It’s just part of the game. You’ll be wiser for the experience and move onward and upward.
I completely agree. And often the signs are there in an interview. Also, there are better and worse jobs in IT. Working a jack of all trades ops job where you will be on call a lot - and on call involves middle of the night releases as well as break fix is a different job than being an architect or doing desktop installs.
Serious question - what do you want to “do”. The problem with IT IMHO is that every company has computer systems and networks, so there are a lot of jobs in the field. But unless you work for an IT outsourcing firm, they are generally back office operations, tangential to the revenue-generating business the company actually does.
Also, “IT” is not the same thing as working in technology. There are a lot of jobs in technology that can be very interesting. Startups. Data science jobs. Application or product development. Strategy consulting. Ecommerce. UX and design. Depends what you are interested in.
The worst jobs in IT IMHO are the system administrator, help desk and infrastructure support jobs.
Maybe go get your MBA or some other degree in a field you think you might be interested in.
And even those depend a lot. I’m “help desk”, but my team requires a lot of skill and knowledge, because we handle a lot of stuff your typical help desk team does not, like access security controls on multiple ‘holy fuck this is large’ database environments.
Tell them no.
Was the business case you made to double the size of the team so that you could double the throughput? I’m going to guess no. Hopefully, you told them that you needed to double the size of the team to adequately deal with the current throughput at a reasonable quality. Tell them if they want to double the throughput, maintain quality, and not have your team fall apart, they’ll need to double its size again.
Use your power.
I’m a developer, not in IT ops, but something si_blakely said sounded interesting: transitioning into IT security. Don’t take my opinion since I’m not an expert in that area. But I imagine it would take the ops experience you have and combine it with the security aspect, and be well-paid and not on call. Maybe doing security audits?
IT security auditing is what I do. The overtime is non-zero. Varies widely, but most of the clients I’ve worked for, and the projects I’ve worked on, I’ve had more work than I can handle. Or my team can handle. I’m not “on call” - I’m not in that part of security - but I’m in overtime land until at least the end of January. Not to the OP’s level, but still overtime.
I had a similar experience working in IT Security - as a project manager - really overworked and understaffed.
Part of the issue is that computer based professions have a carve out from having to pay overtime - as long as they pay $455 a week (there is some language makes lower level IT jobs - help desk or data center monitoring - require overtime). So corporations who are usually incentivized to staff appropriately at non-managerial levels tend to push IT harder.
Yeah, the IT Help Desk jobs I’ve had varied widely in how much information we had, how much ability to propose changes, or to make decisions… or how overtime, work from home and comp time were viewed. Generally the jobs I’ve had where we had more access were also the ones where taking up comp was expected: one of the key questions seems to be “do they think the help desk people are grown-up professionals, or that they are baby Mini-Mes?”
Yeah, the problem there is that the corporate suits tend to see big $$$ in IT payroll (relative to other non-revenue generating departments) and want to pare that down as much as they can, so IT departments tend to run leaner than they probably should, meaning overworked, overstressed staff.
To some extent, this is outdated thinking on the part of the corporate suits; IT isn’t really the sort of thing that you can do real effective ROI calculations on. I have a suspicion that this kind of unnerves a lot of older-school managers and executives, and leads them to try and starve it as much as they can.
Problem is, it’s something that if your company doesn’t invest some certain baseline ongoing amount of money into, it won’t thrive. It’s like small children and enough sleep; vitally necessary, but not something a lot of parents really catch on to.
It depends on what you want to do. I tend to prefer projects where we build or design something new or transform the way a company does it’s business. Instead of more operational work like long-term application support. And I don’t want to be “on call” to fix problems all the time.
I don’t know that IT salaries are any higher than educated people in marketing, accounting or legal departments. But I think where I see a main challenge is convincing executives to invest the money to revamp their systems, plus undergo the change management that is needed to support it. Often the only time the actually do it is when regulatory or infrastructure requirements force it upon them. And then you often end up with half-assed solutions. Like one client that paid us to rebuild a bunch of small Lotus Notes apps using web based technology. What they should have done is paid us more to rebuild the entire department from the ground up to support a comprehensive, integrated system.
Too true. The company I work for actually categorises IT as ‘unproductive cost’ - the term is mean to contrast ‘productive cost’ (that is, costs directly related to primary handling of orders in the production workflow), but the term ‘unproductive cost’ has seemingly morphed to take on a subtle ‘wasted money’ meaning.
This x1000. Project gets bid with 6 month time budget then the customer does not actually sign the contract for a few weeks. Of course no one wants to tell him the whole thing has to move to the right so before the first line is written the project is a month behind schedule.
Then the changes start pouring in.
Many years ago when I worked for a large insurer, we had this big massive project, for which I was hired to be one of the lead programmers.
Just before I quit, they released a 4-5" thick ‘project plan’ that went into great detail and had an extended list of everyone even remotely involved with the project. Just two main problems;
1> They didn’t list any of the programmers in this plan.
2> The plan called for a 30-day programming window in a 14 month project plan. :smack:
Shortly thereafter, the entire 100+ person division was axed.
Work in IT? I may have…
I did IT support for 10 years at one company and field tech support before that. I really liked what I did and I especially liked the team I worked with. I was moving upwards and got to the point where I needed to decide what my longer term goals were so I talked to my manager about it and he was not very helpful. He wasn’t trying to block me out but I don’t think he was doing much on his end to champion me either. I should have been a squeakier wheel, of course, but I was a team leader, I had very good reviews, performance metrics were outstanding, I got a masters in IT management, and I was in a building that needed an IT leadership presence so I thought that would have me on the course I wanted to go. IT support typically moved upwards to network engineer spots and there were no IT leaders developed in my group for more than 5 years (when my manager was promoted to supervisor) until finally a supervisor job opened somewhere else, I interviewed for it (which surprised my manager), and I didn’t do too well (I mean, I wasn’t godawful but definitely I could have interviewed better). I didn’t get that job and it wasn’t the best fit or where I wanted to be in any case, so I hopped on the next non-IT job I could get and became a sales engineer.
Now I support all the sales teams but I’m specific to one product and I have a far better work-life balance and a small (but very much appreciated) monthly bonus.
A few months after I switched jobs, an IT tech who I was mentoring got the supervisor job that I was shooting for, so I get a small amount of satisfaction knowing that I was right. He then moved to a sales engineer role shortly after that as well. The irony.