Discussion on:

Psychological Toll in IT

I work at a mid-sized company ($100M, 450 - 500 people) and we have a small IT department (4 people). I'm a developer but also have to deal with normal helpdesk issues as well. All of us are getting incredibly burnt out because all we ever hear all day is people's issues and their complaining. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to help mitigate that psychological effect? Maybe someone has dealt with that and overcame it?

i.e. people's problems, are what we are here to work on. Even development work is to resolve people's problems. What I personally do to avoid burnout is drink lots of tea. Something a former manager introduced, and which seems to work fairly well in organizing people's problems, is an on-line problem manager hight Schooldude IT Management (www.schooldude.com); this keeps a list of problems (euphemistically called Incidents) with space for notes, status indicators, hours expended, etc. There are probably other similar tools, but I do not know their names. It calms users slightly to know that their problem has a number and is being worked on, and the programmer or other professional can look at his list of Incidents every morning and see which he fancies working on today.

If you're working support there is not a lot you can do during the day to mitigate the effects of dealing with issues and problems all day. One option if you have time is to rotate people out to deal with other issues - does the team do rebuilds, application installs, training, documentation, etc? To be honest I've found it's more down to how you handle it outside of work to relax and refresh for the next day. Some people are cut out for support and some will never be able to handle dealing with the issues and complaints - just depends on if you're cut out for a career in support.

If it's any consolation I've been doing it for almost 17 years now and haven't had a breakdown (yet). Personally I deal with it by studying (anything that takes my fancy, not always IT related), reading, TV, games, friends, family, and the occasional scream at the more demanding clients (but I work for a very understanding boss - the last isn't necessarily recommended if you want to keep the job). Those work for me because I'm an introvert at heart so after dealing with people all day I tend to want to do more solitary hobbies to give myself time to recouperate.