I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs

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.<p>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.

I absolutely <i>love</i> what I do and can't imagine doing anything else.<p><i>However</i>...I have had very few jobs where I was happy. I think there are 2 primary reasons.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>Is the case with these posters that they're working in places where making a technology-oriented product/service is <i>not</i> 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 <i>passion</i> about what they do (rather than merely think of their job as a way to make money)?<p>The other big factor is that I <i>am</i> 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?<p>Seems like there's several conclusions:<p>I. These people are passionate about a subject, but are working in an environment where passion is <i>not</i> expected or even appreciated.<p>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?)

I think he confuses unhappiness with annoyance. Let me give a real world example.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.

It's a living-to-work vs working-to-live question, really.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>(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.)

Someone recently commented, here on HN or elsewhere, that IT is often viewed as a cost center, not a profit center.<p>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".<p>(I typed a bunch more, but I think I'll leave it at the above, for our mutual benefit.)

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.

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:<p><i>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.<p>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.<p>Whereas, it's quite common in IT for micromanagers to overrule the professionals.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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>

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.

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:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>In my experience, this is pretty much pervasive in the industry.

I'll admit that I am <i>very</i> unhappy with my current job.<p>Part of this is whining, I know, but just hear me out.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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?<p>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.<p>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 <i>real</i> work done. Just managing the little problems that the users have)<p>Why is this?<p>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.<p>But that is just one part.<p>Another part is that I am the the <i>only</i> 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.<p>Pretty cool, huh? (maybe not, but I think so).<p>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...<p>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.<p>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).<p>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!"<p><i>sigh</i><p>I apologize for the stupid senseless whining here, guys, work can just suck sometimes when you're the <i>only</i> one here, ya know? Gets kinda lonely :(<p>Thank the gods for HN.

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

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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

Fuckers need to try cleaning chemical reactors.