Wakey-wakey! A quarter of IT pros only get 3-4 hours' kip – and you won't believe what's being touted as the 'solution'

Feeling refreshed, revved up and raring to go? No? Well, the chances are you did not get enough sleep. Among the throngs of IT professionals, it would appear you are not alone. According to a survey of 257 UK-based IT pros, around 74 per cent are getting less than the recommended seven-to-eight hours' shut-eye on a weeknight. …

[katrinab]

And if your job is administering "cloud technologies"?

https://xkcd.com/908/ ?

[NoneSuch]

"Now, all this sounds very worrying, but the research, sponsored by Microsoft services company Core, does come up with some solutions."

So a MS sponsored study says to invest in more cloud computing? Wow, taking that seriously, I am not...

[midcapwarrior]

It's not a Microsoft company.

It's a company that provides services for Microsoft products.

a global professional services company

[jake]

"And if your job is administering "cloud technologies"?"

Just shoot yourself? It'd work for marketards, lawyers and politicians, why not cloudaholics too?

[Greybearded old scrote]

Yeah, right

They didn't start from the conclusion they wanted and work backwards from there at _all_. Because who'd do that?

[IGotOut]

Bollocks to cloud....

Just make it illegal to contact workers outside their working hours, unless it is to change an appointment location.

[Greybearded old scrote]

Re: Bollocks to cloud....

I don't know about illegal, because emergencies happen. Let's make it very expensive, so those bosses who don't respect boundaries get slapped by the bean counters.

Set the suit-wearers against each other, that's the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bollocks to cloud....

For me I lost most of my hair and for some reason decided I didn't want 2 sugars in my tea anymore(In fact one day I couldn't stand any sugar in my tea) working in a call centre environment, its amazing how disorganised things were, how many people were insulted I was asking them a question for something I didn't know then the next day shouting why didn't I ask them regarding this question. Added the power strugle between managers trying to claim another department needs to do stuff. I changed jobs after giving up and got some of my hair back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bollocks to cloud....

\Well if we must go for a total surveillance state how about a few fringe benefits to make us workers a little happier. Legal requirement to have time clocks in all work places and send that data to the government along with your contract for working hours and overtime monitoring. Public prosecution of businesses failing to do so audited by integration with tax system ; )

It's just to ensure tax is fairly paid... oh and no directors awarding shares nonsense everyone has to work an hourly wage for set hours. So many businesses would die a death without free work but maybe the world afterwards could be a better totalitarian state.

Also random inspection of work places to ensure time clocks are being used properly. IT helpdesk labour camp sentences for directors of companies with 3 failures on any one site.

MwAHHHHAHAHAHAHHAHH

I should point out having hated time clocks as being an annoying waste of time the place I had the best work life balance working in IT used time clocks. Maybe they were on to something.

[DiViDeD]

Re: Time Clocks

In my current contract, I'm paid a daily rate (I know, but it's a pretty generous one), but also required to fill in attendance timesheets.

After my first week, I carefully entered all my hours, including breaks, and hit "Submit", only to see warnings flash up on every number stating I needed "special permission from your manager" to work additional time.

The result is that now, whatever time I spend working, the time recording system requires me to enter exactly eight hours per day, regardless of whether I've pulled twelve hours one day and compensated with a four hour day elsewhere.

I can't believe this 8 hour a day fiction isn't being encountered across business. It's like the old days in merchant banking where all us contractors got an extra long holiday over Christmas so that management could report zero contractors in their end of year figures.

[jake]

Re: Time Clocks

Here in the US that is highly illegal.

Note that it's NOT illegal to work flexible hours. What is illegal is to file a fictitious report of the actual hours worked. That'll get whoever is in charge some jail time if the Judge is in a pissy mood.

[phuzz]

Re: Bollocks to cloud....

"I don't know about illegal, because emergencies happen. Let's make it very expensive, so those bosses who don't respect boundaries get slapped by the bean counters."

Congratulations, you just invented the on-call bonus ;)

[jake]

Re: Bollocks to cloud....

"Congratulations, you just invented the on-call bonus ;)"

At a company just North of Silly Con Valley, about 8 of us were each presented with a new-fangled DynaTAC and a couple spare batteries/chargers, and told that we were to stay connected 24/7 ... at which point we all said "more money, please". With threats of quitting en mass. The company finally agreed, and we were compensated the princely sum of $1.75 for each hour of "out of the office" on-call hours. Doesn't sound like a lot today, but in the mid 1980s an extra $11K/yr wasn't chump-change.

I dunno if we were the first group to be electronically leashed to a company by a cell phone or not, but we were certainly in the vanguard ... I apologize profusely.

[DiViDeD]

Re: Bollocks to cloud....

Best out of hours incident report I ever saw was due to a Motorola pager:

ISSUE: Noise coming from pager

DETERMINED CAUSE: Batteries found in pager

RESOLUTION: Removed batteries from pager

[hplasm]

Re: Bollocks to cloud....

Carried around a pager on alternate weeks for a few years. I got called out twice - once wa a wrong number, the other because we were going to lending that pager to a colleague for his wife to announce labour pains, and she called it (me - I still had it) to try it. I was in the bath...

Anither time I was on call at the weekend and had hired a tipper truck to pik up a shed - oddly, from work -

and I called into the garage to fuel it. When I got out, I heard a strange whistling noise, behind me...

Must be under the truck? No...

In the cab? No, behind you.. The pump? No..

Expecting an explosion... keep looking. Half a hour later; it's the pager, round the back of my belt, complaining about a dying battery...

Shamefacedly confessed to a colleague from the Northern offic, only for him to confess back that he had done the same thing last week in Glasgow...

Pagers -good times.

[Drew Scriver]

Re: Bollocks to cloud....

The legal system in the USA would make it virtually impossible to implement this at the federal level and I don't see states moving in that direction either.

Many (most?) states don't even mandate lunch breaks yet (at least not for professionals, who are considered exempt).

However, companies may implement restrictions on their own once a few of them are sued for jeopardizing the health of their employees by failing to safeguard a healthy work-life balance.

COVID-19 may in fact contribute to that, as it has been concluded that lack of sleep may be a contributing factor.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Bollocks to cloud....

"Just make it illegal to contact workers outside their working hours, unless it is to change an appointment location."

Already covered by EU and UK employment law.

[LucreLout]

Re: Bollocks to cloud....

Just make it illegal to contact workers outside their working hours

And those of us who are on call do what with that? I'd rather be called when needed than have to proactively monitor. The members of my teams get well paid, those of them that volunteer for the on-call rota, even more so.

Am I tired if I get called int he middle of the night? Yeah, a bit, but we're only on call 1 week in 12 and we only get called a few times per week. It's liveable and well compensated.

Not everyone on call chooses to be so, but some of us do.

[jake]

Re: Bollocks to cloud....

Nobody is arguing with you, LucreLout. It's an entirely different thing when the employee agrees to that after-hours contact in return for compensation.

However, what is being discussed here is the new, very wide-spread disease spreading rampantly through society where TheCorporation seems to think that just because everybody has a telephone in their hip pocket, they should be at the beck and call of TheCorporation 24/7 without any more compensation than they are receiving for their 9-5 ... and the sheeple are rolling over, exposing their soft underbelly, and allowing TheCorporation to get away with it.

[disgruntled yank]

right

I'd have been concerned if they stopped the survey at 255--what, you've got an eight-bit computer? But 257, that must be conclusive.

[Anonymous Coward]

At work, we've got two kinds of systems, legacy systems and cloud systems (either new things, or legacy things that we've updated and made cloud native). The legacy systems spazz warning emails constantly to the maintenance and ops team, some of which can be ignored and some of which have to be acted on. The legacy ops team have people in entry level positions 24x7 who monitor this flow of excrement and attempt to triage it, and senior members of the teams developing legacy projects keep an eye on this almost all their waking hours.

On the cloud systems, one of the conditions of cloud migration is that things are measured by metrics, that the metrics have sensible alerting in place, as well as an on-call rota for that ops team. In practice, it means that cloud migrated stuff does take less attention than the legacy bits.

Now you could say that's because the legacy stuff is crap, and I'd agree with you. Slamming crap in to the cloud doesn't make it any better, we're quite lucky that our migration process includes time to get that crap in to a better managed state. The main benefit (so far) from switching to k8s/cloud native development practices has been the re-use of a lot of the metrics bits, and normalisation across projects. Lift'n'shift, or just running your on-prem workload in a cloud provider gives you none of that, I'd be wary of anyone proposing moving legacy stuff to cloud without doing the rework steps to first make it cloud ready.

[Anonymous Coward]

We're taking our first baby steps into the cloud and thankfully the consultancy working with us do all this is very helpful in pointing out how we could be doing things better/properly/etc, as well as us in-house dinosaurs trying to avoid all the pitfalls of a straight lift n shift.

Actually right now the cloud stuff is causing me more grief as the business side is trying to run before they can walk whilst we're still building the new infrastructure.

[Doctor Syntax]

"we're quite lucky that our migration process includes time to get that crap in to a better managed state"

Why haven't you done that previously? If it can be done when it's put into cloud it should surely have been possible to do then under your your direct control. This sounds like a management failure.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can answer this in 3 words:

FEATURESfeaturesFEATURES

From an exec level, why make crap better when you can just spend £150k a year on low skill people to watch the crap pile up. Then you can use your higher skill people to make new things that sell for money, rather than use your high skill people to fix things, which makes no money.

Takes time and effort to convince them this is the wrong approach, and it only really works when the elephant poo stackers have stacked the poo so high it can't be ignored.

[Anonymous Coward]

@AC ... stay on prem

Silly boy, you can do what you're doing in the cloud and do it on-prem for less.

The only question is... are you and your team up to snuff to do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @AC ... stay on prem

You can do the same thing on-prem, absolutely. You could run OpenStack, and back object storage with Ceph, and all sorts of things. Then you find out that you have engineers whose sole job is keeping ceph from running out of storage and performing optimally, you've got people managing k8s orchestration and so on and so on.

We manage 100s of Tb of image storage on one product, and that increases constantly. We can and did manage that on-prem with Ceph; its cheaper to let google manage it and let us concentrate on our main job of writing software that uses that data.

[foo_bar_baz]

Re: @AC ... stay on prem

The answer for the vast majority is: probably not.

What's the bus factor in your team? What happens when Star DBA and BOFH both decide to leave the company at the same time?

Let's say your service has a problem and you need to restore a database backup on Saturday night. Is the DBA on call, or do you have an automated system that lets you pick a backup and restore without waking him up?

[jake]

Re: @AC ... stay on prem

"What happens when Star DBA and BOFH both decide to leave the company at the same time?"

Same thing that happens when any primadonna leaves (is fired, whatever). We party.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Foobar (retz) Re: @AC ... stay on prem

If you go to the cloud, you will need a certain amount of expertise.

If you don't have the staff, its time to build it up.

I went thru an exercise about putting a project on prem vs in the cloud.

Can't give specifics, but definitely cheaper also more secure.

Of course many will challenge the security, but again, I can't share details why it would be more secure either.

Sorry, but if your CTO and CIO are not planning to move off the cloud... time for a change up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @AC ... stay on prem

We used to run one of our customer's websites on-prem and they swiftly became much bigger than we could manage, so we moved them into a couple of data centres and it was still a massive pain in the arse (having to get up in the middle of the night to take a spare disc out, arguing with the datacenter to get a new rack in less than six months, being given a power budget that basically let us power 3/4 a rack etc. etc.).

Now they're in AWS and our workload has dropped massively, they pay less during quiet periods, and a bit more when it's busy, but their website actually stays up then, so it's still a win.

tl/dr the cloud is a sensible for public facing services

[Lotaresco]

I had a good long sleep last night

Yep, I managed a full five hours before having to drag my carcass in to sort out some problem that wasn't as urgent as the person yelling about it thought it was. I think many middle managers seem to think that there's a chain of bottom kicking in which IT staff are at the bottom of the heap. This particular "emergency" turned out to be that someone just doesn't read the emails that told him that the work he was shouting about isn't scheduled for delivery for another six months and that if we prioritise the delivery he wants then all the other programmes will be delayed by six months. So no, he's not having his way. Oh and there's no point in him going purple in the face and shouting at me because (a) I'm higher up the tree than he is and (b) not impressed by that behaviour and (c) HR are still working even in these Covid-19 times and unprofessional behaviour is still a no-no.

Sadly I did have to get out of bed and into the office because if I hadn't I would be in the wrong for refusing to help.

[Joe Drunk]

Re: I had a good long sleep last night

That happened to me as well in my Data Center days. A torrent of emails was fired to all related management, team members, stakeholders etc. to ensure his incompetence was brought front and center. The goal was to get him fired but he ended up being transferred to a different location and I never heard from him again so almost as good. I have gotten a few others lower managers fired for their posturing at different gigs over the years. No remorse. Working in IT is already hell and anyone who attempts to fan the flames for their own personal benefit will have a target painted on their backs.

[Scott Broukell]

Look hear! they are always screaming at us NOT to turn the bloody equipment off! so they (IT Pros), can't expect to get turned off themselves! Any way, this is nothing a bit of heavily caffeinated fizzy pop won't sort out! Move along.

[John Brown (no body)]

Judging by the downvotes, some people didn't get enough sleep and were unable to parse the humour!

[Intractable Potsherd]

There was humour?

[jake]

I didn't notice any.

[macjules]

And when was the survey carried out?

Before or after the latest instalment of Doom came out?

[ledgerbench]

They didn't start from the conclusion

[Dwarf]

Conversely ...

What about all those people skilling up on the endless money making machine of endless courses about cloud, that takes time and that means less sleep.

So, arguable if they got rid of cloud, then there would be no need to stay up late and learn about it hence people would get more sleep. so, less cloud = more sleep.

My invoice is in the post ..

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Conversely ...

"What about all those people skilling up on the endless money making machine of endless courses about cloud, that takes time and that means less sleep."

If the employer needs workers to re-skill or up-skill then they should be providing the paid time to do it. Unless they are using contractors of course :-)

[Mike 137]

To sum up

"Fire and forget outsourcing takes the stress out of your job"

Until it goes wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that's funny!

""There's a positive link between the adoption of cloud technologies and people's work/life balance, with 57 per cent of those whose organisations have embraced cloud technologies feeling satisfied with their work/life balance," the report gleefully reveals."

Part of my sleepless nights are due to some pointy haired manager (PHM) thinking that going to the cloud is our solution and its my job to roll up the newspaper and say "No! Bad Manager! No!" and then gently remind him of why.

I'd switch to a shock collar, but HR is afraid I may over do it and cause permanent damage to his psyche.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Now that's funny!

Can't damage what's already gone out with the lawn clippings.

[jake]

Yeahbut ...

Some of us do just fine on 4 hours sleep per day. I typically get three hours at night, and a one hour siesta after lunch. Other folks might balk at such a sleep schedule, but it's been working for me since I was in high school. Gives me more time to get things done.

As for clouds, they give me hives. Who intentionally opens themselves to an expanded set of vectors for security headaches? That kind of shit has occasionally given me sleepless nights since the mid-'80s ... and has given me many, many lost nights and weekends in the same time frame. On the bright side, there is plenty of money to be made pulling companies large and small back out of the cloud. In fact, it's partially funding my pseudo-retirement from IT.

[llaryllama]

Re: Yeahbut ...

I need a good 9-10 hours so taking kids to school in the morning is brutal. I'm in a permanent state of chronic tiredness. I try to be very disciplined getting to bed early but the only time I have to myself is post-11pm so that usually goes out the window. When I was younger and self employed I was quite happy working until 8am and sleeping until 6pm. I think I might be a vampire.

[Paul Hovnanian]

What is 'the cloud'?

It's basically hardware in a data center rack someplace plus a cookie-cutter O/S with basic tools (DBMS, web server, etc.). In my experience, these components have been the least of my worries when it comes to keeping me up at night. Most of the nightmares occur in the higher application levels. The one caveat to this is that many of these application level problems occur when someone (other than myself) takes it upon themselves to upgrade the lower level stuff, breaking my applications. And I get little or no say in the planning of that upgrade. Now I have to drop everything and test (and perhaps patch) against a new version.

I lose a lot less sleep with my own hardware and my own systems that I can manage on my own schedule. Even the data center isn't a panacea. One of the worst outages I witnessed in one of my enterprise app was when the data center people hired a bunch of contract techs to come in and clean up abandoned network cabling under the server room raised floor. Next thing we knew, production servers were dropping off line as they merrily went to work with their diagonal cutters.

[Mr.Nobody]

Re: What is 'the cloud'?

Several years ago, we had a bunch of devs that wanted to update their resumes and get into cloud.

One strategy they came up with to justify the move was to send our Director all the sev1 tickets from the last two years, and implied they were issues with colo/systems/networking issues.

Said Director asked us about the ticket, and after showing him the details, every single outage was due to their shitty code. Not a single hardware failure or systems/networking/colo engineering cock-up.

All of them work elsewhere now, and we are still happily on our own kit at least 1/10th the cost of public cloud.

[EnviableOne]

Re: What is 'the cloud'?

Gave up calling it "the Cloud" years ago, got a TLA for it now

O ther

P eople's

T in

its not an amorphos blob in the ether, its trusting someone else not to have fat fingers...

[chivo243]

Losing sleep!

Over malware and hackers! Good one!

[Dr_N]

" ...recommended seven-to-eight hours' shut-eye"

Recommedation for lightweights and wimps?

[Anonymous Coward]

director / CIO ?

Of course, it's toughest at the top, right? Wrong! It turns out that 65 per cent of those at director or CIO level said they're satisfied with their work/life balance, while only 36 per cent of those in less senior roles could say the same.

Well, at those compensation levels, I'd probably be happy too. Or could at least afford enough booze, drugs and pr0n to make me *think* I'm happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

AI 'R' US

We all know that management wants to replace IT with AI, it's time to turn the tables - write a personal bot to do your job while you sleep.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love being on furlough and not having to get up or do anything for money. I think we should do basic income. Everyone should get 2500 pounds a month and then be allowed to work (and be taxed at like, 50% on top of that) and we make corporations PAY SOME TAX and it all works out, we should try it see what kind of crime and poverty free utopia it might be just in case we end up liking it

[John Brown (no body)]

It's one of those things that keeps coming up. IIRC at least one Scandinavian country has/is/might try it. I think I first came across the suggestion in Heinlein story from the 30's (or thereabouts).

I could see somewhere like the the UK or EU doing it, but not a chance in the USA. It's sounds far too socialist or communist!! It'd certainly make employers sit up and take notice of the workers when they can just up sticks and walk if they don't like the employers work habits with far less worry about finding another job before they end up at a food bank or homeless. Having said that, I'd give up work altogether if I was given a free pay rise to £2,500 per month!!

[jake]

"but not a chance in the USA."

Actually it's an idea that comes and goes here in the US, and has done for over a century. Bernie Sanders is a big fan of the idea[0]. It seems that every time it gains a little momentum the groundswell gets larger. My gut feeling is that this Covid-19 thing putting so many people out of work might make it politically expedient to try "for a couple years".

Look for the Idiot in Chief to try to implement it in the next couple months ... he needs all the votes he can get to stay in the Oval Office; getting a fair number of Bernie supporters over on his side would probably be enough to do it.

"It's sounds far too socialist or communist!"

Don't forget that our supposedly good, god-fearing, right-wing christian President is best friends with Putin and the Fat Elvis impersonator. That's right, our President is a commie sympathizer. It's only a matter of time before he gets corrupted by their goddless heathen lefty ideas ...

[0] Why do you think the kids, hippys and other tree-huggers like the old fogy so much? Promises of free money to get ignorant votes is a long established political tool.

[Alan W. Rateliff, II]

Adopt cloud tech if you want more sleep

In my experience, and I hazard to say I am not alone in this, this report is bullshit.

Technology is the problem, and equally whether on-premise or on someone else's server (the "cloud.") Internet goes down. Services suffer down-time because of some dipstick pushing the wrong button or forgetting to install a certificate or pulling the wrong cable or committing a bad configuration or routing fails because China or a data center in BFE suffers a power outage and the redundancy fails or or or or. Firewalls lock up. Switches glitch during power events, irrespective of the UPS. UPS batteries need changing. Internal network goes nuts because some remotely managed VoIP phone suddenly storms off its assigned VLAN. USB scanners refuse to wake up after going into power saving mode. Printers... oh, God, printers!

We work when we need to. Customers experience problems whenever they please irrespective of where their services are hosted. Sleep be damned. Shove this "report" right up your output ports.

[Tony W]

GIGO

Nothing to say how the sample were found or selected so the data are pretty well meaningless.

But considering those who did respond, it looks as if the problem is stress rather than overwork as such. Of course overwork can cause stress if it makes it difficult to fit in other necessary things such as looking after home and family.

But stress directly related to work is different - it's about feeling personally responsible for failure. It's prevalent amongst those in insecure employment and self-employed people in responsible jobs. From personal experience, it can help to focus on covering your back first and getting the job done second.

[ecofeco]

The beatings WILL continue!

... until moral improves!

[Shalghar]

So the stress generated by potential failure of any kind concerning accessible on prem hardware/software is somewhat greater than the stress generated by potential failure of someone elses hardware and software, the whole permanent connection from on prem to said foreign hardware and the more than doubled risk for power loss of any endpoint plus the hardware that actually connects the two.

The stress generated by fear from security breaches/"hackers" is greater than the stress from security breaches at the cloud corporation like open AWS buckets and suchlike plus the surely reliable status reports and warnings should any breach occur on somebody elses computer.

Its bad enough to fear that you cannot fulfill your responsibilities when you have direct access to the hardware and software that suddenly fails for whatever reason but why would bringing unknown individuals of unknown skillsets into the equation lessen this stress ? Just because its then somebody elses problem ?

So IF the warning system of the cloud stuff (or your own warning email to said cloud company) works reliably and IF their support staff is fast on site and IF they are actually capable of helping and sorting out the issue and IF they have the correct spares lying around IF its a hardware fault and IF their backups are at least as reliable as yours were.....

Thats a bit too IFfy for my taste....

Basically, the "study" relies on the stress relieving factor that any failure of the cloud stuff is somebody elses problem - only it isnt, because your data and services suddenly dont work like they should. So not only is it still your problem, you suddenly have a lot less options and lack any direct access to identify the failure and remedy the issues.

[Danny 2]

Four plus four

I need eight hours sleep but I can split it into two shifts. I had one job where I was driving 100,000 miles a year, twelve hour days, and then my friend and his woman moved in temporarily and I was down to four hours. I asked my doctor for sleeping tablets and she gave me temazepam, but they had no noticeable effect and I assumed were just sugar pills.