IT Workers Pushed to the Limits

Three Strikes, and You're on the Way Out: "It's Management by Fear"

Like the anonymous UC tech staffer, Yau-Man Chan has seen the temperature level rise among IT staffers at his campus. So the CTO of the College of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley does what he can to reduce the stress. "If you read them the riot act or burden them with office procedures and paperwork, I don't think they'll follow you," he says. (Chan gained some fame for his ability to lead under pressure last year as a contestant on the reality television game show "Survivor: Fiji.")

But many companies just turn the screws tighter on an already-suffering IT staff. That's exactly what IBM's Applications on Demand (AOD) unit, which offers software from SAP, Oracle, and others over the Internet, did to its tech workers earlier this year, says a staffer. (IBM declined to comment for this story.)

AOD managers felt tech workers were botching too many modifications and updates to core systems, says the employee. And so managers mandated a three-strikes policy, ominously echoing California's tough "three strikes" law aimed at repeat felons: The first strike for a failed change is a written warning. The second strike is a performance plan -- that is, a type of probation. The third strike is the lowest rating on an annual review, which can prevent raises and the employee more at risk if further layoffs occur.

"It's kind of earth-shattering," says the employee, adding that co-workers labor under a cloud of dread that they'll be laid off soon. "You've got all this pressure building up to do the right thing. Yet when you try to do the right thing, it becomes very difficult -- it's management by fear."

Managers also threw up roadblocks to discourage tech workers from making even routine tweaks, such as software patches and updates, the employee says. Sometimes they denied change proposals simply because they couldn't understand the technical verbiage. All of this has led to a volatile workplace.

At IBM's AOD unit, tech workers reacted by making unauthorized changes; since managers were unaware of the changes, no strike could be made against the employees' records. When authorized changes do fail, the tech workers now cover their tracks. For example, if a tech worker unsuccessfully tried to patch a computer bug, he'd blame the failure on the bug -- not the patch effort -- to avoid a demerit.

The result of this fear-driven workaround to management's diktats: Many changes are undocumented or incorrectly documented, while other changes simply fall by the wayside.

What particularly galls the AOD tech worker is that a few years ago, IBM managers had instituted a similar three-strikes policy, with troubling results. "People threw up their hands on the small stuff," the employee recalls. "Systems weren't patched, which led to vulnerabilities. We had microcode that hadn't been updated on SAN switches for two years. This resulted in a bug, the system crashed, and we lost customer data."

Cost-Cutting Gone Awry: "My Pager Goes Off All Day Long"

A veteran engineer at a large Silicon Valley company says the atmosphere in the IT department has become one of distrust. Senior tech workers have been forced out or fired for alleged noncompliance, only to be replaced by less-capable and cheaper foreign workers. As a result, workloads have doubled. The engineer is now required to work weekends without extra pay to troubleshoot old equipment. "My pager goes off every couple of hours, all day long."

Even worse, a tech worker who makes the latest mistake is "on the hot seat to be shown the door," says the engineer, adding that management has moles inside the technical staff to rat out disloyal behavior. Perhaps most telling, the engineer now dreams of working as a cashier in retail. "I'm not motivated by money anymore, just a few thank-yous," the engineer says.

Despite this volatile situation, the engineer is critical of IT retaliating. "I'm way too ethical to do any damage ... but yes, there're opportunities," the engineer says. "The greatest sin I've seen from my peers is to neglect things, let something sit on the front burner until it goes up in flames. At some point, systems will crash and nobody will be around to fix them."