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73% of Admins Still Want to Quit Due to Stress
The number of IT professionals considering leaving their job due to workplace stress has jumped from 69% last year to 73% according to a recent survey by GFI Software. The article in Help Net Security underlining the increasingly challenging business landscape in the UK and the growing emphasis being placed on IT to help businesses grow, thrive, and compete. Phil Bousfield, GM IT Operations at GFI Software says that IT staffers are under pressure. “Companies are more reliant than ever on IT innovation, uptime, and speed of deployment, and thus, IT staff are under extreme pressure to deliver for the benefit of the whole business.”
One-third of those surveyed by GFI Software cited dealing with managers as their most stressful job requirement, particularly for IT staff in larger organizations, while handling end-user support requests, budget squeeze, and tight deadlines were also singled out as the main causes of workplace stress for IT managers.
The blog list other key findings from the survey:
- 68% of all IT administrators surveyed consider their job stressful.
- 49% are working six or more hours overtime a week.
- 35% of respondents have missed social functions due to work issues.
- 30% of those surveyed have missed out on planned family time because of work demands.
- 28% of IT admins point to a lack of budget and staff needed to get the job done as their primary reasons for job stress.
The top sources of stress for IT admins are:
- Management (35%)
- Tight deadlines (19%)
- Lack of budget (17%)
- Users (16%).
To drive up IT admin’s stress, the most common user issues reported in the article were complaints of hardware not working, only for IT to find the device was either not switched on or not plugged in, and users spilling tea, coffee, and other beverages over their computer or keyboard and then denying they had done it. Some of the most ridiculous things that respondents said they had seen an end-user do include:
Complaining their mouse wasn’t working when they were trying to use a foam stress squeezer.- Thinking there was a ghost in her PC when IT support staff remoted into it to deliver support.
- Reporting the Windows version as being “Patio Doors.”
- Folding up a 5.25inch floppy disc to fit it into a 3.5inch disc drive.
A total of 80% of participants told GFI that their job had negatively affected their personal life in some way. The author states that the impact that work stress is having on health and relationships is a great concern. Mr. Bousfield said, “We all know that a happy workforce is a productive workforce, so it is concerning that so many of our survey respondents are stressed to the point that they are actively considering leaving their current role in order to achieve a better work/life balance.”
The survey discovered some significant personal impacts the IT career has had on the personal lives of IT workers:
- 28% have lost sleep due to work
- 26% have had to cancel commitments to family and friends due to work.
- 19% do not feel great physically as a result of stress
- 18% have suffered stress-related health issues due to their work
- Another 18% also revealed they had experienced a strained or failed relationship due to work stress.
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The IT business can be a grinder, not only because it’s hard, but everybody is an expert because they can use their iPhone. I have covered the health impact of the IT business here and here.
GFI’s Bousfield concludes that the research is a stark reminder that IT staff need to be supported and given the right resources – staff, budget, and technology – to do their jobs well. Management needs to be an enabler, not an obstacle for IT progress.
Related articles
- Work Is Biggest Cause Of Stress In People’s Lives (medicalnewstoday.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Health care |
Tags: 2013, Career, GFI, Health, Information technology, Stress, Technical support, Workplace wellness
Rackspace Strikes Back at Patent Troll
Rackspace, which just successfully defended itself in a lawsuit filed by one patent troll, is now declaring war on another patent troll reports Barb Darrow at GigaOM. The hosting firm turned cloud infrastructure service provider announced on its blog that it sued IP Navigation Group (IP Nav) and Parallel Iron, asking the federal court in its hometown of San Antonio, TX for damages, for breach of contract, and to enter a declaratory judgment asserting that Rackspace does not infringe on Parallel Iron’s patents.
According to the Rackspace (RAX) blog post, Parallel Iron sued Rackspace and 11 others in Delaware. The other firms the non-practicing entity is suing includes; Qualcomm (QCOM), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Twitter, Trulia (TRLA), Wal-Mart (WMT), Visa (V), Groupon, PayPal, Cloudera Inc., eBay (EBAY), and Nokia (NOK). That suit alleges that the defendants infringed on three patents that Parallel Iron claims cover the use of the open-source Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).
In his post, Alan Schoenbaum, Rackspace SVP and general counsel wrote: “Parallel Iron is the latest in a string of shell companies created to do nothing more than assert patent-infringement claims as part of a typical patent troll scheme of pressuring companies to pay up or else face crippling litigation costs. At least that is what it looks like on the surface.”
GigaOM has reported many of the non-practicing companies (aka trolls) are shells created by patent aggregators. Their goal is to wring money out of targets. Sometimes, legitimate tech companies give their IP to trolls to harass rivals or even create their own shell to pursue this sort of litigation.
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The trolls claim they are supporting small firms. The argument goes that without the patent trolls, small companies — those without the resources to enforce their own patents — can turn their IP over to a shell company to protect it. Rackspace’s Shoenbaum calls the theory “laughable.”
I have covered how patent trolls have been stifling innovation and removing over $29 billion in value from the U.S. economy for a long long time.
Related articles
- The Patent Troll Tragedy (growthology.org)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2013, Apache Hadoop, Business, EBay, Open Source, Patent troll, PayPal, Qualcomm, Rackspace
France Gets a 400 Gbps Fiber Link
David Meyer at GigaOm chronicles the latest jump in real-world networking. According to the article, Orange and Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) have lit a 400 Gbps fiber link across the French countryside. This link is the first working deployment of long-distance 400 Gbps wavelength fiber connectivity.
In keeping with Bach Seat’s policy of covering real-world networking, GigaOm says this is the first field implementation. Struggling network gear maker Alcatel-Lucent and France Telecom-Orange (FTE) have deployed a long-distance terrestrial 400 Gbps optical fiber link that uses 44 such wavelengths to move an amazing (for now at least) 17.6 terabits per second (Tbps) of aggregate traffic.
GigaOM speculates moving this amount of traffic will be popular with telecoms operators. Telco networks are always facing a capacity crunch, mainly thanks to the explosion in the cloud and online video.
The 275 miles (450km) link between Paris and Lyon, relies on Alcatel-Lucent’s 400 Gbps Photonic Service Engine. The article reports that the first tester is the French educational and research network Renater. The early use cases for this bump up from now-standard 100 Gbps wavelength technology will most likely be found in business and research, for services such as video on demand and telepresence that will make good use of the boosted bandwidth.
“This link transports the bulk of France’s scientific data that passes through our network,” Renater MD Patrick Donath said in a statement. “This pilot phase also aims to test the latest switching equipment supplied by major OEMs on a network running at this capacity and will enable us the anticipate the architecture of Renater’s network in the coming years.”
“A 400 Gbps network is an important step forward for the networks and research projects of tomorrow.”
Related articles
- Submarine Capacity Quadruples (dailywireless.org)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2013, Alcatel-Lucent, ALU, France Télécom, Networking, Optical fiber, Paris, Tbps, terabits per second
What is 4G Mobile Wireless
Wireless operators continue to roll out mobile networks built with acronym-heavy standards such as 4G, Long Term Evolution (LTE), IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX), or HSPA+. Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM says it’s hardly a surprise that every press release is touting 4G, which presumably stands for the fourth generation wireless network. Only, according to InfoWorld, the truth is, neither WiMax nor LTE qualify as 4G technologies, according to the International Telecommunications Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R). For a service to be called 4G by the ITU-R carriers will have to use one of two future mobile wireless technologies.
GigaOM reports that in October 2009, the ITU fielded 6 candidates that could meet the true definition of 4G mobile wireless. The main criteria required speed boosts, but more importantly, new technologies that make more efficient use of spectrum, as well as an ability to work with other radio access systems and fixed wireline networks. The standard also requires that equipment makers offer features that will help guarantee the quality of service on wireless networks. Of the 6 candidates, the ITU declared the upcoming called LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced – also known as IEEE 802.16m the only true 4G mobile wireless technologies.
True 4G wireless calls for peak speeds of 100 Mbps for mobile applications and 1 Gigabit per second for fixed networks. To do such speeds, operators will need five to ten times as much spectrum as most are using now to deploy LTE, as well as complex antenna configurations. The new 8×8 MIMO will need some new antennas at the tower and inside the mobile devices. Some operators won’t ever get to that point. Others might, but it’s going to take four or five years before people start rolling out anything like the ITU’s version of 4G mobile wireless according to the GigaOm article.
The faux 4G we are getting now, comes in three flavors thanks to a bold marketing effort by T-Mobile writes Ms. Higginbotham. T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network is most assuredly 3G (or maybe 3.5G for some) but as its CTO, Neville Ray, argued with GigaOM founder Om Malik, its real-world mobile wireless speeds are better than those offered by WiMAX and are comparable to the real-world expectations of Verizon’s LTE network. The key to T-Mo’s experience lies in its spectrum resources. As a general rule, the more spectrum an operator has, the more lanes in its highway it can cram bits into. The blog says T-Mobile can use that spectrum to increase capacity or increase speeds. With plans to move from 21 Mbps to 42 Mbps speeds using HSPA+, T-Mo is going for speed to keep up with the wireless mobile Jones.
Laptop reports that other mobile wireless operators do not qualify as 4G either. “… Sprint and Clearwire’s Mobile WiMax (3 to 6 Mbps), T-Mobile’s HSPA+ (5 to 8 Mbps), and even Verizon Wireless’ LTE network (5 to 12 Mbps) don’t even come close to deserving the 4G moniker.”
After all, marketers pushing LTE first starting waving the 4G mobile wireless flag several years ago, despite the ITU hadn’t yet decided if LTE was 4G. The first releases weren’t. We’ll have to wait for LTE-Advanced in about four or five years for true 4G. By then, it’s possible we’ll be dealing with 5G mobile wireless networks or something even better the marketers dream up. In the meantime, consumers will buy their faux 4G mobile wireless phones for their faux 4G mobile wireless networks and never sweat the difference GigaOm speculates.
The faux 4G networks are incremental improvements over 3G. As Tolaga Research analyst Phil Marshall told InfoWorld, these wireless mobile networks were designed from day 1 for data, and are all Internet protocol (IP) from end to end. That’s a huge improvement over 3G and it’s a marked change. Despite the improved architecture, Wi-Fi Net News asks if the spectrum is available to meet the 2015 rollout for real 4G. “It looks like the maximum speeds being discussed require extremely wide channels, like 100 MHz. That’s not impossible, but no U.S. carrier has 100 MHz in a chunk that it materializes. The FCC white-spaces rulemaking frees up a bunch of 6 MHz pieces, and that’s the last major realignment after DTV 700 MHz spectrum that I’m aware of. The definition of 4G may now be set, but the ability to roll out 4G at anything like the minimum speeds promised seems highly problematic even in five years.”
Related articles
- Faux G (economist.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Mobile Patent Troll Sues Everyone
Surprise, surprise there’s another mobile-related patent lawsuit. David Meyer at GigaOM says this time the plaintiff is an obscure Delaware-registered limited liability non-practicing entity called Steelhead. The patent in question covers ‘mobile radio handover initiation determination’ – in other words, choosing which cellular base station has the best signal as the handset moves from one place to another.
The defendants are a who’s who of the mobile world: Apple (AAPL), AT&T (T), Google (GOOG), HTC, Kyocera (KYO), LG (LGLD), MetroPCS (PCS), Motorola Mobility, NEC Corporation (6701), Pantech, Research In Motion (RIMM), Sony (SNE), Sprint (S), T-Mobile, Verizon (VZ) and ZTE (763). The article says these firms committed the mortal sin of allowing their mobile phones to act like mobile phones. But the interesting thing about this particular suit is the origin of the suit – or, more precisely, the reporting around that origin.
Mr. Meyer reports that U.S. Patent No. 5,491,834 comes from BT (BT). It was filed in 1993 and granted in 1996. The patent is still listed by the USPTO as belonging to BT. In its court filings provided by the author, (the Motorola/Google example is here), Steelhead notes that it “owns all rights of recovery under the ‘834 Patent, including the exclusive right to recover for past infringement.”
The author suggests that this case may not be BT “aggressively monetizing” its patent portfolio. BT told Mr. Meyer, “BT sold all of its rights to the patents last year. We have no involvement in Steelhead Licensing LLC’s litigation activity.”
BT claims the troll is not a shell front for the firm. A spokesperson for the telecom giant told GigaOM, “BT doesn’t share in Steelhead’s licensing income”.
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I have covered the mobile patent wars many times here. I don’t know why I find patent trolling so interesting to follow. Maybe it is the same reason I watch NASCAR highlights, for the crashes, or the buy a few Powerball tickets, just in case.
Maybe someday all the money spent on lawyers will actually go back to making things and creating jobs.
Shame on BT if this is a legit patent and they were not smart enough to enforce their claim when they had it. I’m no lawyer, it seems to me that mobiles that can’t find a cell tower to connect to don’t work.
Related articles
- The Patent Troll Tragedy (growthology.org)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.