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From...
Tech careers mean long hours and cold dinners
October 16, 1998
Web posted at 5:25 PM EDT
by Julia King
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(IDG) -- Dick Colebank's wife gave up years ago on the idea of cooking and eating dinner with her husband.
"She used to make meals for me, and I'd turn up two hours late. That got old real quick, so we decided to just forget it," said Colebank, who typically puts in 50 hours per week as assistant vice president of technical services at Lone Star Life Insurance Co. in Dallas.
Jeff Scherb, senior vice president and chief technology officer at The Tribune Co., usually is in his Chicago office by 7 a.m., after already having worked 45 minutes or so during his train ride into the city. He tries to leave work in time to tuck in his three kids at night — on days when he isn't traveling.
"I don't even have any concept of how many hours a week I work, but it hasn't been 40 in a long time," Scherb said.
Scherb's long hours are by no means the exception. On average, information technology professionals work 50 hours per week. Almost half (47%) work an average of six hours on Saturdays and Sundays, according to a Computerworld survey of 250 IT professionals.
Seven out of 10 IT professionals have worked while sick. The same number have bailed out of family affairs and other social activities because of work.
And 51% of the surveyed IT workers said they "occasionally" miss getting home for dinner; 28% said "frequently."
Idealism ... get real
Moreover, anecdotal information indicates that Generation Xers have the same long hours, even though they joined IT's ranks with grand notions of "having a life" outside of work.
"It was an idealistic vision that generation had," said Brian Hoffman, an IT recruiter at Winter, Wyman & Co. in Boston. But once on the job, reality sets in.
"They find they need to be available more than 40 hours because a user they need to catch up with isn't available until after 6. Or they may need to wait until after the end of the day to get test time on a certain computer. There are so many things that necessitate more than the standard workweek," Hoffman said.
Chief among those, professionals said, is the ever-increasing complexity of technology itself. As hardware prices decline, individual groups within companies are more frequently buying and implementing systems for department-specific tasks. It is up to the IT department to make the hodgepodge of chips, wires and software work together, a job that often can be technically challenging and always is time-consuming, workers said.
"It's gotten worse over the past few years [because] everything has to interface with everything else," said Jack Howarth, a systems analyst at Dresser-Rand Co., an oil industry equipment manufacturer in Broken Arrow, Okla.
"Now, it's more than writing a program to produce a report. It's writing a program to access 14 different systems to produce a report," he said.
As a result of that complexity, Howarth spends more time working than he ever did before, often forgoing even weekend leisure activities such as attending a car show.
"I can't remember the last time I actually did some enjoyable reading, like a novel. I can't remember the last time I went to a movie, either," Howarth said.
In August, a peak vacation month at many companies, Howarth worked his usual five days plus three out of five Saturdays. When he does go on vacation, he does what his colleagues do: keeps his destination — even if it is no farther away than his backyard — a closely guarded secret.
"People cover themselves by saying they're going out of town because they know if they do vacation in town, they'll be called if something goes wrong," Howarth said.
On the other side of the coin are the 61% of IT professionals who interrupt their vacations to call and check on things at work. About half of the people surveyed said they work while on vacation, and 25% bring along a laptop computer, pager or cellular phone to keep in touch with the office.
Some professionals, such as Steve Frick, a systems analyst at restaurant equipment manufacturer Delfield Co. in Mount Pleasant, Mich., also regularly work on holidays, but it is out of necessity more than anything else.
This year, for example, Frick had planned to take a long weekend to spend with his family. But instead, he will be converting the company's systems to a newer version of manufacturing software that is year 2000-compliant. Four weeks later — during the Christmas holiday when production is once again shut down — he will be back at work testing the new software.
Working long hours, especially on holidays, "causes a lot of tension in the family," Frick said. "One of my co-workers and I were just talking about that. He said he regrets how many Christmases he has worked and that he knows his wife is going to be upset with him again [this year]."
Many are changing jobs in hopes of reducing the number of hours they work. But that, too, is unrealistic, Hoffman said.
"Companies will promise it's a 37-3/4-hour workweek, and then comes the caveat that hours may run longer on a project-by-project basis," he said. "Then you find out that the projects are six months long, and you're living at the office."
At Lone Star, Colebank uses some unofficial flexibility to compensate his IT staff for its long working hours.
"We don't officially have a direct compensation for all hours worked, so if they work Saturdays or Sundays, I give them time off somewhere else," he said.
"The benefit of the long hours is actually a more relaxed environment," Colebank said. "If they have something to do during the week, like a doctor's appointment, they can do it."
A little understanding
Some pioneering companies are trying new approaches that may provide some relief to IT workers in the future. One approach is long-term "time banking," said Ken Prager, an organizational expert at Riverton Management Consulting Group in Palmyra, N.J.
Under that scenario, workers from year to year bank extra hours they work plus sick days and vacation time they didn't use. Employees could use that time later to, say, care for an ailing parent, Prager said.
Still other companies, such as Acacia Life Insurance Co. in New York, are building on-site meditation rooms where IT workers can go to relieve stress during working hours.
"This is a very new thing," said Carole D. Stovall, a Washington psychologist and specialist in workplace stress. "But slowly, more companies are setting up situations where workers can take that very important break every hour — away from the computer screen," Stovall said.
"The more hours you work, the less productive you'll be," she added. "You end up in a downward spiral, plus you make more mistakes, so it's very costly to constantly walk around with a high stress level."
Recruiters report that a handful of companies also are beginning to pay salaried IT workers a pro-rated hourly rate — but not a time-and-a-half overtime rate — for every hour they work beyond 40.
Some relief for harried IT workers would seem in order. "I am on call 24 hours a day," one IT professional said in the confidential survey. "So I leave town and go to a cabin with no electricity to take a break."