Employee Suicides at French Telecom and IT job Stress

It is a sad thing when a job stress gets so sever that an employee had to take his or her own life to direct attention to the issue, it is beyond me to understand how the French Government and the company’s officials let the number of employees committing suicide reach to 25 without taking any drastic measures to address the issue.

I still remember my first IT job as a tech support representative, on our job orientation, the director, in his efforts to make the job attractive to us said “this is the job where you can leave office and there is still sunlight outside”, he was talking about the many years he worked in IT fields and he seldom left office while the sun is still up.
No doubt, that IT related jobs are demanding and stressful. The fact that IT is one of the most dynamic industries, IT personnel must continuously update their skills. Look how, in a very short time, the world had to move from WinXP to WinVista and now Window7.

In my own journey in IT world, I started as tech support representative in 1995, where we were told that “you will leave work each day while the sun is still up”, to working as application tester where we never left office at 5PM, there was no compensation for over-time and some of us had to work on weekends. The pay was good, but the stress level was high but on those years, we were young and were looking for job security and experience so most of us did not mind long hours.

Sometimes in the middle of 2001, I decided to make a career shift to management, I realized the importance of having a balanced life, a life which is not centered around my job, then again in 2002, I left the corporate world entirely and started my own small IT consulting firm where my focus was and still on small business owners, I work less hours and make less money, but I spend more time with family and friends and I still do the work that I love to do.
So yes, IT-related Jobs are demanding, it is the nature of the industry that is continuously evolving and penetrating every aspect of our lives.

My advice to any new comer to IT would be “Spend few years working on hard-core IT jobs then move to management or consulting where you can have more free time to spend away from job.”