Sustainable Work Environment

Hopefully, the German myth of the "Fachkräftemangel", the fairy tale of the shortage of skilled workers, engineers and IT specialist has now been buried for good. And I really hope so, since I probably cannot bear another study with random factors (7.14) multiplied onto the real numbers because of gaps in the data.

Note that a very similar thing is happening in the US with exactly the same tricks and exactly the same untrue statements with the same faking of statistics and studies. Actually, no, it's supposed to be even worse in the US and some experts actually claimed it cannot happen as badly over here. Well, they seem to be quite wrong. It is happening. Maybe the situation is not as bad as overseas, but it does happen: Corporations lobbying for cheap skilled work and having their worker training paid for by the government or shifted as a burden onto the worker to do in their free time.

Business as usual: Capitalize results, socialize costs. Liar, liar, pants on fire. So, I claim, and I am not the first one: At least in IT, we do not have a skilled worker shortage.

We have a shortage on sustainable work environments.

There are problems in any work environment, today.

A 2008 study said

• only 15% of workers are motivated and feel obliged to their company.
• 64% only work-to-rule, which probably hurts themselves more than their company
• 24% have quit internally and also do the absolute minimum required to do their jobs.

Jeff Atwood wrote an article about programmer types in 2007, stating that 80% of programmers are the 9-to-5, leave me alone with work after work type that do not really care about their craft. He is quite arrogant about it, but in my opinion he is missing a very important point: If you start out as an 20%er (motivated, truly caring about your job), most development jobs nowadays seem to be such that they make you into an 80%er. It might also simply be a defense strategy to keep sane. When you realize, nobody seems to care but you, you simply stop trying to push the boulder up the mountain.

And if I am to judge, environment in many (read the numbers!) companies are essentially setup to make you into an 80%er (before eventually dropping you): Whenever I open my ears, I almost hear the very same complaint almost from every acquaintance that is also working in IT:

Experienced people, familiar with the technologies that their company is using and/or offering are heavily overtasked. It's usually in the range from 10% (for the lucky ones) up to 40% overload and this overload goes on for weeks and months.

If you are fluent in German, read this. If not, I'll summarize:

• Almost half of all IT works claim they have too little off time. More than 50% percent claim a lack of work-life-balance.
• Almost the same percentage claim that their work is not organized in such a way as to avoid and prevent stress.
• Almost 30% state that if work requirements stay as they are, they clearly won't make it till retirement. An additional 40% think it more likely they cannot sustain their pace until retirement.

Read the last point one more time. Carefully and remember: Results sum up to 100%, there's no overlap:

70% percent of all IT workers consider it more likely than not that they will not be able to do their current jobs until retirement age.

Well, I consider that quite a good definition of unsustainable.

Want more numbers?

• IT workers are four times more likely to suffer from occupational depression (what you might call burnout) than the average worker.
• In one study, 53% of IT workers in Austria are at risk of burnout and 13% have critical symptoms and should be treated immediately
• 40%  have symptoms of chronic fatigue, an early indicator for burnout, and 30% have trouble regenerating from work-related (mental) exhaustion

If you look at German law, these might be considered illegal work environments.

The Rhein-Ruhr-Institute did a working paper in 2009, listing some of the major problems:

• constant overtasking. To achieve set goals, workers need to constantly "voluntarily" work long hours.
• new requirements and change requests are added without adjustment of deadlines and budget restrictions.
• unplanned tasks are piled on top of planned work without plan adjustment (documentation, status reports).
• lack of control: possibility for creativeness is limited by change  requests, strict financial restrictions and tight deadlines.
• project workers are held accountable for results, but have unsufficient resources to achieve goals. There is a conflict between assigned tasks and available resources.
• limited control over work environment. Selection of suitable tools and  methods is not under the control of the specialized worker.
• project workers are held accountable for results, but cannot influence priorisation, schedule or work organisation.
• lack of gratification. Performed work is not appreciated and seems meaningless despite high workload.
• team support is lacking. Teams change constantly, workers need to compete with each other, teamplay is implicitly discouraged.
• lack of fairness. bad communication, suggestions to improve are ignored and workers are given the impression that they are foremost expense factors. Combine this with the lack of control over work environments.
• loss of identification with work and company 
• conflict between personal work ethics (do quality work) and job reality (meet unrealistic deadlines).
• permanent pressure to keep up to date without time allocation or support (resulting in trying to keep up to date in free time)

Most strongly affected are project managers and team leaders, because they experience pressure from both sides. Support from the top seems curiously absent, something I would consider a total management failure.

Oh, and wait: Did I read that correctly? Outsourcing is a conceived a threat and creates a highly stressful environment on both sides ...

The studies also strongly relativize earlier studies that work in IT is usually creative, self-determined, and  autonomous. Either the work environment has changed significantly since these initial observations or the situation was bad in the first place.

A DIWA-IT study claims that the work environment has changed significantly for the worse and blames

• tighter financial investments in IT projects
• high "replaceability" of workers because of offshoring, economization, and internationalization.
• loss of influence from workers, "industrialization", market orientation. Workers feel both overtasked and helpless to achieve their goals.
• social cohesion in team is cancelled by management methods and constant pressure.
• "system of constant probation", result oriented work, workers are trying to achieve goals they cannot achieve with their resources. Workers that do not achieve results are threatend with the loss of their job ("be more productive or be fired").

Especially the latter is a marvelous strategy: Everything seems to be managed with threats. Perceived economic pressure is pushed through directly to workers: Adapt or perish.

I only recently read an article by some cloud computing advocate. He/she basically said that corporate IT needs to offer services that are on par with off-the-shelf cloud offerings, because those are so much better and easier to use than what corporate IT offers. The threat then is: Give me this or corporate IT will die. Seriously, who are you? If such people are responsible for anything, they should be made personally responsible for any work-related illnesses of their subordinates and customers.

You want to know, why your employees are no longer motivated? Because you are brilliantly killing their motivation and harvest their energy, leaving them drained. You offer them no support and try to manage them with threats.

So what do you offer IT workers? Small scale work with limited scope but big responsibilities. Constant need to do long hours without even seeing the results or with no or only little appreciation for their work.

And when nobody cares about my work, I would try to stop caring about my work, too. Because when there's no appreciation, but only running against a wall, continuing to run against the wall is a recipe for disaster.

My theory is: All of this was working back in the day when the workload was not too high and people where motivated by their tasks, because they had both responsibility for larger systems and the possibility to influence decisions. The churning of "new" technologies was slower (I repeat: new technology does not necessarily mean innovation and new is not neccessarily better in IT) and knowledge was significantly more stable. People kept up with changes mostly in their free time or during work lull times. And now? Lull times are being or have been eliminated. Experts talk about increased work density. This requires more focus on day-to-day tasks during work time. The result is that workers

• either stop honing their skills and only do their jobs. With the constant churn of incompatible no-progress, their net-worth is reduced simply by the adoption of "new" technologies.
• or shift their knowledge acquisition into their free time. This causes them to get more likely to burn out or at least fatigue. Combine this with overload and lack of appreciation in their day jobs and the constant threat of outsourcing and the like for added benefit.

Also the complexity of some of the modern systems make it next to impossible to test them out with the resources available to a single person. You cannot learn to administer a network cluster with a few machines alone even if you use virtual machines. I do not have access to enterprise grade network equipment to fiddle with. I lack a few cloud servers to play with puppet, vagrant, and all the other nice tools. However, people still try and try and they feel helpless while doing so.

This theory is backed by the DIWA-IT working paper: IT workers shut off their own, health-related early warning system because of a loss of inner (identity) coherence. Most of them probably really liked their profession in the first place and wanted to get something done. But getting things done has become harder and harder with the (often needlessly) increased complexity of the IT landscape. Add constant churn (useless change), global competition and greatly reduced rewards and gratifications and you have a disaster recipe.

Because of the constant threats, workers compromise and these compromises more often than not are in conflict with personal vision and work ethics. So they not only compromise their personal values but are also forced to spend more and more time doing work they feel is insufficient to simply retain their livelihood because they experience a very real existential threat (loss of job, unemployability).

It is, in essence, a burnout mill, where you either go numb or fall of the cliff. And it does not get any better: The cited studies and working papers are from 2005, 2008, and 2011.