stltoday.com — According to a survey released this month by Dublin-based consulting firm SkillSoft, 97 percent of IT professionals feel traumatized by their daily work. Indeed, 80 percent of them get tense just thinking about going to the office.
Jun 15, 2006 View in Crawl 4
drakethegreatJun 15, 2006
From listening to people on the other end, most people's complain with IT is that they always have excuses. Articulate yourselves to your bosses and TELL THEM why you can't complete things on time if you can't.Going, Yessaaa boss, will do boss and then failing to do it is what makes for a stressful work environment. Have some balls and stand up for yourselves instead of complaining on digg.
h2so4Jun 16, 2006
Yet, according to a paper presented to the British Psychological Society earlier this year, librarians suffer more from stress than any other occupation!OMG we are out of Harry Potter books!
lunarJun 16, 2006
"The word "oncall" causes me to wet myself and hide in a dark corner... :("That's kinda funny to me. I work as a firefighter on-call 24/7. Plus regular shifts.Looking back on the job, it is a lot less stressful than when I worked at a IT helpdesk for a year. Plus it's more fun.
onesipJun 16, 2006
ah yea, I am an IT major now, I guess I am heading to the horrible world, lolz..
Closed AccountJun 16, 2006
@cosmicjustice I'm so impressed by your credentials I think I'm going to roll over and die! I'll bet you made a little program that send a note to your cellphone everytime someone from IT gets too close to your precious data.I feel sorry for you, hoarding your data, thinking your data is the most data important ever in the world, having been burned by someone incompetent. That's right, incompetency is in every profession, probably in the cubicle next to yours (maybe yours?) or down the hall - usually management. Let's not forget these are the people who tell IT what to do, without actually listening to real solutions or anyone else, first. If I cared about money I would have indeed become a plumber or an electrician. That does not equate me to a plumber or even a unionized janitor. Emergency room doctors certainly are not the highest paid compared to other doctors. I make more than many IT people, and there are IT people who make a hell of a lot more than me. So in short - Wow an advanced computer science degree and thats the best logic you can muster? I hope your IT dept, saves you one day anyway, the next time you employ such spurious logic with your data. Don't forget to buckle-up before riding the information super-highway.
aximbigfanJun 16, 2006
hey its good pay... who gives if it tramatizing? yes, i work in IT.
aliensporebombJun 16, 2006
In some ways working in the IT world lead to to realize that I was actually equippedwith a lot more critical thinking skills than some of the people around me that I washelping. I suppose the only real negative side of things is certain companies I worked for saw IT as a liability or tried to turn it into some kind of profit center. You can't win in eithersituation if you're working in that kind of environment.Now that I'm hanging out more towards the engineering side of things yet still haveplenty of customer contact I'm able to deal with the "difficult" people a lot better thanwhen I started. Many times the people you're dealing with don't know and don't carewhy something failed, they just need to be able to work again. Some individuals literally curled up into a crying ball of angst when they lost some critical data that they hadn't backed up and some system failed. I witnessed anotherguy slam a glass door causing it to nearly shatter when he didn't get what he wantedright away. I once helped a crying divorcee get into her computer that her spiteful ex-basically locked her out of. It's odd but sometimes you'll encounter people riddled withnegative emotions and a lack of critical thinking skills.Many times I found workarounds to get people going that defied logic but would let them get what they needed done.Ah the days of tech support back in the early 1990s:I personally witnessed other IT employees shaking and shivering and cryingunder their desk when they took a call from an abusive moron, I watched yetanother go into insulin shock (diabetic) when talking to a customer and tookover for the guy while one of the managers drove him to the hospital, I workedwith another guy who literally had nightmares of his experience in the IT world.It takes a certain kind of personality to be able to work this job and find it enjoyable, stimulating, certainly frustrating at times, but ultimately rewardingin an odd way.Interesting article, but there have been others.
ras0neJun 16, 2006
where the hell do you guys work...???i'm an IT in the usaf and i've worked on base networks supporting over 8k users, running real time war operations, and every piece of crap you can think of running off these networks and the last thing i ever feel is traumatized.i guess the corporate world is a different beast, that or the IT guys need to grow some hair on their chests...