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 ones 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.