Fuckers need to try cleaning chemical reactors.
The two activities you mention seem pretty unrelated.
I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
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Re: I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
#12Unless you are passionate about programming you are never going to enjoy programming. I have been programming for the past 19 years. I am a fanatic programmer. I have to code every day (learn new frameworks, try out different algorithms, come up with problems and write code which solves those problems, optimize your earlier code, redesign or rearchitect, try out code project samples etc). Again you will really enjoy…
I can understand that. But really, truly braindead code hurts. There's interesting sifting and recombination of details. Then, there's such wrangling of concepts which is just drudgery!
Re: I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
#13I have met very few IT workers that I consider engineers. Most consider it their job and have the same attitudes as others who have a job.
Re: I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
#14I'll admit that I am very unhappy with my current job.
Part of this is whining, I know, but just hear me out.
One major, major, major problem with my job is that I work for a small company, and am the only person here that knows tech at all.
This was really great for me at the beginning. I am very proficient in BSD and Linux, so everything (mailserver, file server, FTPs, VPN, firewall, etc.) was built on one the two. I've had the opportunity to work on some really fun projects. One of my favorites was building access points out of soekris boards and ubiquiti wireless cards (this was before ubiquiti started offering their own, vastly superior, vastly cheaper solutions).
I'm also pretty proficient at python and perl. Because of this, I've had the opportunity to build some really fun in-house stuff that people have loved. I built us a contact management system on python, and I've built countless extraction tools (grrr...text files) on perl. Currently, I'm working on a content management system for our marketing department. This is all really fun and great, but remember how I said I'm the only person here?
My typical day involves arriving here at 8:00 (or so, my commute is an hour long), then sitting in front of my monitors for about 9 hours, until 5:00 rolls around.
During the day I CANNOT get anything done. I'll end up reading HN, or working on my own website. (errr..this is inaccurate. What I mean is that I don't get any of what I consider real work done. Just managing the little problems that the users have)
Why is this?
Well, a major part of it is the almost constant flow of interruptions from people who's computers are "broken" (I am "the I.T. guy" [a title that I despise], so every problem from a phone cord with a loose connection to a user that has pressed the insert button on their keyboard and now how a "broken email" gets handled by me). I'm sure that every coder here can relate to the frustration of getting halfway into a problem, then being rattled out of it by something like somebody not being able to figure out a numlock key and why, after they press it, their "numbers don't work". The overwhelming majority of code I have written has been done from the comfort of a barstool sitting at a local bar that I like. For some reason, I can get more work done there, or sitting in my backyard in a camping chair in my pajamas playing fetch with my dog, than I could ever even DREAM of getting done while actually sitting where I am now, at my desk.
But that is just one part.
Another part is that I am the the only person here who has even a basic understanding of computer systems. Remember the wireless network that I mentioned earlier? Here is how it works. It lives on a physically separate switch from the rest of the network. On this network lives an openBSD machine running openVPN. If a client on the wireless network wants to connect to anything on the "other side" of the openBSD machine (which has three interfaces, one of them on the private lan, another on the wireless lan, and another virtual interface that is a VPN tunnel between the two) it has to authenticate with openVPN.
Pretty cool, huh? (maybe not, but I think so).
Nobody here understands this. Is this narcissistic whining? OMG THEY DON'T APPRECIATE ME! Yes. Yes, it probably is, but it is difficult to get motivated to do anything when there is no payoff of "good job" from the boss. (judge if you would like). The only thing that gets noticed is that things aren't broken. Holy hell though, when they are...
There was one time. One of our T1s went down (there are two, one of them for our private LAN, another for the internet lounge that we offer to our customers). My solution to this was to take an OpenBSD machine that I had sitting in my office, put it on both networks, and make it act like a gateway for our private lan so that we could route outbound traffic through it, and out the working T1.
This wasn't a problem, but it took about an hour (at first I was going to try and do it without NAT, the problem was getting the router on the public LAN to route traffic destined for our private subnet back to my new gateway).
Nearly the entire hour was spent in front of a terminal in our server room with my boss standing over my shoulder going "what are you doing? Why isn't this working yet? Blhack, we REALLY need this to work RIGHT NOW! I don't think this is going to work. We really need to think about another way to fix it, can't we just use the wireless (the public LAN has a wireless network available, I hope I do not have to explain why this would not work). Can't you just try it this way? (this person does not even have a basic understanding of routing, or what it is), have you tried rebooting it. Here, I'm going to reboot it. Just unplug it and let it sit for a while!"
sigh
I apologize for the stupid senseless whining here, guys, work can just suck sometimes when you're the only one here, ya know? Gets kinda lonely :(
Thank the gods for HN.
Re: I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
#15It's a living-to-work vs working-to-live question, really. As it turns out, far more people choose to compartmentalize their work-life into an annoying, necessary evil than to dial back their standard of living while dramatically increasing their work responsibilities. And this is true of more than just programmers. I've heard similar from accountants, lawyers, cooks, bank reps -- basically everyone I've ever worked…
I think small businesses get about the sweetest retirement packages in the United States which do not involve backstopping by the taxpayers of California. With the SEP plan (one of a few options) you can sock up to, essentially, $5k + 25% of salary (capped at a very generous number) in a tax advantaged retirement account. It is like the IRAs available to regular wage employees, except superior in just about every way. (You lose out on employer match, you gain on sickening tax efficiency.)
Another fun option, especially for young entrepreneurs, is the Roth IRA, which is such a good deal it ought to be illegal. Pay taxes now at your low "I do not make much money rate". Watch investments compound for a few decades. Then it is yours, tax free, allowing you to avoid the significantly higher rate you'll be facing when you're significantly wealthier, and also letting you do some fun tax structuring if you also have taxable investments and/or income during retirement.
If you start saving young, $1 put in a Roth IRA today buys you $1 in tax-free income a year, for perpetuity, starting at retirement.
Re: I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
#16I'll admit that I am very unhappy with my current job. Part of this is whining, I know, but just hear me out. One major, major, major problem with my job is that I work for a small company, and am the only person here that knows tech at all. This was really great for me at the beginning. I am very proficient in BSD and Linux, so everything (mailserver, file server, FTPs, VPN, firewall, etc.) was built on one the two.…
Working at a small company is obviously very different from working at a large institution. Both have their pros and cons and I think that time spent at each is invaluable experience.
Who knows, maybe you've gotten all you can from this gig and are ready to work at a big company. The change in culture might be just what you need now.
Re: I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
#17I can't seem to link to an individual comment, so I'm just going to repost it here. It's by Katie Lucas. Begin Quote:
The problem with IT, generally, is lack of respect. Because it's something that looks easy and looks like something anyone could do, people don't respect experience and talent.
For some reason this just doesn't work in other fields. While everyone feels they can put a sticking plaster on a cut, they go to a doctor for more serious stuff. Any fool can build a garden wall, but if they want a tower block one hires an architect and a construction company and lets them do decisions.
Whereas, it's quite common in IT for micromanagers to overrule the professionals.
It doesn't happen in building. Managers simply aren't allowed to say things like "Oh, I don't think we should RSJs in those load bearing walls". If the architect says they're needed, then they go in. We also don't hire doctors by picking the tools they'll use. When you want a doctor to take out an appendix, you want a qualified general surgeon. You don't ask them whether they prefer a #3 or a #4 handle on their scalpels.
And yet it's pretty common to see projects which have picked a technology first ("Oh we're going to use J2EE for this") and THEN hire the team around that ("Wanted, tech arch, 5 years exp with J2EE, C , C++, JAVA, Perforce, Apache, Perl, Python.") and only at that point produce the spec. And then if the job isn't one the technology is suited for, that ends up being the developers fault and they're the ones who work overtime to put that square peg in the round hole.
It's scarcely surprising that a) almost nothing works properly, b) there's constant chaos and that therefore c) almost no-one finds their work rewarding in ways other than money.
I freely admit that a lot of my time, I feel like some sort of thief. I sit in projects which are doomed. They're more doomed than a plane that's lost both wings and is on fire. I see the people around the project running about setting more of it on fire as it hurtles towards the ocean and removing more control surfaces and making it worse. And I watch developers switch in and out of seats as we trail wreckage and smoke down. And it's always been like this. The project is a free-fall disaster before I join and after I leave and there's just nothing, nothing, nothing I can do to rescue it at that point in time. And yet I'm being paid to be there.
And I feel bad about that. I feel that I ought to be being paid to achieve something. But usually I'm just being paid to sit in a seat in a vehicle performing a ballistic trajectory straight into its crash site. And even if I quit then the next thing will be the same and whoever takes my place in this seat will be in the same situation.
And this is not how I wanted to work. I wanted to build things that people wanted. Not turn up at an aircrash and fill a seat in it for a while. And while it's financial fulfilling, it's not very emotionally fulfilling.
Most bridges don't fall down. Most patients don't die. Most IT projects are a failure in one way or another. It's like being a surgeon back in the days before anaesthetics or antibiotics. Most of our patients die... and that's got to be bad for morale.
And I can't help but think that this really has its roots in the fact that people think software is simple enough that they can exercise control over it at a level they ought not to be and that they also don't want to pay what it actually costs. Architects generally don't compete on price and you don't get to tell architects that their idea of how strong structural steel is is an underestimate you can feel you can ignore in this project. But people time and time and time again pick the cheapest option for software, design it like they'd design a tin shack and then act surprised when the end results turns out to be flimsy tin shack instead of a tower block. Katie Lucas Thursday, June 25, 2009
Re: I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
#18I was having a conversation with my mom the other day, and she mentioned how the software her company bought wasn't as good as the old off-the-shelf stuff and how all those "Computer People" in the IT building should get off their lazy asses and fix it.
This, gentle(men|women), is why I will never work outside of tech
Re: I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
#19Maybe some of those IT workers are unhappy with their life rather than with their job. Or their job is not great enough to compensate for the rest of their life. Or their identity/self-esteem/life is wrapped up too much in their job...
Re: I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs
#20I used to read the Joel On Software forums. The awful life of an IT drone was a common theme, it would show up about twice a week. The sad thing is that I recognize some of the posters' names and it's the same people who were posting the same complaints 6 years ago. If you're still complaining about your career after six years, the problem is you, not your job.
I would rather not draw that crowd over here, or have their stories reposted, or even links to that forum. That sort of negativity is boring at best and poisonous at worst.