According to a depressing survey by SWNS reported in silicon.com,Three-quarters of IT staff hate their jobs so much that they go to work wishing they had a different one… and half of IT managers also admitted to being deliberately unhelpful or obstructive with colleagues and the biggest gripes being that they are bored and don’t earn enough money.

I wonder just how representative this survey is. Open-source projects rely on tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people who love working in and around IT. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t devote their time and energy voluntarily contributing to projects.

At the other end of the scale, my day job in commercial IT commisions an annual employee opinion survey. Within our large IT shop, over 80% of folk agree that their work is interesting. Around 90% agree that the people I work with are willing to help each other, even if it means doing something outside their usual activities.

I don’t know how SWNS (who?) carried out their survey. Maybe they set up a website somewhere and attracted bored geeks surfing from work on a wet Friday afternoon. I believe their results are totally misleading. With “facts” like this, it’s hardly suprising that IT is reporting a skills shortage.

The facts are that IT requires a vast range of skills and competencies and can offer fulfilling jobs to a huge range of people. Society is now so dependent on IT that it is vital we continue to attract the brightest and best into the profession. That means telling it as it is – even if that doesn’t make for eye-catching headlines.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 12:28 pm and is filed under The day job. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.