Why System Administrators are Uniquely Susceptible to Burnout
According to Wikipedia, high technology workers are more prone to experience burnout than other professions. Others who are susceptible include medical professionals, social workers and health care workers. Burnout is a combination of generalized anxiety disorder and depression and is not limited to any one profession. However, given that system administrators find themselves in highly stressful situations on a daily basis, it is no surprise that they are among the most commonly affected.
Lack of Boundaries for Roles and Responsibilities
While the accounting and law professions have had their roles refined over hundreds of years, the system administrator has only been in existence for a few decades. The boundaries are still being established and will continue to change for some time. A system administrator’s role varies from organization to organization, as it should. However, system administrators, particularly those in small- to medium-sized companies, often end up leading projects outside of their proper role, such as building moves, HVAC systems, electrical projects, construction projects, soda machines, fax machines, phone systems, security systems, cell phones, sound systems, the CEO’s kid’s busted computer etc. Unfortunately, many system administrators deal with these roles by resigning themselves to working longer hours rather than shaping their environment for their long-term success. There are exceptions, but this is generally a bad idea and is a contributing factor for burnout.
Poor Management
Given that the IT profession is comparatively young, there is an overall lack of good management in the field. In other professional fields (engineering, law, medicine), a manager must have performed the job s/he is managing with some degree of success before being given a greater position of responsibility. This is not the case with IT. I once had a company as a client who hired a former house painter with no IT experience as the director of IT. I can only speculate as to how he secured the position, but his IT department was constantly scurrying from one train wreck to the next. The primary victims of this person’s lack of competence were his stressed out, burned out techs.
Other times management doesn’t understand the subject matter and therefore fails to staff appropriately. Their lack of understanding may lead management to expect a certain level of service but refuse to allocate proper authority or funds to meet the need. I can’t count the number of times a client has told me they can’t tolerate any downtime and then become incredulous when I spec redundant firewalls/servers/disks for their environments. The discrepancy in expectations is usually resolved after some discussion of the real world reliability of complex systems. But I have cleaned up after enough system administrators to know that this is not as common as it should be.
Misjudgement in Accepting Responsibilities
System administrators pride themselves on being able to learn new technologies quickly but this can get them into trouble when they begin to take on new roles and responsibilities for the challenge alone or solely to get their hands on new “toys”. It can result in them spending huge amounts of time on low-value projects leaving little or no time to deal with their core responsibilities. At that point all it takes is an unexpected outage to put them behind schedule on every single other item on their already oversized task list.
The Common Factor
The reason situations like these contribute to burnout is they leave a person with the sense that they are not in control of their environment. In college psychology courses, they call this “learned helplessness” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness) and it is the primary cause of depression. The other thing it contributes to is anxiety. Put these two together and you have the recipe for burnout. If you have symptoms of either depression or generalized anxiety, seek professional help immediately. This article provides information on burnout, but each situation is different and you should contact your health care provider for treatment.