So I’m spending my 26th weekend in the last 52 weeks babysitting a team doing maintenance on some systems that support a “critical” business application that does some dumb shit to convince morons to waste their money, and I’m getting a little tired of it. I’ll probably be in bed by 4am, but my toddler is going to wake up at 7:30 on the dot, and I’m going to be too wrecked to do much of anything with her for what pitiful sliver remains of the weekend before I collapse back in to bed at 9PM and haul my ass in to the office again on Monday.
After 15 years in the field, I’m burned out. Used to be, I enjoyed turning my innate love of technology into novel and cost effective solutions to business problems. I liked being part of the crew keeping the ship running in the middle of the night. I brought my work laptop with me on vacation.
Then I got into management, and I got to do all of the other stuff, plus I helped my teams further their own personal and professional ambitions. It was great, for a while. I’m making a damn decent salary for my area - not doctor and lawyer money, but I’m part of the 10%. My wife can stay home with the kid without much impact to our financial well being, and when she does go back to work, she has the option to pick something edifying and rewarding for less money instead of soul-sucking and stupid for more. Not bad for somebody with a useless liberal arts degree who had zero ambition for anything specific as a youngster.
Now I’m just tired of it. Tired of being on call 24x7. Tired of knowing that my only path forward is getting promoted to a position that’s also on call 24x7 managing five schmucks like me, or quitting and starting my own shop where I’d likely be on call 24x7 for fear of fucking up and losing revenue. Tired of the knowledge that, at best, I can look forward to a weekly average of 60 hours with a big chunk of it being on some fucked up off hours schedule for the foreseeable future. Tired of compulsively checking my phone for the first four days of any seven day vacation. Tired of helping assholes make money by making money for other assholes.
Looking at it honestly, the only way I can see to get out of it is by getting out of IT. I just have no clue where to start. I have system engineer and programming skills, great general management skills, and a pathological work ethic, but I have no idea what other fields to even start looking in where all of that could be transferable to a comparable income and a sane work/life balance.
If you’ve managed to pull it off, I’d love to hear your story.
60 hours? That’s not healthy. It sounds like you need to delegate more. Why did it have to be you babysitting the maintenance team and not one of your minions?
I’m in exactly the same position. Yeah, 60 hours is not even slightly unusual.
I’m aiming to move to a larger organisation. It seems as though there is more of a tendency to run the IT department hot at the smaller end of the scale (where everyone is expected to cover everything, and requirements change more fluidly and rapidly).
In a larger organisation, roles get specialised, budgets are more formal, plans are more important, reactive shit happens less.
Start looking for another job in IT first. I’m in IT and seldom work more that 40 hours a week and when I do, I get paid for it. My boss would like me to work more hours and even pay for them, but I refuse.
I once told my boss that I’d come for emergencies. And by ‘emergency’ there better be a siren (police, fire, or ambulance) in the background of his phone call.
If they have you and your team working that many hours, they surely can’t afford to fire you. Start pushing back on the hours and just go home.
Of course your management might be pretty stupid if they are having the have their employees working such hours.
I know a few people who dropped out of IT. Almost all of them took a much lower paying job. A few were close to retirement anyway so the drop in pay didn’t bother them much. One friend went from making six-figures to minimum wage working at a Sears hardware store. He was financially set and enjoyed the work.
Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in. I did venture out a few times in small ways but my career has been ongoing for over 40 years and as time goes by it becomes more impractical to branch out and start over doing something else. It had been my plan to find a new career in my 30s but then suddenly I had kids and I felt I had to provide for them as best I could. Later I was more comfortable financially and took time to try a few things without risking everything but I have to admit I missed the comfort of what seemed like guaranteed money. Now I see retirement looming, and I want to be in a position to take a stab at some part time ventures so I keep working to keep my income up and put more money away. As I think about people who have had to downsize their careers in so many areas I think I made the right choice, I haven’t had a job for life, but I have had a career which still pays off. I guess I’d say learn to live with it, it drives me crazy at times, or I guess I should say crazier, the industry has changed so much over time, and I wouldn’t advise someone now in their 30s to stick with it the way I did because the potential for the future doesn’t look quite the same.
I’ll second the opinion of looking for another job in IT first. Sounds like you’re in data center support or production application support - try another area of IT. Or another company, where the data center has a larger staff in proportion to its size. Since you’re now an IT manager, you may find you can move to another area more easily. I’m not in management myself, but it seems to me that management involves more issues dealing with people than technology, and people are more alike from place to place than technology is.
Yes, the hours in IT can suck mightily. I’m not at your level of work hours, but I am also burning out. I’m looking for other projects within my company, and if my workload doesn’t lessen there I’ll look for another company.
The hours are long and often stressful, but the pay and benefits are good. There’s always work to do. I’m in IT security, which is such a cluster-swamp part of the field that, as a colleague of mine said “Bad security on their part is job security on our part.”
Yeah, never underestimate the shortsightedness of senior management - it’s perfectly possible for them to have created a situation of dire dependency where the key players they absolutely require and rely upon are overworked and under-appreciated - and they’ll threaten to fire and probably go through with it, then blame the resulting chaos on the overworked shmuck they just fired. None of which will help the individual - who is faced with the choices:
[ul]
[li]Stay and be abused[/li][li]Work to rule and be fired[/li][li]Try to find another job (which isn’t a quick or easy solution - and is even harder when you are constantly exhausted)[/li][/ul]
Same thing happened to me. I think the human brain can only hold so much information… I learned all about computers, then they go and CHANGE EVERYTHING! And began doing this about every three years.
My poor brain only has so much space!
Anyway I don’t know if you are in a position to work for minimum wage or lower… But if you can swing it, find a rural area farm which needs a live-in farm hand! (Ask at feed stores.)
You will be doing things like…
-Stacking hay in the barn.
-Cleaning up the animal poop in the barn.
-Feeding animals.
-Fixing fences.
-Etc.
It is a WONDERFUL BREAK from all that stress! (For a few years.)
I transitioned into both project management and IT Finance - i.e. the accounting of IT - like contracts, procurement, asset management, capacity planning, portfolio management. People don’t have an asset emergency on weekends and you don’t discover that you need a new datacenter on Friday at 11pm. (Or if you do, there isn’t anything that can be done about it - it takes months to set one up).
Now I’m running the back office (accounting, contracts, etc) for a little consulting company.
Oh, I’m delegating. This is taking the rotation in to account.
I’ve also made and sold a business case to double the size of the team - I’m just waiting for the positions to be filled. The downside is that the expectations will be that we double our throughput. After all, if we can get five people to bust ass to the tune of 300 hours a week, we should be able to get ten people to put in 600 hours a week, right? Mangetout, I wouldn’t count on a large org being any better. I’ve worked at a Fortune 25 and a small company with less than 75 employees. I’m currently at a Fortune 500. While I spent more time putting out small fires that had the potential to turn in to existential crises at the small shop, at the large companies it takes literally 12 months after the team has reached capacity to add headcount. Hence the 60-hour-per week death spiral.
I actually have a lateral transfer lined up for a new team that’s working with more interesting technology and will at least theoretically provide a more sane schedule (after I spend a month in Bangalore training the night crew, of course…) but I’m stuck waiting for my current job to be backfilled. Apparently I’m so fucking great they just can’t let me go.
I’m not in IT myself, but I do have a suggestion that has worked for me and for others in different fields.
Have you thought about doing IT training? A lot of professions have licensing or certification programs where practitioners need training and/or exam preparation. Or, it could be simple skill training. Or, it could be for continuing education credits. I’m talking about single 1 to 3 day sessions.
You generally don’t need to be accredited (unless you want to be). You can market on-line or through a company that specializes in it. Word-of-mouth is also very powerful.
I’ve found that I can teach for a day or two a week (average) and net $2K to $4K a session. (Sessions range from $495 to $895 per student.) Typical class size is just 5 to 20 students, which is not that hard to get.
Just a thought. Developing the curriculum and materials is a pain, but you basically do it once and then update periodically.
And you would be surprised how much respect it gets you. You may not know much more than anyone else with your level of experience, but students will believe you to be the Fount of Wisdom.
Looks great on resumes, too, especially if you want to go back on the front lines.
Try a different line of business or move to government/non-profit. I was there a few years ago working for an international Fortune 500 manufacturing company. 24x7 on call, spending evenings on conference calls with overseas sites, etc.
I’m now in IT for higher education. A completely different attitude; 5:05pm and the office is a ghost town. Much lower stress and pressure. The down side? A 15% pay cut, but worth it to me to spend more time with my young children. The school appreciates the business experience I brought and the focus, organization, and cost effectiveness stemming from that. They try o do everything they can to keep me happy knowing they can’t match my former salary. I also feel like I’m contributing more to the improvement of society than making shareholders rich by making widgets.
I have worked in IT for over 20 years and I have burned out and tried to leave a few times. There are other things that I would like to do but none of them pay even remotely as much unless I drop out of the workforce completely and take a few years to get a Masters in some in-demand field but I don’t even know if that would work. A direct transfer into another field is a non-starter for financial reasons. I see job postings that say something like “make up to 70K!”. Yeah, about that. Even if that wasn’t a lie, that is a whole lot less than I make now and I can’t live on 70K even if I wanted to (I certainly could have when I was younger but a mortgage, braces, college funds and similar things quickly dwindle down even reasonable sounding opportunities to the level of volunteer work because you are still going to be instantly broke) .
My personal solution was to switch into consulting with a very well known pharmaceutical company as my sole client. I am essentially the only on-site, full-time IT person in one of their critical facilities but that gives me lots of leverage and I would be extremely hard to replace. I also have lots of freedom about how I structure my day. The downsides are that I am on call basically all the time (that is a big incentive to make sure everything is reliable in the first place) and the highly regulated environment makes it very hard to get any outside IT people to do anything without a mountain of paperwork and red tape. Still, it is rock stable and has been for the past 7 years. I know I have a job with good pay and very generous benefits until at least 2020 which is a whole lot better than most people in the IT industry can claim.
I work IT in Higher Ed. Much Less hours then the corporate grind.
My paycheck is smaller but I love being home more.
I was in CS for 9 years and carried a beeper. Moved to a support position in HR and no longer have call. I setup the Dept’s server, maintain all the staff workstations and write SQL reports. I’m usually home by 5:30 most nights.
I should add that not everyone in IT works 50 - 60 hours a week. I don’t. Even though I am on call almost all the time, both my boss and I heavily discourage people from using it and I get comp time if they do. I bill for 40 hours a week and that is exactly what they get. An outside vendor screwed up a project today and I had to get involved by phone. It didn’t take long but it did screw up with my plans with my daughters so I will taking time off this week to make up for it.
It wasn’t like that at my last job. Nothing was out of bounds for my shitty manager and his bosses. Nights, holidays, weekends were perfectly in bounds for them and they did not hesitate to try to use it just out of the blue. I won’t bore you with the details but they all eventually got fired and I got so sick it literally almost killed me. I am not ever letting anyone abuse my life or time like that ever again. I refuse requests to come in on the weekend to babysit other people all the time now. I just say that I have better things to do and, if they don’t know what they are doing, they shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. We have lots of other people that can open the doors and sit there to make sure they don’t steal or sabotage anything.
I transitioned out, when my company moved to Pittsburgh, and I didn’t want to go.
I’d give much to transition back in again. IT operations was the best damn job I’ve ever had. Yeah, I worked a lot of nights and weekends, and the whole period from Christmas to New Years. (You can get a LOT of work done when everyone else is not there!)
Another option is to transition into contract work.
As I said, I handle contractors - I work with developers, not ops teams. Most of our clients have a 40 hour work week limit - that is what is budgeted and that is all they want you to work.
There are some downsides - you get paid more per hour, but benefits tend to be lousy and you might be out of work for a few weeks or months between gigs. On the other hand, when you work, you get paid and contractors usually don’t have the responsibilities that employees have in terms of accountability.
One of my worst project management jobs was a job where everyone on the team was a contractor, and management really didn’t get that you can’t push these people to work 60 hour weeks without compensation.
I left my IT job for a post-baccalaureate pre-medical program, went to medical school, and became a doctor. That path, however, would not fit the OP’s desire to work shorter hours.
It’s not a guarantee, for sure, but there is a trend - small companies can get away with mediocrity for longer, perhaps just because it’s easier to run a small it department ‘hot’ than it is a larger one - the number of interfaces between roles and sub-teams increases with size.
I’ve been in a bad situation for nearly 2 years now - part of the reason it’s taking me this long to move out is the I am not prepared to jump from the frying pan into the fire - for example, I was approached by a recruiter last week who wanted to submit me as an applicant for a role in a smallish company; the job description said essentially:
"You’ll do everything in IT" (which included physical and logical network, server hardware, OS - Linux and Windows - and software, telephony, Microsoft Exchange, Backup and DR, Desktop hardware builds, desktop OS support and configuration (including Windows XP) running - and being part of the staff of - an IT helpdesk, managing large projects, providing DBA services for MS SQL, MySQl, Paradox, supporting and training users in the use of Microsoft Office, including Access, vendor management, customer liaison, custom report design and application development. There will be some out-of-hours on-call work, as well as a requirement to arrange important changes to take place at weekends. Other duties as required..
The role had one ‘assistant’. I declined and told the recruiter that the role is a recipe for failure. Of course, he doesn’t care - he’s being paid to feed them hopeful candidates. If they place a candidate who only lasts a year before burning out, the employer will be coming back to the recruiter for another go (and paying another fee).