See......I have a right to be stressed.

©2001 Bill Hall

Many IT professionals feel traumatized by the daily grind
Matthew Lynn
BLOOMBERG NEWS
06/04/2006

If your screen freezes, try ignoring it. As that report you've spent a week working on gets chewed up by the hard drive, shrug and forget about it.

Whatever happens, don't call the exhausted souls in the information-technology department. They are too stressed out already. The last thing they need is you shouting at them.

According to a survey released this month by Dublin-based consulting firm SkillSoft, 97 percent of IT professionals feel traumatized by their daily work. Indeed, 80 percent of them get tense just thinking about going to the office.

Poor them.

Whether IT is really the most stressful occupation on the planet is something we could all have an interesting, if nervous, conversation about. What appears beyond doubt is that workplace stress has turned into an epidemic.

Why is that? After all, as the world becomes wealthier, and as billions get invested in new technology, you might imagine our working lives would get easier, not harder.

In reality, work has become so psychologically demanding because we choose to make it that way.

No one would deny that stress is everywhere. SkillSoft talked to 3,000 people to come up with its conclusion that handling the computers frazzles the nerves more than any other job, Kevin Young, managing director of SkillSoft, said in a telephone interview. "That is true right across different industries. The speed of change just gets faster."

In the SkillSoft survey, the IT jocks came out at the top of the pile. They were followed by medicine and engineering. Yet, according to a paper presented to the British Psychological Society earlier this year, librarians suffer more from stress than any other occupation.

It is hard not to sympathize with all of them. IT workers have to wrestle with technology that never seems to get more reliable or user-friendly. If our cars were as wonky as our computers, we'd all keep a spare horse in the garden just in case. Librarians have to deal with people who don't bring their books back on time, or maybe fold down the edges of the pages. (Well, maybe most of us could roll with those punches, but they are very gentle souls, which is why they didn't become firefighters or hedge-fund managers.)

The rankings may well be meaningless. Everyone is under pressure at work.

Why are jobs becoming more stressful all the time? There are three reasons:

First, hyperactivity is now a badge of honor. In the modern office, there is little place for the people who puts their feet up on the desk, push back the chair, and stare at the passing clouds for a few minutes. If you aren't rushing around like a hamster on steroids, the boss thinks you are lazy. You will be downsized before you've had a chance to say "mañana."

Stress has been built into the DNA of office life.

Next, we have created an ever more demanding, 'round-the-clock business culture. Shops are always open in many countries. The call center will take our orders in the middle of the night. The markets switch from one time zone to another. As consumers, that's great. We can get anything we want, when we want it. As producers, it's not so great. We have to be plugged into the working world all the time -- it is hardly surprising we feel under pressure.

Yet, most of us participate in the economy both as consumers and producers. So while we've benefited as the former, we have suffered as the latter.

Lastly, we have forgotten how to be polite and considerate when dealing with our co-workers, suppliers or customers. In the SkillSoft survey, IT workers cited bullying behavior by managers and colleagues as among the reasons they felt so stressed.

Yet, work is so stressful because we've chosen to make it that way.

Maybe it's time we all just relaxed a bit. And perhaps even stopped shouting at the IT department -- I'm really not sure they can handle the strain anymore.