Time for a mid-life crisis
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It appears that 43 is the most likely age for IT workers to have a breakdown – with potentially disastrous results
IT workers are some of the most depressed members of the workforce. According to new research backed by mobile phone operator Vodafone, the peak of career depression among IT workers occurs between the 30s and early 40s.
Nearly 60% of workers in the 31 to 35 age bracket feel undervalued, the research found, and nearly 50% are “unfulfilled”.
But the good news is that as time goes on, job and life satisfaction improves. Indeed, satisfaction levels were highest (90%) among the highest age bracket (65 and over).
But for some, the pressures of middle age are just too much to bear. And as two recent, high-profile cases demonstrate, when that pressure boils over in IT workers, the results can be dramatic.
Terry Childs is a 43-year-old systems administrator for
In July 2008 he decided to lock down the administrator accounts for the city’s wide-area network (WAN), which is used to transmit important documents such as legal case files, refusing to hand over the new passwords. He was promptly arrested.
Admins were locked out of the network, unable to make configuration changes or updates, for the best part of a week, until San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom personally persuaded Childs to hand over the passwords.
Childs’s lawyers explained in court that their client’s motivation was to “expose the utter mismanagement, negligence, and corruption at [the department], which if left unchecked, will in fact place the City of
He felt his manager was undermining his work and he was surrounded by incompetents. Childs’s bail was set for $5 million.
But sometimes disgruntled IT workers can be a force for good – even if their own motivations are less than pure.
Last month, an IT technician for a bank in Lichtenstein sold details of the private bank accounts of wealthy tax avoiders to the German government, which said it paid $7.8 million for the stolen data. Kieber, also 43, had already tried blackmailing
By revealing the extent of tax avoidance to government officials, Kieber “has managed to generate the biggest political backlash against tax havens in more than a decade”, according to a spokesperson for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Further reading
Unhappiness in the IT sector
The IT professional’s lot, it seems, is not a happy one
