[jerryji]

I voted you up.

But I don't fully agree with you. Maybe you didn't mean it but your tone sounds a bit too condescending to me -- like some Wall street rich guy saying if you were poor and still are poor, then it's your own problem, just get out of my sight -- not everybody has a dream job at a dream work place, in fact, I would argue most don't, regardless of industry. Should we care why many IT workers are not happy even if some individuals can't escape the blame? Shouldn't we be a bit more tolerant and listen more so that hopefully we will make the IT a better industry to work in?

Last but not the least, the Joel on Software crowd is not really drawn here with similar submissions, even though I will probably refrain from submitting similar moody articles here, wherever they are from.

[menloparkbum]

My comments are specific to the Joel on Software forums.

IT can be a crappy job and complaining from time to time is a good way to blow off steam. But consistently venting about the exact same thing for 6 years is pathological. It also set a pretty lame tone at the JoS forums. Certain people would show up in nearly every thread about anything to snipe it down and remind everyone that life sucks and then you die, that's just the way it is kiddo, you picked the wrong job and there ain't nothin' you can do about it now. We just don't get any respect! It was like a Rodney Dangerfield sketch on repeat, except it wasn't supposed to be funny.

One of my theories is that in addition to providing an alternative to sites like ExpertsExchange, Joel Spolsky joined up with Jeff Atwood to start Stack Overflow partially because his own forums got spoiled by a bunch of bad apples who wouldn't leave.

[reduxredacted]

Jerriji, I felt like I had to reply to this because I don't think your wrong, and in light of my last reply I think I may have come off the same way.

"If you were poor and still are poor, then it's your own problem, just get out of my sight"

I didn't take that away from the topic at hand. People unhappy in their IT jobs are employed and not poor in the Western world. So the unhappiness comes from something else. I've seen very well paid developers just fall off a cliff and suddenly hate their job.

I don't understand the reasons, but I don't doubt that they are all that different from the reasons the rest of the working world faces. Sometimes it's time to change careers. As human beings, change is feared (or family obligations come into play that make accepting risk less desirable than doing a job you hate).

I feel compassion for those individuals, but in as much as I have to work with them, my compassion is driven to finding ways to identify "great things" about the job they hate.

Negative attitudes are poison and there seems to be a lot of that in IT. I can't tell you how many meetings I attend where the various stakeholders in our organization are at eachothers throats and my boss or me are called in to mediate. It's not an exercise of mediation, it's an exercise of breaking a cycle of frustration, taking the emotion out of it and focusing on the problem as the thing that gets the brunt of the righteous anger (it's amazing what happens when you take three pissed off people and focus their anger at the problem rather than at one another).

Sometimes we're in departments that are only noticed when "nothing is broken" and are hammered on when some extraordinary circumstance causes something to fail. We resent the fact that the people doing the yelling don't understand how unpreventable that circumstance was. It's a tough roll to sit in and tolerate and breeds contempt.

But focusing on that element of the job IS poisonous.