance learning angle is way overstated, but that's going a bit too far.
I learned programming mostly on my own, albeit while working in QA and having exposure to code and programmers. But it's not like I got mentored or needed someone to hold my hand learning this stuff. If you can read and have the initiative to play around with code and figure it out you'll do a lot better than half the learned fools coming out of university. I consistently out perform my peers with CS degrees when it comes to tracking down a hard bug. I swear some of these people hit the first wall and just have no idea what to do.
There are no seniors because the seniors leave. That's why you keep seeing groups like Infosys, TATA, or MSPs getting tapped for this service (I would be very leary of working for an MSP unless the package was very appealing). That's why I won't take a position where I have to screw with physical hardware, AWS everything.
Pardon my French but: what the fuck? How can anyone in his right mind can make a death threat over some piece of technology not working? I mean, I’m sure those people do exist but I don’t understand their thought process.
Based on the rest of your story, he probably feared for his life...
Isn't that a criminal offence?
But then, if the service company needs the new business that bad, that's hard to square with "there are not enough IT people".
As ethbro pointed out[1], criminal statutes have been interpreted such that a non-credible thread does not usually fall within them. Cops generally don't like it when you call them for non-criminal things. Honestly you're probably best off asking whoever got threatened what they want to do rather than optimizing for corporate ass covering.
The only thing calling the cops does is make the prosecution's job easier in the highly unlikely event that the threat does turn out to be credible. Calling the cops doesn't actually protect you from anything in a situation like this. I don't understand why people don't understand that. They take statements and leave. On the off chance the prosecutor is feeling bored and wants to pursue charges then yet more people's time is wasted and nothing happens, maybe someone gets a fine.
And the beat cop who was to take your statement is going to be more qualified?
Emphatically: yes.
Threat assessment is literally one of the things police departments are trained on in some degree or another, and they have a pretty powerful escalation path at their disposal when working to vet and take action on those threats if deemed credible when someone says "I will come to your office and kill you"--if the situation warrants it (PNI).
You may not like the outcomes, but one's personal opinions on how effective an investigation is doesn't preclude the constabulary from having much more expertise in their ranks than a direct line supervisor at investigating a threat to someone's life.
IT can pay well but not that well.
Think how it plays out.
"Accountant said she'd kill me."
"I did not."
Ends with nothing happening.
Specifically speaking, if it's done in person, state law holds. In Virginia v Black (2003), the Supreme Court found [1] that states may ban speech which represents a "true threat" (i.e. one whose intent it to cause another party to fear for their lives). But there's generally a high bar and more aimed at allowing regulation of cross burning and neo Nazis than an angry co-worker.
If it's done via the Internet, federal §875 [2] governs. Because of some strange wording and first ammendment concerns, the Supreme Court has held that the intent to actually commit a crime must be present in order for the words to be illegal.
[1] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/537/465.html
I ended up getting fired within 18 hours after reporting harassment.
Depending upon your sub-sector of IT it can be completely inverted from that where there's far, far too many layers of management around maybe a handful of individual contributors. This is typical for most sub-fields of enterprise software that attract and retain a lot of non-technical people because the business requires interfacing with a culture of primarily non-technical-first customers. These companies tend to become the opposite of an IC-heavy IT shop - way too much positivity and a ton of stereotypical sales personalities (to be fair, the most common profession in the US specifically is salesperson). In fact, a lot of what the movie Office Space entails is what engineers at such an environment would go through in enterprise software and still does today, not what popular culture currently thinks of tech companies in the past 15 years.
I personally believe that the issue we are seeing today is that most people don't know how to manager stress, emotion & energy. Most people are leading a very reactive life and constantly been pulled and pushed in all directions by "life"
Stress happens when there's a large gulf between what you expect and reality. Most folks in IT are getting paid so well that they can bridge this gap better than most folks. All one has to do is freaking chillax. F material things, don't compare yourself or compete with others, learn to make do with what you have. Last but not least, do your very best at work, but detach your emotion from the outcome.
I have worked at multiple companies with the churn'n'burn mindset, and while some handle the stress better than others, the only thing that handling the stress will get you is more work and stress.
Are there people out there who are taking the world too personally? Yeah, definitely.
When I see people weeping in a bathroom, not once, but so many times I dont even notice it anymore - that's not a personal failing of will, the business is using up people like gristle in the mill.
Pretty much everyone disappears in their for about 30 minutes once a week. And this is the men's restroom by the way. Not sure how the ladies deal with things.
"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:"
This poem was hung on my bedroom wall for my whole childhood. Great poem. It taught me everything about finding the patience to be understanding of other people.
You say this as if a foregone conclusion, a statement of fact.
There's zero wrong with considering what it means to be a man. Just because I don't address what it means to be a woman doesn't make me sexist. It's not toxic to consider who you are and what values you hold dear.
Perhaps the wince that's induced in you is projection on your part? It doesn't make me wince. Nor do I apologize for it. I don't look at this poem as sexist. It addresses who I want to be as a man, no more, no less. It has no bearing on my thoughts of women. I'm not a woman, therefore my thoughts and feelings about what women should be are largely irrelevant... at least as irrelevant as to Rudyard Kipling who didn't address this topic at all in the poem.
This is personal for me because it is the most profound thing I've ever read. For someone to come and refer to it as sexist is demeaning.
Savor it and quit being so wound up is all I'm saying. There's a place for everything and this was ill-placed.
There is a gulf between "misogynistic" and "being part of a culture that largely ignores women". It strains credulity to claim that the words "son" and "man" don't draw males closer and push females away. Any one poem is a "micro", but it adds up across the culture.
As with all though, you either evolve or you're doomed to irrelevance. This should be a familiar concept to any programmer in the past 20 years :P
Exactly this. It can be tough but you pick up your load and move valiantly forward.
If you can't make a trivial fix to a simple problem, you aren't paying attention to the poem's message.
It would be like, in the pursuit of lowering your sodium intake, making bread without salt. Is it healthier? Maybe. What does it taste like now? Cardboard.
But...it doesn't. While the fictious direct addressee is the “son” (whether literal or in the figurative sense of an protege of an elder mentor is neither explicit nor important, since the whole impact of the poem is in its general applicability not in it being specific to an addressee) of the speaker from whose POV the poem is told, the son/man pairing necessarily states that the qualities are tied to adulthood/maturity, but is just as valid if they are not inherently tied to gender as if they are.
Having grown up as the child of a single mother, I don't think many men ever stop to think where we'd be without them. It's not a place I'd care to exist.
Most men are only as successful as they are because they had a loyal and dependable partner at their side to help propel them there - if by nothing more than taking care of all the shit they have no time for while they're so busy chasing their success. I wonder how many men would be half as successful without their partners supporting them and encouraging them forward.
Amusingly, these are red pill concepts. I don't follow that belief system (many of it's proponents range between pathetic to downright unhinged) but I did read about it. There were some corn kernels of truth worth picking out of the turd of a viewpoint.
The ideas can be found in various philosophy and culture including Stoicism and eastern philosophy. "Shit tests," though, that's just the misogyny.
Skip the turd, go read philosophy.
Performance will drop if you detach emotion from your work, even if it is supposedly 'rational' work.
We aren't robots, and the whole brain is supposed to work together to achieve a goal, and emotions have a part in that.
This isn't to say outcomes don't matter; but from a practitioners point of view, they matter only so much as they inform those involved on what works and what doesn't. In general, measure what you care about, but be careful because you WILL get more of what you measure and there are often unintended consequences (cobra effect).
edited for additional clarity
I think this means more, "however things might go, the outcome is not taken personally", the person's selfhood and worthiness is independent of the work they do.
I also agree that integrating work with deep care, passion, and excitement is worthwhile. Imagine if more people were finding purpose and meaning in their work, how happy and energized they would be!
Pro tip: Don't work for any place where "maturity" means becoming less human.
IT used to be a comparatively stable environment if you were supporting servers or infrastructure.
How do you mentor someone in environments where chasing the latest fad every year is the norm?
A piece of hilariously cynical advise I got from one of those people with decades of experience was, "If you can't change your workplace, then change your workplace." Which is to say, if you don't feel empowered to make changes, then you need to think about why you are there. Is your role simply to be a cog? Hopefully, you are still improving in some way, but if not, you can probably find a better use of your time.
Regarding your question (yikes). Things are very cyclical and problems tend to be recurrent in some form. Thus, things that are new tend to be like things that have existed and some old lessons still apply. Generally, I've tended to mentor on processes, expectations, and alternative techniques.
For me, old-dog-learns-new-tricks, I spent the weekend debugging why an ansible script failed. This would be the fourth in the last half year.
Now, I appreciate the work people did, but in the end, I had to figure out why packages x, y and z and dependencies a, b and c would not play on distro N. The deeper I go, the less google is my friend.
I agree that everything is cyclical, but if I was 20-something, I’d just go to a bootcamp for mainframes. 30 years ago, my worst case was RTFM, and damn if the answers weren’t in there.
Today... your mentor is barely keeping it together.
I am so blessed to have entered when I did. But even then, the road was littered with peers who are not the same.
This is true. IT is the second worst industry. Healthcare is worse.
The way Law has dealt with this. The top performers are made partner and are driving Ferraris and the bullshit work is dealt with by the juniors.
>I personally believe that the issue we are seeing today is that most people don't know how to manager stress, emotion & energy. Most people are leading a very reactive life and constantly been pulled and pushed in all directions by "life"
I'm certain there's truth to this.
>Stress happens when there's a large gulf between what you expect and reality. Most folks in IT are getting paid so well that they can bridge this gap better than most folks. All one has to do is freaking chillax. F material things, don't compare yourself or compete with others, learn to make do with what you have. Last but not least, do your very best at work, but detach your emotion from the outcome.
Certainly a factor, but when you're burnt out. You lose emotion. That's actually a telltale of burnout late stages, you lose all emotion.
This is not true. Partners at top firms might be driving Ferraris, but they still work insane hours doing stressful work. Making partner doesn't let you take your foot off the gas. The stress and burnout issue at Biglaw firms is probably worse than in IT.
Blaming the resulting problems on the worker is a rather common way of justifying these kinds of abuses (either as internalized by the worker, and as a way for employers to keep feeling like they're good people).
Which is kind of difficult, even as a long-term professional.
As a software developer, I'm responsible for the program that I write. I'm barely responsible for design & marketing, though.
When a customer criticizes the application for being what it is, I find it very hard to detach my emotion from it. I always feel that they are criticizing me, personally. And I blame myself, partly: "How couldn't I have seen this?". But sometimes, the criticism is directed at marketing or design, which leaves me with a "I told them so!" kind of feeling - still, I'm the one who has to defend the decision that has been made in front of the customer.
Btw, they don't know that they are writing with the developer - for them, we look like well-trained support agents.
If you’re right you have valuable skills that are in high demand. As patio11 would say
“Charge more”
By all accounts charging more also generally leads to better employers/customers and in the cases where it doesn’t it gives you the security to increase your prices until dealing with assholes or the highly demanding seems worthwhile instead of a hideous necessity.
In r/sysadmin there's a tongue in cheek comment of 'quitting IT to become a goat farmer'
I actually personally place it really at 1 place. https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio...
The Ontario government(where I live) passed laws before the Y2K hoax removing:
The right not to be forced to work 20 hour days. The right not to be called back into work 2 hours after a 20 hour day. The right to get 2 days off per week, they force you to work 7 days a week. The right to a lunch or breaks. The right to be paid overtime pay if you work alot.
I've had 3 employers now that required me to work ~12-18 hour days everyday, no lunch, no breaks. At least I did get overtime; but I'd have to justify the overtime bigtime.
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.
Any competent IT org should strive to balance crisis interactions with preemptive actions.
Aka the package delivery person effect: 'Why does everyone like their package carrier? Because everytime you see them they bring a gift!'
If you only ever see IT when your system melts down or an upgrade goes awry, you're going to hate them. Even if they're doing a wonderful job.
So, please, if you run an IT department, give your troops some time to make house calls. "Just checking back in. How's the fix working?", "Anything troubling you?", etc.
If not for your org, then for their mental health.
Not caring is basically quitting inside. Is that better than negativity? Perhaps. Perhaps a new company would help but perhaps not.
No they're not. Most are doing pointless non-work (or negative work) because businesses need to show 'growth', usually by inflating head and report count.
There just isn't enough skilled IT people. The industry is immature and is bottom heavy. The top performers and seniors, are then overwhelmed with work and the business is unable to hire more senior people to reduce workload. Then the business keeps growing and eventually you get a death spiral of people quitting and making the situation worse.
>I started asking myself questions like — "Even if the projects I'm doing succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, how would it affect people?
IT is so inherently negative as well. In my last job 1 person and myself were the only people trying to stay positive. The other people in the office had succumb to the negativity and would even attack us for being 'mr happy'. They were literally so negative that they just attacked positivity.
I had places where I would go onsite to resolve an emergency. I never caused the outage, I was there to help. I would still get death threats from clients. "The accounting files are the server, if you lost them I'm going to go to your office and kill everyone." My employer wasn't even their IT, their IT person quit upon discovered 2 drives dead on the raid 5 array and no backups.