Discussion on:

10 things IT pros do that lead to burnout

Numbers #1 and #2 have to be non-negotiable. Is one's job worth your own insanity and/or broken family?

I see this all the time. The biggest reason all this happens is that management rewards this stress inducing behavior and worse, punishes those who don't work themselves to death. The guy who works 90+ hours per week gets raises and promotions while the guy who clocks "only" 50 hours ends up getting the pink slip.

At Apple, they even had a 90+ hour "club" complete with T-shirts. Yeah, that's the company that was run by that god, Steve Jobs, that you at Tech Republic all worship.

...that god, Steve Jobs, that you at Tech Republic all worship.

I don't worship at the Church of the Bitten Fruit. I'm a Pastafarian.

Aren't the iPod and iPad proof of intellegent design? Where's my $250,000?

The main article reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon where the pointy haired boss is worried about people working themselves to death, and instructed his employees to take a break if they hear the voices of dead relatives...

This applies to all jobs, not just IT.

Skip lunch? That will never happen to me. No job ( unless life or death ) is so important to skip lunch for.
Let's eat!

I used to eat my lunch at my desk, but the phone would keep ringing. Customers sometimes take a different lunch hour. Eventually I changed my habits so that I ater my lunch (usually before lunchtime) and then left the office to walk up the high street or down to the harbour. Much Better!

I let the phone calls go to voice-mail. If someone showed up at my desk, I said I would take care of them when I finished eating (worded politely). Worked most of the time. I can handle the few exceptions. If it was an emergency, I took care of it and went back to my lunch. I had a flexible schedule and a very understanding boss so things generally worked out just fine. If it got too frustrating, I took my lunch outside and went for a walk. Also, every Friday, I went out for lunch and stayed out for up to 2 hours. That very understanding boss was OK with it. He knew I got my work done.

I've been playing this game for decades now and those are SOME of the things that we do in the IT world (look at us right now, up at 03-something on a Monday morning on a computer)...

'nuf said...

When I was young and fighting my way up the ladder I thought that putting in long hours was a good career move. Then my girlfriend put her foot down and I had to rethink. I realized that I was working slower, pacing myself like a marathon runner, to keep enough energy back to finish that twelve-hour day.

Once I decided that at 5pm sharp I was out of there I started working faster with more focus and got the same work done in less time. Plus I got home in time to play with the kids and was fresh enough for some romantic activity later on.

Been through all of these myself and concur with all of them.

Main thing I would add is that each year you need to sit down and assess how you are doing. I had customers and places I worked where it crept up on me and eventually the expectations were far beyond what they were 5 years earlier. In the end, I thought to myself what hourly rate I would want if I was bidding for the work on the basis of what it had become. I concluded in the end that no rate was worth it to me, and so parted company amicably before it became a difficult split.

Remember, no-one says on their death bed "I wish I had spent more time in the office".

...and we all know about these points, and yet, we end up eventually ignoring some or all of them unfortunately. Why?

It's all about insecurity. Most people are trying to hang on to their jobs. Even if they do not feel immediately threatened then they worry about the young upstart who can work day and night like he/she can party all night and then becomes a potential threat.

As one rises through the organisation you get beyond most of that, but then as you take on more responsibility you have to drive down costs for the shareholders, etc.

But it really is down to the company culture, what does the CEO and the Executive board and shareholders want of their teams. If they respect them, then that will drive down through the organisation normally, but in my experience there are only a few enlightened companies that are like this. Otherwise, try working for a nice entrenched bureaucracy where you may not need to break your neck and worry about shareholders salivating for the next quarterly results!

Better still, take a life and career change and use all your experience and wise words to coach or train people. But then self-employment can be another challenge that can keep you up all night!

A few years ago when working from home first became practical, I went to the USA for a holiday (from the UK) and one of the first things I did was to connect mmy laptop and log in to the office - and it worked first time. A week later I tried logging in to check my email - no success. This didn't bother me as I knew that if anything urgent cropped up, they could phone me. When I got back, I told my boss about the problem and he told me he had disabled my login. "If you're on holiday, you're ON HOLIDAY" was what he said. So my boss understands the benefit of completely getting away for a break.
On the subject of overnighters, I once spent a night in prison - working to get a security system operational before a government inspection the following morning - and I made it, just!

you have to get the balance right... no one expects this from you.

Still alive but ended up in hospital for three months.

With respect to point 9, I was always on the receiving end of unrealistic expectations. Particularly when the sales director popped his head round the door claiming he'd pulled in a FANTASTIC deal invariably for something we didn't have/couldn't do. He must have been an alumni of the Dogbert school of sales management.

Problem is that managers always flog a willing horse and trot out all the platitudes about how everyone is 'counting on you', 'we just need to make this last push'...

Older and wiser now.

It took me a long time, and a heart attack to realise that I had all the balance wrong.
If you are paid to work say 40 hours per week, and you put in 60 hours, you are devaluing your skills.
I sat down one day and worked out that some of my staff, on a substantially lower wage than I were actually earning more on an hourly basis because they were not doing the stupid hours.
No more stupid hours for me.

I have probably worked my last IT contract after seeing how unrealistic expectations have become the norm. Subcontract into, say HP, often is via one or more small IT businesses and each needs their cut. Some of these businesses are quite happy to delay payment for months or worse, promise to honor reimbursements then not deliver and hope you will not expend the effort to chase them down.

The health implications have me earning a wage outside IT and no intention of risking working with the "fly by nighters".

Now the satisfaction comes from turning down work and referring them to previous misdemeanors, but I feel sorry for the folk who have house payments and need the cashflow.

The only way this will be corrected will be when there is a shortage of engineers and sadly in Australia the dodgy businesses can draw on a flooded Indian market to import cheap labor. I hate to think how long it will take to correct the imbalance with such an inexhaustible supply..

The IT consulting firm I work for has set up their bonus program so the only way you can get a bonus is to put in an exorbitant amount of overtime helping with sales leads, proposals, interviews, taking classes, conducting classes, and even their sanctioned community activities. Thinks its fair? They even encourage you to give up your vacation time to gain more points for a bonus, but its not guaranteed. A "former" coworker gave up his vacation only to have the bonus range chart change so he was a couple points short of a bonus...and no, they wouldn't give it to him.

The worst thing is not the 30-hour work-days. It's not the foregone vacations. It's when you produce something great, something valuable, something to make the company and the world a better place... and it isn't appreciated. But then you do some dinky off-hand thing straight out of a manual and the pointy-haired B-school bozos carry on for a week about what a great thing you did. That's what drives burn-out, when you have to ask yourself, "Why am I bothering to do this? Why am I bothering to try to do my best when, time after time, I'm not rewarded for it?"

Someone else objected to the carrot and stick. At one place, a new general manager called all of the SW product developers in for a speech. He wanted to make sure we all knew that meeting release dates is important, but his approach was to say, "If we're a month late, it costs us $12M." or whatever. So I had to ask him whether we'd all get a cut of the $12M if we got the product out a month ahead of time. He did not answer in the affirmative.

For some people, there will be your 8 hours??? work and you need to attend 4 hours of meetings every day. The actual issue is you go to meeting when you are working at peak of your concentration. After coming out you need 30 min to one hour to get back to same focus level.

I think one need to spend time to decide which meetings to attend and say NO to un-related and un productive meetings.

The first six (among others) sounds like my old job before I pulled the pin as an IT Manager. The CFO said there would be plenty of appraisal and bonuses for completed projects, enabling the business to move forward using technology..... Blah, blah! As far as I'm concerned, move whatever direction on the ladder you feel happy with, do what you love doing, show your employer a bit of passion but don't bother over doing it, bending over backwards gets you nowhere.

No one remembers the guy who lived at work basically. Once he is gone, no one misses him, all of his work achievements are quickly swept away like a sand castle built on a beach.

The new employee comes in with fresh ideas, and everything they did or held sacred is history.

I have seen this several times over, no one is irreplaceable that is ego and all things that go up eventually come down.

You either kill yourself or become unemployed, especially in IT. Honestly if you want to have a spouse and kids - do yourself a favor and don't go into this career track. It will end up hurting your relationships in the long run. You will find yourself checking email at the dinner table, at the beach, at the theme park, obsessively keeping in touch because that question can't possibly wait a few days...and even then get 'called out' for not working hard enough or quick enough. I'm not sure what happened to this industry but it's truly hell to work in anymore.