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.

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.

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.

"If you were poor and still are poor, then it's your own problem, just get out of my sight"

I didn't take that away from the topic at hand. People unhappy in their IT jobs are employed and not poor in the Western world. So the unhappiness comes from something else. I've seen very well paid developers just fall off a cliff and suddenly hate their job.

I don't understand the reasons, but I don't doubt that they are all that different from the reasons the rest of the working world faces. Sometimes it's time to change careers. As human beings, change is feared (or family obligations come into play that make accepting risk less desirable than doing a job you hate).

I feel compassion for those individuals, but in as much as I have to work with them, my compassion is driven to finding ways to identify "great things" about the job they hate.

Negative attitudes are poison and there seems to be a lot of that in IT. I can't tell you how many meetings I attend where the various stakeholders in our organization are at eachothers throats and my boss or me are called in to mediate. It's not an exercise of mediation, it's an exercise of breaking a cycle of frustration, taking the emotion out of it and focusing on the problem as the thing that gets the brunt of the righteous anger (it's amazing what happens when you take three pissed off people and focus their anger at the problem rather than at one another).

Sometimes we're in departments that are only noticed when "nothing is broken" and are hammered on when some extraordinary circumstance causes something to fail. We resent the fact that the people doing the yelling don't understand how unpreventable that circumstance was. It's a tough roll to sit in and tolerate and breeds contempt.

But focusing on that element of the job IS poisonous.

I hate it. I've been working in IT for most of my life in one capacity or another. I LOVE my job. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm the sole income provider for my family of soon to be four and I put in well over 60 hours a week most weeks (salary, and up until now, likely below market value).

I am intellectually stimulated in my job. I have learned how to work with complicated personalities and have learned how not to be a complicated person. I've also learned that a good 20% of my job involves motivating those around me into realizing that the things they are doing are important and fantastic.

I don't get the bad attitudes...My job involves solving problems and building things. I enjoy seeing the result of my work get traffic. I enjoy solving complicated problems. I even enjoy documenting the solution because I know that a small percentage of the folks who have to read it will appreciate what was done.

I see a sense of entitlement amongst some of the folks I work with. They are very smart individuals and expect people around them to just recognize that despite their inability to practically apply their genius into something productive. They're like a jet engine sitting at idle. Lots of potential, lack of motion. I don't know what causes that.

It helps that I work for some of the best people I have ever known. I've seen the "it is what it is" attitude and it drives me crazy. I see a lot of folks in IT that learned how to write software very young, were treated badly for being a nerd and haven't matured into men of action. Perhaps I'm naval gazing a little, as it took me a while to get past that.

But "we build, we create, we solve, we are the great minds that conquer." "It is what it is" is a disease. It is what we choose to do with it.

I imagine that attitude that makes IT folks hate their jobs is the same attitude that will make them hate any job.

I'm really not trying to condemn those who are in a rough spot with technical managers who have no business managing human beings.

I'm just pleased with menloparkbum's assessment. "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."

Consider the other, personally motivated side of this "IT dissatisfaction" scenario: specifically, that the type of people who work in IT fields are often fairly passive and sometimes choose not to stand up for themselves when they really wish they had.

Someone with this type of demeanor might tend to find themselves settling for the wrong job, as well as staying in a job that turns out not to be so great somewhere down the road.

Could it be?

I have experienced this personally and have seen others go through similar scenarios. Not quite Milton in "Office Space," but some have come close.

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.

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?)

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.

It's that much harder to paint yourself in a different light when most peers are fine with the status quo.

It's becoming more necessary to distinguish yourself as being Mr.X who can do X, Y, Z better than anyone else in the world. Otherwise, you're just another Engineer or IT guy they hire and fire or deal with like everyone else. With so many talented Engineers coming in from Asia (hundreds of thousands a year?!) it will be harder to land a job with a decent salary if you are like everyone else.

Bingo!

Being a software engineer (or just "programmer" if you will) for a company for which producing software is the primary business is very different from being some kind of IT "drone". Hell, even if I wanted to program for a company that did, say , insurance, I would at worst be an enterprise programmer, and those jobs , while being (relatively) boring seem more more fun than these "IT" horror stories.

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.

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.)

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.

IRAs are personal retirement accounts, separate from the issue of employer compensation. Anyone can contribute up to 5k to an IRA in 2009. But if you work for a company with, say, a 401k, you can sock away up to an extra 16.5k. And (the relevant bit) when your employer (inevitably) contributes less than what you'd like, you can personally contribute until you hit that warm fuzzy feeling.

I don't know about you, but I've socked away more than 5k per year toward retirement. Rolling with just my own IRA wouldn't cut it. And the lost employer contribution to a tax-deferred plan is a non-trivial amount of additional compensation loss to be considered when moving from corporate employment to small business/self-employment.

Business-exit is my retirement fund.

If you assume a more reasonable 3%, you get 9.8¢ per year in perpetuity from your after-tax $1 invested 40 years earlier.

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.)

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

I completely agree with that statement.

IT is a discipline of intellect. Managers are successful when they understand the strengths of those they manage and allow them to take ownership of the things they are responsible for. Men (and women) of reason, don't thrive in an environment of button pushing and lever pulling.

Micromanagers destroy innovative thinking and ultimately destroy themselves by pushing their staff into a cycle of mediocrity.

"Most IT projects are a failure in one way or another"

Managers and companies who understand this won't miss out on the handful of breakthrough innovations that transform their business as a result of a brilliant mind rethinking the way business is being done.

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.

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.

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.

But your company is not going to pony up the money for that because it sounds like you're willing to do tech support during the day, then build the infrastructure for them for free, at night.

If you want to be happy at your job, then you need to explain that you're basically doing unpaid work, and that if they want to maintain the current level of service, you need at least one other person.

You have to find a way to communicate complex ideas to people who don't understand it. Find out what they understand and what their values are and term it in that way. It could be time, money or customer convenience.

The main aspect is trust. You get paid for the job you do so no appreciation is in order. It's their trust that you know how to deal with the crisis better than anyone that's needed. Let me tell you the only way they will trust that you know what you're doing is if they know what you're doing. If they don't get it they'll think you're a dumbass, or condescending or an introvert. All things bad for a team and bad for business. Imagine you are the teacher of a grade 10 class teaching derivatives and integrals. If your students don't get the concept then at some point they will start cursing at you as you write on the board - even though you know what you're doing and they don't.

That's the communication bit. The other half is to limit yourself from all things tech and do it routinely. This is not once a week gym time or when you're free. Book classes in martial arts or cooking. Take up smoking shisha at a cafe. Find something you can do regularly and often that has no part in your life now - and non-tech. If work demands some of your free time then you say NO. If that's not an option then hire an underling and train them on specific tasks.

There was another comment here about how we are not meant to live in cubicles. I like it. We are not meant to do one thing only everyday. That is mind numbing.

That won't get rid of everything that comes in your door, and you may find yourself reduced to sending the email yourself, for something your boss walked in and wanted you to do. And it won't stop the "OMG the network is down" freak-outs, either.

On the other hand, it will hopefully reduce your walk-in interruptions, and it will give you more of a record of the work you're doing. Bosses who don't understand anything beyond rebooting can see how many work requests you're handling in a day, to tell how busy you are. Ideally, you can have the 'tech@' alias CC your boss and other crucial managers, at least at the start, so they can see how much you're doing.

Who knows, maybe you've gotten all you can from this gig and are ready to work at a big company. The change in culture might be just what you need now.

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"?

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.

The funny thing is I've been interrupted 3 times while writing this comment, it's ruined my flow and I forget what I was going to write.

Oh yea, I lock myself in an office and close the door when it's time to work on spurts of programming, otherwise I feel burnt out and nothing gets done. I've also got a boss who's capable of doing IT work. Having two of us helps entirely, maybe a $25k a year intern to ease the "my caps lock is broken!" off your plate could help.

But seriously, take your 20% time and don't answer the phone and use it to program. You need your focus time, and then come back and do the rest of your job.

Many of us know the problem of constant interruptions. Fortunately there is a workable, mechnical solution to this problem.

1. Get an office with a door (this may require some social engineering).

2. Buy a solid wooden panel (about 1m² in size), two hinges, two screws and a nylon string. Make sure to buy the heaviest type of wood they have on stock.

3. Glue a piece of paper onto the panel with the answers to the most common questions printed on it. Think of it as your FAQ panel. There's a lot of room on a square meter, so in 8pt type you should be able to fit on there the answers to pretty much every question that ever crops up.

4. Mount the panel directly above the door with the two hinges at the bottom end. Make sure the panel has good travel and can swing into the "straight down" position. Bonus points if it can even swing through the opened door.

5. Flap the panel upwards so that it rests straight to the wall, pointing up to the ceiling.

6. Use the screws and the nylon string to the connect the upper part of the panel with the door knob.

So how does this help with the daily support workflow?

Whenever someone opens your door for support they will be provided instantly with the solution to their problem. The solution will hit them like a brick, so to say, before they even ask.

You still have to get up and swing the panel back into the home position after each case but that's more quickly done than discussing numlock-issues. Moreover you will soon notice a sharp decline in support requests thanks to the improved workflow.

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

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.

But somehow, you are allowed to imply that cleaning chemical reactors wasn't much fun, while at the same time disallowing other people from expressing negative feelings about their jobs.

By that logic, Y has no right to make this complaint if anyone who has worse job than Y exists. They do exist, therefore Y has no right to complain about X's complaining.

Y's position is inconsistent. It says "You have no right to complain because your job isn't hard enough, but I have a right to complain because my job is/was hard enough".

It establishes an arbitrary baseline of having-a-difficult-life and consequent implied manliness/human worth that Y is above, but X is below. It's a way to smugly look down on someone for not being as awesome as you are, while trying to project a humble "I did a shitty job" image.