Top 10 Most Stressful Professions
According to 33 News abc survy IT experts are more likely to suffer from stress than any other professional , A staggering 97 percent of people working in IT claim to find their life at work stressful on a daily basis.The poll revealed that IT professionals say it is difficult to get the work done when managers are constantly on their backs.
September 17, 2006 at 5:42 am
This article really hits “IT”. You spend so much of your time helping users with basic computer skills that you cannot work on projects.
Managers do not seem to notice the onslaught of phone calls you take or their basic nature that could be handled with proper training. I installed a trouble ticket system http://www.orts.org to show the how and why things were not getting completed, well you just get the response, ok, lets try to finish it up.
The most stressful moments in IT really come from the unknown system outage. Adopting Linux early in its lifespan to host our enterprise application, saved a great deal of money and my Linux skills were above average at the time, but I ran accross a problem that was critical. Our system had crashed and I couldn’t fix it, our backup was over a month old (a little glitch from our software vendor).
No working system, all workers were sent home, so about 45+ people didn’t get paid for the day or they took a holiday, and the people who stayed, ask every 10 min. when will the sytem be back up?
I had my first panic attack during this episode in May of 2004, we had just started a customer service department and it was their first day to go live.
Dell had actually screwed up the configuration from the way it was ordered…imagine that, btw I will never and have never ordered anything from Dell since this incident.
The missing data on the backup tape was the breaking point. I thought I was going to have a heart attack at age 25. I had been a non-smoker for about 2 years at this point as well, not after this.
I was able to get the system running again by the next day, due to a 24hour plus day.
I have had other issues similar to this…in the summer of 2006, I spent 36 hours straight at work on the same dell $14,000 (POS) machine. The amount of hours I worked in the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2006 were enough (based on a 40 work week) to be finished for the year. My manager actually bought me a toothbrush and toothpaste one day. I told him I didn’t know to take that, does that mean I will be pulling more all nighters?
This truly adds up to such a huge opportunity cost loss. In most career positions work can continue when their responsibility fails, not in IT. If you can’t fix it, you had better figure it out.
My wife has seen me snap over job stress so many times, she told me she thinks I am bi-polar. LOL, I don’t think many people know or understand the weight IT professionals carry on their shoulders. Truth is…business stops when the network or computer shuts down.
I also find it funny that the windows in my office do not open. I have made many comments about jumping out, the response is “you will just hurt your self and end up in the hospital”. My reply is always, a concusion and a daily spell of unconciousness is all I want
All that aside, the problems and unrealistic deadlines cause the stress, but I truly do love what I do when I get to do it. Writing code, designing special hardware devices, or automating a task is quite a reward.
So just remember when you call someone from your IT staff in 3 or 4AM, that they are probably asleep and you just woke their whole family up, so don’t be pissy with them.
August 4, 2007 at 6:38 am
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August 6, 2007 at 8:17 am
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August 14, 2007 at 7:57 pm
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September 19, 2007 at 9:31 pm
oh, those 30+ hrs. shifts…
March 19, 2008 at 9:37 pm
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