Discussion on:

IT jobs claim four of 10 positions in most hated jobs list

I agree with your points about surveys; truly there's not enough information here and the results are almost certainly biased. One example is IT audit; having been on both ends of an IT audit auditors find it tedious to complete and the people being audited find it annoying. Still, the IT comments are spot on.

The main complaint I hear from my colleagues in IT centers around how little respect IT tech support gets from business areas. We're seen as a necessary evil, an expensive group who should be cut, a group who is just supposed to do as we're told. We're not involved in decisions regarding how to write applications ("This is what the customer wants, just make it happen by next week"); data security is considered an afterthought ("Let's build the application and worry about security later"); and most galling, if something bad happens it's our fault but when we do something good it's just business as usual. This is particularly bad in tech support, not so bad in application support but still there.

I've never been an IT director so I can't speak for that, but it seems reasonable to assume this goes up the ladder. Many IT directors worked their way up within the department, and when they get to the top and can't change the status quo it must be very frustrating.

That's about how it feels sometimes. Your just around to clean up user messes and push a plunger through network pipes from time to time, and my favorite the "I had an error thingy so I pressed [OK], can you fix it?" guessing game. Ah.. good times..

But if something should break like a user's chosen background or icon layout; well, now your the most critical person in the building.

Now, to go figure out why the network pipes are delivering excel files so slowly.. no other file types.. just Excel.. must be a Monday.

probably the MS validation add-in. Just remove it and see excel speed-up

Sure, it's about the best of MSFT's miserable offerings, but there are other spread-sheet programs out there. Dump it and get some real work done.

Or, they could simply transfer the data as text files with tab-separated fields (and dump the extraneous B-school bozo formatting along the way; win win!).

It's not like a janitor gets to decide on the crap going through the pipes now, is it?
As an information septician, the janitor is definitely able to grade the crap in orders of crappiness... but that doesn't mean he gets to stick his nose up over substandard crap. The quality of crap depends entirely on the asses of users and their managers.

The janitor can complain all he wants about people flushing things which are contraindicated for flushing, and someone in power might listen, but how do you enforce any rules on people who don't care if they break their necessaries?

OTOH, a case can be made for changing to different file formats when one is breaking the pipes, but the chances that this is taken as the good idea over re-plumbing (temporarily, or better, permanently) the pipes is slim.

One of the most trying jobs I had was at a training/HR software development organization. The IT team would be drawn into hours of meetings where the psychologists would babble on about what to call a widget on the interface. The IT team had no input except to sit there, bored, listening to this nonsense. Apparently, it never occurred to management that the psychologists should battle it out amongst themselves and only draw IT in when they had "finally" made a decision. As you might guess, the IT team drew many late hours implementing code because they were forced to spend their work hours in meeting after meeting.

I wanted to add that this took place during the dot.com boom. To add insult to injury, the IT people were stacked 3 to a cubicle. I couldn't help being amazed that this organization treated such marketable and knowledgeable people in such a shoddy fashion.

When I was in school, I couldn't believe some of the people taking some of the psych courses would be clinicians or therapists or counselors or researchers. Turns out they were business management and marketing types.

Convincing people what they think they need is tops.

And noticing things like fads, and other aspects of "the herd principle" - even by those who claim they are "individuals", devout followers of Ayn Rand, et cetera...

I like how you said (or they) IT is a "necessary evil". Many times we have to explain why we have to spend thousands of dollars for upgrades. "Why? Because that how much it is going to cost. I dont put the price of this stuff they do. Now get it or fail." Yeah I wish we could say that. lol Sometimes I wonder if janitors have better jobs, at least people somewhat understand plumbing. Try to explain networking to someone that barely understand computers. "You know what, I dont know what you are saying. Just make it work and hurrry up. We are already late as it is." That's when you say "I hate my job."

But apparently the convenience store graveyard shift clerk is happier than a "Director of Information Technology"? Or the person at the fast food window?

The solution is simple. Tell those Directors to quit directing and sign up at the fast food place. Let the Product Manager and Marketing Managers work graveyards at the convenience store in the barrio. Maybe we'll all be happier.

I am an Electronics Technician working in an IT department as a Technical Specialist. This, in theory, puts me in two of the 'most hated' positions. I love my job! The pay isn't great at my company, but the work is different all of the time. Variety is what make the job worth while.

What is the issues which these job on the list? I understand #1, Director of Information Technology. I did that a decade ago and won't go back. Too much politics and not enough hands on work.

I'd have to say that I'd take any of those jobs (even Technical Support) over some of the jobs I had in my early days, like swinging a bush axe under power lines, or putting up fiberglass insulation in new apartment construction in the middle of summer.

Tho I swear there are times now that I can't wait to get home, get outdoors, and wield a powertool. Of course this is Fall mania talking, not itchy and 1000 degrees like you experienced! I guess my worst job was putting up hay on the family farm and hoeing tobacco.

I grew up in Gretna, between Danville and Lynchburg. I, too, worked in tobacco (pulling) from my youth. I got so sick of the stuff I was never tempted to start smoking .

I can believe this, because I work in IT. IT is squeezed from both sides. They are given extremely strick security protocols, and asked to keep viruses and spam out of the network, but then looked on by the rest of the company as a roadblock. Where I work, no matter how much we bend over backwards to make things seamless and just work, any time they find they cannot do something, we are seen as not helping enough. I work for a state agency, and there is only so much we can do within the state mandated security protocols, and yet we have people wondering why they cannot bring in whatever they want and use it on our network.

As bad as these are, you have to count your blessings if you have one of these jobs.
Most of these are pretty well paying jobs.

Could be worse, you could count yourself among the unemployed.

Tech jobs are great, but career prospects have been crippled in recent years, with outsourcing and offshoring.

Throw in a bad economy and obtuse management styles from corner offices and yeah, I get why the IT jobs are on this list. I certainly wouldn't recommend that my own child pursue a career in technology.

I couldn't agree more with this. The United States has crippled a vast portion of the market that could have a major impact on the economy by allowing companys to outsource IT and hire people from overseas. This should be stopped and our own internal IT infrastructure rebuilt. The economy would grow quickly.

I am a Director of IT at a fairly large operation. I have to say that the analysis is pretty much spot on. There is little to no respect from the top tier of management above us and the users below us. The general consensus is that if they don't know what it is we do, it must not be hard. We have to work miracles on a budget that gets smaller every year. We have to keep things "easy" but still stop all spam (with no false positives) and all intrusions and viruses etc. But the minute one of those systems prevents someone's kid from downloading MP3 files we are the problem. (and I'm not kidding about the kid part) My favorite CEO request for the year so far is "just build a bunch of applications and then we'll pick the one we like". Second runner up was "what do you mean you can't tell the computers to only print on paper and nothing else? This is the problem with incompetent IT people." I kid you not. This was because we couldn't make the "print to file" box disappear on all of the computers in the world when they happen to be printing any of our materials. Stressful? You bet. Does management have a clue what they want to accomplish? No. Do we still have to figure it out and do it? Yes. If one of the departments is waiting on something from us, it's out fault for not delivering. If we need something from them in order to deliver it, it was our fault for not making them provide it. There is no time that the IT department is in the right and there is no time that any other department is in the wrong. Grumpy about it? You bet I am.