Why are we so underappreciated?

Clarifications

I totally understand where your coming from, at my place, they have added additional titles to my job function.
But when i asked about being compensated for the additional roles (since they layed the others off) they tell me, oh thats what IT does. (Im thinking, ok, now im citrix, project manager, email, helpdesk, MS server, windows 7, office, linux, cisco, etc Admin, oh and i forgot, you personal home IT person too when you network and pc have issues), in my case there is no overtime of weekend pay, im just expected to work all hours with no compensation. (We even have to fill out a daily time sheet showing what we worked on (i have yet to work less than 40 hours a week)
I agree, we are expected to know all technologies yet no compensation. And other jobs that have there own caveats, appear to be better compensated for a 9 to 5 job
but when you mention the inappropriate tone used when speaking toyou, you should let them know that you disagree with that. I had to do that a few time and actually got HR involved. In all cases i ensured there were witnesses to what occured.
One of my old coworkers told me there was an "IT union" movement in the late 1990s, to protect the IT workers from overtime abuse and layoff abuse.

Will be interesting to read other comments on this issue.

All this technology just works by effen magic. There's nothing to it, anyone can do it!
Anecdotal example; (there are so many)
VP of a major US bank decides that wireless is the way to go for his home connectivity requirements. Purchases a WAP, unplugs his PC from his Cable modem and plugs in the WAP. Shockingly nothing works! After spending way too much time telling me his tale of woe he expects me to drive an hour to his house on Saturday to take a look at it, unpaid of course. So, I ask him if he cloned his MAC address, turned on DHCP, setup security on the WAP, and has a wireless card in his PC. He drools on his desk calendar and says that he doesn't need to know any of that stuff, it's just supposed to work. You know, it's magic!
In the US the educational and retail systems encourage this sort of ignorance.

I get where both of you are coming from. Work late, no overtime and then those side progects like setting up VPN's from the office to an executive's home. You show up at the guys house and you can't even concentrate because his home is the size of the US capitol building. Come on guy, you can't afford to pay me overtime for coming out here on a weekend?

We are intelligent and have formidable skill sets and technical ability. We have to be organized, document servers, switches, firewalls, vpns, support contracts, licenses and maintain 24/7 availability, compliance with banks and outside vendors. All of this is accomplished with shrinking budgets, staff cuts and higher expectations. No executive assistant can do all this. If they could, they would expect more money. But like Mark says, because our role is IT, we are supposed to handle increasing loads but not be compensated for it.

At least I genuinely enjoy the technical aspect and am always learning which not everyone can say. It's the compensation and all the b*llshit that gets to me.

Well you are completely Unimportant till things stop working.

Then when the Brown Stuff Hits the Fan it's your Fault and what the Hell are you sitting on your AR$E for when you should be working to make it work again?

Unless you Edumicate the Executives as to what IT Actually Does and it's Limits you will continue to get crap like this every day and it will get worse when something like the current Blackberry Failure is going on.

I personally used to get crap like that all of the time you would walk around telling every Boy and their Dog that you where about to pull the E Mail Server and be ignored but the moment that the E Mail Server got yanked you had everyone complaining that their E Mail was no longer working and to allow the company to not go down the gurgler and loose everything [b]NOW[/b] you had to get the E Mail back up and running, like [b]YESTERDAY[/b] before it failed.

I just got used to being ignored and did what I liked when I wanted to and they figured out very quickly they they had to live with the Outages that I caused to fix the Computers before they failed by themselves and took hours/days/weeks to fix. ;)

Of course if you are bearing the Brunt of the Blackberry issue at the moment telling people the real explanation of Executive Surinamese like CEO = Chief Embezzlement Officer, CFO = Chief Fraud Officer and so on will help no end and then you can inform them to thank their lucky stars that they are not currently part of [b]"The Cloud"[/b] where they currently own the Hardware and can control how it works instead of being stuffed on a 10 Year Old Server which is about to fail and they have no control over who gets their Data.

They tend to stop complaining when they realize that the [b]"Cloud"[/b] has bigger problems than they could ever imagine and that if they are involved with [b]"The Cloud"[/b] they are completely Stuffed when it goes wrong. :^0

The reality however is that the Current Blackberry issue is on the RIM [b]"Blackberry Cloud"[/b] so you should be telling this to these people who complain that you are unnecessary and completely worthless and a waste of company funds this. ;)

Cool

Those morons someone hired into the IT department who couldn't manage their way out of a wet paper bag, yet they just cruise through their days with impunity. (Look for them in Q&A or support forums anywhere. It scares me when I know more than they do. Really.)

This doesn't make it any easier for professionals who, you know, actually do their jobs well.

If I ever had the pleasure to work with folks like you, every day would be SysAdmin appreciation day for me.

and somehow, someday, some time, someone will yell at you why you forcing me to choose either one, but not both. and someone follow your advice, he/she will yell at you said that is not his/her decision, but you. when you try to explain, he/she will say he too busy to explain to you further, leaving you shock by alone.

i totally agree to you especially these 'someone' asking you to go to their house for their own personal stuff, and what made me shock is, some time directly from their wife/husband or even children. hello!!

Everyone is under appreciated. People with real relevant IT skils are still very employable. That is why an earlier answer mentioned all the morons who populate IT departments - that's all they could find!

If you are good then move on. Find another job or go contracting. I bet most pay rise offers still happen as you put in your resignation letter when they realise that it is gonna cost a whole lot more when you are gone. A month or so later you may even get offers to help them recover at which point your fees will be astronomical (has happened to me before).

If you were not missed then you were not that valuable in your old job anyway so now in your new one you have the opportunity to become so.

As the old proverb goes "you don't know what you have got until it is gone"

I don't think frustration is unique to IT. But, if you plan on staying in IT and you're compentent, get used to frustration...
Get used to being ignored until something breaks...
Get used to working on personal tech for some muckity muck...
Get used to being called in on weekends to plug in a power cord someone yanked...
Get used to "making things work"...
Get used to cleaning up other people's technology messes...
Get used to getting a budget for a Yugo and having them expect the USS Enterprise...
Never do anything half-assed, fix things when they break, and keep a positive attitude - you're not alone.

Hi,

I really dont care what job your in, theres never any reason to talk to a worker in a nasty tone, use profanity, or talk down to them. Unfortunitly with HR in companys these days, they really dont defend the worker, so t execs get away with it. Me personally, (i may make alot of people unhappy at that moment) but if anyone comes to me with a hot head and starts being loud with me and especially if profanities start being used. I tell them to come back later when they cool down, if there calling me ill give them 3 warnings, then ill hang up.
Then when im asked why i do that, I tell them, my job does not include being verbally abused. (that ususally ends that issue pretty fast. I have found most people do respect me for doing that, and the really respect me because i never show fustration, and nover user profanities. I always come to work with a smile, try to help everyone out (even if i really dont want to and think their issue is a waste of time). I try to remenber that , not eveyone know what i know, and i dont know everything either, so one day they may be the one helping me with somthing.

I don't care what type of day you're having, always conduct yourself as a professional.

"I don't care what type of day you're having, always conduct yourself as a professional. "

No, if people are being abusive they need to be prosecuted. I dream of the days when it was acceptable for disputes to be ended with duals, but alas. A lot of people, especially the stupid ones, are addicted to emotions and need to get their fix.

However I find if someone is hot tempered most the time it really has nothing to do with me or the tech.

If they are belgerent to make themselve feel more powerful. I remind them they can always go back to paper and pencil, I can get another job anyime I want, and they could hire their nose picking nephew to teach them how to use gmail.

THere are plenty of reasons, but I will give you a quick list

a) lack of professional designation. When I graduated from college, my professor told me that most people have Fought against this for years, because they are afraid of the "liabitlity" (lawsuits for screwups). Engineers are paid more, because they have the professional designation, and have INSURANCE to cover liabilities and there are standards....which brings me to ....b)

b) lack of standards. Any yahooo can start tapping on a PC keyboard and eventually get it working, and then call themselves a IT Professional. The industry has thousads upon thousands of these individuals, all competing for the same jobs. Employers for the most part hire the least expensive, not understanding the consequences when their system has grown over time and suddenly it is ready to become Kracatoa! I've made an entire career cleaning up the messes of others, some of whom were PhD and Master degree grads, who got into this because it was "fun"

c) Lack of Self Promotion. IT people for the mostpart are WONKS, and shy away from self promotion and HAVE NO CLUE HOW TO EFFECTIVELY EXPLAIN WHAT THE H*** IT IS THEY ACTUALLY DO. Therefore no one UNDERSTANDS if it IS important or not. Furthermore....90% of you will "sigh" when confronted with a problem, then sit down at a keyboard in front of a user and then with lightning speed, play the keyboard like a jazz pianist fixing the problem as if it were simple magic!

d) most people never know how, or are willing to say NO!!!! I spent 10 years telling my brother to SAY NO NO NO to his managers, who had NO PROBLEM assigning unrelistic projects. Of course they did not know that he was spending the evenings and weekends at work for the mostpart, or logging in from home on the weekends to get the work done.

Many times if they KNEW...they would simply assume that he DID NOT UNDERSTAND what he was doing and thus was INNEFICIENT!!!! Having been at the executinve level for years, I can assure you that when you are not able (ligitimately) to get projects down because they are simply not possible for your resources, IT people are simply seen as working too slow.

e) Lack of Professionalism. Which is tied to all the above. There are far too many IT people who ruin it for the rest of us. They are rude to people, act like nerds in highschool and thus are treated as such. Through the years, when I took over new IT departments, the first thing I did was enforce a dress code...ie. dress shirt and tie. (of course this all depends on the local environment but you need to look professional if you expect to BE TREATED professional) In addition, I taught them how to answer phones, talk to users, managers, how to explain things, and the need for DOCUMENTATION!!!!!

Anyway, these are my observations from 15 years in the biz, and I would love to hear what you all think of my observations, and if you think that perhaps you might have unwittingly been doing some of the above.

There have been studies done anonymously that find people who make more money do less work than the people they manage. That is what management is. America is business oriented. They don't care who does the work as long as business is good. It's backwards and short sighted but this mentality did make many people rich.

We need to shift back to caring about workers and how things are made. Quality products made by well paid people. Respect for IT is tough to ask for when the execs don't even respect the other people upon who their business depends.

Most of the time the users don't know what goes on and what your job takes. They don't need to know either. And it's not your job to have a go at them. Sure, if they're being rude then try to turn that around in an assertive manner, but if there's a larger issue then it's something your manager should sort out!

Lots of the time, it does depend on user education, other times, you will be a hero if you can fix something that broke during the previous IT guys watch.

I find assuring users that they may call you if they have a problem can help a lot. Make you seems like less of a problem and more of a solution.