The company I work for recently published a policy forbidding blogging while at work. From first glance this looks like a natural and normal thing – why should they provide resources to enable people to blog. Blog from home on your own time and with your own resources. At second glance this is a little scary for the paranoid blogger. Read the rest of this entry »

I receive so many eWeek emails that it isn’t funny, and most of the time I have to just delete them because I don’t have time to even open them let alone read them. Recently however a headline What Is the Nature of an IT Worker? caught my eye. The article discusses, very briefly, a few of the common problems for IT workers and the things that cause those issues. For example, overworked, constant interruption, and a perception from others that they don’t understand the business. I can only speak definitively on my own experience, since I don’t want to repeat sentiment I’ve heard on the net, so here are my two cents.

Overworked

IT workers are the most consistently overworked individuals where I work. There are other groups of people who have projects or deadlines where they may work 50 hour weeks, but on average their numbers are much lower. I know of several individuals outside of IT who have claimed to work much more than they actually do, and I know people in IT who claim to work a lot more than they actually do. They are looking for the “sorry me” pitty that accompanies it, often to get out of doing something else. The cold numbers state that IT workers on average consistently work more than any other department. But not by much. So what is the real problem here? I have this posted on my name plate outside my cube:

I have infinite capacity to do more work so long as you don’t mind that my quality approaches zero. –Scott Adams (Get your daily dose: Dilbert: 2009 Day-to-Day Calendar (Dilbert) )

The real problem is that IT workers are not properly validated for their work. When validation comes it comes in the form of more work. The harder an IT worker works, the more tasks and projects are given to him, which up to a point is a great thing and validates his career, but after a certain point causes burnout and a crash. I was in two meetings this past week with groups of individuals who had a specific job function. One was for UNIX administrators and one was for something dealing with security. In both groups I described my activities and breadth of work and was asked who was helping me. “I am the only one here who does this,” was my answer, which is completely true, “and these are only one part of the many things that I do.” I realized that a few of the people on the line had less work to do than I did, had help or a backup for that work, and that for all of them that single focus area was all they were expected to do. This is what I get for being good at the many things I do, and is also pretty much the only thing that validates me at work. That is the problem.

I called a co-worker at another office location this week as well and gave him a problem that I was having with something under his jurisdiction and he thanked me saying something to the effect that he was glad I called him and gave him a challenge. He was feeling like he needed a reason to be there for that day. In effect I validated him by giving him that task. Crazy! Yes, we IT workers are validated when you overwork us, which is probably why you do, but if that is the only thing you do then we will turn into the type of people who take baseball bats to computer equipment. Hint: Money is always good. Occasional comp time when projects are at a low point is also good. Emails to the entire organization about the next problem (keep reading) are also well received and is cheap.

Constant Interruption

IT workers are unique in this, and I don’t mean that no one else gets interrupted, but there is no other group who get less respect than IT. Just yesterday I was having a training meeting with the IT group to bring everyone else up to speed on an encryption project. Half the group got pulled away for “more important things” because apparently IT things aren’t important. While in the hour long meeting I was twice interrupted by an engineer who just had to pop in and have a question answered right that second. The non-work related questions also need to be taken outside of work hours. Just because I can fix your home computer does not mean that I want to, or that I want to hear about it and give you free advice.

I am also constantly doing projects – long term ones that can require a good 15 minutes of focus before becoming efficient. With the cube world being as it is I am constantly interrupted by a person walking up to my cube and stomping or scuffing his feet right at the end to announce his presence. Pretending to not hear the stomping and scuffing does not work. The questions are as often non-work related as they are work related, and rarely are they things that I will help them with immediately anyway. Between Wednesday and Thursday I was interrupted by one individual four times for a petty problem a computer illiterate contractor was having while trying to get on our contractor VLAN. That probably set me back an hour between those two days, and it is nothing that I should be doing – we have a help desk for that sort of thing, but they were out running about doing their jobs, so I got bugged. I won’t even mention the phone calls, or the constant meetings about having other meetings. You know what I’m talking about.

Perception from others as not knowing the business

This one gets IT people frequently although it is probably not as widely understood by those outside the industry. I saw it mentioned in the eWeek article which is why I mention it. IT people, especially ones that graduated with Computer Science degrees, often get artificially devalued for not understanding the business reasons for doing something. The thing is, it is often the exact opposite problem. IT people are forced to live to strict standards in large business IT and to provide a balance between many different forces. We live by Sarbanes-Oxley rules, legal rules, security standards, business needs, efficiency requirements, deadlines, budgets, equipment and software limitations, and quality standards just to name a few. IT people know better than most about the real reasons for doing things the way they are done. It is the non-IT worker who just ran out of hard drive space who wants to run to staples to buy another hard drive for $150 to fix our storage problems. They are the ones that don’t understand the business reasons for doing things. (Hint for those of you not in IT, a SAN is frequently used for anything mission critical, and it costs way more than $150.)

I speak from a biased standpoint since both of my degrees are Business degrees. I felt that it would be a waste of my time and money to focus solely on computer classes when I can just open a book up and figure something out. IT comes naturally to me. The Business is where IT really provides its worth. I do not have contempt for my CS brothers even if they tend to have contempt for me. I do believe that more IT workers should be business trained than CS trained, but most IT workers with Business or Science degrees who work in any decent size business environment figure out the business quickly, and usually know more about that business than most any one else there.

This will probably end up being a typical day in the office story for most of you, but I just need to let it out a little. If you didn’t read my posts about “One Project” the summary is that I was working on just one project last week at work because it was something critical that had to be done and because my boss’s boss told me to. I was told to concentrate on fixing that problem while all my other projects would have to be put on hold and be adjusted to accommodate it. I fixed the problem and returned to work this week to find out that I have no such luck. I had to complete not only last week’s projects but this week’s as well, oh and a new project that came up during the week while I was concentrating on that single task. So I have been putting in a good deal of unpaid overtime which is why posts here have slowed. In spite of my efforts, not everything that had to get done this week will be completed. On top of all this work I’m going to get a nice big red mark on my performance record that will haunt me for the rest of the fiscal year. They sure know how to motivate people.

My project is actually resurrecting an old SGI Fuel system whose motherboard and hard drive simultaneously died. There were no backups of the system, and it is a testament to the SGI hardware that this system lasted 6 years with 24/7 operation. This system is critical to production as it programs multi-million dollar machines. There is an upgrade to the software package available that will work on Windows, but the cost is somewhere in the six figure range. The system is also used for engineering work, and while this part hasn’t been production critical it has been an annoyance.

I managed to attend a telecom and send a bunch of emails back and forth today, so things are starting to get back to the grind. It has been a nice break though, and I wish that there could be more like that. I’ll have an SGI guy on-site tomorrow to replace the motherboard for a second time. It appears that the SCSI controller has gone bad because I am unable to load the engineering package on the system and it has been having some performance issues.

For at least a year I’ve been running around with multiple projects on my plate, all of which have deadlines that are either in the past or too soon to be completed properly. It is an understatement to say that we are understaffed. If we aren’t understaffed then we’ve just got too many people going in irrelevant directions. I may be one of them. Today, for the first time in what feels like a year I got a clear concise directive from the director of technology at my site to drop everything I was doing and work on a single project that was causing production downtime. I sent an email out to cancel my appointments for the rest of the day and tomorrow, knowing that the project would take at least a second full day, and went and focused on that one singular project. Email was turned off, the blackberry was put aside, and I just worked. It was refreshing.

I know I’m not the only person who has a job like this – I always have things on my plate and there is rarely anyone willing to step up and tell me that their project has to displace all others. Instead they just tell me that I “might” have to work some overtime in order to get everything done that I need to do. Like I don’t do that already. If an extra few hours of work every week would get my job done then it would have been done a long time ago.

I’m not complaining, just saying that a change in pace is nice every once in a while. I wish I’d been home with more that 20 minutes with my kids before their bedtime. I wish I had more time to spend with my wife. I wish for one day every week or two that I could spend a regular 9 hour day working on a single project without any interruptions. That would be great.