Join us at the hedge for a conversation
about engineering,
technology, and business. This week, Russ White, Denise
Donahue, and Sonia Kuck dig into the sources
of stress in information technology.
Well, good evening, Denise, and hi, Sonia. I
think it's early in the morning for Sonia
and it's about late night for Denise
kind of strange
so So so Denise
I heard you're really stressed today. Is that
is that accurate?
Oh, man.
So I heard Sonia was gonna come on
and solve that for you. That's what I
heard.
I appreciate it, right? Thanks.
Now, see that just transferred all the stress
from Denise to Sonia. See how that works?
It did. Yeah, to Sonia, yeah.
I feel like I should find a couch
and go lie down now.
Yeah. Listen, doctor, let me tell you all
my worries.
Listen, you did a really cool presentation actually
at Interop on this, I think. Stress or
burnout or something. Right? And it was really,
really good.
So tell us a little bit about stress
in the workplace and, like, what's going on
there? What are your observations?
Look, it's really interesting looking at it specifically
from an IT industry
perspective. You know, we're hearing a lot more
stories that are visible now about people,
being stressed,
dealing with the impact of burnout
and then even getting into deeper sort of
psychological issues like depression and suicide. And it's
something that when you start talking about it
within our industry specifically,
you realize that so many people identify
with these feelings across our industry and you're
not alone, but it's not something historically in
the past we've already talked about. There's a
few things why it's really relevant in our
industry response
out
the
door.
We
have
to
get
the
project
response out the door. We have to get
the project to go live that night. You
know, we've had to get those systems back
up and running again so they're available. And
so we do these these periods of work
that are
very, very impactful in terms of needing a
full time and attention on them right now
and and causing our stress levels to go
up. But the challenge is that
that seems to be a normal day in
our industry now. It's it's not something that
just happens short term. It's
outage. And what we're finding with burnout is
it's that cumulative burnout.
It's the the long term exposure to those
stresses over time, especially when you look at,
you know, at people like myself that have
been in the industry now for over twenty
years
dealing with these sort of situations.
Yeah. You know, I think it's not only
this project this project this project, but the
rate of change in our industry too is
so fast, so intense.
You're having to
to not only learn new technology, but learn
new mindsets
about the technology
in between
getting
that that equipment up and going, in between
troubleshooting that issue, etcetera.
Yeah. I was gonna bring that up too.
I mean, I've been doing
I started doing electronic engineering when I was
a kid kid, and then I did that
for about five or ten years. And I've
been in networks or
networking,
Banyan
Vines
and Nobel NetWare and Lantastic. I admit it.
I admit it for the last thirty years.
And the rate of change is just
incredible.
And the pressure you're talking about, Sonia, is
really bad. I mean,
I know that,
I walked into an account. I didn't walk
into an account. A guy called me. I
was on global escalation at the time, and
I was the back end person. So when
I worked for this for Cisco, we had
a back end person on global escalation and
a front end person. I assume most escalation
teams worked that way. So it was a
person who stayed home and backed up and
did all the back end work that needed
to be done, and then you you flew
somebody on-site as a hostage,
essentially.
Until the problem was fixed.
That's what we always called them hostages.
Anyway,
so I remember this. The hostage called me
one time and he said, They met me
at the train station and they said, 'If
the network goes down again, the entire IT
department is fired.'
No stress.
Wow.
No pressure. Wow. No pressure.
Right?
So that's,
you know, I think that is, it's really
bad the way that we operate
with just having this hangover our heads constantly.
Now now do you think agile has made
it easier or harder?
Look, it's it's a little bit of both
and it's not an area I'm completely familiar
with being more on the IT pro side
than the software development side, but certainly even
in the IT pro world, though the way
that we deploy things that sort of rapid
pace of change now.
Yes, in some respects it does make it
easier to recover if if we put a
minor change into production and it breaks
it.
Recover if if we put a minor change
into production and it breaks it's it's easier
than doing a big
update. You know, sort of once every every
quarter or every half year, but it is
that it is does seem to be this
always on mentality that you know that this
seem to be this always on mentality that,
you know, that this we're always spinning plates.
Mhmm. And another thing about no. Go ahead,
Denise. I was gonna say, but then there
are other industries that are equally stressful. I
mean, think of a heart surgeon maybe. I
don't I'm trying to think of of others,
but surely there are police police officers,
fire fire off fire
persons. What do you call it? Fire persons.
Firefighters.
But but But yeah, absolutely. I think I
think
that one of the challenges is that we
don't particularly do well in the IT industry
and I'd love to hear if any organisation
does this better than what I've seen in
the past.
We're not really great at
supporting people who are in the thick of
fighting that fire.
You look at a surgeon who doesn't operate
by himself, you know, they they have
a team of support in the Operating Theatre
but then
hopefully we don't expect them to carry on
and do major surgeries back to back without
a break. And
what I see in the IT industry is
a disconnect between
what we'd like to do and how we'd
like to structure things to make
work more manageable, easier to cope with less
stressful.
And
the support that we get higher up the
food chain, whether it be with staffing resources,
whether or not we actually are structuring resources
so that we have a team or we
have
just as experienced qualified members who are not
on the tools when we're on the tools
so that we can get off the tools
and go and take a break and they
can come in and take over.
I've also got a background in volunteer disaster
response
and that sort of fatigue management and that
that taking over is something that emergency services
do really well and and just doesn't seem
to be a thing as much in our
industry and it usually just comes down to
resourcing. We're only a small team, we can't
afford for half the people that will be
working on this problem and then come in
and take it over.
And then, you know, that's why we end
up with people that have worked three days
without any sleep.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, yeah. And most most
shops
are small. I mean, even in large scale
networks, like, you know, you think of a
hyperscaler and you think, oh, a hyperscaler has,
you know, 20 or 30 network engineers. Actually,
most of them don't.
Most of them have four or five really
good network engineers and a bunch of people
who are doing DevOps. And you don't call
the people doing DevOps when there's an outage.
You call the network engineers because you know
they can fix the problem. And there's only
four or five of them. And if one
of those is on vacation or two of
those is on vacation, then you got one
or two people working on it. And then
because it's all customized, there's nobody you can
call. You know, it's up to you to
fix it. So it's just you're you the
buck stops with you and that's it. And
you're done.
And even from a sport perspective,
you
know, dialing into vendor support, I know it
used to be far different, and I think
this actually increases stress as well,
that dialing into vendor support is not as
effective as it used to be. So you
always feel like you are the buck stopper
at that point. I think that's a bad
that's a bad situation.
Yeah. And to a lot of extent, the
IT industry attracts people who have that just
get it done mentality. We are the kind
of people who roll up our sleeves and
keep working until the problem is solved. It's
it's
a personal pride and it's a dedication
to, you know, to get the thing working
or get the deadline met. We attract those
sort of people and they're the kind of
traits we look for when we're
we're looking to hire someone into this industry.
You don't want someone who's just gonna walk
away from it, you know, mid crisis and
go it's all too hard. I can't do
this.
And so we we kind of make a
rod for our own back by,
you know, by attracting those kind of people
and then not giving them the the resources
and the support and the culture to know
that it's okay for them to turn around
and say, I need to tap out and
get someone else to come and look at
look at it with these eyes.
Yeah. Yeah. I remember we used to interview
for tech technical assistance center and we would
bring the person in the room and have
three people asking them questions. And then the
phone would ring in the middle of them
answering a question.
And we would hand the phone to them
and they would have to answer the question
of the person on the phone.
And then we expected them to continue on
with the original answer.
Right? It's pretty real life. That was a
real life test. Real life for a technical
assistance center. Right? Yeah. But still, you start
thinking about that, and that's really bad. You
know? That's not good that you have to
live in that environment day to day. That's
a total that's a total burnout situation. That's
that's really good. So how do we fix
it? And how do we alright. Well, I
guess before that, how do we recognize the
signs in
in each other
that they
that our coworkers need a moment, need to
be tapped need to tap out for a
little bit, and provide be able to provide
that to them.
Yeah.
So if you think if you look, if
you're talking about something that is
an an immediate response to something that's going
on,
certainly, it needs somebody maybe one step removed
to
just keep an eye on how many hours
being logged. How long has this person been
working on the thing? Have they had a
break? Did they go home and get some
sleep?
That kind of thing. In terms of longer
term, you start to see signs and symptoms
of maybe people not participating
as much as they would normally and that
could be little things like not responding to
group emails or not being as active and
and chat channels that kind of thing.
Maybe it's little things are starting to make
them snap. They're starting to get irritated about
things that normally wouldn't bother them. And it's
all about really keeping an eye on each
other to detect the changes
in in personality and and behaviour from your
from your colleagues. The other interesting point about
it is that,
we are not just a work being. We
don't just have this person that comes to
work that isn't impacted by everything else that's
going on and see you don't know what's
going on in the lives of your coworkers.
They might be dealing with some other stuff
in the periphery with with family or friends
or whatever and all of those kind of
things can sort of compound as well and
make little work stresses,
make them react in a bigger way than
they normally would. Not purely because of work
stuff because what else is going on in
their life too. So it really is about
watching out for each other and
looking for those changes. In terms of what
we do about it,
It's a really tough one.
I really like the concept of what I
call stomping out superhero statements.
And what that's about is when you hear
someone who turns around and says, oh my
gosh, I've been working on this thing all
night. I haven't had any sleep. Yes, they
deserve
respect and and gratitude for the effort they've
put in. But we need to turn around
and start saying that's terrible. Like what can
we do to stop this from happening again?
What do you need
right now to try and fix that?
And so, yeah, it's about stepping in and
recognizing that those kind of
statements of look at all the activity I've
been doing. I'm so busy are actually a
negative thing. It's it's a cry for help
for a problem that we actually need to
solve as opposed to saying you're amazing. You're
wonderful. Like you have worked so hard, which
is true, but we need to follow-up with
that.
How can we prevent this? And the hardest
thing I see in our industry that I
don't have an answer for is
how we drive the importance of this up
the management chain because I had so many
managers that come and talk to me that
say, I really want to support my direct
reports when they come to me about this
stuff. But my manager is saying the work
just needs to be done. I could, we
just have to do this or we don't
have the extra staff. That's the that's the
the nut that we're that we're trying to
crack. I am seeing a few changes in
management in terms of leading by example.
So, actually seeing managers and
like managers up the chain of command coming
in and saying things like I'm taking leave
for two days
or I'm not checking my emails outside of
work hours and then actually publicly making a
statement to say I'm modeling behavior
so that my
workers see that we have a culture here
where it's okay to do that. It's okay
to take the work apps off your phone
when you go on vacation. Like, you know,
that kind of support and modeling that good
behavior from management, we need to see more
of that.
I think that's critical.
You're right. To to even have a culture
where you're comfortable going to your manager and
saying,
hey, I'm overwhelmed or I need I need
a hand here or I need a I
need some time off.
Yeah. You're absolutely right. It's it's not hard
to speak up about this stuff. You're not
about to go to the place that puts
money in your bank account every month that
helps pay your mortgage and say, hey. I'm
not doing too great at work here. Yeah.
Exactly. And especially, I think, with the tech
culture. The tech culture, kind of the start
up culture where you
sleep at the office. You know?
First my first visit to Facebook headquarters, they
had little rooms with beds, and they gave
you toothbrushes and stuff. I'm like, oh, how
sweet. And the other and the my friend
who was showing me around said, no. That
means they expect us to be spending nights
here getting stuff done.
Yeah. Right. And I was gonna say, I
mean, that is part of the culture. Right?
And I think maybe part of this has
to be a culture change. I mean, I
I don't wanna be, like, negative on certifications
or anything, but
the person who has 14 certifications,
maybe it's time to stop.
Alright, Russ. How about the person who has
14 degrees?
We're not gonna get into that. No. We're
just that discussion. I'm just saying in general,
right, We do live in a culture
in tech where we expect everybody to know
everything, to learn it on their own,
and
to,
you know, we just expect people.
We we I mean, it's beyond expectation. It's
like it's such a big deal to get
that seventh sort of expert level certification
or whatever it is, and we just make
a big deal of it. It's like the
same thing to me of working all night,
and then the person comes in in the
morning and they're congratulated for getting the job
done. Yeah, they got the job done, and
they have killed themselves doing it. And and
maybe we just need to, as a culture,
just step back and say, is this really
healthy? Is this really
what we want
for our lives? I mean, can we model
as Sonya says, can we model something different?
Can we actually
as people figure out say,
you know, it's good to have two certifications
or three certifications on your resume and then
do something else.
You know? Get a hobby. I don't know.
Whatever it is. But live your life and
and not be so focused on,
it's almost like we're on a treadmill
and all these people are running on this
treadmill and we have four or five people
who are running really fast. It makes the
treadmill
run really fast and then we all have
to run faster to catch up. And then
those people who wanna get ahead, they run
faster than everybody else. So we're like in
this continuous
like, oh my gosh, I can't run as
fast as the treadmill, and then we all
fall off the edge of the treadmill and
go, ah. You
know? Right.
That's to Sonia's point. That's
right, and that's the kind of person that
this industry attracts.
It does. I'm that person. You're that person.
Sonia is that person. Yeah. We're all we
all are and they have to find a
way to put that stake in the sand.
It is really hard to stay in your
own lane.
Managing
your stresses and and managing burn out is
different for everybody. And so what I can
cope with in terms of workload or how
many hours I work or how much sleep
I get can be completely different to somebody
else even on the same team as me.
And I think, you know, it's about recognizing
that as an individual,
you know your limits and and you set
your boundaries and you can't expect other people
to to be like you are. If someone
is
a lifelong learner
and you know they're the person that loves
digging into technical stuff outside of ours, maybe
they've got children that have grown up or
they don't have children at all like they
might have a different mindset and be in
a completely different place in their life than
you are that's trying to juggle with a
bunch of projects and you've got young children
or
it really really isn't is an individual thing.
And I think you're right in terms of
us expecting that that there is a bar
that we should all meet. And then in
reality, it doesn't work like
that. Yeah.
Yeah. Really. And and I, you know, go
further. We do it on resumes. We do
it on LinkedIn profiles. We do it on
everything.
And another thing I think that really causes
a lot of stress in our industry that
I don't know how to cut through all
the time is just the hype cycle.
Oh, it's a new product.
I've got to go learn this new product,
and I've gotta do it tomorrow so I
can put it on my resume. And so
that way I'll get a job, and you're
like,
I don't know. Or if you're if you're
like, being as part of the sales organization,
I've gotta go learn this new product because
my customers are gonna be asking about it.
It might be appropriate,
an appropriate fit. And so if I don't
know about it, how am I gonna be
able
to Right. Give them the best solution for
their problem?
Right. We could do we could do a
whole podcast episode just on strategies for keeping
up with the pace of change in this
industry. Yeah. Very true. Yeah. We probably could.
Yeah.
So
we've talked a little bit about how to
recognize it.
What's causing it to some degree? Maybe some
strategies
around dealing with it, just modeling this
and trying to get people to see that
it's an issue. Right?
Do you think I mean, are there measurable
mental health things going on here? I mean,
are there people looking at this from a
research perspective or is this completely like Sonia
out talking at Interop?
That's a really good question. Look, there is
a bit of research going into this, but,
I love how you kind of brought it
back to facts and figures right because as
people in IT generally it's a big generalization
here. We like things that are tangible and
we like things that are quantifiable.
We like issues that we can diagnose and
get the facts on and and unravel the
problem. And so things like mental health are
a little bit hard for us literally to
wrap our heads around because
there are a lot more sort of touchy
feely
sort of hard to quantify and not quite
as easy to put in a box.
There is a website called mycompass.org.au
and at mycompass.org.au
it's actually a measurement tool for helping you
benchmark
how you're feeling and and and where you
are with your mental health. So you can
go through and answer a series of questions
with a little sliding scale that you can
move.
You can go and do that today and
if you register for a free account
that'll give you like a benchmark that's that's
your
your baseline level as you are today and
then if you are going through some stressful
times or if you do put some strategies
in place like maybe making sure that you
do schedule some time to get out of
the office, go for a walk, do some
exercise, whatever it is that you want to
put a strategy in place to try and,
sort of manage that work life balance,
you can then go and redo that same
assessment see if you've moved the needle. Is
the is your mental health you know improved
or gotten worse since when you did that
baseline? So I love
organisations like that that are trying to give
us a little bit more quantifiable
data
for our own personal use
in terms of where we're at and whether
or not the things that are happening in
our lives are improving that or being detrimental
to it. So what was that website again?
It's called mycompass.org.au.
Mycompass.org.au.
So do you also think that there might
be something in the culture in IT
about,
being people
who are
not kind being seen as somehow
better, smarter than anybody else, and a little
bit of pride in introversion. I mean, I'm
an introvert, so let's, you know, get that
on the table. And almost everybody
I know in the IT industry is an
introvert at one point, of some, you know,
somewhere on that introversion side. Even if you're
pretending to be extrovert introvert, yeah. That's, yeah.
But most people that I know, like, I
mean, I go to conferences, networking conferences, and
by 06:00 at night, I've gotta go back
to my room. I'm done, I'm just done.
Yeah, yeah. It's a recharge, yep. Yeah, it's
just enough. I've had my people quotient for
the day.
Thank you very much, yes. Yep, that was
fun, but I'm glad it's over. So anyway
So I mean, do you think that might
play into it as well that we attract
people that not only tend to be introverts,
but there also tends to be like, when
I was at Cisco, we had tough stories.
Right? You know, the guy that you would
email, and they would email you back with
a bunch of cuss words and blah blah
blah blah blah. You know,
there there almost seems like this strange
thing in our culture that
we gravitate towards that in some way.
Yeah, look I I talk about what it's
like working in a team of rock stars
and the thing with rock stars in our
industry is that they make everything look easy.
So when they get up on stage and
they demo something
you don't see the struggle
that's gotten to that talk. You don't see
how many hours it took them to put
the demo together. You don't see how long
they invested in learning the new technology or
the problems that they had along the way
as they were trying to figure it out.
And so when you try and do the
thing you go oh my gosh this is
so hard like this is gonna take me
so long. And they just stood up and
demoed it like you know it was something
they do.
They're so amazing.
And I it there's another there's another great
side to that too, which is that there's
a book called Quiet
which talks about how a society we've started
to equate being extroverted with being successful.
So we've taught people that if they want
to get ahead in life, they've got to
be these outgoing people. They've got to be
good at networking and social situations. They've got
to be good presenting their ideas in front
of large groups of people. We equate that
public facing
thing with success.
So Quiet is a really great book about
that. I'm also completely an introvert. So I
can sit here and chat on Twitter.
I'm doing this podcast recording this morning. I'm
going to speak at a user group tonight
and I'm going to be completely done
by the end of it. And I think
we need to bring it back to the
fact that
introverts
being an introvert doesn't mean you can't go
out and do the people things,
but it means that when you are in
those situations your energy battery is being drained.
And so you're right you get to the
end of the day speaking if you are
one of the speakers
and you are totally done like you just
need to sit by yourself in a room
in a corner and
you can't people anymore. Whereas extrovert
whereas extroverts find the opposite with an extrovert
if they are working solely by themselves.
For example, on a project they might even
be part of a remote team, their energy
battery starts to get drained when they don't
have enough people contact. And so they need
to go out and they need to socialize,
they need to you know to go out
and have lunch with people, they need to
be around people to to fill that battery
back up again. And so that's the actual
main definition and you will be surprised the
amount of speakers, well known speakers in our
industry
that if you talk to them and ask
them which one they are or you ask
them what they do
after a conference day, you'll find that we're
really all closet introverts.
Yeah. Yeah. Mhmm. Most of them are. Yeah.
And so working remote's another interesting thing with
stress. Right? Because the introvert is gonna find
it less stressful perhaps and the extrovert is
gonna find but it also depends on the
work you're doing.
Right?
Like, I find that for me, I prefer
to go to the office once a month.
I work remote. So I go to the
office about once a month. I try to.
Well, turns out to be every six weeks
a lot of times. Just be real about
life. And, that seems to work for me.
Even when I wasn't remote,
I actually went to the office one day
a week.
Mhmm. That that was enough.
That's about how often I go. But then
I have customers I meet with too. Yeah.
Yeah. So I mean so I would go
to the office when I didn't work remote.
I wouldn't take my laptop
at all. I would just go in and
meet, and that was the end of it.
And then anything I needed to do my
laptop is the next day when I'm back
at home.
And so, you know, I think that people
need to consider that, because I know a
lot of people who just go to the
office every day, you know.
And that's a stress. And that's a stress.
And
maybe it's better to think about that a
little bit as a way to, like,
not be so stressed all the time.
Yeah. It's interesting because we it's getting so
popular in our IT industry now for organizations
to support remote workers and the concept of
remote working where traditionally they may have wanted
to pull everybody in into the office. And
so there now is this this big push
to allow those flexible options which is really
great for for introverts and people who suit
that working style.
Not so great for people who really do
miss the people contact they miss the physical
standing around the water cooler chatting.
I am fortunate that I get enough of
that into kind of interaction for me online.
It's Twitter, Facebook, Slack, our own internal comms
channels those kind of things I'm I'm connected
enough with people all around the world that
I chat with at random times of the
day because time zones and and that's enough
for me for my water cooler, but it
doesn't suit everybody's
style at all. And so that's one of
the things that we're gonna need to look
at is if we are
going to be determined to have a remote
only strategy for a particular team,
you know, how are we supporting the people
that actually do need that FaceTime? When are
we getting together
in person a couple of times a year
at an off-site, for example, to actually bring
people together to to give them that connection?
Or how are those people connecting with other
people in the organisation
or customers or networking groups? How are they
getting that sort of physical people time that
that they need to be happy?
Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Alright. Well,
I think that pretty much covers the topic
for right now. I think we should do
another show on dealing with stress, managing stress
at an individual level. What are you doing?
What am I doing? You know, whoever comes
on to talk about it. How do you
how do you manage this stuff? So,
thanks for coming on, Sonia. You can people
can get a hold of you someplace if
they wanna talk about if they wanna stress
you out by talking if they wanna
You guys Sit on my virtual couch.
So you can find me on Twitter at
soniacuff.com
or I regularly blog technical things on my
team blog at itopstalk.com.
Cool. I'm I'm actually just discovered that blog
and I'm gonna follow it now. So Denise,
what are you what are you available at?
Lady Netwker, I think it is on Twitter.
Right? Right. Was it Netwker? I tried to
shorten it so it's spelled n a t
w k r.
Alright. That's cool. And that's, yeah, right now
I'm not I'm not blogging
right now. Well, we're gonna work on it.
We'll fix it. Yes.
Oh, no. Stress.
Stress. That's right.
So
you can always find me at rule11.
Tech and routing at routing geek on Twitter,
but I really don't log on to this
is one of my stress management things. I
don't keep Twitter or anything on my phone
at all. I don't keep work email on
my phone. That's a stress to you because
actually that's a stress relief for me. It's
kinda like chewing bubble gum
for the eye. Like, TV used to be
bubble gum for the eyes. Twitter is like
bubble gum for the mind to me. No.
If I need to do something on my
phone, I just play solitaire or something. I
don't need to talk to people.
So thanks, Sonia, for coming on and talking
about this, and thanks, Denise, for coming on
and talking about this, and, we'll catch you
next time on the head.
Thank you for joining us. You can find
the hedge at rule11.tech.