Information Technology
If you’ve seen the movie Office Space then you’ve seen a lot of the junk that really goes on in a company with a sizable IT department. The movie, as funny as it may be, is not too far from the truth. There really are jobs out there with tangled messes of bosses, “efficiency experts”, long unexpected hours, and a mountain of inane reports to create/analyze/etc.
My optometrist told me to lay off the caffeine, but he hasn’t worked in the IT field apparently.
The stress can get to you if you let it, especially when the leadership redirects THEIR stress back onto you. I’ve determined that managing stress effectively is an art form that very few have mastered. Personally I take the “caffeine and blogging” approach to blend the buzz of a chemical reaction in my brain with the joy of letting off steam in a public forum such as this one.
So what keeps me going? Why do I stick by Information Technology if the stress is so high and sometimes unbearable? Well, it is the simple joy of working with computers. When I work on a computer, be it programming or software configuration or hardware maintenance, I get the same sort of buzz and artist gets as he masterfully slings paint onto his easel. It is a feeling of creation and of doing something important.
Programming is a form of magic. As a programmer you get to create things out of seemingly nothing. People use your creation and a lot of the times they have no idea how it could be possible to create such a program and that is just plain cool. So it is that sort of feeling that keeps me going in spite of all the stress.