Tuesday, December 2, 2008

IT Administrator Job (dis)Satisfaction Survey

I drove a lot today, returning home from my holiday weekend. While I was driving, my mind wandered to my job. It was supposed to be my day off, but all I did today was fix things and provide support to users. I was bitter, because I felt like I never have time off, even when I'm off, and that I'm never away from work, even when I'm at home.

Then I started wondering exactly why I was whining so much. It's not like these aspects of the job were unknown to me when I joined the company. At our Christmas party two years ago, my boss told me that part of the reason he hired me was because I told him about the other times I've shrugged off personal life to fix things for work. I guess I should have seen it coming.

I thought back to some other conversations I've had with people, and what their experiences are as admins, and really, the ones I've talked to don't have a clue how the rest of the world works, in terms of numbers of supported devices and supported users, hours worked, etc etc.

To fix this lack, and hopefully to provide some transparency to our profession, I drew up a quick 10 question survey at SurveyMonkey (a great site for building surveys). I call it the IT Administrator Job (dis)Satisfaction Survey. Please take it, it will only use a few seconds of your time, and every result helps to add to the shared knowledge of our positions.

The questions aren't perfect, but I think that they should shed some light. I'll leave the survey open for 2 weeks, till December 16th. After that I'll examine the results, produce some graphs, and post the results for you to see.

Thanks for your help!