|
Softpanorama |
May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
|
| News | Main page | Recommended Links | Work overload | Spam and mail overload | Etc |
... there’s a difference between information — the stuff made so abundant by digital technology, and knowledge — the insight we get when we’ve had a chance to sort through things and figure them out. Psychologist Robert Butterworth says we need mental “content filters,” like the filters many people use on e-mail programs, in order to sift through all the information thrown at us every day. “There comes a point where you have to decide which information to look at and which information to overlook,” Butterworth says. Perhaps the best solution to all this is the simplest one: turn off the computer, close the book, and think about what you’ve seen, heard and read. |
One in four of over 1,300 managers surveyed, admitted to actually suffering ill health as a result of the amount of information they handle.
According to the survey, the results of `Infoglut` include:
The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common folk. He meant that those who belong to elite trades -- physicians, lawyers, teachers, and scientists -- protect their special status by creating vocabularies that are incomprehensible to the general public. This process prevents outsiders from understanding what the profession is doing and why -- and protects the insiders from close examination and criticism. Professions, in other words, build forbidding walls of technical gobbledegook over which the prying and alien eye cannot see.
We may well ask ourselves, then, is there something that the masters of computer technology think they are doing for us which they and we may have reason to regret? I believe there is, and it is suggested by the title of my talk, "Informing Ourselves to Death." In the time remaining, I will try to explain what is dangerous about the computer, and why. And I trust you will be open enough to consider what I have to say. Now, I think I can begin to get at this by telling you of a small experiment I have been conducting, on and off, for the past several years. There are some people who describe the experiment as an exercise in deceit and exploitation but I will rely on your sense of humor to pull me through.
Here's how it works: It is best done in the morning when I see a colleague who appears not to be in possession of a copy of The New York Times. "Did you read The Times this morning?," I ask. If the colleague says yes, there is no experiment that day. But if the answer is no, the experiment can proceed. "You ought to look at Page 23," I say. "There's a fascinating article about a study done at Harvard University." "Really? What's it about?" is the usual reply. My choices at this point are limited only by my imagination. But I might say something like this: "Well, they did this study to find out what foods are best to eat for losing weight, and it turns out that a normal diet supplemented by chocolate eclairs, eaten six times a day, is the best approach. It seems that there's some special nutrient in the eclairs -- encomial dioxin -- that actually uses up calories at an incredible rate."
Another possibility, which I like to use with colleagues who are known to be health conscious is this one: "I think you'll want to know about this," I say. "The neuro-physiologists at the University of Stuttgart have uncovered a connection between jogging and reduced intelligence. They tested more than 1200 people over a period of five years, and found that as the number of hours people jogged increased, there was a corresponding decrease in their intelligence. They don't know exactly why but there it is."
I'm sure, by now, you understand what my role is in the experiment: to report something that is quite ridiculous -- one might say, beyond belief. Let me tell you, then, some of my results: Unless this is the second or third time I've tried this on the same person, most people will believe or at least not disbelieve what I have told them. Sometimes they say: "Really? Is that possible?" Sometimes they do a double-take, and reply, "Where'd you say that study was done?" And sometimes they say, "You know, I've heard something like that."
Now, there are several conclusions that might be drawn from these results, one of which was expressed by H. L. Mencken fifty years ago when he said, there is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it. This is more of an accusation than an explanation but in any case I have tried this experiment on non-professors and get roughly the same results. Another possible conclusion is one expressed by George Orwell -- also about 50 years ago -- when he remarked that the average person today is about as naive as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.
And something else, which once was our friend, turned against us, as well. I refer to information. There was a time when information was a resource that helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their environment. It is true enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a scarcity of information but its very scarcity made it both important and usable. This began to change, as everyone knows, in the late 15th century when a goldsmith named Gutenberg, from Mainz, converted an old wine press into a printing machine, and in so doing, created what we now call an information explosion. Forty years after the invention of the press, there were printing machines in 110 cities in six different countries; 50 years after, more than eight million books had been printed, almost all of them filled with information that had previously not been available to the average person. Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.
But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of chaos. If I may take my own country as an example, here is what we are faced with: In America, there are 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting tapes; 362 million TV sets; and over 400 million radios. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year (300,000 world-wide) and every day in America 41 million photographs are taken, and just for the record, over 60 billion pieces of advertising junk mail come into our mail boxes every year. Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.
The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.
And there are two reasons we do not know what to do with it. First, as I have said, we no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives. Second, we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information. As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS.
Now, into this situation comes the computer. The computer, as we know, has a quality of universality, not only because its uses are almost infinitely various but also because computers are commonly integrated into the structure of other machines. Therefore it would be fatuous of me to warn against every conceivable use of a computer. But there is no denying that the most prominent uses of computers have to do with information. When people talk about "information sciences," they are talking about computers -- how to store information, how to retrieve information, how to organize information. The computer is an answer to the questions, how can I get more information, faster, and in a more usable form? These would appear to be reasonable questions. But now I should like to put some other questions to you that seem to me more reasonable. Did Iraq invade Kuwait because of a lack of information? If a hideous war should ensue between Iraq and the U.S., will it happen because of a lack of information? If children die of starvation in Ethiopia, does it occur because of a lack of information? Does racism in South Africa exist because of a lack of information? If criminals roam the streets of New York City, do they do so because of a lack of information?
Or, let us come down to a more personal level: If you and your spouse are unhappy together, and end your marriage in divorce, will it happen because of a lack of information? If your children misbehave and bring shame to your family, does it happen because of a lack of information? If someone in your family has a mental breakdown, will it happen because of a lack of information?
I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes us the most misery and pain -- at both cultural and personal levels -- has nothing to do with the sort of information made accessible by computers. The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the computer for this? Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine. But it is presented to us, with trumpets blaring, as at this conference, as a technological messiah.
Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better -- best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it. I said a moment ago that computers are not to blame for this. And that is true, at least in the sense that we do not blame an elephant for its huge appetite or a stone for being hard or a cloud for hiding the sun. That is their nature, and we expect nothing different from them. But the computer has a nature, as well. True, it is only a machine but a machine designed to manipulate and generate information. That is what computers do, and therefore they have an agenda and an unmistakable message.
The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems. And so all the brilliant young men and women, believing this, create ingenious things for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will become wiser and more decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By becoming masters of this wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige and power and some will even become famous. In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could learn from such people -- perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and mental illness and anger.
As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us Star Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will give us artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to self-knowledge. They will give us instantaneous global communication, and tell us this is the way to mutual understanding. They will give us Virtual Reality and tell us this is the answer to spiritual poverty. But that is only the way of the technician, the fact-mongerer, the information junkie, and the technological idiot.
Here is what Henry David Thoreau told us: "All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end." Here is what Goethe told us: "One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words." And here is what Socrates told us: "The unexamined life is not worth living." And here is what the prophet Micah told us: "What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" And I can tell you -- if I had the time (although you all know it well enough) -- what Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Spinoza and Shakespeare told us. It is all the same: There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
During the survey, one in four of over 1,300 managers surveyed, admitted to actually suffering ill health as a result of the amount of information they handle. Ironically, half agreed high levels of information were required in order to perform effectively. In the survey, 48% of managers predicted the Internet would play a primary role in aggravating the problem further in 1998.
Effects of Information OverloadAccording to the survey, the results of `Infoglut` include:
- Procrastination and time wasting
- Delayering of important business decisions
- Distraction from main job responsibilities
- Tension
- Stress and loss of job satisfaction
- In many cases, illness and the breakdown of personal relationships.
Psychologist Dr.David Lewis, an internationally known Psychologist, Consultant and Lecturer, analysed the findings of the survey and commented:
"Information Fatigue Syndrome – having too much information – can be as dangerous as having too little. Among other problems, it can lead to a paralysis of analysis, making it far harder to find the right solutions or make the best decisions."
The 350 page report, entitled:
`Dying for Information? An investigation into the effects of information overload in the U.K and World-wide`,
Is based on a survey of 1,313 junior, middle and senior managers in the U.K, U.S, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
- Two thirds of managers report tension with work colleagues, and loss of job satisfaction arise because of stress associated with information overload.
- One third of managers suffer from ill health, as a direct consequence of stress associated with information overload. This figure increases to 43% among senior managers.
- Almost two thirds (62%) of managers testify their personal relationships suffer as a direct result of information overload.
- 43% of managers think important decisions are delayed, and the ability to make decisions is affected as a result of having too much information.
- One in five senior managers believe that substantial amounts of time are wasted collecting and searching for information.
- 44% believe the cost of collating information exceeds its value to business.
- Almost half (48%) think the Internet will be a prime cause of information overload during 1998.
- The vast majority (almost 80%) of managers cites the rapid increase of internal communications within companies, and communications with customers and suppliers as key reasons for the increase in information levels.
Remember when you thought cell phones, pagers, and laptop computers would make your life less complicated? Instead, technology has infiltrated every aspect of our lives. We are faced daily with more information than the average person in the seventeenth century dealt with in an entire lifetime. So what, short of throwing your computer off the roof and moving into a cave, can you do to survive? What you have to do is practice triage. For doctors, triage is the system of prioritizing patients in an emergency situation to ensure medical care of the greatest benefit to the largest number. For you, information triage means prioritizing, delegating, and just letting some things slide. A doctor wouldn't set the arm of a patient before attending to a gunshot victim just because the guy with the broken arm got there first. You have to assess your priorities and then take actions that allow you to get the most done.
Fifty years ago, presidential science adviser Vannevar Bush accurately predicted the rise of personal computers, information storage and search tools, and electronic commerce in the article "As We May Think," published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It has become one of the most widely cited scientific articles of the century.
Bush, who oversaw all U.S. wartime science efforts (including the Manhattan Project), worried that increasing specialization would soon stall scientific progress. Noting that "Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it," Bush proposed a solution called the Memex. He envisioned "a device in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility."
Search services have unified what was once a sprawl of uncharted fiefdoms on the Internet. But despite advances in processing and storage, the underlying approach has remained essentially unchanged for years: Users enter a few descriptive words and hope those words are used in relevant documents. It's fine for searching through a collection of a few thousand items, but punch in "travel" on Digital Equipment Corp.'s AltaVista search engine, and you'll get more than 7 million possible answers. That's noise, not information.
The explosion of data available on the Web is aggravating the problem. By late 1997, there were more than 640,000 sites and 100 million pages on the Web, and the number continues to double every six months. Without fundamentally new approaches, the number of documents returned by a generic search engine will grow at the same rate.
The information age has lived up to its name: It takes ages to sift through all the information that is now available to organizations. The overabundance of information has created a time-consuming and difficult challenge for busy executives and professionals searching for that key piece of data in an increasingly competitive world.
Content owners (primary publishers like McGraw-Hill, CMP Publications, Ziff-Davis and others) want to extract as much value from their ownership as possible, and not give away half or more of the revenue to the information repackagers that now stand between them and the end-customer.
As the balance between print-based revenue and electronic revenue shifts, primary publishers are scrutinizing these issues more seriously than they did in the past, when electronic revenue was meager compared with the robust print business.
It's Monday morning, and you're just getting in to work. You pass the pile of faxes on the fax machine, then grab the stack of mail from your mailbox, wondering why you still get so much paper in this electronic era. At your desk, you note your company's stock price as it scrolls by on your screensaver, click some Web links to get last night's sports scores and this morning's headlines, and, finally, check your email.
There are more than 100 messages. Some are useless marketing spams; some are mildly interesting newsletters; and buried near the end of the queue, there's an urgent message from your boss. If only you had a faster modem at home, you could have been in touch over the weekend and avoided the backlog...
Welcome to the information glut. According to Data Smog, a new book by David Shenk, information overload is more than an inconvenience; it's responsible for higher levels of stress, decreasing educational standards, and numerous other social problems.
Traditional mass media are partially to blame, but the Internet--with its vast storehouse of knowledge and promise of instant communication--contributes to the avalanche. While the book's alarmism may seem a bit extreme, we've all experienced the paralysis that comes with having too much information, too many options, and no time to make a rational decision, let alone take a one-hour lunch.
So how can you cut through all the junk? We can't turn off your fax machine or convince you to throw out your cellular phone. However, if you want to get the most out of your computer and the Internet--without being buried by too much information--read on.
On the 3rd December 1997 a one day colloquium was held at The Institute of Electrical Engineers in London to address the problems of information overload. The primary objective of the colloquium is to consider how to overcome this problem from a technical perspective, that is examining a number of I.T. stategies such as Data Warehousing and the use of Intelligent Agents.
A paper entitled, "Information Overload - myth or reality?", suggests that there may be alternative non-technical reasons why information overload exists. The paper briefly examine the rise in status of information, the stresses of modern working life, the reality and consequences of information overload.
In the late 1970s, Air Force pilot Colonel John Boyd wanted to understand why US fighter aircraft consistently won air combat engagements against aircraft that had better maneuverability. His observations led to what is now known as the Boyd Cycle. Conventional wisdom dictated that aircraft with better maneuverability, given similar speed capabilities, should generally win most close engagements. However, this was not happening in actual air-to-air engagements. US fighters, despite wider turn radii, consistently beat opponent aircraft and pilots. Based upon an analysis of the airframes and their capabilities, Boyd came upon a subtle conclusion. It was not the turn radius that is the decisive factor in air combat, it is the ability to see the enemy and the speed with which control inputs reached control surfaces which turned the tide in singular engagements. Boyd’s hypothesis was that US fighters were winning because they could complete a "loop" of action faster than enemy aircraft. Boyd’s loop occurred in four distinct steps:
Observe: Our pilots could see the enemy better and more completely due to the cockpit design of our aircraft, which had great visibility.
Orient: Since our pilots saw the enemy first, they could react, or orient themselves toward the enemy faster.
Decide: After seeing and instinctually reacting with an initial orientation, our pilots’ level of training allowed them to decide faster on their next combat maneuver.
Act: When US pilots input control movements to their aircraft, their inputs were more rapidly converted into control surface movements, with the resultant faster initiation of a desired maneuver.
Based on these observations, Boyd’s OODA model of air-to-air combat was valid and useful to the Air Force. The model worked and accurately described that particular aspect of conflict. However, after Boyd’s presentations on the OODA loop gained Air Force-wide acceptance, they also worked their way into the US ground force’s inventory through a series of conceptual briefings given by Boyd and through the maneuver warfare writings of William F. Lind.
- Prudloe Vensigian from Deep Run Mobile Home Park, Maryland , November 1, 1999
Baldwin and Lessard are combat veterans of the Net, both in terms of writing and personal experience. They are also long-standing Truth Tellers.
In addition to writing about computing for a number of magazines and websites, they also run the guerilla website NetSlaves, a running testimonial to real life for many in the hi-tech workplace.
"NetSlaves" is a terrific extension of the site, one of the few books to come off of a website that really works as a book. Lessard and Baldwin have a powerful story to tell, and they do it with a lot of punch. "NetSlaves" ought to be handed out to every graduate of every tech school, and given to every new employee of every Net company.
Baldwin and Lessard say their grand "pre-alpha" statement about the Nature of Net-Slavery is this:
"Technology has changed, but human nature hasn't. Whether it's the Gold Rush of 1849 or the Web Rush of l999, people are people. More often than not, they're miserable, nasty, selfish creatures, driven by vanity and greed, doing whatever they can to get ahead, even if it means stepping on the person next to them, crushing the weak, and destroying themselves in the process."
The authors don't have a particularly high regard for many forms of Net work, which they lambaste as the New Media Caste System, but they care about Net workers, and the book is curiously affectionate, even loving about them, as well as a hoot to read.
Both concede that one of their purposes in writing "NetSlaves" is to have the book serve as a quasi-historical, quasi-anthropological reflection of a particular moment in the culture.
Although the tone of "NetSlaves" is informal and funny, the point is pretty serious. "NetSlaves" has done what legions of reporters and authors have so far failed to do: paint a truthful picture of about the new nature of work in the techno-centered world.
For all of the media blabber about Net commerce and hi-tech startups, life in this fast lane can be brutal - insane hours, almost no employee-employer loyalty, greed and moral cowardice, help-desk geeks driven mad by enraged customers, back-stabbing, savage pressure, competiveness and the many resultant neuroses from all of the above.
Baldwin and Lessard make no pretense of objectivity. They write with almost ferocious authority and persuasiveness. They describe themselves as "two angry, cranky bastards out for blood" on behalf of their exhausted selves and the countless burnouts, geniuses, thieves, opportunists, workaholics and losers they've encountered along the way.
"NetSlaves" gives us a whole new language for the villains and back-stabbers who make up the hi-tech workplace. Particular venom is reserved for the "Fry Cooks," the "get it done at all costs" project people of the New Media Caste System. (There's also the "Garbagemen," the workers who have to get servers up and running when they crash).
My favorite chapter is about the "Cab Drivers," the haunted and hunted itinerant Web freelancers who design sites, followed closely by "Gold Diggers and Gigolos," a scathing portrait of the ambitious, night-crawling, hard-partying, butt-kissing movers and shakers and wannabees of hi-tech work world.
"Most Web sites are designed by itinerant, restless young people who have given up the constraints of working for one company in particular, in exchange for the self-determination of pursuing their own path. The rationale is that they can earn a higher hourly rate and pick and choose their projects.
"The reality, however," write Lessard and Baldwin, "is that these Cab Drivers have to constantly hustle for work and their passengers, or clients, who are also cash-crunched, are notorious for skipping out on their fares. Added to this is the lack of health benefits that Cab Drivers face - a plight which has forced many to simply neglect themselves." This is a world in which workers are terrified or despondent when forced to take a few weeks off, convinced they'll fall behind forever.
"NetSlaves" succeeds wonderfully in its goal to tell the truth about a particular culture at a critical juncture in time. It is, in fact one of the few telling looks inside the new kinds of workplaces springing up in the hi-tech, global economy. Workers beware.
Its 4:30 am on a Friday and I just finished the last Mountain Dew. We ran out of coffee hours ago, the remains of it now black sludge at the bottom of the pot. The buildings air conditioning went off sometime the previous night and its up to almost 90 degrees in the server room. The two volunteer hackers on the staff went home after 12 hours, leaving me and the sysadmin…
This is a normal day for me.
I‘m a systems engineer in the client services division of a network security software company. Basically what that means is that when networks break, I fix them.
I am 22 years old, I make a large multiple of the national average salary, and if I cashed in my stock options I could buy a very nice house. I’m also sixty pounds overweight, I sleep an average of four hours a night, and I have several ulcers. I usually spend about 60 hours a week at the office, but I’m on call 24 hours a day seven days a week. If I was honest with myself Id probably say I worked about one hundred hours last week. This is a normal life for someone working in this industry.
We live in a world today that runs on information. And people want all of it now. When was the last time you actually wrote out a personal letter to someone, on paper, in pen? Why bother when E-mail is so much faster and easier? But what goes on behind the scenes when you hit the “send” button? There are thousands of people out there just like me who have titles like “Network engineer” and “Systems administrator”. We keep that information flowing, and we get paid what seems like a lot of money to do it. If you’ve been in the market for a good network admin lately you know what I mean. The market is pushing the salary into the 100k+ plus range for someone with the necessary experience to handle even a relatively small network, never mind what the really large companies like State Farm insurance or Wells Fargo bank have.
I started work on this problem with the sysadmin on Thursday before the close of business, getting things set up, preparing for the changes etc… The company was switching internet service providers that night because the previous one hadn’t provided the level of service they needed. This entailed changing the IP addresses, and DNS configurations of every machine in the building, running three different operating systems, probably two hundred machines all told, then setting up the servers, routers, and switches necessary to get it all running. It’s a big job, but with six people working on it we figured we could get it done before start of business the next day. Normally you would do this kind of thing over a weekend, but the ISP could either do the changeover tonight, or wait till next week, and we needed to be online before Monday.
Getting back to what happens when you press the send button. You expect the computer to send the message, and that the person it was sent to will receive it. What happens to the message then is an incredibly complex series of storage, sending, routing, switching, redirecting, forwarding and retrieving, that is all over in a fraction of a second, or at most a few minutes. But you don’t care how or why it gets there, only that it does, and this is all you should care about. After all you don’t have to know how your cars engine works in order to drive it right. But someone has to know in case it breaks. And when your email breaks you expect someone to fix it. It doesn’t matter what time it is, or where the message is being sent, you want it to get there now.
Its now 8 am and the network is still down. We’ve managed to isolate a routing problem and are in the process of fixing it. The ISP gave us the wrong IP addresses and now we have to go back and redo all two hundred machines in the building. The router was crashing and we couldn’t figure out why. Two hours on the phone with the vendors support, and three levels of support engineer later we fix it. People are starting to come in to work and ask why they can’t get their email. The changeover process takes us about three hours and finally everyone has the right IP, but things still aren’t working right. A bunch of people use DHCP for their laptops and the DHCP people cant get out to the net. The CEO of the company is one of those people…
So what do we do? Well we hire people to take care of the network. And we give them benefits and pay like any normal employee. We also give them pagers, cell phones, a direct phone lines to their houses so that any time, any where, we can get them, because the network could go down, and we DEPEND on that network, and those people. This is where things go skew from the normal business model.
All compensation is basically in exchange for time. The only thing humans have to give is their time. When I pay you a salary it is in exchange for me being able to use your abilities for a certain period of time every year. The assumption is that the more experienced or knowledgeable you are the more your time is worth. This works fine when you are being paid a wage, but salaried employees aren’t. They exist under the polite fiction that all their work can be done in a forty hour period every week, no matter how much work there is. We all know this isn’t the case of course. And when it comes to Systems administrators and network engineers that polite fiction isn’t so polite. In exchange for high salaries and large stock options the company owns you all day and all night, every day and every night. You are “Mission critical”. High salaries become an illusion because when it gets down to it your hourly rate isn’t much better than the assistant manager of the local Pep Boys.
I finally went home at 1 that afternoon. I couldn’t stay awake any more and if I didn’t leave right then I wouldn’t have been able to drive home. The funny thing is I felt guilty for leaving. Things still weren’t working quite right, and I felt like I should have stayed until they were. Even funnier is that I volunteered for this. The only part of the job that I actually had to do was to change a few IP addresses and configure the firewall, but I thought I’d lend a hand, and I couldn’t do the firewall till everything else was working anyway. My wife hadn’t seen me in two and a half days, and I could barely give her a kiss when I walked through the door and collapsed on my bed. The SysAdmin was fired a few hours after I left. Back to work Monday morning.
From reader comments:
like furnace stokers (Score:2, Funny) by sed@netcom.com (http://durak.org/sean/) on Monday July 26, @06:57AM EDT (#2) (User Info) http://durak.org/sean/ i sometimes liken system and network admin to being a coal stoker in the basement of a big building, just shoveling coal into the furnace 24/7 to keep the business above running. punchline of your story is that they fired the (only?) full time system administrator. personal and professional info on homepage: http://durak.org/sean/ Amen Brother (Score:1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 26, @06:58AM EDT (#3)
Been there. All I can suggest is that you make a serious effort to spend more time playing and less time working. When I left my last job, I had 8 weeks vacation accrued, and a real bad attitude. I took two months off working, and now I limit my work week to 50 hrs on regular weeks, and anytime I work more than that, I take off a day or half day in the following week. This has really helped me be a lot nicer person overall (and my wife REALLY likes that). I have always met folks in high positions who DO appreciate my effort, and have thus always had stellar reviews and reccomedations for future employment. Good luck, and stay sane.
As one Slashdot reader put it (ArticlesHome Sweet Sweatshop):
They think that because they work 18 hours a day, neglect their home life, end up divorced, have kids that don't know them, and few real friends, they are "Heros". They gave their all, 110%. Guess what, for that 110%, you will get a watch and maybe a small pention when you retire. You will dye alone, and no one that ever worked with you will care. There is so much more to life than the grind. People who overwork themselves aren't heros, they are idiots...
Another reader stated about WEB-related jobs
I work in "the Industry" and telecommute from home (very small apartment on the 5th floor). I have 10+ people over me and a few below me, and I've never met any of them face to face -- I only know them by e-mail, though I work with them every day for 18+ hours, sleeping on a futon in between. Pay is good, but it's very isolated -- no human contact at all, and I get very tired of staring at the same Netscape, Emacs, and shell windows all day, every day. I go through 150+ ounces of dew and coke every day, and there's nothing directly outside but traffic and other buildings. Time pressure is also fairly high. Everything must always be done "within 24 hours" because that's the way the Web works, I guess. I'm getting fairly tired of working this way.
Another interesting quote:
You know, media companies aren't the only ones. ANY sort of internet startup, and I've worked for MORE than one, has so many unreasonable demands that it's absurd. And in my experience, most of it's the people in charge. I'm working for a startup now. Hating every minute of it. I'm expected to work 80 hour weeks, be on call, do customer tech support (I'm the system administrator), and do seven other people's jobs while I'm at it. Which *NECESSITATES* a 70 hour work week. Every.. freaking.. week! And to add insult to injury, I'm not even paid 1/4th of what I'm worth according to every salary survey out there. And of course, I'm going to be the first one asked to take a pay cut or vacation when the VC runs out. Which I expect to be very soon. The company is a management disaster. Ignorance and blatant lack of record keeping and blatant lack of research has already wasted over $4 *MILLION*. And of course, in typical "let's get ready for that day far FAR away when we make an IPO" fashion, we have a CEO, CFO, CTO, and COO already. Who's combined salaries could buy me *two* RS/6000 SP2 Advanced Switches (which, last check, are over $100k/ea) *AND* a Lexus!
Yet another:
Why DON'T you take your own advice? I've left two companies so far, when the management got absolutely intolerable--when the 'con' list got longer than the 'pro' list.
Two truths I've learned in my first two internet jobs (since '94, when I graduated university):
- Once you lose absolutely all respect for management because of their incompetence, there is no way they can earn it back. It's time to leave.
- When nobody in your chain of command knows what you do and how... when it's "assholes all the way up," it's time to leave.
A reader from
Dallas, Texas , August 21, 1999
Simple, targeted revenge for mistakes he made in business I struggled
to force myself to finish this book in hopes that somewhere, maybe even on the
last page there would be a reason for having ever purchased this book. I was
wrong. I felt like the entire purpose of this book was to make others look worse
than the writer, and thereby raise himself up in the process. It didn't work.
The internet has only just begun, yes there were early days, but it's a fast
growing medium that, unlike any other medium, the masses can control. There
are big players, there are major corporations in the game, but people still
have control over what they do. Arrogant editors and writers & VCs miss the
point. The medium is about people, community, tribal aspirations, connections,
ideas, concepts or the simplest truth of them all.......the internet is a campfire,
pure and simple enough for even this author to somehow have understood from
the earliest days of his internet struggles. I enjoyed reading AOL.COM, had
high hopes this book would be in that class, it was/is not.
A reader from Pune,
India , August 20, 1999
Excellent narravative of startups and VC-Owner relationship Among the
various books available on the topic of startups, etc, this book most closely
and frankly puts across the relationship between the Founder of a startup and
the VCs who finance it. Also recorded the life and death of a internet startup.
At times, the author seems almost aplogogetic, but that is always better than
cockiness.
A very good buy!
A reader from Indianapolis
, August 11, 1999
Business Blinders Michael Wolff's attack on the the Internet Business
world is interesting, but he makes the one mistake every business person seems
to make: there is more to the world than making money. There is more to the
Internet than how it is commercialized. If there are NO businesses on the Internet
in the future, it still is going to be important. Since Wolff never get's beyond
Television asumptions, he overlooks some of the most interesting things that
Internet has to offer in Many to Many communication: the regular guy is just
as accessable as the huge corporation. The regular guy can probably make money
EASIER than the big corporation. There is more to life than being the organization
man...
Copyright © 1996-2007 by Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov. www.softpanorama.org was created as a service to the UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) in the author free time. Submit comments This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is placed under the copyright of the Open Content License(OPL). Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine.
Standard disclaimer: The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the author present and former employers, SDNP or any other organization the author may be associated with. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose.
Last modified: February 28, 2008