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Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

glench.com

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Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#101

Post by sleepysysadmin »

accnumnplus1 wrote: post #21
sleepysysadmin wrote: post #9

There is a severe workplace burnout problem in IT(especially MSPs); which when not addressed grows into bigger mental health issues and even literal sicknesses. There just isn't enough skilled IT people. The industry is immature and is bottom heavy. The top performers and seniors, are then overwhelmed with work and the business is unable to hire more senior people to reduce workload. Then the business keeps growing a…

"There just isn't enough skilled IT people." Does that reconcile with ageism?

Certainly an interesting point.

In r/sysadmin there's a tongue in cheek comment of 'quitting IT to become a goat farmer'

I actually personally place it really at 1 place. https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio...

The Ontario government(where I live) passed laws before the Y2K hoax removing:

The right not to be forced to work 20 hour days. The right not to be called back into work 2 hours after a 20 hour day. The right to get 2 days off per week, they force you to work 7 days a week. The right to a lunch or breaks. The right to be paid overtime pay if you work alot.

I've had 3 employers now that required me to work ~12-18 hour days everyday, no lunch, no breaks. At least I did get overtime; but I'd have to justify the overtime bigtime.

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#102

Post by hindsightbias »

sesteel wrote: post #29
segmondy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there really is a severe workplace burnout problem in IT, but perhaps that's not the problem. There're ton of companies with burnout problems and worse turnover rates than IT. I personally believe that the issue we are seeing today is that most people don't know how to manager stress, emotion & energy. Most people are leading a very reactive life and constantly been pulled and pushed in all directions by "lif…

Detaching emotion from the outcome is key. I've heard it described as professional distance or professional objectivity and it is a key component of maturity. It is more prevalent in other industries, but tech has grown so fast that we have a serious mentoring problem. There isn't enough good mentors, people with decades of experience, to go around. I grew up in part of the industry where people had been working for…

> 3 decades ago

IT used to be a comparatively stable environment if you were supporting servers or infrastructure.

How do you mentor someone in environments where chasing the latest fad every year is the norm?

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#103

Post by Glench »

ben7799 wrote: post #90

Maybe too many people are trying to find all their meaning in life through their work. It's not a recipe for success for most people, I think the media plays it up a bit too much. They're only covering the success stories in terms of people who are single minded and who make their work everything. The author of the article doesn't mention any relationships or other interests in life, no passion for anything but work.…

This is a good point. Our culture places a lot of emphasis on work. And I think there's something important there — that if we're going to spend most of our time doing something (work), it should be something we enjoy, find meaningful, and helps others. But if we lose perspective and forget the other things in life we'll surely become unhappy.

Since leaving tech my life has also become more balanced in other areas of life such as relationships and physical health, which I didn't mention in the article. Thanks for pointing that out!

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#104

Post by crankylinuxuser »

jaziek wrote: post #95
mikepurvis wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a Windows thing? I'd investigate an unknown system starting with commands like `systemctl status`, `lspci`, `lsusb`, `apt policy`, `dpkg -l`, and `top`.

It's a cisco thing.

Yep.

When I did a lot more router work (Cisco, Juniper, Ciena, Broke-aid!), my previous employer forked RANCID and wrote extensions for every router. From there, we then sent all the configs to a SVN server every hour. None of the fork was upstreamed, since it also had a ton of tie-ins to other inhouse infra.

The idea was that we had hourly backups of every router. And if bad happened, we could run RANCID in reverse and populate the configs in SVN to the router.

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#105

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

hobs wrote: post #54
segmondy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there really is a severe workplace burnout problem in IT, but perhaps that's not the problem. There're ton of companies with burnout problems and worse turnover rates than IT. I personally believe that the issue we are seeing today is that most people don't know how to manager stress, emotion & energy. Most people are leading a very reactive life and constantly been pulled and pushed in all directions by "lif…

Sounds like moralizing claptrap to be honest. I have worked at multiple companies with the churn'n'burn mindset, and while some handle the stress better than others, the only thing that handling the stress will get you is more work and stress. Are there people out there who are taking the world too personally? Yeah, definitely. When I see people weeping in a bathroom, not once, but so many times I dont even notice it…

We have one stall at work that's called "the crying box". It's got a box of extra box tissues, it's a little bigger than most (handicapped), and we keep an old Game Boy with Tetris hidden behind the soap dispenser.

Pretty much everyone disappears in their for about 30 minutes once a week. And this is the men's restroom by the way. Not sure how the ladies deal with things.

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#106

Post by filozof900 »

ben7799 wrote: post #90

Maybe too many people are trying to find all their meaning in life through their work. It's not a recipe for success for most people, I think the media plays it up a bit too much. They're only covering the success stories in terms of people who are single minded and who make their work everything. The author of the article doesn't mention any relationships or other interests in life, no passion for anything but work.…

I see it the same way, that's a real problem. People often don't do anything apart from work, also don't feel like the belong anywhere. Corporate life make it even worse.

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#107

Post by corneliusphi1 »

jaziek wrote: post #95
mikepurvis wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a Windows thing? I'd investigate an unknown system starting with commands like `systemctl status`, `lspci`, `lsusb`, `apt policy`, `dpkg -l`, and `top`.

It's a cisco thing.

I was gonna say that that sounded like a really bad interview question... until I googled CCNA and saw that it was a cisco certification. That does sound pretty bad

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#108

Post by ratling »

lilactown wrote: post #73
ratling wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Remaining outcome agnostic." i.e. I'll be fine no matter what happens and no matter your emotional state. Also called "Keeping frame." Not letting other people's shit tests affect you. Amusingly, these are red pill concepts. I don't follow that belief system (many of it's proponents range between pathetic to downright unhinged) but I did read about it. There were some corn kernels of truth worth picking out of the t…

TRP has done a great job of appropriating decent life advice and using it to make their misogynistic message more palatable. They're not the first group, nor the last, to employ this technique. The ideas can be found in various philosophy and culture including Stoicism and eastern philosophy. "Shit tests," though, that's just the misogyny. Skip the turd, go read philosophy.

I probably missed all that because the one philosophy teacher I had was an obnoxious douche.

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#109

Post by ergothus »

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #9

There is a severe workplace burnout problem in IT(especially MSPs); which when not addressed grows into bigger mental health issues and even literal sicknesses. There just isn't enough skilled IT people. The industry is immature and is bottom heavy. The top performers and seniors, are then overwhelmed with work and the business is unable to hire more senior people to reduce workload. Then the business keeps growing a…

> The industry is immature and is bottom heavy.

I'm not entirely sure what "bottom" you refer to here. From what I see, there's a misalignment: Lots of senior people lose time doing work that doesn't require senior people, because there aren't enough non-senior people available to do that work. The solution to this is seen as hiring more senior people, which fails, because while there are lots of junior people, no one is making them into senior people. This results in very little hiring at all, and what hiring there is is focused on shuffling senior people between companies that does little to address the problems.

Then you end up with a lot of people with "senior" titles, but their actual seniority of experience varies wildly. Lots of talented people fall to the wayside because the primary way of becoming "senior" (in terms of capability) is giving you time and seeing if you draw all the correct conclusions and lessons by yourself (which also requires the work you get to help teach you those lessons).

So the industry (in terms of people experience) is bottom-heavy in the work pool. Places that can afford it are top heavy in talent+experience, and everyone else is bottom-heavy in low experience, and neither type of place is doing anything to really address their problems long-term.

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#110

Post by wgloucester »

At first I was hesitant to read this, as it sounded like the musings of yet another software engineer who, upon attaining career success and financial security, starts to become restless and chase vague goals like "happiness" because now they're too successful and there's nothing more for them to work towards. It's one of those problems you have to be extremely fortunate to have, and I can't relate to it at this point in my life. Actually reading to the end, though, it sounds as though what he was really seeking was more along the lines of spiritual fulfillment - and it sounds like he found it, through a series of inquiries and experiments that don't necessarily align with what society tells us we're supposed to find meaning in. Even for people not experiencing the particular problem of existential ennui plaguing the socio-economically privileged, I think this article has useful things to say about how to figure out what to do with your life - especially if financial security is a non-issue, whether because it's virtually guaranteed or because it's extremely improbable no matter what path you choose.
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