Are You Satisfied?

What Is Going on Here?
The assumption that job satisfaction and adequate compensation is always and only about dollars is what's going on. If almost 50 percent of respondents believe they're adequately compensated for their work in IT but 76 percent are dissatisfied with their job in IT, then factors other than salary level are feeding that job dissatisfaction. It's possible to believe that you're being compensated adequately for the work you do yet still be unsatisfied with the work itself. And it's the work that makes an IT pro's career satisfying and rewarding or frustrating and draining.

As Figure 2 shows, many factors influence total job satisfaction. And although compensation rates highest among those factors, several others indicate one particular area that appears in large measure to be influencing job satisfaction for IT pros. Look at the factors ranked 2 through 5 on Figure 2. All have to do with the reason IT pros have jobs at all: technology, and the challenges of working with it. Whether you're required to implement technologies you have little experience with, given inadequate training to support projects that are your responsibility, or must spend large amounts of time researching and recommending technical solutions with which you're unfamiliar, it's clear that a large part of your dissatisfaction stems from the pressure placed on you to meet your employers' need for IT solutions that work, that don't cost too much to purchase or maintain, and that don't require management to understand what you do.

Of course, other important factors round out the list of factors that influence job satisfaction. Interestingly, both working independently and working with others are cited as influencing job satisfaction. Sounds like your classic case of Damned if you do, damned if you don't, an influential factor in job satisfaction all by itself. Number of hours worked is another influence. Our survey results show that the average number of hours IT pros work in a week is 45.4, with an average of 4.4 hours spent on call. To give a bit more context to those percentages, 61.4 percent of respondents work between 41 and 50 hours per week, and 30.2 percent spend more than 10 hours per week on call.

You might think that the factor ranking 7 in Figure 2—job stress—is a somewhat redundant category. After all, aren't all these factors stressful, at least insofar as they influence job satisfaction? Just what is "job stress" for an IT pro anyway? Fortunately, you answered that question, too.

Stress Marks
In Figure 3, you'll find survey respondents' ratings of 19 work-related problems on a scale from Not at all pressing to Most pressing. The most pressing situation is not having enough people resources to get your job done. Interestingly, not having enough funding for projects ranks 10 on the list, which indicates, once again, that dollar figures don't paint the entire picture of job satisfaction. If you don't have staff adequate to meet the demands on your department, does it matter whether individual projects receive funding in the budget?

Seeing patterns and connections within and among the problems in Figure 3 brings up lots of interesting questions and possible areas for future study. For example, do politics at work (ranked 2) influence lack of IT management direction (ranked 5) and management taking companies in the wrong direction (ranked 11)? Do you have to compromise to meet business/user expectations (ranked 9) because you don't have enough people to do the work, because you can't adequately test products and solutions (ranked 6), or because products are unreliable or buggy (ranked 7)? Are systems and network complexity (ranked 12), spyware (ranked 13), spam (ranked 14), and vertical applications support (ranked 18) only somewhat pressing problems for you because technical expertise is your bag? And if the answer to the last question is yes, then is the main problem for IT pros at work the fact that technical-expertise alone isn't enough to get the job done?

It's a Hurtin' Thing
How you answer the question that this article's title poses depends on a number of factors that will vary for each IT pro. (To learn about database professionals' job satisfaction, see Dawn Cyr's SQL Server Magazine article "It's What You Make IT," December 2005, InstantDoc ID 48229.) But there's no question—no matter where you work, if you work in IT you have a tough job with a variety of demands and stresses, only a few of which actually have to do strictly with technology. Perhaps on our next Industry Survey, we need to ask you what you think the solutions are to your job dissatisfaction. So stay tuned, let us know what you think, and be careful out there.