IT staffers on ragged edge of burnout and cynicism

Amen indeed

oh, and substance use != substance abuse

When users know the rules but complain about hardware that IT does not support anyway.

So staff calls helpdesk CRY CRY CRY this does not work CRY CRY CRY....

WELL MAM IT DOES NOT SUPPORT THAT PATICULAR HARDWARE.

STAFFER.... WELL I WANT SUPPORT FOR IT ANYWAY!

staffer calls head IT SUPPORT MANAGEMENT and cries and tries to get helpdesk to support it.

staffers are complete idiots.

Re: IT security staff?

Yep. The whole article can be summed up with this paragraph from it:

Management may also be the problem, not the IT worker. "As an experiment," Corman said, "explain to your children what it is you're trying to explain to your chief security officer. If they get it and he doesn't, then the problem isn't with you."

In my position, I work in tandem with an actual knowledgable CIO, and surprise surprise, we accomplish our goals and get the job done.

Any IT staff?

Made similar experiences. There are wrong perceptions in the industry that we get first class quality IT service by deploying ISO9001, project management for everything the techie is laying his hands on and ITIL . More often than not, ISO9001 turns out that we have now meticulously documented that we are doing $h1te, techies have the pleasure to write the project plans for the project managers and ISO20000/ITIL is an exercise in spending hours filling in BMC Remedy forms. And only after that the IT guy is allowed to do actual productive work, like training up the people from the outsourcing company who will take his job.

It is just that ISO9001 and in large parts ITIL was never meant to be a writing-essays-exercise, the idea was to create a knowledge database, a configuration management system, develop in-house technological excellence.

ITIL advocates very much a long term view of service strategy, design, transition, operation and - most importantly - continuous service improvement - and not pleasing the short term quarterly profit report to some stock exchange.

The PRINCE2 project management methodology lives by the rule "management by exception", which means skunk works, don't let anything interfere with the creativity of the IT guy.

History proves that companies that have taken a long term view and developed and kept their knowledge in-house succeeded most in long term: e.g. Toyota, and Google. This may also be the reason why we see somewhat an insourcing drive in recent years.

Re: IT Security is very important!

Would that the the same people in my company who roll out Adobe 6 with each new PC build and will not allow upgrades as it is 'against the Security regulations'?

I am assuming they have never heard of 'security patches' and 'free' but what do I know?

Re: stress, cynicism ?

Not so much mandatory attributes as a healthy survival mechanism. Show me anyone who has worked in IT for more than a year without learning the ability to externalise their frustration.

As for coping with PHB's? I shall continue with the military metaphor adopted by the article's author. I upgraded from frontline trooper to special forces. Now instead of being in the trenches with my superior officer, I'm about 400km away behind "enemy lines".

Re: Replaceable cogs

The sad truth is that people are (and have to be) replaceable to a degree. The pain is greater with people at the higher end of the scale, but in general, they don't see that pain represented anywhere specific. And they make the HUGE mistake to bring in contract labor to fill voids or complete projects.

So, if you can't beat em? Join em. That's why independent contracting will pay for my retirement at some point not too far down the road. May not be so straight forward on the other side of the pond, but us Yanks don't have too many hoops to hop through and all the extraneous, political bullshit stops being important.

Re: We should all strike

The Wally method, if you can't take a vacation because the PHB has you overbooked, take an in-office vacation. There's all sorts of make-busy and twiddle-fidget that needs to be caught up on anyway, and it can be explained that if the lighter tasks don't get done, the system will go down in flames eventually.

Just remember, the best way to destroy a PHB is to give them what they want, not what they need. Makes them look proactive and allows you to do a bit of Jeeze who'da thunk it while thinking over the previous decades when you were young and altruistic and had to fight tooth and nail to get things done right. Give in and let it rot, then explain afterwards how it should have been done, but now will cost more because of the heap of fail that's built up.

No you can't run that remote office VPN link to provision 5 voip phones, 5 computers and a printer using two Netgear routers you picked up at Office Depot and a DSL connection sqeezed out of Qwest's behind on the spur of the moment. It's sure been an interesting six months trying to keep it going hasn't it? But that's what thinking outside the box gets you. Now lets start thinking inside the box and build the connection using equipment and data services that real companies discovered and have been successfully using for a decade or more.

Re: Flawed method?

Indeed flawed. 124? Not enough. Let's not forget that unhappy people tend to let the world know more about it than happy people if the world asks "who's happy and who's not" (because they're biased towards it).

See paragraph "Whether data are collected through face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, or mail-in surveys, a high response rate is extremely important when results will be generalized to a larger population. The lower the response rate, the greater the sample bias. Fowler (1984), for example, warned that data from mail-in surveys with return rates of "20 or 30 percent, which are not uncommon for mail surveys that are not followed up effectively, usually look nothing at all like the sampled populations" (Fowler, 1984, p. 49). This is because "people who have a particular interest in the subject matter or the research itself are more likely to return mail questionnaires than those who are less interested" (p. 49). " (from http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/fact_sample.html ).

Re: us stressed?

...and I like the bonus game. You know the one -- where, as a member of the company stock option plan, you see the reports and know things are doing great (as in: BEST YEAR EVER), and then your PHB comes to you and tells you how it was a "bad year" last year, and so no bonus for _you_. Then he proceeds to drive off in a new Lexus SUV he paid for with cash during what used to be bonus week.

My revenge is subtle and it is sweet. Every day, arrive at work ten minutes after PHB, with an oil can. Every day, there is a spreading slick of oil/brake fluid/transmission fluid/coolant under said new Lexus. What? Moi? I know nothing of this. Possibly you need to take it to the shop again.