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IT jobs without long hours?

Pedro_ramirez

Is IT always about long hours or are there jobs that come in IT without long hours?

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Comments

docrice

Depends on the organization. Some might typically limit to 40 hours per week, other expect you to do a lot more with constant on-call.

paul78

This topic comes up occasionally - you can find the most recent discussion here - http://www.techexams.net/forums/jobs-degrees/110454-ever-9-5-a.html

OctalDump

Pedro_ramirez wrote: »

Is IT always about long hours or are there jobs that come in IT without long hours?

In Australia, standard work week is 38 hours. It is possible to get IT jobs that are those hours, and sometimes a little less.

However, IT is a bit variable, because of the need in some fields to work outside of 'normal' hours, the need for on call, and in some cases the pressures of project work. This depends on the role, the company, the industry among other things.

Actual hours worked don't correlate with productivity, and the less well organised the environment, the more likely they are to still use hours worked as the only proxy measure for productivity. Long hours can actually have less aggregate productivity than shorter hours, particularly if the long hours are constant rather than rare exceptions. Longer hours typically means more mistakes, slower work pace, and less creativity - which all mean lower productivity per hour worked, and at some point there is a crossover where the reduced per hour productivity means lower total productivity. Bigger picture, good staff don't tend to stay in bad companies. Companies that are well organised are aware of these things, and work to get the most out of their workers.

Developments within IT management, things like ITIL and Agile methodologies, go someway to helping because they aim to make environments more predictable. This means that there are fewer crises to manage, less on call work, and out of hours works can be better managed. It also means that projects are less likely to overrun or enter a 'panic mode' state.

There's also peculiarities in industries that make companies better able to manage their work and hence give workers better conditions and sane working hours. So, it's worth getting a sense of the company and the industry as well as the role. A system administrator in an environment that is very project centred but poorly managed is likely to get sucked into the end of project panic. A software developer in an organisation using a mature SCRUM process is more likely to have predictable workloads. A service manager in a critical industry is likely to need to be on call at least part of the time.