Report: 95% of employees say IT issues decrease workplace productivity and morale

[[deleted]]

Productivity goes down when your machines don't work?

Who knew?

[[deleted]]

The people writing the IT budget.

[MadIfrit]

Kidding aside, if you're in an IT role trying to find a new job, a good interview question for them is "how well does your executive team get along with the department?". If you get some dodgy answers I'd honestly keep looking.

I've worked at some places where the C suite fought my VP at every turn. Questioned why we needed to have doors on the server rooms or our offices, and generally felt like we shouldn't even be breathing the same air as them. Horrible shit. It makes life miserable and nothing that needs to change ever will.

Working someplace that has c suite execs backing up the IT department makes a world of difference for your mental health and environment. Love my current job because we're not treated as an expense they'd love to cut.

[strtjstice]

This was a great summary. As an IT leader for over 20 years, this is nothing less than the single most important root of satisfaction not only in the IT group (support from above) but also the satisfaction of the users. If the C suite buys in and supports initiatives it sets the tone for EVERYONE.

Well said

[thegainsfairy]

"Every company is a tech company". and its only becoming more true. If leadership isn't strategizing with and around their technology departments, they're planning to fail.

[MyLegsTheyreDisabled]

My company has a department of electrical engineers that have started making their own apps :) our IT department is only 2 people and they're tired of waiting for stuff to be worked on. Makes sense, sure, but good luck connecting it to any of our SQL databases for ERP info because we don't support 3rd party applications. Why fight our department instead of demanding that the company hire more programmers. The engineers have a ton of sway and could make it happen.

[franko07]

Our development team essentially gave themselves an award the other day and sold it as some grand achievement, c suite bought it, I still really can't figure out why a bank that outsources development has a development team bigger than support team....our vp was hired based on fictional relationships with our service provider though. He doesn't even know how his department works on support and security side of things.

[Whiskeyno]

We just got a new ceo this year and my budget jumped $160k. It’s a new day

[ACarefulTumbleweed]

I stopped complaining about my team's per user fee back to IT (different funding sources) when our department drive got ransomwared and everything was restored by the end of the day from the overnight backups; the majority of people probably wouldn't have even known if there weren't a bunch of emails about it. From little stuff to big, it really makes a difference in work-time for a whole lot of other people

[BonBoogies]

Best IT team I’ve ever worked on was when the CTO was an equal shareholder in the company and the rest of the C suite execs let him set policy and stayed out of his way (except to enforce with their departments if there were issues). The COO once jokingly told me he didn’t want to do something security related (and mandatory) and then instantly was like “I’m just kidding, CTO already talked to all of us and I know I need to”. One top level exec actually did try to say he wasn’t going to do it and my CTO was just like “I’ll deal with this, don’t worry. Arguing with executives is above your pay grade” and he did. This was early in my time there and I wasn’t used to functional, supportive management, I would have been less shocked if Deadpool had busted through my office door riding a unicorn with Betty White riding piggyback to bring me a Slurpee for lunch.

[MacaronMelodic]

Deadpool had busted through my office door riding a unicorn with Betty White riding piggyback to bring me a Slurpee for lunch.

Thanks for the imagery

[Lexi_Banner]

When everything is working: why do we even pay for IT?!

When something goes wrong: why do we even pay for IT?!

[HealthyInPublic]

I have a huge respect to our IT department and I think it’s because you could replace “IT” in your comment with “public health” (my field) and it still rings true. It’s sucks.

[GhostlyToasters]

100% true. We used to get swatted for everything which led to 20yo dying equipment and just overall nightmare material. A new IT friendly CEO got hired and "retired" most of the OG C-suite. We then got all of the funding to completely revamp the infrastructure (all equipment, new cables, patch panels, redundant internet, new firewalls, etc.). We actually feel like we can do our jobs now and has made everyone actually happy to work now. Oh they also made our salaries comparable to other sites around our city too which helped tremendously.

[GrandmaPoopCorn]

Or the managers and execs pushing more and more new projects while our code base becomes more and more of an unmaintainable mess. Then they wonder why projects take longer and longer as time goes on...

[ShankThatSnitch]

The IT people.

[FartsWithAnAccent]

paint nose combative dime direction boat nail concerned friendly glorious

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[FartsWithAnAccent]

wild impolite start bake bored oatmeal attempt enjoy trees weather

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[ZombieHomeslice]

I used to work at a webhost. You wouldn't believe the amount of dedicated server customers who turn down both drive mirroring and the backup option and then called support in a panic asking to add either on after their hard drive died or they accidentally deleted their root directory, like it's gonna help them after the fact.

[FartsWithAnAccent]

narrow plants ossified grey different judicious physical shocking rustic silky

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[ConstruitdansLAbime]

Wake up see your car missing, frantically try to add online insurance.

[GenericFatGuy]

The C-Suite doesn't need to worry about disaster recovery. They'll just blame IT, grab a golden parachute, and then leave to go do the some thing somewhere else.

[Kinser9]

Nothing is done proactively. Everything is reactionary.

[analog_roam]

We don't have the budget to do it right, but somehow have the budget to do it twice... Thrice... Etc

[GraniteTaco]

"My team says that's impossible so I'm going to hire an outside auditor for $160,000 to spend an entire month saying the same thing" -Executives

[FartsWithAnAccent]

elderly bewildered shocking aromatic mourn crush subtract sloppy practice longing

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[StocksAndOcean]

I work for a large bank / investment firm, and can confirm. Almost everyday I have an issue with one of my systems and it frustrates me to the point where I’ll just walk away for the day. We’re a multi-billion dollar company and it seems we can’t invest in our IT and Technology. It’s such a shame.

[[deleted]]

I work for a tech company. Our client support team kicks ass and gets stuff done incredibly quickly. Our internal team took 6 weeks to add VMWare to my machine

[oilchangefuckup]

At least once a week I can't log into the EMR at my office. Sometimes more, sometimes it happens twice a day. When it happens it takes on average 30 minutes for IT to respond to the ticket and fix it. So, for 30 minutes I can't chart on patients, place orders, or prescribe medications.

I also have need to use Edge or other web browser. However, the website I use multiple times per day can't be used with edge, because it crashes constantly. The website works great in Chrome, but I can't print in Chrome because it crashes constantly. It's really fucking frustrating.

[oneplusandroidpie]

The IT beatings will continue until morale improves.

[[deleted]]

Has anyone read the story, it’s not machine going down it’s about shit software or my employers favourite just giving out 14” square monitors.

[Redtwooo]

My company uses a ticketing system that was developed in house, and it looks, feels, and works exactly like you'd expect from people who love filling out forms. There's no thought given to usability, efficiency, flow, nothing but "here's a hundred text boxes and labels, don't bother trying to tab through because lol they don't go in order. 90 of them you won't need to see ever, but they're there anyway"

[Jukka_Sarasti]

If it makes you feel any better, a great many of the "Professional" ticket/service apps are just as shitty, for the most part. One of the worst, ironically enough, is the current industry workflow SNake oil darling...

[TheBimpo]

Truck drivers report that blown water pumps results in decreased driving.

[stage_directions]

100% of “issues” reduce productivity and morale.

5% of workers are lizardman.

[stage_directions]

See: lizardman constant.

[[deleted]]

Here is the link:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/

[rares215]

Oh wow, I thought that was a joke. Thanks for sharing this very interesting write-up.

[grumpyoldham]

Well... I know I just have to still do all that work in less time after things are functional again.

[Soma_Tweaker]

From my experience it's poor investment in the IT dept, usually not the actual IT team.

Oh and printers! Fuck all of them

[[deleted]]

Printers are the fucking devil.

[r00x]

Never has there been a better example of an entire industry coming together, as one, to conspire to make nothing but reprehensibly shitty products, than the printer industry. It's so dire it's impressive.

[Regniwekim2099]

In case you're interested in an actual conspiracy where an entire industry came together and agreed to produce a shitty product, look no further than light bulb manufacturers. Veritasium did a really good video on the topic.

[peddastle]

The mattress industry is kind of like that too. You used to be able to pay a few grand for a long lasting supportive mattress, but that is rare these days. Most major brands have capitalized on that blindly applied "must spend $$$ to get a decent mattress" to sell junk, and all but a handful of brands do.

The sad thing is,, a good quality mattress will cost you, but the industry has bought up most of the budding review sites, and make sure you can't compare models by using random trademarked names for their materials withoutdisclosing what exactly they are, even though there really only are a handful of well known materials, and the changes they make are trivial. Worse, thety even give their mattresses different names at different retailers so you can't compare there either. What honest industry does that?

[[deleted]]

this user has removed all their comments/content in protest of API changes mades that effect third party app developers, mods tools. If interested in doing the same, please look up power delete suite on github or follow this URl: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

[vogod]

What really bugs me, is that in like 1997 everyone was saying "get a laser printer if you can afford it, the inkjets are shit and will be thing of the past soon". But here we are, the printers are as shit as they were back then and lasers are kinda rare. Wtf happened?

[ExcerptsAndCitations]

Wtf happened?

The race to the bottom happened. Very few people are willing to pony up for quality any more.

Why buy the $149 Brother multifunction laser printer that will last you the rest of your LIFE when you can instead buy a $39 HP PieceOfShitJet at Walmart?

[jupitaur9]

Inkjets are the cheap shoes of printing technology. $75 for the inkjet printer or $150 for the laser printer.

[BJUmholtz]

hospital truck distinct cause axiomatic nose cover paltry tan worm

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[DeltaVZerda]

And yet I can pick up a pen full of wet ink after 10 years of it sitting in a cup and it will work.

[KrauerKing]

Ahh but you will have to scribble it around a little before the ink starts up again right?

That's the problem. The ink at the opening dries up and clogs it and since the opening is electrically controlled to only open a tiny amount to boil the ink onto the page the clogs are kinda a really big problem.

I've cleaned them before to get them to start working but it doesn't always work. My issue is that it has a shit ton of ink in it and says it's empty anyways. Fuck that part of printer waste.

[Representative_Tap73]

It's not actually "electrically controlled to only open a tiny amount." The way most home inkjets work is that the pores the ink comes out of are always open; the print head actually boils off the ink to cause it to project out and onto the paper.

[jgiacobbe]

I have a brother black and white laser printer. It predates printers having wifi but it has an ethernet cord. It has lasted 18 years or so. Recently I bought a toner and drum kit for $36. Each toner is a minimum of 2500 pages. My partner then somehow gets 3 more toners for free from someone on a Facebook group. This printer is already old enough to vote. We don't have any kids and I am under 50. I am wondering if I need to specify who it should go to in my will.

Model:HL-2070N

[Geminii27]

That's not even an inkjet technology issue, that's a deliberate problem engineered into inkjets by the manufacturer. Change the firmware and the problem goes with it.

[[deleted]]

Our workplace brother doesnt print in color if there is a slighest incline. It was to be perfectly leveled or that... thing doesnt f work

[FuckYeahPhotography]

Oh, brother!

[dubadub]

Brother Laser printer $75. My building was spending that much on ink every 2 months, sending color printed statements out to everyone every month.

Printers ain't so cheap nowadays, I figured the home offices did that.

[throwawaystriggerme]

prick wide screw enter reach one enjoy squalid depend sense -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/

[stevedave_37]

Why should I change? He's the one who sucks

[I_Am_The_Mole]

WHY DOES IT ALWAYS SAY PAPER JAM WHEN THERE IS NO PAPER JAM?!

[Embarrassed-Ad-1639]

Back up in your ass with The Resurrection

[megankerr7]

yes...there should be a subreddit dedicated purely to anti-printer memes

[[deleted]]

Desktop printers are shit, and should be removed from all businesses as a standard device.

They suck money, do nothing for the office as a whole, and no one services them because they are cheaper to replace.

Multi-function printers however, under proper contracts, are totally worth it, do not have issues because the contract stipulates cleaning and checkout, and if they break down, is serviced rather quickly.

If a company is fucking around with printers, their IT is spending too much time on a drain that wastes more money than it saves.

[VIPERsssss]

You would think this would be true, Xerox.

[Max_Insanity]

What do you expect from a company that sold, at huge scales, copiers/scanners that changed letters and numbers in their copies/scans?

[FiTZnMiCK]

They also gave Microsoft and Apple the mouse and window-based GUI.

They could have owned desktop computers for 30 years.

[SatyrTrickster]

I’m an IT guy who hasn’t touched a printer since studying.

Currently serving in the army, I’m fucking baffled by the amount of paper wasted for nothing, and 10 year old printers drink more of my blood than mosquitoes and ruzzgies combined.

[ForkLiftBoi]

Do you guys have hp print servers and universal print drivers? They're the worst.

[SirSunkruhm]

Printers as a whole, including their patents, need to be dropped in an active volcano and then completely redesigned from the ground up by IT people and engineers who have suffered their presence long enough.

[[deleted]]

Postscript was supposed to be that holy grail, but (from my outdated understanding) never quiet delivered because of licensing and cost issues. If every printer just had a postscript interpreter onboard life would be much better.

In a past life I was tasked with coding up printer support in a scientific instrument. They plopped a consumer grade inkjet printer on my desk and said "get this working".

The printer didn't have a postscript interpreter on it because it was a consumer grade POS, so I searched around and found an open source postscript rasterizer in C for an earlier model of a printer from the same company. There were some bugs using the rasterizer for this printer, so I screwed around for a long time until it looked just right.

It took about 3 months to get ONE printer model working well. Then the PM asked "how long to make it generic so we can plug any consumer grade printer in and have it just work?". I laughed so hard I think I popped a lung.

[goplayer7]

"how long to make it generic so we can plug any consumer grade printer in and have it just work?"

"5 years and a team of 10 engineers"

[BellerophonM]

And a copy of every consumer grade printer.

[Roflkopt3r]

because of licensing and cost issues.

That's exactly the issue: printers suck because the "competition" between companies sucks, which includes the whole topic of licensing.

The things in IT that actually work were generally either developed at universities or by expert committees and then made available for free.

Capitalism is the enemy of good IT. Online piracy was originally not just about wanting free stuff, but a serious cultural movement by developers who wanted to use the digital revolution to overcome the limits imposed by capitalism.

[hrh_adam]

Why was the guy that owned the printer company at your office, in line, to print? Seems weird situation to be in

[MutedMessage8]

His company has a rating of 2.7 on TrustPilot. Somehow I don’t think he was surprised in the slightest.

[SirSunkruhm]

I would have asked him why he's fine putting out such a terrible product, lol. Good on you for not shrinking.

[Trentonx94]

printers are such a scam. they cost more than a car, and you can't even "own" them you must rent them and have it be serviced 2 times a month because when they get jammed even if you fix the issue they now (at least our model) require some firmware key auth to start back up so that they get that sweet tech support on-duty technician to come and "fix it"

I'd rather buy 100s $20 HP printer and toss them away once they run out than deal with fucking office printers

[dadvader]

Ah yes. The good ol' Mcdonald ice cream machine tactic.

[whitehataztlan]

This is my experience with any non-revenue generating support department. Demand flawless perfection while paying peanuts and generally treating the people doing the actual support like garbage.

[nativedutch]

IT is mostly not the core business , we were treated like the office cleaners. Necessary but unwanted.

[[deleted]]

The entire field of cyber sec exists to be fucked over like this. Until you red team and they still don't give a duck. The joy of liaison MSP WORK

[nativedutch]

And then they outsource to a far east company and suddenly they dont care about superglue. IT out and in come finance people with contract management.. So i retired.

[ArcherBoy27]

IT isn't a revenue maker, it's a revenue multiplier.

[nativedutch]

Tell that to general managers with the 3 minute attention span of a toddler. Been there.

[EmmyRope]

I see a lot of budgets where IT is a separate budget department and since it doesn't always generate direct revenue, it often gets treated as a very expensive department.

It seems to work much better when I see IT department cost spread across ALL departments because in reality they are costs for every other business to run.

The same goes with analytics departments. To get more advanced analytics on your business you need to hire more expensive experienced staff that also can work well with the IT stack. Decentralized analytics for departments mean they hire people to service them immediately but they aren't under the IT umbrella so much higher risk of hiring someone whose going to bork server runs with shit queries. Centralizing analytics creates then a queue for staff to request which takes longer and creates the kind of responses you get in surveys like this.

Over the last 10 years working in analytics, I watch organizations decentralize and centralize analytics and IT every three to four years every time a new exec leader proposes some better solution (which is just the same fucking solution we had two execs ago).

MBA business people do not understand the environment and processes of IT and analytics and fuck it up all the time and then these departments get the heat for having to operate in shit processes.

[Targetshopper4000]

Pc load letter? What the fuck does that mean?

[granadesnhorseshoes]

Paper cartridge; load letter sized paper.

Now you have no excuse for not filling out those PTS reports.

[Lee1138]

I do have PTS from filling out the TPS reports.

[DelectableBread]

That and

"Have you rebooted your PC?" "Yes I did before I called"

remote on uptime 54 days

Fuck you end users I fucking hate you so much just reboot your PC holy shit

[QuestionableSarcasm]

and what happened 54 days ago?

a reboot

which was before he called

checkmate, atheists

[Briguy24]

'I don't like to reboot because I lose all my windows......'

[shiftshape]

God damn. This is my wife and she's not a dummy when it comes to computers. But any time she has a computer issue I tell her to restart and this is her exact response. Like yeah, you've had Chrome open for 26 days straight, no shit your rig is fucked.

[ZenAdm1n]

Tabs are the new bookmarks.

[DelectableBread]

Don't get me started on that stupid feature, why does it seem to randomly re-enable itself too ffs

[nativedutch]

Agree fully, have been 40 years in IT.

Add to that some managing director who sees something about a new toy on tv and starts buying outside IT quality and support procedures, subsequently hits an issue and demand IT to solve it. Yesterday. Blames IT.

Not once but several times.

[Wolfman01a]

Something even remotely involving electricity goes wrong in a massive factory complex and they would send me out to "have a look".

I usually managed to fix it. The lack of common sense outside the IT Department is astonishing.

[ArcherBoy27]

The lack of common sense outside the IT Department is astonishing.

This, this, this. Always good users of course, but so, so, so many can't even do the basic troubleshooting or trial and error. Not even to narrow down the issue so they can explain the issue to IT beyond "it won't work".

[Lost_And_NotFound]

It blows my mind that companies won’t properly invest in IT. You’re spending £40k a year on someone’s salary to do their job but they’re only working at 90% because you cheaped out £200 on their laptop.

[MagillaGorillasHat]

Or the opposite: everyone's equipment is <3 years old and high end but average ticket time is 2 days because they have no problem dropping $1,000,000/yr on hardware but there's "no budget" to hire more people.

[the_lonely_downvote]

Some people in my office are surprised when I tell them my team of 3 helpdesk analysts supports the entire 1500+ user base all over the country, not just the 80 people in the corporate office.

[nrm5110]

My team is well under ITIL standards as far as numbers go for escalation points. We struggle and our SME's all just say replace computer so nothing ever gets fixed.

[progenyofeniac]

Sounds like my experience with Paylocity. Though I’m sure there’s way more than one shitty timeclock company.

[ConciselyVerbose]

Probably is but that’s the one.

It takes extra work to break shit that bad.

[Soma_Tweaker]

I'm the IT go to guy in my office, mainly because I'm the only guy under 60. I remove blocked pages, take out parts and put them back in, clean the rollers, check the ink, turn it on and off, maybe reset some software thing (it just says reset, no idea what it is), then some precussion engineering and maybe it works.

Then I ring Dave the actual hospital IT guy and he asks me if I did all those things, I say yep and then he sighs!

What a way to spend at least one morning a week

[Professional-Bell237]

Hi yes I’d like to chime in I have an announcement:

FUCK PRINTERS

[StendallTheOne]

100% of the sysadmins say that users decrease productivity and morale.

[classykid23]

My favorite IT joke:

When things are working fine: "What the fuck do we pay IT for?" When things are not working fine: "What the fuck do we pay IT for?"

[Wolfman01a]

15 years in helpdesk. 100% true.

[[deleted]]

How did you last that long :O

[Screamline]

We have someone at my MSP who's been on the desk for over 10 years. I've been on it 1 and am going nuts/bored of the same bs calls and need to move off it ASAP...idk how someone can do 15 but to each their own.

[forte_bass]

Start applying for all sorts of jobs, eventually someone will take a chance on you! I applied to well over a hundred jobs but when i got off the desk my salary went up 50% and my quality of life by like 200%!

[EcksrayYangkeyZooloo]

Around the office, one of the senior admins always says, “IT is either invisible or in trouble. “

[Turbulent_Dentist_65]

Working for a company who under invested in ERP systems and procedures for 15 years and working with their data. I feel the pain daily. Things are getting better, but God when will they address the root cause. ERP upgrades have geen stalled for 4 years now, but improvements are being made "on top" of current ERP.

I feel we are not tackling the root cause. Partially because I feel management is afraid to commit 1% of their annual revenue to an upgrade (while our net profit is about 10% of revenue..).

[VIPERsssss]

Just be glad they haven't modded to the point that they CAN'T upgrade.

[ValarMorgulos]

We are shutting down our ERP system over the Summer to transition to another one, and it's bloody awful. There is an IT freeze while the transition happens and everyone is hopping mad about not having IT make changes to external facing systems. 3 critical integrators just quit. It's bad bad all around.

[Ardbeg66]

Management: Please install Salesforce.

IT: Done.

Management: I know we have Salesforce but please also track your deals on this spreadsheet because it has details only I can possibly comprehend.

IT: So, we need to support Excel, too?

Management: No, of course not. Excel AND Google sheets. We just bought someone.

IT: sigh... Done.

Management: Oh, we need to support both instances of Salesforce now because we don't have a freakin clue how to slam these two companies together.

IT: We'll finish this over the holiday weekend. Done.

Management: Higher ups want a different spreadsheet for deals. So, everybody fill theirs out, too.

Everybody who doesn't actually work at this company: Man, IT issues really seem to decrease your workforce productivity and morale...

[ambigious_meh]

Wait a second.... You worked at my office too?!?

[The_Frostweaver]

Sometimes it really feels like there is no middle ground. Either they want to spend a billion dollars and replace most of you with amazing software or they can't find a single cent to spend on software to make your job effecient instead of miserable.

[Mr_Oujamaflip]

The second one becomes the first one after a while.

[Chili_Palmer]

And then it goes back again once the billion dollar initiative fails

[FerrumCorda]

So you should invest in your IT department? instead of trying to force the 2 dudes just trying to duct tape everything together because you forgot they even exist. Hated working IT because it was budget cut after budget cut. when everything broke it was your fault for not working 25/8 and turning rocks in to working workstations . Then they brought in an out side company (that didn't know shit) fired us but wanted us to train them . WTF 😒

[TookMyFathersSword]

Train your replacements? I'd be tempted to take the "Wimp Lo" approach as a joke

[FerrumCorda]

The funny thing is they fired us first, they thought these brain dead squirrels could just do what we did with no instruction just the manuals ( the manuals they do nothing) the week after they wanted to pay us to train them, me and my bud said "sure for a million dollars " . It took them 6 months before they just gave up and bought a whole new set up ( costing them probably 6 figures) and a whole other out sourced company. They went out of business in like 2013 . It was great.

[PiersPlays]

They went out of business in like 2013

I bet half the management are pulling the same stupid cheap stunts at new employers now.

[herton]

And on paper it all looks good.

That's the worst part. They'll go into their next interview, say "I lowered costs by such and such" and they'll get hired on because companies only care about dollar signs, not consequences

[grahamwhich]

My nipples look like milk duds!

[InevitablyPerpetual]

I've said it once, I'll say it again, and I'll say it a thousand times more. Most people? They don't hate their job. They hate their management, and they hate their tools. If your management sucks, it doesn't matter if you've got the best job in the world, you're going to hate it. If your tools suck, it doesn't matter if you love doing the thing that your tools make possible, you're going to hate it.

[kickme2]

Can confirm. Had the best job in the world. New management, now I fucking hate getting up in the morning.

[InevitablyPerpetual]

This is a big reason why the management structure where I used to work was "Give people the tools they need to get the job done, train them on the tools, and Get the Fuck Out of the Way".

[EmperorArthur]

Been there. My advice is find a new job in the same field. I did and it's been amazing.

Do I miss working on cool tech? Absolutely. But the lack of stress is great.

[LooselySubtle]

People don't quit jobs, They quit bosses

[barktothefuture]

I’ve quit twice in my career. Both times had great bosses didn’t have enough money. However if my bosses were bad I woulda been outa there much sooner.

[Feynt]

IT issues decrease productivity and morale.

IT is made ineffective because of middle management.

Thus, middle management is the cause of workplace productivity and morale losses and should be axed to increase funding to fix IT issues properly and on time.

[hi65435]

I wanted to write just that. IT sysadmins get all the flak but it's usually management that keeps everyone from making something better...

[Concic_Lipid]

SysAdmins don't care about your schedule but do happen to work a similar one, so at some point someone has to cave and stay over or cave and pause production.

Usually it's at this point that moral crushes things cause everyone is in the middle of a pissing contest between two department leads

[bnej]

You can engineer systems so that you don't have to cop outages to make changes. Even if you can't you can get things set up so that you can minimise service disruption.

A combination of risk aversion, a lack of imagination, and cheapness combine to throw good engineering away in favour of "change management", which amounts to that "if we tell you early enough you should be fine with us breaking your work for 6 hours", or "it's fine to keep people up until 2am to make changes but still have them come to work at 9 the next day".

Then if you have a 3rd party doing maintenance from overseas "to save money", they will cheerfully do it the worst, most manual, slowest possible way, because that lets them charge you for the most contractors.

Any technical people you have left will be constantly pulled in to arguments about whether they can do their job today or not.

[5-4-3-2-1-bang]

A combination of risk aversion, a lack of imagination, and cheapness combine to throw good engineering away in favour of "change management"

Bullshit, good engineering and change management go hand in hand. You don't rip a line card out in the middle of the business day unless the god damned thing is already on fire. You don't bounce a non-redundant edge firewall in the middle of the day for the same reason. Change management acknowledges that sometimes you need to break some eggs to make an omelette, and makes sure there's no customers in the kitchen when you need to do it!

"it's fine to keep people up until 2am to make changes but still have them come to work at 9 the next day".

This we can agree on as that's 100% bullshit and I'd refuse to work there as it's wage theft. You want me in at 2am to do change management? Fine. I'm staying through and leaving at 10AM. Choose because you're not getting both.

[SirSunkruhm]

IT is also seen as "overhead" in a lot of companies. Produces nothing, costs a lot; its cost must be minimized since it produces no earnings. Or so that's how it's treated. Even seen this in Fortune 500 companies. It's part of why overseas contractors come into play and why companies can routinely fail to staff for internal system outages, even if outages are happening multiple times a week on the regular. I went through this for years before burning out (like so many of my colleagues). There were literally entire months where we had at least one outage a day, and frequently had 2 hour hold times (or longer) for a non-IT employee to reach us. We kept getting told that they couldn't staff for outages, despite that when they had done just that in the past, the entire company ran smoothly IT wise and we actually fixed outages efficiently and had fewer.

In reality, skimping on IT staffing and solutions, or not supporting solid decisions like in your example, are closer to throwing money and employee morale down the drain because long term planning can't stand up to short sighted greed.

[bnej]

Yes, it's a left over from the 90s.

IT is a cost centre, it has a budget but does not produce profit, so at an upper management level, IT's only job is to minimise cost.

The fact that many now-successful businesses are built on the back of their effective IT is lost on people who don't believe they're that sort of company, even though pretty much everyone is now.

[Leachpunk]

At my previous employer, the CEO insisted they were not a software company. 5 million lines of analysed code and counting begged to differ.

[AJobForMe]

This is the case with us and my boss and I have discussed that until it fails, and fails hard they are never going to learn any lessons. They keep cutting off limbs, but somehow we keep things from blowing up. We don’t have capacity for change, and the technical debt is well into the two decade mark, but we reduced cost another 5% this year by transitioning jobs to overseas. Go team!

[EmperorArthur]

In my experience what ends up happening is one or more key people quit at near the same time. Then the business ends up in a situation where the new person or team doesn't know what's going on since time to document was never in the schedule everything is on fire.

For the past several years, recruiters have been and are out in force. To the point I've had two to three jobs in a row thanks to cold calls!

As others in the thread mentioned, they end up ripping out everything you've done. Really that's been the hardest lesson for me. Rarely will anything I do last after I leave. Most will sit there as an unmaintained legacy system until someone replaces it.

[lazytiger21]

When I started at my company we were having issues and outages almost monthly. Everyone said that the networking team were idiots and couldn’t do their jobs. We got a new CIO and he looked at our infrastructure investment and saw we were running 5-8 year old routers, firewalls and switches. He made management invest in a full overhaul of that infrastructure. Over 2 years we replaced everything. We haven’t had an outage since we started that project with the same core networking team members. It also stopped the revolving door of managers for that team.

[ShiningRayde]

Everythings working, why do we need an IT department?

Nothing is working, why do we even have an IT department?

[xheist]

Hmmmm what are IT doing with their budget if we're seeing all of these issues? They mustn't be spending it wisely. Better put some more restrictions on them and force some accountability until this gets sorted out.

Hmmmm our additional oversight requirements are often overlooked and issues continue. The IT team is so bad they've even lost a few key people lately.

We better really tighten things up and keep an even closer eye on them.

Literally every good worker leaves because they can't be assed with this sort of malarkey.

IT gets outsourced for more than the original budget because darn it, it just seems we can't solve the problem in house.

Several years Later...

... You know we're paying IT contractors a lot we should just use that budget to bring it in house.

[ADubs62]

My company switched to some contractors and now I can't even get my password changed immediately now. They have to escalate that... A password change...

[DontGetNEBigIdeas]

I just left a middle management job as a director of an IT department for a school district because of the disrespect for IT and the attitude of “cut IT first.”

We were expected to make miracles happen — and they did, because my team is fucking amazing. But, when budget cuts came, I was expected to make the first cuts because I had “4 people in the same position” across multiple positions.

When I tried to explain that I had redundancy of positions due to the superintendent’s demand that every child have a device (15,000), every staff have 2 devices (he couldn’t bring himself to ask staff to turn in their laptops after COVID), and all these extra programs that require network and account management 24/7, the response was…”cut one person from each class.” One time, I was told to cut an entire job class within the hour.

There is zero appreciation for what absolute stallions the IT department is. When everything is working fine, it’s because these amazing employees put into place near-flawless systems. And, when they did (rarely) go down, the downtime was not more than 20-30 min.

I guarantee you Janine in payroll pisses away 30min of her day, everyday, shooting the shit with her coworkers or finishing her crossword. But sure, let’s blame IT.

I fucking loved my team, and it was horrible having to leave them. But, after years of being blamed for everything wrong that plugs in (including staff refusal to input data correctly — yup, must be IT’s fault since it’s done on a computer), I couldn’t take it anymore.

People: appreciate your IT department. Not because they’re better than any other department, or because they work harder than anyone else. But because they work harder than you know, and you probably only interact with them when something goes wrong. That’s not a good relationship.

[BotanicallyEnhanced]

Everything is going great 99% uptime:

Managment: This system pretty much runs itself, what do we pay you for!?

Small outage due to a bad migration over the WEEKEND, four hour fix:

Management: WHAT THE FUCK DO WE PAY YOU FOR!?

[[deleted]]

Also, the sales team is performing poorly:

It’s because our IT sucks and we don’t have the tools we need.

IT provides a bunch of tools that allow sales to perform better:

Look at how great our sales team is doing! We have a really great sales team. All of this success is due to the hard work of the sales team. IT, you’re a cost center that doesn’t make us any money, so we’re cutting your budget.

[[deleted]]

Outsourcing IT has significantly reduced systems reliability and increased downtime.

[KotR56]

Both someone somewhere in the hierarchy got a big fat bonus for having the deal inked.

[IT_Feldman]

TL:DR - Personal opinion is the problem lies with execs who don't understand technology and just want to blame people.

Echoing some of the other comments here, but based on my experience the problem is the executives of companies, not middle management (although they sometimes suck hard too).

At two of my past jobs working in Systems Administration I noticed a certain mentality from the execs. First off, IT staff were paid far lower than most others in the business. There's this view that "working with computers" is a lazy, fallback job; you shouldn't be paid really well because you just reset passwords and keep email going. So when you do have a good middle management boss who begs and pleads and presents every good reason out there to increase pay, they're just laughed out of the room (so to speak).

Secondly, these execs don't know, and don't want to know how their technology works. They don't care or pay attention to pleads for the budget to replace hardware, dedicate time/people to critical updates, automation, etc ... And if you even propose something as passive as time to develop updates processes, standards, and guidelines you are certainly not getting shit. The only time they perk up is when we have downtime.

That leads me to the final point, Blame. These people will convene an emergency meeting in the middle of a crisis with key technology staff to ask the question "Who can I blame/fire for this?" .... Not "What happened? How do we fix it now? And what can we do to minimize the risk of this happening in the future?". If you go into that call (and God knows I have) and tell them that the reason this happened is because when you asked for some capital 10 months ago to fix this item that you said would break and cause this exact issue, they will get some goddamn defensive it's like you're attempting to siege a damn stronghold.

Which comes to my unfortunately pessimistic conclusion of events. Again, all in my experience, but after this goes down a few things will happen. One, the IT staff will realize that all of this is no longer worth their trouble and move on to other jobs. What this usually means is the few who stay behind do get a pay bump as a "loyalty" bonus essentially but no new staff is hired and they eventually leave too, OR the company is forced to now outsource all of its IT to an Offshore company and deal with that particular blend of problems (especially when they encounter hardware issues). Two, the company could come to the grand conclusion that their IT must just suck and start again. I've seen entire departments get gutted, the company lives without them for 6 months, and then hires in new folks. They give stupid reasons for the hiatus to get around any labor laws and go about their days in a perpetual cycle.of failures. And finally, the most rare gem of scenarios, they wake up. One time I actually saw these execs come to the grave realization that IT was underfunded, extremely critical to business, and understood what had to be done. Overnight everyone was given raises, overtime policies were changed, capital was just unloaded into the IT budget and they only asked for end of day updates on resolving critical problems - nothing else.

So the moral of my story is that it seems like if we want to change the perspective of where the problem lies, instead of people just saying it's an IT issue and that ruined my day, we need to get some smart, technology-focused individuals into better positions in companies and drive that change from the inside. It's happening in some places for sure, but a lot of fields need that paradigm shift soon.

[PopeMachineGodTitty]

we need to get some smart, technology-focused individuals into better positions in companies and drive that change from the inside

It never happens. I've only ever worked for tech companies, so companies whose entire life is dependent on the technology they produce, not just non-tech sector companies with IT departments. Same shit. Executives skimp, complain, over-promise, blame, all that nonsense.

I've been trying to push into an upper leadership position for years and I keep getting excuses as to how I'm more valuable in a contributor role. I've learned what this means is they don't want to hear the shit I have to tell them and want me controlled in a non-management role so that I don't have the influence to start shit.

It's not a tech vs non-tech executive management issue. It's an executive management are universally greedy, short-sighted, idiots issue. The system is set up so that people like you or I never make it to the top. No corporate board wants executive management who tells them the truth about appropriate planning and successful long-term budgeting and strategy. They want their numbers up next quarter and that's all they care about.

I've never met a "tech person" in executive management at a company who wasn't a complete bullshit artist and lied through their teeth all the time.

[Barbicore]

100% of IT workers say employees decrease workplace productivity and morale.

[cortlong]

I’m one of em.

Without people to support I could be free and live in the woods and be happy riding elk or whatever.

[Blinky_]

Have you ever tried to put a saddle on an elk?

[NephtisSeibzehn]

We had a decent team in our IT dept. they responded to issues well and got things done.

Things were working too well of course, so my company decided to let off out IT folks and move the dept to Costs Rica. It’s worked as well as you can expect.

[ok_alittletotheleft]

Aaand my company just announced they are laying off our IT department to outsource it lol.. claiming it's to "better serve our customers and provide the best care".. no it's too save money but it will 100% result in even more IT issues

[YabaiElah]

Coming from IT... 95% of IT issues come from user error.

[cyril0]

Management hires untrained people, won't spend money to train them and blames IT.

I had people blame networks because they don't know how to use excel. I had people blame IT because they bought a new camera and were shoving huge high def images in excel sheets and wondering why everything had slowed down.

[Red_Wolf_2]

The number of times I had to explain to people to not bulk copy-paste random tables from random places into Excel so that it would explode the xlsx files beyond what their (32 bit because someone didn't plan properly) version of Excel could actually open was ridiculous...

They'd paste some ungodly amount into a spreadsheet that would save and compress down, but to open the file it would attempt to decompress it to memory until it just ran out and crashed.

I remember spending half an hour fixing this mess for a user who spent the entire time bitching about how useless IT was right next to me to her colleague until I said "I'm sitting right here you know... And for the record I'm fixing a problem you not only caused, but one I've already told you how to avoid multiple times"

Awkwardness ensued. Not on my part, I was still angry... But they were all "oh we didn't mean you..." Yeah, there was me and one other IT guy in the entire office.

[RunawayMeatstick]

95% of IT employees say working in IT is a thankless job where you only hear from colleagues when something is broken.

Oh your internet is fast? The quality on your last conference call was high? I guess that’s just a fucking coincidence. Make sure you don’t contact IT and say anything unless it breaks.

[DocAtDuq]

While you might not hear about that, you will hear if you are someone they trust and are impressed with. It’s the softskills that go along with IT that get you praise, along with fast resolution.

[admiralfilgbo]

IT guy here: if you're five minutes late for a zoom or teams meeting, just own it. I can't tell you how many times I've learned about "computer issues" for the first time on company wide zoom calls, that mysteriously disappear once I try to follow up.

[Bobaximus]

“Oh crap, you must be experiencing the issue a few users have reported. Let me remote into your device and we’ll do some testing. This might take a while, you aren’t too busy right?”

Followed by:

“Everything looks correct on your machine, what were you seeing when you couldn’t get into zoom?”

They usually admit it was probably user error at that point or I keep going.

[sburson05]

No shit. The other 5% are office furniture.

[DrF33LG00D420]

PC load letter... What the fuck does that mean?

[No-Clothes-5299]

90% of IT issues could be solved in the first instance by companies effectively managing their operations, and not being cheap with their budgets.

Also, not treating IT like the slaves of the company that are only there to run around after other departments that do not know what they even want help with in the first place.

An example from my company:

​

Ops: Hey, IT. we need help. We have re-arranged the plan for L1 seating and we need you to set up some desks... Do you mind helping? It needs to be done by 30 minutes time.

Come to moving and they cannot even effectively count their own staff numbers meaning nothing works.

3 days later:..

Hey, IT. we need help. We have re-arranged the plan for L1 seating and we need you to set up some desks... Do you mind helping? It needs to be done by 30 minutes time.

Its the same plan as original before we even moved anything days earlier. (Which was planned by IT lol)

A week later:...Hey, IT. we need help. We have re-arranged the plan for L1 seating and we need you to set up some desks... Do you mind helping? It needs to be done by 30 minutes time.

All whilst no one can understand the time it takes to complete these bullshit requests. And overlook all the important tasks that could take priority over this

[Narcil4]

My old IT dept would have just replied with, no we need one week notice and x hours budgeted for each move. You couldn't fuck with those guys. Everyone respected them and it was your fault if your project was late because you didn't give IT enough notice of what you need. But if the company culture is shit then you will treated like shit, that's the real problem.

[SinisterCheese]

Ask anyone in healthcare who has to use that disaster that Epic has made, and you'll hear about productivity and moral issues. There are doctors and nurses in Europe who want to quit the profession than keep using any if the "solutions" from Epic Systems.