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The Curious Case of the Collapsing Coworkers

February 19, 2018 by John Spencer Leave a Comment

The Curious Case of the Collapsing Coworkers

Working 24/7 is now our culture. Working forty hours a week is the new lazy. I know, because that’s what older people tell me. “You got to pay your dues,” they all said, so I never thought about what was too much to take on, or the potential consequences.

Then, eight years of working 55-65 hours a week left me suffering from severe chest pains at age 30. Doctors were baffled, as I am typically at an ideal weight, eat right, and exercise regularly. I wound up in the emergency room one weekend and endured a heart cath procedure, where they go in through your femoral artery and image your heart to see what’s wrong with it.

But there was nothing wrong with my heart.

Age: 31
Diagnosis: Work stress.
Prescription: Two weeks rest, stop working so much.

My company didn’t like that. “You’re too important to be off. Work from home, or else.” But the plug in my artery came loose, and I nearly had to have a blood transfusion, so I got one day off. Unpaid.

I know I’m not the only one who has experienced something like this, because I’ve seen it happen elsewhere. The next company I worked for purported to have a better culture, but a year in, one of my 30-something teammates suddenly collapsed during a project. Turned out he’d been working 60-70 hours a week for months. They rushed him to the hospital for an emergency heart cath, only to find nothing wrong with his heart.

Age: 39
Diagnosis: Work stress.
Prescription: Two weeks rest, stop working so much.

The company balked. “We can’t make our deadline if you take two weeks off. Work remotely and lie to HR about it, or else.”

I got out of there before they could put me back in a hospital bed, but quickly discovered that overwork is an epidemic. My new employer soon revealed themselves to be severely understaffed. Their desktop support department consisted of just one man.

I overheard him expressing concerns about his hours and workload one day, and management replied that HR didn’t want to see any overtime on his paychecks. He asked how he could possibly do so much work in eight hours and they said, “Figure it out, or we’ll find someone else.”

So he continued working 14 hour days, with 6 hours unpaid. I wasn’t surprised when he collapsed on a business trip a month later and woke up in the hospital following an emergency heart cath.

Age: 38
Diagnosis: Work stress.
Prescription: Two weeks rest, and stop working so much.

Despite the doctor’s orders and the fact that he’d nearly dropped dead, the company ordered him to return to the site and finish his work upon release. “We don’t have anyone else, and times are tough. You should be happy you have a job,” they said.

I’d already posted a new resume by the time he told me. Meetings there featured jokes about “living” in the airport, spouses threatening divorce over the hours, and now employees collapsing from overwork.
Not very funny to me.

A small business is like a family, people said, so I sought to join one. I was hired and found that sentiment to be true, but I quickly found one coworker getting frequent shout-outs for responding to email at two or three in the morning. She’d give out her cell phone number and tell clients to call whenever. She often skipped lunch and talked about how she worked every evening, and every weekend.

You can probably guess where she ended up.

Age: 37
Diagnosis: Malnutrition, work stress
Prescription: Two weeks rest, eat better, stop working so much.

But this time, I couldn’t fault the company. I rarely worked overtime there. She did that to herself, and kept trying to work despite doctor’s orders. The company eventually had to step in and temporarily take away her access.
So why include her? Or the helpdesk guy who willingly worked unpaid overtime?

Because we often choose to overwork ourselves. We don’t say no, and we don’t set boundaries to protect our work-life balance. Know the difference between working hard and being taken advantage of, and take it from someone who’s been to the edge – when you’re staring death in the face, you aren’t thinking, “I wish I’d spent more time working.”

You’re thinking about all the time you could’ve spent doing something else.

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John SpencerJohn Spencer is a technology professional located in a blue city somewhere in deep red TX.  He himself is best described as “purple”.  He has a bachelor’s degree in English but works in technology and is best described as a jack of all IT trades but a master of none.  He is currently working to correct the latter and is studying for a Master’s degree in technology while working full time.

Filed Under: Featured Post

Y’all Ain’t Killing Me: The Rise Of “Super Jobs.”

January 22, 2018 by John Spencer 6 Comments

Y'all Ain't Killing Me: The Rise Of “Super Jobs.”

Image credit -Mad Wraith Lic-CC By 2.0

 

I’m contacted daily by IT recruiters; I have a pretty versatile skill set and there are a lot of jobs open in my area. Lately, I’ve noticed an uptick of what I call “super jobs” hitting my inbox. These are positions where employers try to cram multiple roles into one in order to save money. Here’s a good example of a super job I recently received. After the example, I’m going to break down for you what it really means. It is an altered version, as I removed all of the company’s identifying information:

Specific tasks may include but are not limited to the following:

• Managing development and assessment of inventory for machine connected locations
• Reporting on planned demand against projections for machine connected locations
• Capturing product metrics and reconciling by region and by data plan
• Regularly connecting with appropriate Telecommunication contacts to determine if there is back billing, Client status of payments, billing information corrections
• Examination and reconciliation of billing and financials related to application
• Understanding of application fees charged by the vendor that are related to signal strength or quality, develop reporting
• Execute audits of orders and disconnects
• Examination of data usage, and development of reporting
• Examination of connections and gateway alignment, and development of reporting
SharePoint:
• Developing dashboards and reporting
• Enhancements to work trackers
• Addition of workflow to reporting pages
• Automating metrics capture and reporting from trackers
• Integration with Excel for dash boarding
WLAN:
• Monthly metrics and status reporting which includes: tracking of deployments across the Enterprise, capacity of critical infrastructure (Controllers and licenses, PI hardware and license, MSE hardware and license), demand forecast across the Enterprise
• Development and publishing, updating information for monthly operational updates
Skills & Capabilities:
• Advanced Excel expertise pivot tables, formulas, charting
• PowerPoint expertise
• SharePoint Developer
• Data Collection, Data Analytics, Data Manipulation, Metrics Generation
• Highly self-organized and works without constant supervision
• Network background and experience.

Could I do it? Sure, I have experience in all of those areas and I have the skills listed. But for you non-IT people, this is what they’re really looking for:

• A Sharepoint admin/developer (often two roles, but we’ll be nice and say one),
• A BI developer/report designer
• A data analyst
• An application support analyst
• A billing/collections analyst
• A server/network admin
• A level 2 (or 3) help desk analyst
• An inventory asset manager

Count those: that’s a minimum of eight roles for one person. EIGHT. Each would be a full-time responsibility at a reasonably staffed company, requiring a seasoned asset manager and IT professionals with advanced skills or certifications in these very separate areas: Networking, Databases, Business Intelligence, Sharepoint, Excel, and Programming. I know IT people who are advanced and/or certified in one of these areas. Maybe even two or three.

But I don’t know any who are at this level in six, let alone eight. They contacted me because it’s on my resume, and I do have a level of proficiency in those particular IT disciplines. I’ve been forced into doing this “super job” thing before, and I know exactly what it means: 10-12 hour days at the office, logging in every day when you get home from work, working all weekend every weekend. You get to be awakened in the middle of the night for emergencies, and no real time off because “you’re too important to be out of contact,” so they bother you the whole time you’re away.

I had one company give me an airtime USB with the expectation that I would carry it always and pull over to work on the side of the road if called while driving around on the weekend. I wish I was kidding. That amount of work for one person is neither reasonable nor sustainable. I think companies know this, and they don’t care. It’s not like the days of yore, where they would bring in talented people and groom them for the future. In today’s workplace, they want to bring you in, load you down, and burn you out. And once you’re gone, or dead, they shrug and bring in the next one.

But maybe you’re up for the challenge, if the price is right. I mean, they must be offering a six-figure salary to put up with all of that, right?

Nope. Try $40 an hour (83.2k yearly) as a contract to hire (so no benefits or PTO). It says three months, but in my experience, that always gets extended to between 12 and 18 months. If you’re lucky enough to survive that, and they eventually bring you into their company, expect that pay rate to drop to under 80k yearly. Oh, and you’ll be salaried, so kiss all that time and a half you were getting for the insane overtime hours, goodbye. In fact, now that they don’t have to pay for it, expect the demands to increase.

“Thanks, but no thanks”, I replied to the recruiter. Y’all ain’t killing me.

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John SpencerJohn Spencer is a technology professional located in a blue city somewhere in deep red TX.  He himself is best described as “purple”.  He has a bachelor’s degree in English but works in technology and is best described as a jack of all IT trades but a master of none.  He is currently working to correct the latter and is studying for a Master’s degree in technology while working full time.

Filed Under: Featured Post

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