IT Job Satisfaction Plummets To All-Time Low 453
cweditor writes "IT job satisfaction has plummeted to a 10-year low, according to a recent survey. Another on general job satisfaction rated IT a paltry 45%. From the article: 'The CEB's latest survey found that the willingness of IT employees to "exert high levels of discretionary effort" — put in extra hours to solve a problem, make suggestions for improving processes, and generally seek to play a key role in an organization — has plummeted to its lowest levels since the survey was launched 10 years ago.'"
Re:Perhaps... (Score:3, Informative)
He was meaning the free lunch on the part of the employers, not the employees.
Re:Perhaps... (Score:1, Informative)
You would think that companies would have to pay appropriately for the jobs done, but wait! In the 80s the current man in charge granted amnesty to illegal working. Thus increasing the available worker pool, and lowering wages. Then the government started a war on unions. About 25% of the workforce in the US was unionized. One of the functions is to limit access to jobs, decreasing the supply of qualified workers, thus increasing the wages. With a decrease in unionized jobs the worker pool increased and lowered wages. Then someone realized that people in India speak pretty good English. Why pay an American a good wage to take calls when you can pay someone in India a lot less? Thus increasing the available worker pool, and lowering wages. Then in the 90s we passed a trade agreement that opened the borders around the world for large companies. Now it was easy to offshore jobs to other countries, and import the goods back in to the US. Why pay an American a good wage to make a thing when you can pay someone in China to make it for 10 times less? Thus increasing the available worker pool, and lowering wages.
How do we solve this? Get corporate and union money out of politics. Have publicly financed elections. Get out of the WTO. End NAFTA. Enact the Free Choice Act. Make things in the US. Charge a lot of money to import things made outside of the US.
Go after companies that higher illegal works. Put the CEO and head of HR in jail. If the supply of jobs for illegal works goes away, then the illegal workers will go away too. Right now we go after the workers. That does not help.
Re:No more working for the man (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, fully agree (Score:5, Informative)
Dutch as well, and don't recognize the articles problems at all.
And living in the US ain't really cheaper. You got to look beyond single prices and look at total expenses. Simply put, American pay less taxes but their medical insurance is more expensive. We pay more taxes but our insurance is cheaper. As a business, you pay fewer taxes in the US, but you got to have very expensive litigation insurance, in Holland taxes are higher, but you can't be sued for millions because someone walked into your glass door.
The issues become very complex, take housing. housing in the US seems typically cheaper for MORE house, BUT it is in spreadout suburbs with no local provisions. The houses are also typically wood.
Now that sounds great, but it means greater travelling expenses, the wive can't just pop next door to visit her mother, kids need to be transported by car to their soccer club. Wood needs constant painting. All those extra rooms need furniture, heating, cooling etc etc.
This living space issue bit Microsoft in the ass with the X-box. To big for Japan where houses are smallest of all. Imagine a 50+ inch tv in most european houses, does it even fit? If you can't use a screen that large, you don't want it, but if you got a huge house in the US, then that screen becomes far more desirable.
What I seen from trips to the US and working with people from all over the world is that american workers need more, and can afford it because they spend more time with their job which in our eyes might look a bit like you are working to pay for gadgets that you can't enjoy because you are always at work.
Or as I wrote 2 days ago in a similar story, I had a US co-worker who worked for over a year in holland to pay for a big screen tv in the US... Why?
But this discussion will never be won. For a settlement to be reached, one side would have to admit that they are wrong and both europeans and americans are far to pigheaded to do that.
Lets face it, the US is the place things happen and EU is the place the economy hasn't tanked so badly. The american method works for americans, right up to the point that it doesn't. And in the EU, you can get 1000 euro raise, yet get only 300 more in your bank account (Yes really).
Re:No more working for the man (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure what you mean by "commonly accepted definition", but I've always understood IT to mean "the guys who make the computers do what they're supposed to". If a company develops software for their own internal use (like my last 3 jobs), then software development is IT. However, if the company is a software development company, then software development is part of R&D, as they're the people developing the next product.
The American Heritage Dictionary agrees with me, so this is not a "Euro-centric" definition.
information technology
n. Abbr. IT
The development, installation, and implementation of computer systems and applications.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Re:Yup, fully agree (Score:1, Informative)
Here's something you might not have known: 99.9% of all houses in the USA are total pieces of shit. I made that statistic up, but my pop was a custom home builder for over 20 years and I know how houses are made. In most cases, that means simply "to code", which in most places means that you must join certain pieces of wood with a shitty, flimsy piece of metal. This puts flex in the house for quakes, but also makes it flop and slop, it means the house can exert no influence over how it settles, et cetera. As well, the vast majority of houses are framed with 2x4s which aren't even 2"x4" any more, even though the only real advantage of smooth [milled] timber is that you don't have to wear gloves while you work with it. That, I guess, and that you can put more sticks on a pallet, and you need more of them to build a given frame, so you can sell more of them, all the while keeping the milled-off sawdust and making it into other products from which you profit.
This inadequate timber frame is typically topped with a roof made of environmentally destructive tar shingles, and paper, over pre-manufactured trusses, which are usually garbage. We still wire with copper, but then we jacket it (by code!) with PVC, which releases dioxin when it burns. The majority of windows are still double-glazed.
Even more offensive is a problem which we share with most of the rest of the world; buildings don't integrate passive solar design, so they're unnecessarily expensive to cool and heat.
I don't know if houses in the rest of the world are trash, but most of the ones in this country are. Oh and, most of the old ones built right (from when we had more wood to spare, I guess) are on floodplains and have been flooded at least once, filling them with rot and mold.
All of these things are a factor of the tyranny of the masses, a product of the same mentality that brought you Wal-Mart. I'd rather live in a military tent on my land while saving money for a good house... oh wait, the moneyed class made that illegal almost everywhere.
It is no longer your "father's" IT business (Score:2, Informative)
A decade ago, I went from a university where I had built the network and helped move the campus into the information age to a business where the entire IT staff was outsourced since the business thought it would help them manage their costs. Couple that with the increase in government oversight and regulation (SOX, HIPAA), and now IT means spending more time writing process documents and less time working on the things that attracted bright people to the business. Ed Yourdon saw this coming in his book "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer", but the same precepts apply across the board. If your function is thought to be a commodity, then business will find a lower cost provider than you. If (as others have mentioned) your IT functions are not seen as a strategic asset, then IT becomes a commodity automatically - something you have to have like lights, plumbing, power, garbage collection.
Let me guess why (Score:5, Informative)
Let me guess why
1. Bad economy, fear of job loss
2. Not getting the work that they were hired for. This bait and switch is at its worst with
programming. Advertise for developers, hire developers, do not give them development work
and watch the poor attitude grow ( or the worker leave ).
3. People who don't know better forcing stupid technical decisions on technical people
who do know better AND without hearing AS WELL AS respecting their professional opinion.
4. Not getting rewards for extra effort. Doesn't even have to be money, just a sense
that someone is interested in what you did or at least *appreciates* it beyond a
cold "thank you".
5. Knowing that you are not valued, that the moment they can outsource you with someone
cheaper you will be replaced. Why value a company beyond them being a pay check if
they don't value you beyond being a cheap enough part in a machine?
6. As per the other day on slashdot, penny pinching on minor perks
Re:Perhaps... (Score:4, Informative)
The reason is simple: over the last few decades it has become apparent to just about anybody who pays attention to history that most unions, in the long run, have actively contributed to the downfall of the very companies and industries in which they operated.
I can give you three great examples right off the top of my head: the aluminum industry, the steel industry, and the automobile industry. All of which were, at one time, strong American industries, and all of which, a few decades after massive unionization, became little more than a pathetic shadow of what they once were.
Listen, bud. Unions once had a reason for existing: corporations had a practice of paying workers (often [legal] immigrants) far less than a livable wage, at the same time failing to maintain a safe workplace. That is the kind of situation unions were designed to combat.
But over many decades, the unions used their coercive force to demand more and more pay, and more and more benefits, for less and less work... to the extent that a lot of people ended up getting paid a lot of money to do almost nothing... especially if they were not just Union members, but Union Representatives. (Can you say "Mafia"? Sure. I knew you could.)
It even got to the point that in some states, and in some industries, you could not get a non-management job at all, by law, unless you were a union member.
Don't try to give me a hard time about this not being true, because I have seen it with my own eyes and experienced it with my own pocketbook and (involuntary) union membership. I had to join a Union just to get a job, and pay them monthly dues, even though they consistently HURT my relationship and negotiations with the company, rather than helping. The Union didn't care about helping me, working for that small company. They were completely focused on the big aluminum processing plants in town... which they eventually managed to get SOLD and CLOSED DOWN.
I am not going to try to tell you that unions have no place and do no good. There are still situations in which they do have a place and can still fight corporate abuses. But for the most part, the big unions have dug their own VERY deep holes, and buried themselves in them, to the detriment of EVERYBODY involved. RIFP (Rest In Frigging Pieces).
Re:No more working for the man (Score:5, Informative)
And he still doesn't seem to have learned his lesson:
Those statements are mutually exclusive.
Re:Not attracting new blood, good suggestions igno (Score:5, Informative)
So a lot of the time when a techie goes the extra mile and comes up with a good solution it is not implemented, or worse they are chastised for wasting their time on it. Again this is even prevalent in the currently depressed economy where decreasing costs and expenses is more important than new innovative ideas in the eyes of many business people. There are only so many times an intelligent person will go that extra mile, get rewarded with a proverbial kick in the teeth, before they learn not to bother.
Or worse, the extra mile becomes the expected norm.
I remember working a lot of long hours (70-80 every week for months on end) to get projects done on time. The marketing people kept on making shorter and shorter time-lines with clients. We were getting projects finished in 3-4 weeks that should have taken 2-3 months. When we were called into a meeting on Tuesday afternoon to explain the new project that was due at 4PM the following Friday (3 days later), the 5 IT people looked at each other and said no way could we get this done. We were told no excuses, the contract was signed. Our getting projects done in totally unreasonable about of time came back to bite us.
Re:Working conditions differ... (Score:2, Informative)
The survey data is very global with just less than 50% of the respondents being from US companies. The remainder are from almost every major geography with western Europe, Australia, Canada, and Mexico being the best represented (from a researcher's point of view though, pretty much every geography is well-represented because of the size of the dataset).
It's also important to call out that the "discretionary effort" cited in the article isn't just "more hours". It involves productivity while working, likelihood to bring new ideas to managers, etc...
There's a video here of the research director cited in the article walking through the results in more depth. The really interesting thing isn't that satisfaction has gone down, it's that *compliance* has gone down within IT. (ignore the last ten seconds of salesy-ness in the video.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD08P6kYCuI [youtube.com]
Not so foolish (Score:3, Informative)
The unemployeed guy who owed $1.3 million just lost his home today, so there is some justice in the world.
Re:IT field avoidance should be a no-brainer (Score:4, Informative)
There are plenty of union shops that have been running just fine for a very long time, without any sign of problems.
The collapse of the US auto industry has absolutely nothing to do with the laborers, but is entirely bad decisions by management, ever since the memory. And there's no excuse for it, since the 70s burned the realities into the heads of everyone else but those high-paid executives with short-term cost-cutting goals in mind.
And labor laws are a joke. Note that most in IT are on "salary", who are on-call around the clock, and don't get paid overtime, in clear violation of applicable labor laws, knowing the cost of the lawsuit, and the time wasted in court, will make the overtime pay hardly worth the effort, unless you have a sufficiently large class action.
When the cost of living disparity between 1st and 3rd world countries is so high that people in China will quite literally work for what is pocket-change here, no company that can outsource, is holding back, based on non-unionized IT or anything else... In short, fear of outsourcing is artificially keeping wages low in companies and industries that simply can't paractially be outsourced.
That sounds much worse than the current state of things, where you're paid X for each year of experience, and X is the same practically no matter how good you are. And where companies band together to mutually refuse to hire each other's employees, in an attempt to keep wages down, pay no retirement, and make the job so miserable that IT has the highest turnover rates of any department in any given company.
I've worked in several non-union shops where I've though exactly the same thing about the employees...
Re:Perhaps... (Score:3, Informative)
"I inadvertently left out a big part of my point: most worker protections that used to be gained by union membership are now guaranteed by law. So why do I need a union?
I can get the same 401K plan as my boss... without having to go on strike to get it. I can get the same health insurance plan as my boss... without having to go on strike to get it. And so on. Because that's the law."
Excuse me? You are kidding, right? Please?
None of those things you mentioned are provided by law, at least in most of the US.
Most of those things you listed exist because of unions. Directly or indirectly. Or they exist because there is a limited supply of workers with a certain ability (often related to union activity or lobbying).
What is a business required to do in Washington state for instance:
Pay minimum wage (currently the highest in the US at $8.55).
Pay overtime for non exempt employees for hours worked over 40 hours in a week.
Maintain a "safe" work environment.
Maintain a work environment free from "discrimination".
Rest break of 10 minutes every 4 hours.
Meal break of 30 minutes if working over 5 hours.
Pay taxes.
Etc.
Not required:
Sick leave, holidays, vacation, or time off of any kind.
Benefits (Insurance, retirement, etc.)
"And I like it that way, because it's called "FREE MARKET"."
There is nothing free about the marketplace in practice. And the existence of unions does not prevent wage negotiation. Contracts negotiated by unions may. There is a difference.
"But in most cases, the reasons for the very existence of a union simply do not exist anymore."
I disagree. See above. Ultimately unions are corporations. Their purpose is to represent the interests of the workers (shareholders). They work about as well as regular corporations work. As long as you have corporations you will need the equivalent of unions.