I Keep Telling People IT is Hell

Four of the Top 10 Worst Jobs in the World are IT Jobs

I have worked in IT, or IM as they now prefer to label it, for 35 years. I started when a computer the size of a bedroom could only do one thing at a time and you had to feed in a punched card deck about two foot long to tell it what you wanted it to do.

This was back when computers did not have a screen, the input data was spooled in from reels of punched paper tape (shown at right), and the results produced (i.e., the output) spewed out as hundreds or thousands of fanfold 15” x 11” pages of paper (shown below). This ‘output’ then had to be decollated (i.e., the carbon paper between the multiple copied removed) and boxed up and sent to the required departments via air freight or courier.

Seriously. I have decollated hundred of miles and boxed up many tons of fanfold output from the IBM 1130 I first started working on in IT, and then later the CDC Cyber computers we upgraded to. Then called couriers to dispatch it off to the various divisions of the company eagerly awaiting their daily, weekly, or monthly ‘computer’ reports on whatever it was that they got computer reports.

But stuff always went wrong. Departments would not send you all their input data for the run and you would not find out until after the run (making the whole job run useless). Or the paper tape reader would jam. Or a job instruction card deck would somehow get out of sequence. Or you would get a disk error on one of the 500KB disks used by the computer. Couriers would not arrive on time to get the boxed output to the required destination by the required time. And many other things I cannot recall. All of which caused intense stress because “whole departments are stopped waiting for this”. It was hell. It was intense. It was extremely stressful.

Well in 35 years it has got a lot worse.

According to a posting on CNBC (here) the ten most hated jobs are:

1. CIO or Director/Manager of IT/IM.
2. Director of Sales and Marketing.
3. Product Manager.
4. Senior Web Developer.
5. Technical Specialist (IT/IM).
6. Electronics Technician.
7. Law Clerk.
8. Technical Support Analyst (IT/IM).
9. CNC Machinist.
10. Marketing Manager.

From this list items 1, 4, 5, and 8 are IT/IM functions and how they missed out IT/IM Project Manager from this list I have no idea. Maybe it is sort of embedded in item 5.

Some of the problems with working in IT/IM are:

1. When someone contacts you they ALWAYS have an issue (they are not calling for a chat), and they expect you to know precisely what the issue is and to fix it then; within minutes—and the reality is that it is going to take hours and probably days and they get angry when they realise this.
   
   
2. Over the last 10 years or so in IT, despite all the box ticking about planning and design, the reality is that due to modern business pressures and unrealistic expectations almost all IT/IM projects are not completed before the next initiative starts to roll over. This means that users of the system hardly get time to work out how to use it before it starts to get upgraded or replaced.
   
   
3. With so much more interconnectivity and integration of computer systems and applications the chance of making a change that will adversely impact other connected systems or applications has increased significantly. Ten or so years ago it was unheard of that a change to a tool like Microsoft Excel or the Web browser (e.g., Internet Explorer) could cause collateral damage to business systems but these days, due to functional integration, a simple update to Excel can cause widespread grief across a business. Because of the combinations and variations it is impossible to test all likely outcomes even if you had a year to conduct testing, but you generally only have a couple of weeks allocated for this.
   
   
4. The other thing with working in the bowels of IT/IM in a large company is that it only takes one simple press on the Enter key, or a click on an OK button, to instantly cause a catastrophe that affects a whole department or the whole business; and it can take hours or days to get things back to working order again.

At least once a week I say to someone where I work “IT is hell. What on earth possessed us to choose a career in IT?”