Modern times

I’m writing this while I’m on vacation. Sound familiar?

Too many of us in the industry agree to stay tethered to our jobs under any circumstances. Me, I’m just being dumb — I could have delegated the writing of this editor’s blog to someone else. But for savvy IT types, budget cuts that were never restored and the increasingly specialized nature of IT leave large numbers of IT people without a fallback person who can do their job — and a writhing BlackBerry wherever they go.

In IT at the breaking point, InfoWorld’s Tom Kaneshige examines the question of whether IT professionals on the whole have been pushed into the red zone. You’ll find the anecdotes Tom recounts compelling and, if you’re unlucky, familiar. IT has always been a workaholic profession. But a lot of people I talk to sense that something qualitatively different is going on today, with late nights, weekends, and working vacations becoming more and more routine.

The inspiration for Tom’s story was Paul Venezia’s coverage of the strange case of Terry Childs, the San Francisco network administrator who was clapped in irons for refusing to give up passwords to the city government’s new FiberWAN network. Turns out Childs had been on call 24/7/365 for some time and was the only human being who understood the network’s complex configuration. That’s not an excuse for holding your employer’s network hostage, but nonetheless Childs’ situation triggered a flood of sympathy from InfoWorld readers. Clearly, a lot of you feel trapped in similar situations.

A couple of weeks ago on my blog I asked the question: “Has the gap widened between what is asked of IT and what is humanly possible? Or is crossing that chasm just part of the job description?” One commenter, who calls himself IT survivor, spoke for many in his direct response: “Yes and yes. IT is still a cost center. To most [management], as long as you keep throwing a load on something and it doesn’t break, it was the right thing to do. I just ran into a colleague who left our company to go to another company and then returned to us. I asked him if it was possible for the new job to be worst than the old. He said: they just want too much done by too few people with not enough planning or time and by gosh you better not miss ANY deadlines!!”

It’s funny. I grew up in an era when “taking a 9-to-5” was considered a “sellout” in some circles, and even dedicated professionals anticipated that, by the turn of the century, we’d all have four-day workweeks and our biggest problem would be figuring out what to do with our leisure time. Today, I don’t know anyone who works just 40 hours per week –and the prospect of retirement for middle-aged guys like me seems like a distant dream or, worse, a joke. What happened?

I now return to my regularly scheduled vacation. See you next week!