IT Workers Face Dangerous Stress 136
feminazi writes "William Cross, CIO and Ph.D., told the IBM Share conference this week that IT workers often face dangerous levels of stress. In a Q&A with Computerworld.com, he described some of the manifestions: "They tend to be less emotionally stable. They tend to react strongly to small things that they might not react to under other circumstances. A change in schedule may be a crisis if somebody is really stressed." What to do? "Easy things. Exercise ... learn to relax, learn meditation, learn breathing exercises, participate in your religion — all of those things are very effective stress managers.""
This story selected and edited by LinuxWorld editor for the day Saied Pinto.
Other methods of relieving stress (Score:5, Funny)
It's a sure way to de-stress
Hi, my name is Libby Tarian (Score:2, Funny)
You don't hear of Chinese or East Indian workers suffering from this kind of stress, do you? That's because they love their work and they're grateful, unlike you lazy union commies. They could be digging a ditch filled with Union Carbide chemical waste and they'd be singing in the acid rain.
It's articles like this that convince me that you IT workers ne
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Re: Hi, my name is Libby Tarian ... BOFH response (Score:4, Funny)
Not wise to do that if you're American (Score:2)
If you filch my personal info from a data center in India and sell it to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, however, the FBI can't touch you! Identity theft is much more fun than wrecking a computer! And remember, it's easy to get my information... just bribe the data center manager a year's salary... which amounts to your lunch money for a week.
Ah, the joys of offshoring!
[this is a parody, of course]
Libby Tarian is.... (Score:2)
Anarcy in a suit.
Anarchy was good enough for me..
Good enough for me and Ayn Rand.
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If I were a better comedian, it'd be easy to make a counter-parody of the socialists that make such libertarian parodies: You don't hear of North Koreans suffering from digging Union Carbide ditches while singing in the acid rain, do you? Of course not; their economic system is too backward to get them to a post-agrarian level in the first place!
I'm sure after a few years living under the gun of Fidel Castro or former Chairm
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Religion? (Score:3, Funny)
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You go to the scary devil monastery [faqs.org], and your spiral into hell starts when you go Down, not Across [wikipedia.org].
("That's it! I have had it with these muthafuckin' lusers on my muthafuckin' server!")
Appropriate Sacrifice (Score:2)
You go to the scary devil monastery [faqs.org], and your spiral into hell starts when you go Down, not Across [wikipedia.org] .
This only happens when you have neglected all of the appropriate rites and rituals of the faith. This especially includes the sacrificial white chicken on the Altar of the Keyboard of the Server Almighty. Your input mast be acceptable and perfect in form and function, lest you b
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Note that this was said to me, not by me. I had to invoke the Forgotten Ones (and Zeroes) to save my persistent soul, but it all worked out fine in the end.
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Take small breaks to do quick exercise (Score:4, Informative)
For developers, or those who otherwise sit at the keyboard and monitor for long stretches, don't underestimate the importance of getting up to do a few stretches every once in a while.
Once I sat in front of Visio, concentrating on state diagrams for a loong time. (I was just learning how to use Visio.) When I finally got up, my mouse arm was wracked in pain. I had sat there for hours, sans break, without realizing it.
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Having to move around on a regular basis rather than spending 4-8 hours in the coding mindset is helpful...
That's us, oversensitive (Score:5, Insightful)
"The hardware you wanted won't be available until two days after launch. Is that going to be a problem?"
"Why the hysterics, the manufacturer said they'll have Linux drivers weeks before our new launch date."
"How long after the launch date do you think it will be before you NEED the backup server?"
The little things I get stress over the day before a large scale deployment:
"We just decided we liked your idea. Can we make the database access clustered?"
"For our launch announcement, how long can we claim it will take to have this ported to Windows Mobile too?"
"The RAM you requested didn't arrive because we didn't order it. How many simultaneous users can we support with half the RAM?"
"We can just add the extra disk space to the servers with USB drives right?"
IT guys are sooo damned touchy!
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You have people (I presume the Marketing folks) actually ask before they make such an announcement?!?! Lucky.
Nubs.... (Score:1)
LRN2PLY!
Stress... (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to believe in stress, but now I've come to realize what I was experiencing was actually exasperation at poor decisions made by people who are paid far more than I. It's not really an illness or disease, as much as a realisation that the criteria applied to who gets the top jobs is utterly useless. Less concentration on shiny suits and bullshit - more on ability to deliver results.
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believe in it or not, fact remains it's real and measureable.
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Re:Stress... (Score:4, Funny)
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Amazing!
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Specially IT workers... (Score:1, Insightful)
"Everything's working fine, so what did you do today, Oh, nothing?"
"It doesn't work, fix it!"
You just described... (Score:2)
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Plus for the residents it's just a short period of their career and they know it. After a few years of 80 hours days they know they will move on to the next phase of their career where they will be paid more to work shorter hours. Indeed, often the more they are paid the less hours they will work.
For us it's an ongoing period with no expected end other than death or unemployment, the former actually seeming preferable at times as at least that way you won't have to get up every morning to bust a gut tryi
Stress? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well I keep meaning to take some time off between jobs, but the head hunters just throw more ridiculous sums of money at me. I haven't had a proper vacation for years, but after a week of not working I start getting bored. I'm sure things would be different if I had a family waiting for me to get home at night, but considering I'm only 3 years out of college, this is fun. Also the stress on the job pales in comparison to the stress I went through during plebe year at Annapolis. I transfered to UW Madison after that year, but stress does not effect me in the same way it used to.
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The people feeling stress on your projects are the plebs at the bottom, pulled this way and that by their own (probably incompetent project managers). I would hope
What Stress? (Score:1)
Re:What Stress? (Score:5, Interesting)
one might say people who continue to work for such companies or in such conditions are idiots and just stressing themselves. This is either true (in a lot of cases) or just short-sighted (in many others).
As an example, I work in a high stress position, providing my services cheaper than my peers for a job I genuinely believe in (providing technology to under-privileged children so they can complete school and break out of the poverty cycle). If that's not worth a bit of stress, I don't know what is.
anyone who says they have no stress or don't believe in stress just doesn't have a stressful job. their experiences don't define anyone elses - nor invalidate them.
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Or they have a mortgage and not enough saved to sit out a couple of weeks while payroll catches up.
I have worked for a couple of companies that worked hard to keep their employees on a close enough financial edge so they could not leave and did not have enough money to hire legal council. I would not be su
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I don't get stressed by jobs. I'm a contractor, so I don't play any role in internal career plans of others (or have any career plans in the company of myself that could affect my or others thinking). Basically I don't really care wether anyone makes money
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I think you are correct - the most common IT worker stress is caused by a combination of:
1. Having to finish tasks too quickly (ie. feeling 'rushed') OR
2. Having too many tasks to do at once (ie. feeling 'swamped' with tasks)
Both situations immediately put people in a very uncomfortable mental state.
I agree that sometimes this is a management failure, but i think you also have to take some personal responsi
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Here's a clue. If you've got time to read Slashdot then of course your job isn't stressful. If you had a stressful job then you wouldn't have time to read Slashdot once a day, let alone taking "constant breaks" to do so. It has nothing to do with knowing the answers or knowing where to look. Likewise, lounging around the pool all day is usually not stressful.
My excuse is that I'm retired (because of too much stre
This is old news. (Score:1)
We are frequently required to carry pagers or phones for 24x7 support. Work can't always be left in the office because of this. On our days off and after hours, phone calls and pages are made to us to fix what other people see as problems. Exercise more? I would love to.
Re:This is old news. (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to go to the gym 3-5 times a week on my way home from work until a manager complained I was only spending 8-9 hours a day working.
So you updated your resume and found a job working for sane people, right?
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At which point, you inform him that he either gets you for 10 hours a day or he gets you on the pager/cell phone. Not both. Just because the manager chooses to spend 12 hours a day in the office doesn't mean everyone else has to. Grow a backbone; an unreasonable demand is an unreasonable demand.
If your company can't afford to hire enough IT staff so they make everyone else
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there are? It seems the minimum nowadays is 45+ unless you want to be seen as a slacker. Not to mention the commute. Not to mention only 2 weeks of vacation and 5 sick days a year. Not to mention the 'I know you are tired/burned out but I really need this to be done so can you come in on the w/end' etc. etc. etc.
I would gladly take a 25% pay cut tomorrow if I could work 30 hours a week with 50% remote (to save on the comm
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Tell your boss that you'll give the company 12 hours a day by leaving home for work at 7am, getting home at 7pm, and being available by phone during the commute.
Point out to him that this is 48 hours a week, that he gets you most days of the week (four), and that on these days you spend 75% of your waking hours on this job.
Throw in something about how you do your best thinking while driving to and from work, and remind him he d
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It's a pretty good setup (government job). The pay isn't great ($35,
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This seems like an attempt to circumvent labor laws. IANAL. In any event, it skirts the mutual understanding between you and your employer when the salary offer is made: the annualized figure is based on a standardized number of work hours per year, which is calculated from a 40-hour work week. Requiring 15% overtime (46 hours per week, or over an hour a day) amounts to a de fac
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Employees unfortunately are "free", so their time can be spent on the daily / weekly / monthly reorg tasks with impunity.
Cause and effect (Score:5, Insightful)
But is that because they are in IT, or are they in IT because of that?
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But is that because they are in IT, or are they in IT because of that?
As someone in IT, I'd like to say: I'd throw a chair at you right now if I could.
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It's reports like the above.... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,20972,00
http://self-help.vocaboly.com/archives/495/value-
Re:It's reports like the above.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Fun company-sponsored outings. What a waste. Just because I work with you, does not mean I'd like to spend my spare time at a picnic with you. In fact, after working hours, I want to get as far away from you all as possible.
Unfortunately, these "fun outings" turn into a political nightmare. Unless you volunteer your own time to help set-up, clean-up, or cook, you are seen as someone who hates the company. Unless you show up and play softball or voleyball, you are seen as having no loyalty. You have to sit with people who fired your best friend or smartest worker and smile and drink beer and talk about their fucking kids and listen to them struggle to remember my fucking kids.
And God help you if you or your wife doesn't bring a good side dish.
Rec rooms are okay, but you are looked down upon if you spend too much time there. There are days when my workload is really light. But, I'm still chained to my desk looking busy. Why? Because I've already used my 15 minutes playing ping-pong.
We don't have enforced breaks, but we do have subsidized education and certification. If you take a class over lunch or at the end of the day, bosses are very understanding and ensure you get there on time. Although, you may have to come back after class and burn the midnight oil.
We also have free memberships for a local gym. Almost no one goes. It really is sad to see how people put their work and family before their own personal health. Never quite understanding that, if you are dead at 40, you do your family no good.
We also do casual fridays every now and again. You usually have to drop $5 in a bucket to participate. The money goes towards the next stupid fucking picnic. If you don't participate (my casual *is* buisness casual), everyone thinks you were too poor to afford the $5.
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July 31, 1999.
Yeah, that sure was a fun time, wasn't it? See if you can dig up any of the articles between then and now that explain what happened to all the dot-com companies. I've never worked for the big guys mentioned in there, but I'll wager they don't offer all those perks now. They don't have to.
Companies aren't quite as anxious to overpay for decent talent anymore. All those things you mention end up in
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Often company perks of this kind, for example company cars, are not only cheaper to provide than actually paying a industry competitive salary, but also hav
They missed another relaxer - Getting Laid (Score:2)
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If I could be, I would be getting some female attention.
And I'd be a lot less stressed.
Its like 'How many ladies would understand that I'm looking for some horizontal DDR?'
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Are you ready for a revolutionary concept? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it disheartening that a manager figuring that out would be worthy of an article. I mean, this shouldn't be rocket science. The general idea I've gotten from various managers is that you can get more productivity out of people with a certain amount of overtime for a short period of time, but frequent overtime or extreme "crunch time" will in the end just destroy your work force and with it your work.
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In all honesty, I think companies *want* the workers to fail. They want to be able to show a page of your code after 60+ hours of work along side the code created by a team of Indian programmers. After that, it's just a matter of getting you to quit so that they don't have to announce layoffs.
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Overworking that actually goes on the budget is way much rarer - usually those "imovable" deadlines suddenly become much more flexible when a manager cannot squirm his/her way out of paying 150% or 200% for work beyond normal work hours.
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Um, that's almost besides the point. You neeeeeed to have a measurable metric of effort, and the only one there is, regardless of actual output, is how much time you're spending visibly working. If the product is late, there's pressure from above to increase effort. How do you m
Not TOO stressful (Score:1)
IT Team can help filter stress (Score:2, Insightful)
Haven't your heard? (Score:1)
Asperger's Syndrome != Stress (Score:1)
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Second, the fact that 99% of the people with the disease du jour from a short checklist in Reader's Digest or Slashdot or whatever does not mean that the other 1% are also just fooling themselves. Dismissing them is as unacceptable as dismissing anyone else with a "hidden" illness. E.g., my girlfriend has fibromyagia (only she can spell it). She looks fine, we can go on short hikes, but I would never say that she's just
Yah, it's the IT works fault. (Score:1)
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It's is about time for a union (Score:1)
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The Answer = Taoism? (Score:2)
Lets see... Taoist based kung fu
Exercise - Check
Relax - Got tai chi? - Check
Meditation - Check
Breathing Exercises - Check
Participate in your religion - Check
Maybe I am on the right path afterall. This computer stuff is for the birds. It wrecks the body (got carpal tunnel) and stresses you out. After spending too much time in fron
Zen master says... (Score:4, Funny)
Does exercising really reduce stress? (Score:2)
I'm asking this as a serious question. I work out and exercise all the time but when I'm really stressed from work or whatever I have to cut back on the physical exercise or I really start to flip out with anxiety attacks, panic attacks, etc. It just adds to the emotional instability. Again, it's not like I'm a computer using couch potatoe, I exercis
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Exercising is a stressful activity. It stresses you physically. If you're already overstressed how will this do anything other than make you more stressed?
Organised exercise stresses me out. Suddenly there's goals, performance standards, if it's a team sport I've got to live up to the others expectations, and so on.
Instead, these days, I just go for a walk. I live in a nice enough city that it's fairly easy for me to just find a creek with a jogging/cycling path beside it, or a sequence of parks with pa
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I don't feel less-stressed when I'm done working out at the gym or done running, for instance. But when I'm done doing martial arts? Yeah, definitely!
I also feel less-stressed when I get enough sleep...
The definition of stress... (Score:1)
Only people that are diligent and take pride in their work get stressed, which applies to most of the IT people that I've met. People that don't care don't get stressed.
Since managing a group of computers running Windows is a hopelessly impossible task to do perfectly, because it's a moving target, it creates great stress for those diligent people.
I would suggest that because the vast majority of IT people are managing MS Windows that the real culprit is Windows itself, and not IT intrinsically. Until
The definition of stress... (Score:2)
How many times have you had to tell the same dumba$$ "Don't do X", yet they go and do it, and then whine to the boss that it's got to be fixed "right now" for the 47th time?
Our example. We'll call her Melinda to protect the stupid. In the three years that Melinda worked for us, her workstation managed to contract every single virus that came through. Melinda would uninstall her antivirus software "because it made her computer slow". When we disabled her acces
Farmer flextime (Score:2)
Start by printing out a free chart [navy.mil] for your area. You get on the train/bike/bus/car at the crack of dawn, arrive at work an hour later, and similarly step off that train/bi
One more suggestion (Score:2)
Not really (Score:1)
stress and users (Score:2)
Do not take responsibility for things that are not your fault.
User does something dumb, loses their work or whatever, and has a go at you about it. Is this your problem? No - so don't take any shit for it. *Politely* inform them of the options, and schedule work when you can fit it in. If it's going to take more time for you to fix it than it will take for them to start-over, then too bad for them. No, an emergency for them is not an emergency for you - unless it truly is more imp
Helmets (Score:1)
Stress? You mean angst (Score:1)
Re:Stress? You mean angst (Score:5, Interesting)
The rest of the IT people are probably touchy and grouchy because the intern is taking too damn long to do even simple jobs and spends all their time talking to the users when they should be moving on to the next task. Plus management has just dumped another 4 man weeks of extra project work per week on them because they've got an intern to pick up the day-to-day work.
Stephen
Stapler (Score:1)
Watch out for your Health... Stress is dangerous (Score:1)
I hate the term "IT"! (Score:2, Insightful)
I do not want to be lumped into "IT". I am a programmer, not IT.
Programmers do real work. IT is, more often than not, the adversary.
IT: We are taking away administrator rights.
Programmer: What?
IT: If you download and install any software from the Internet, you will be fired.
Programmer: What?
IT: If you need anything installed, we will install it for you.
Programmer: I need X, Y, and Z installed.
IT: That software is not on the approved list
Programmer: What software is on the approved list?
IT: Th
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Programmer at a law firm: "Admin has changed all my .pl scripts so that when you click on them, they open in notepad, and taken away my ability to tell it to run the perl script instead. Please change it back."
IT: Because of the existence of perl viruses, we won't let you use the windows gui click ability, though do require you use windows. Open up a cmd window and type in the following path to get to perl.
Programmer: I am a PERL programmer, everything I do I do in perl. Can't
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Religious believe should not necessarily be incompatable with being scientific-minded. Remember that science cannot explain everything. It is just a methodology for specific purposes. Unless, like many I know, you make science your religion.
</flamebait>
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> Well that is interesting. I thought most IT people shun religion and mysticism.
> Goes along with being scientific-minded.
Newton, Einstein, Kepler, Oppenheimer, and many others were heavily influenced by mysticism.
Here are some Einstein quotes:
"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion.
Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science.
Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man.
To know that what is i
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Re:Participate in your religion? Meditation? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm reminded of a great quote from the Dalai Lama(iirc, and *) that I saw a few months ago. Some interviewer was asking what it would mean to Buddhism if scientists proved something contrary to our teachings. He looked at the interviewer like he was insane, then said that the teachings would be changed to reflect reality. No fuss, but then again the central premise of Buddhism is to become truly aware of what's going on. (Which is an incredibly scary thing, once you start to get serious about it. You can't hide things from yourself any longer.)
(*) ObDisclosure -- I consider myself a Buddhist in a Tibetean tradition, so strictly speaking the Dalai Lama is our spiritual leader. But it's nothing like what you would see in the Catholic church, for instance. I just thought the statement really caught the way that it's a non-issue.
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Just because the Dalai Lama can't write proofs, calculate the stress on a I-beam or program in C doesn't mean he wouldn't believe Bhuddism's world view should change if some scientific discovery suggests that it should.