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10 low-stress jobs for IT pros

Hands down the least stressful part of any job I've ever had was server jock...especially on unix systems.

Desktop support, training, and SALES? I suppose it depends on where you work, but you don't get more stressful than no sales = no money. Desktop support???? My xyz application is not working and I'm on a deadline!!!! I need it NOW!!!!

No. I don't agree. In fact, I've had some thoughts about a way to change companies to make customers LOVE them. Make the server jocks and sys-admin positions the entry level jobs, and make the customer support jobs the high paying, been there a long time and learned the company, the high paying jobs. You retain people who are driven to provide customer service and REALLY know the company and the technologies used.

Of course, companies would have to think beyond the next quarter for that to happen. No point expecting that.

... because when a server goes down, the a major piece of company-wide functionality is down, unless you have the resources to put together a high-availability, highly redundant system... in which case your job got a LOT easier. With desktop support, the problems are rarely too critical. That makes a big difference. There's a big reason why server folks get paid 2 - 4 times as much as desktop support, and a lot of it is the stress levels. Desktop support folks don't have "on call" for the most part, don't have to spend nearly as much time juggling "keeping the lights on" with "rolling out the latest and greatest", and aren't constantly fighting to keep up with the latest batch of products.

Remember, the list isn't about "no stress" it's about "lower stress in comparison to others"...

J.Ja

How often do your servers go down in 2012? I have had boxes with uptimes of nearly 2 years. In fact, 90% of the time the problems occurred, they were self induced...and happened after hours. In instances where it was a real-time business critical problem, it was because "we" decided to make ill advised changes at the wrong time.

I honestly hate to make this confession, but our stress as server jocks is a very self-serving idea we propagate to get paid more and to get users to leave us alone.

Of course, as I said, it does depend on where you work.

For my "day job" I'd say that less than 25% of our physical boxes are what I'd call "stable". I know it is NOT a Windows issue, because our VMs are rock solid. But our physical boxes are a nightmare. We started replacing them (we had done a lot of white box servers a few years ago hoping to save some money and get super-custom stuff), but the replacements (Dell) are just as bad. Meanwhile, my home server, which is totally overloaded (2 Windows VMs and a FreeBSD VM on a Windows server with a mere 8 GB of RAM, running on hardware that I bought to be a Vista desktop when Vista RTM'ed) is humming along without so much as a hiccup... I patch it every few months and that's it. My FreeBSD server would have near 2 years of uptime on it except I was doing something or other 6 months ago with it and had to reboot it. If Windows servers didn't need reboots to be patched, my home servers would have 1 - 2 years of uptime on them. So I know it's not Windows. But at work I've got some very expensive servers that are lucky to make it a month without an unexplainable, unsolvable crisis. It's maddening.

J.Ja

OT...but I'd be on a virtualization agenda for the remaining boxes. Darn if that consistent virtual hardware isn't nice, huh?

Dell literally writes their bioses to downgrade hardware so they can upsell you. They literally have 3 lines of the same product where the only difference is bios a, b or c. Not to mention Dell uses shoddy hardware to begin with, and notably bad ram.

HP is significantly better, but still what I consider a baseline.

My general caution against virtualization is that admins generally have a tendency to underprovision servers when given VMWare ESX and all of its neat little tools. I've worked with organizations where you had to fight for 5gb of hard drive space and 1gb of ram, and they ran everything off a SAN that cost between 11 and 18k/tb, with 2HBA's powering the entire assembly through a random array of networking appliances usually not greater than 10/100.

You need to have someone competent writing guidance for the establishment and provisioning of VMs for a specific purpose, and control that admins tendency to think that if everything is constantly redlined, but not crashing it means they've tuned it perfectly.

Spending 25k simply to virtualize dhcp servers is a bit of overkill; however, that doesn't mean that a simple virtualization setup is undesireable. It does give you hardware independence.

I am not an "all in" virtualization guy by any stretch of the imagination. Not comfortable on the firewall...and you do lose performance, obviously, over what you have on the metal. But it is undeniably here to stay, and it can be used by all sizes of shops to improve their situation.

In large organizations where you have SAN storage systems, lots and lots of VMs and many complex application. The rarity of a server malfunctioning is more often than what you think. If you work on an environment where you only have 12 servers then you dont see that happening and you are pretty much stress free. Now increase that amount by 100 and you will see your stress level rise over the top.

We have an almost entirely IBM shop (except for some Data Domain boxes) and about the only thing we ever replace is failed disk drives - at least for the last three years, that's all I can recall. Especially on their "p" servers. The "x" stuff is much better now as well. We're not a 24/7 shop at the moment, but I have to say that the money we spent buying IBM equipment (which is getting less expensive) was well worth the extra sleep we get from not being in here working on stuff in the wee hours of the morning. As usual, YMMV, but for us, IBM would have to screw up really bad for us to want to even attempt to use another vendor's product.

IBM is an excellent OS, the installation is not as straight forward as Solaris but once installed it is a robust OS trouble free; however, problems always arise specially if the server has not been configured properly due to lack of Capacity Planning, which seems to be always the case with large servers. Also, most SysAdmins neglect the patching of the system periodically and hence trouble arises over the horizon. Upgrades also represent a problem if not planned carefully. However IBM is the most robust OS of all I believe. Smit is good and is all you need for administration. As far as Windows boxes I don't even want to see them as they crash for no reason all the time; in my book, Windows is for the home and very very small business...I rather go with Linux period. Also, webservers represent a headache as they have problems all the time; however, Load Balancing helps a hell of a lot.

All in all, the stress escalates as the SysAdmin goes from small corporation to the very large ones...you are 100% correct about IBM

I do agree with you on this one Justin, Server administration is a nasty job, as I have done it a lot. When a server goes down the whole company goes down and you are the one getting the heat. You did not mention Webserver administration and there is a high stress job which some SysAdmins do. Imagine be responsible for 2,000 webservers and each webserver is a different customer. You have to be on your toes at all-times upgrading the Certificate and see that each webserver is up at all times and that alone keeps you busy. Also systems administrators do some networking administration and again it can get nasty as most networking admins are not fully familiar with UNIX administration as most of their work is DNS, Firewalls, and Load Balancers plus the cabling of computers but that is not done on a daily basis. I think that UNIX SysAdmins is the most stressful job on the market especially now that companies want the SysAdmin to do everything under the sun including Windows administration and Windows crashes a lot. WebLogic is another part that SysAdmins do ... well, the list goes on and on and I have done it all; so, I know about stress on the job. If you review the list of skills companies are demanding for a SysAdmin to be skillful with you can fill up a page and to top it off they want you to be a hardware guy as well. UNIX flavors are a lot and they want you to know them all and Windows, plus all the applications in existence.

I've done both server and desktop support. And while I won't say server support is easy, you try dealing with an executive's desktop being down. I was executive IT support for a major computer company and I can tell you hands down that it was anything but low stress, especially when dealing with high powered executives.

Desktop support doesn't have "on call"? Are you serious? I have no idea where you are getting these ideas but throughout my desktop support career, I was required to be on a rotating "on call" schedule. This was with small business and enterprise environments alike.

And this doesn't include all the direct emails and support requests that I got from groups I supported in the middle of the night that I answered to be a good hamster. Couldn't figure out their email? Can't get in to an application? Desktop is first tier support so guess where it goes first? That's right.

There is usually a critical need for people to assume the role of a new user and who has to rely on the documentation that comes with a system. Typically, the documentation is woefully lacking for those who are not already intimately familiar with the system. Documentation, often, assumes a user is already familiar with the system and just needs some minor guidance.

As it is so tied to personality. Server jock might be lower stress than desktop commando if you don't enjoy dealing with customers. If you are a worrier, backups might leave you awake at night dreading the day a restore will be needed ( or disaster recovery ) and trying to find increasingly convoluted means to cover all bases.

As for the desktop vs server importance to the company I've had laptops which had the ONLY copy of super secret plan 9 from outer space go belly up. (you know who I'm referring to, exec level) Talk about much wailing and gnashing of teeth!

You decide what you teach, you give the questions, exams, you decide who passes, fails. (Only stress might be not getting paid enough).

My first two years as a University lecturer were working nearly 24 hours a day preparing lectures and making sure that they fitted all the guidelines for the course spec, preparing an exam that was of the right difficulty level, thinking up and writing practical lab instructions. Marking exams to deadlines. The fun/ low stress bit of the whole teaching thing was in the labs with the kids putting together networks. Lower stress yet was being my own lab technician and doing the maintenance/repair of kit without a deadline ( I always had a couple of spare processor boxes under the desk in case of catastrophe [ like the time a couple of idiot students wondered what would happen if the flicked the 220/120 volt switch down to 120 volts. Everybody thought the smoke plume coming out the back of the PC was 'neat'])

I thought this whole article was tongue in cheek - all of those jobs have their own types of stress.

Hey, that is a good one...teachers don't even need to know what they teach!

I'm fascinated to read that my job as an IT trainer is low stress!

Some of the most stressful jobs I had were desktop support. If the Finance Director can't access his monthly sales figures because Excel doesn't work, you gotta fix that in 10 minutes or you are out of a job.
Backups are fine until something goes wrong; then you need to cope with 5 users standing round your desk watching you restore weekly backups plus incrementals and commenting on everything you do. That's not relaxing!

I think it entirely depends which organisation you work for, and the culture of the company. Nothing to do with the type of job you do.

Having done both sides of the fence for several years now in the same and different organizations, I'd have to say my time as sysadmin has been the most stressful. When I was desktop support, if I couldn't fix a client's excel (or other) problem that quick I'd have an alternative connected and running in 5 minutes and the FD would be doing what he needed while I got to work on his broken machine elsewhere. Seriously, while I agree there are numerous challenges doing desktop support, which are often varied, and often not the same thing twice, sysadmin work has a lot more riding on it. A bad decision can take down a company for hours, and the only thing people remember you for is the bad stuff.
If a sysadmin is not at least a little stressed at times, or seems to have a lot of free time, I'd suggest they're not doing their job properly. There are always things to be doing to maintain healthy servers, preparing for the next upgrades, integrating new equipment/software, patching, monitoring usage stats.... the list goes on for these positions too.
In my last role as a sysadmin (currently taking a break after moving country) I even had to interface with staff often, assisting with planning and implementation of new systems required by the organization, on top of normal duties. That's without thinking about the DR we actually had to go through with earthquakes affecting everything (yes I'm from Christchurch, New Zealand).

If you have people standing around watching your restores, then you're not managing the situation well. Nobody should be distracting you from important restore work, as a simple wrong choice could in fact do more damage than good. Could I venture to suggest that you politely explain to these people that everything will work faster, and with less stress for everyone concerned if they just leave you to "work your magic" and you'll let them know when it's done (or simply refuse to do the work until the leave you alone - sometimes this works too).

To some extent the culture of an organisation can have an effect, more so your direct manager, but apart from a personality clash, if you're competent (or better) at your job then this is not usually a stress cause.

It sounds like you're having a hard time in the company you work for, rather than the actual job stresses - perhaps it's time to look for an organization with a better culture, or supporting team?

Just a thought.

I am Executive Program Manager, and all the positions you mention, when doing their jobs seriously are meeting the same stress as us all. We always have to produce a lot of challenging work, most of the time under-estimated by customers/sales people.
The only none stressed are the one that are not really good or involved, and that some managers (unfortunately) leave away from the real arena.

I can't believe you think Sales is low stress or that the job doesn't come home with you. It is always with you - you must be constantly networking, meeting sales deadlines and goals. You can never go home from a sales job. Ever.

Having a rich background in several Business as well as I(C)T related functions/roles I can only say that the article is showing a very limited and unilateral view.

Most of these 'jobs' indeed have their individual portion of stress and no job whatsoever should be underestimated. Let me end this post with a quote straight from a poster on my wall which enlightened a few people sofar ;-):
"All is perception.
To a worm, digging in the ground,
is more relaxing
than going fishing."
(author unknown)

S.

Seems you've rattled the cages of the desktop support people. I too have done both desktop support and systems administration and can say that if a server went down or there was a problem with the network the whole department would help, if it was a problem with a desktop machine, laptop etc your on your own. Also by and large system admins don't really have to face the angry staff, you got the option to lock yourself in the server room, whereas a desktop support tech is straight in the crosshairs whatever the problem/

Being a trainer is a very stressful job. Between the travel, being the punching bag, and generally having to have all the answers, regardless of how esoteric the question, means that training is a VERY stressful job.

Not only that, but as a trainer you encounter ALL of the problems you say we don't. We have to explain WHY the users system crashed or why certain things are happening in the customer's environment. We also have to deal with project timelines and fully understand where the project is and what has been done...not only that we have to completely understand the customer's environment and what has been done to it.

Dektop support technician is not a low stress job as it requires lot of interaction with irritated user

I am a Global Eneterprise Technician. I am currently supporting 450 EU down from just under 600. I have approx. 125 remote users at any given time anywhere on the globe. I am at a fortune 100 top 25 SMB doing over 500 Million a year in business. I am under my second Managed services group as this company has been bought and integrated into a larger Enterprise. My entire job is SLA based with 8 -11 hours for any given situation -even less for the Executive Care client. I have to handle all hardware and software issues for any given piece of equipment as well as hands and feet for on-site servers. Encryption -Data Recovery-VPN-Virus -Software (updates and GP's from server side) security all have to be maintained as well as all the paperwork. My tickets run on a 13 hour clock that have to be managed within my 40 hour week while maintaning my SLA. Walking into 20 people at your door and figuring out which Executive you need to get back up first -the engineer thats down costing 1,000's per hour , or the Mfg line thats down- or th exec in Hong Kong who suddenly cannot get to there data on a network drive or whos VPN isnt connecting. No -not much stress.

IT Industry Analyst is someone that tell you how the industry is going to change in the next year; and then a year later he tells you why it didn't.

Since when does an architect get to divest themselves of project responsibility once the project is rolling? Generally they hold the bag for the entire project's success or failure, unless you happen to work at one of these places that calls senior devs architects *coughtechrepubliccough*.

I won't discuss the stress factor for each one of the mentioned or other not mentioned.

Look at it from a customer perspective on no 2-10. Create a less stressed organization: outsource and / or buy and adopt ITaaS / cloud... Stop in-housing these type of resources and roles. Make the stress / no stress situations the service providers pleasant responsibility.

I know I'm generalizing and making it easy for me and easy for others "attacks" and opinions.

@maxbuchler

Putting posts on techrepublic telling us how unstressful out jobs are.
Sorry JJ, I disagree with your relatively low stress jobs. As others have said, Desktop Support very stressful as you deal with the angry customer. And I agree with many of the other comments.

I'd hate to see what James considers to be high stress.

Those are far from low stress. If you think a computer lab tech in a university is low stress, you have obviously been out of that business way too long. In this day and age, with medium to large universities, competition is fierce to get students. And one way they attract them is with fancy technology. You had better have everything perfect, or maybe that kid who just walked through will decide not to apply - and then there's hell to pay. Miserable nighttime and weekend hours on a regular basis, extreme pressure for everything to be perfect - not just no, hell no, that is not a stress free job at this juncture. Desktop support technician depends on where you work - it's a thankless position by default, and if in an environment of perfect or else, you will be miserable. Think long and hard before jumping into those as a 'stress free' career.

The least stressed are the managers of all types, and the higher one stands in the hierarchy, the least stressed he is.
Why ?
Because their main task is to transfer the pressure upon the lower level
ones, who are doing the effective work.
Theirs is only the glory and promotion, the work investement belong to the others ...

Not sure how you arrived at this but desktop support technician is NOT a low stress job. I've been IT support since the days of DOS. I personally never did desktop support, but I was in the same department as them. And by days end each & everyone of them wanted to kill someone because of the stupid stuff they had to contend with. And do it with a fake smile on their face. And the company I'm with now, I worked closely with the desktop support technicians as an admin. These guys are NEVER happy. I'd really like to know how you arrived at this conclusion.

This is the worst list I have ever seen from TechRepublic and I usually take my information from your lists and articles with complete confidence that I will make sense to someone quoting from your information. As an IT Lead Desktop and Network Support Technician I must say that it completely surprised me to see Desktop Support in this list let alone #2 on the list.

First time I ever felt compelled to join a TR conversation. But I have to defend my peers in Desktop Support. Each category listed has it's own level of stress. Why? Because mechanical, electrical, and electromagetic systems fail. No one person's stress caused by those failures is any greater or lesser than any other person's. I have been in this role, or variatiions of it for 23 (+,-) years. The most significant part of that time as team lead (working team lead, not a manager) for 30+ End User Support technicians across the united states for a fortune 500 customer supporting 9000+ systems and users internationally. When you are the lead, you take on not only your own ticket issues, but serve as mentor and troubleshooter for many of the other technicians.

In most cases you have to work with what you are given, which if the customer controls the IT purse strings, you quite often don't have the luxary of the store house of equipment to "get the user funtional", while you work on a resolution to the failure. The Deskside support technician is typically the "face" of the supporting organization. So they get the full verbal or emotional affront of the customer, and they have to stand their and take it. Deskside support is as much about personal interaction, and being able to difuse a volitile situation as it is about technical expertise. First and formost you are dealing with the component between the chair and the keyboard before you have an opportunity to address the machinary. In many End User support environements, by virtue of the contract negotiated with the support organization, the end user gets to set the severity level of their issue regardless of the logical impact on the company. Therefore, what should be straight forward break/fix becomes a political nightmare, because an individuals own perception of self worth compels them to request a severity level that should be reserved for an entire faciltiy being down, and not an individual, which pulls a technician away from more relevant work. Also by nature of the severity level, automated escalation procedures are pulled in to play which compound the technical issue with management oversight and micromangament of the situation.

My degree in Physics has served me well in providing technical expertise and a scientific approach to problem solving in the End User Support arena. I would never be so arrogant as to say that my role is more stressfull than any other person in the IT community. By the same token, I would never be so condesending to my peers in the IT community as to say their job role is less stressful than any other.

The stress exists in all IT rolls, The level of stress spans the spectrum, in all IT rolls. How the individual responds to the stress is what differentiats your ability to cope with it. The stress can be your down fall, or it can be your opportunity. To paraphrase an old addage: If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.... but don't expect any one else's kitchen to be any cooler.

In all of my roles I've been both a server jock and desktop support person. If you count switches and routers as a different role....well....I had that too. And in one instance where two of us supported 2k machines.

Justin's point about a server crash causing many problems is true. But I had much more in depth knowledge of the servers from the get go. They didn't crash much, and getting them up was usually a very quick deal.

In some uncontrolled environments, you don't know what the heck the users have put on their desktops, and they DON'T want you to simply image the thing. Result....often hours wasted with a user breathing down your neck.

I will repeat, it depends on where you work. It is all relative. In my own experience, make me responsible for 1000 Unix servers over 100 desktops with users with admin right ANY DAY OF THE WEEK.

I remember preparing lesson plans for a 10 week A+ cert course I taught... I've never had so much stress.

But once I was down with the info, teaching was the most fun I've ever had on a job. So getting started is a big hump to get over, but worth sticking to, the ride is all downhill once you know your subject well.

I like the mention of a backup manager. This is a large part of my work, as a server and network admin for a number of clients. I have everybody backed up to the hilt, including an off-site copy I keep on my server at work. (I do not accept HIPAA-regulated backups on my off site system, they go to a commercial vendor, eg amazon, for the liability issues)

Just the other day a colleague asked me to help with one of his biggest clients. The fellow had a RAID 0 system and one drive failed... the absolute worst case scenario with RAID 0. Guess what? No backups. I am so anal about making sure data is protected that I almost brain lockup over the fact that this colleague had not set up backups for this client.

The client lost everything, starting with quicken, which basically WAS the company. (the payroll alone is causing the company a massive headache atm)

This colleague operates on the premise that data safety is the responsibility of the owner of the data. He suggests they set up some kind of backup, but doesn't insist. He will help them if they ask, but he doesn't want to push the concept because he doesn't want the liability.

I say it's more liability if the customer has been depending on me for years, only to find when the worst case happens they've lost everything.

I've never gotten in trouble for being able to restore the customer to exactly where they were before some disaster halted operations. Most of the systems I've serviced can be put back into service in 1/2 hour (or less) regardless of the nature of the failure.

PS, something to consider, that I had been unaware of regarding off site backups. One client told me she got a break on her businesses insurance because we have an off site storage solution. I'd never heard of such a thing before, but maybe it's something to explore. Couldn't hurt of some data-dependent business mentioned they have off site backups when negotiating with their insurance co.

Anyone out there ever heard of an insurance or paid support incentive for having off site storage?

So are you looking for a replacement or a new colleague?