Don't Be an IT Casualty
True story: My first Heart Attack was Stress-Related from working about 15 hours per day every week as an IT Consultant.
The daily breakdown:
1) 4-6 hours = (2* 2-3) hours commuting from Central MD
to Northern VA and back,
2) 8 hours billable on-site, and
3) 1-3 hours Analyzing/Reviewing/Studying: Project Documentation, Trade Journals, OEM Upgrade Documentation, IT/Database/Development-related Web Sites/Blogs, E-mail Lists.
(Too much Stress [over time] caused physical damage to a Large Blood Vessel on the front of my Heart-- this damage resulted in a 90% blockage of the Vessel. Blockage of Vessels, by definition is a Heart Attack.)
I was very lucky, I was at home when I felt the symptoms and my Wife rushed me to the Hospital Emergency Room that was only 5 minutes away. The ER Room Doctor said that I only had about 5-10 minutes from the first symptoms before I would have died without proper treatment.
This all happened at 7pm, I was due to fly from MD to FL on business trip at 7 AM the next morning. It wouldn't have been too good if the onset was later during the flight!
The project I on was had me flying from MD to CO and back every 4 weeks with these changes for the week in CO:
1) 2-3 hours = (2* 1-2) hours commuting from Hotel to Customer's Site and back & going through extremely rigorous security checks on entry,
2) 8 hours billable on-site, and
3) 4-5 hours Analyzing/Reviewing/Studying: Project Documentation, Trade Journals, OEM Upgrade Documentation, IT/Database/Development-related Web Sites/Blogs, E-mail Lists.
Thats 14-16 hours/day plus 2 hours from Home, 5.5-6 hours Flight Time, 2 hours from Airport to Hotel, 2 hours commuting from Hotel to Customer's Site and back on Monday and reverse all of that on Friday.
The pay was good, but not that good-- I quit soon after the Heart Attack and only took Consulting jobs that totalled 40-43 hours/week maximum, with minimal commuting time.
PS
On my previous project the PM Designed an entire system, but one of the key features that was available on the chosen DB software on other platforms was not available on the platform we had.
As the Team's Database Expert, I got to tell the Customer about the problem that left no-way-forward with the specified and purchased H/W, OS, & DB S/W.
About 3-5 days after that fateful meeting, the PM that designed the system commited Suicide!
