IT Industry Blues - Part 1

A friend in Chicago told me on the phone the other day that she should move up here to the edge of the world because the lifestyle is more relaxed. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken three days of vacation, and then Friday was a holiday, so I took the long weekend off from the world to spend some time with my daughter. My friend’s comment, though, brought back memories of a time when I practically lived for work.

When I first started working in the IT industry there was always some new program to learn or some new version of a piece of software that I’d mastered and now had to learn all over because it had changed so much. Application crashes regularly chewed up hours or days worth of work and spit out digital nothingness.

A typical day could be described by: “I’m almost caught up to where I was this morning.”

There were unforgiving slave-masters like the managers who were convinced that every word the client said was gospel, so if they wanted it done last week with a hundred gigabytes of information on a one-and-a-half megabyte floppy disk, then by God someone would have to work late to make it happen, someone other than the project manager, of course. And there were those insidious little unreasonable, two-bit lying pieces of workflow junk, the Gantt chart.

I was handed a Gantt chart once that showed me three weeks late 15 minutes after I started the project.

How many evenings and weekends did I work to finish something to make the client happy and get repeat business so that I could work more evenings and weekends in a never-ending cycle of ball-busting project after project?

That’s right. It just went on and on from one mad rush to get the project done and make the client happy to starting the same idiotic cycle the next day. It never stopped. And what happens in the meantime?

Your kids grow up, your hair disappears, your wife leaves you, you get laid off.

And then you realize how expendable you are. Then, all those weekends and extra “just a few hours” show their face value: nothing. They get summed up on your resume as “hard worker” or “willing to work extra hours” or “I bend over better than anyone you’ve ever met.”

And I'm not saying that nobody should ever work late or spend the occasional weekend on work. Sometimes, there are genuine emergencies, but these should never - not everyk - be allowed to become the norm.

Here's what the norm is: You spend a reasonable amount of time on your job and you spend a reasonable amount of time on your life. And here's the rationale for that: People don't exist to fulfill the needs of work; work exists to fulfill the needs of people.

Think about it.

Next post: The Team Player Syndrome