Loneliness and Isolation

The Unseen Challenges Faced by Technology Professionals

What I have found throughout my career is that I get asked a lot about psychological issues in the technology world. When I speak to co-workers or fellow professionals, from new tech guys to CIOs, the questions asked are more about high expectations and imposter syndrome, but more often than not, loneliness and isolation.

I figured I would write about it since it is an important topic, even though writing in a blog format is not my top skill. When you are new to the technology profession, all that is usually on your mind is getting a MCSE or whether your CCNA matters or not. What usually happens is that you get into the real world, and then things like your relationships with your spouse, pets, landlord, parents, and all kinds of other stuff actually contribute more to your success in this career. More than the things that you think, and this is something that is endemic as well as intrinsic to being a technology professional.

One of the things that you really do have to realize is that if you are going to be a technology professional in the real world, set a goal, do something impressive, or work towards doing something impressive, and hopefully not spend your entire life on a help desk.

If you only want to spend time on a help desk or work as a desktop support professional, maybe this doesn’t count as much, but for anyone else, this may be more of an interesting read. You have to understand that, in regards to loneliness and isolation, there are a few things that are just intrinsic to who we are and what we do.

This becomes an issue because, for most companies, there are not very many of us. If you go into a company and look at the technology support staff, even if you’re in a large company, the reality is this: There are just probably not many, right?

When I worked on a project with an enterprise, we had tons of employees, like a hundred offices, satellites, uplink centers, and all that kind of stuff. The entire data communication department for the entire company had eight people. They dealt with all the system equipment. My department had like 10 or 20 so the entire IT staff is just a minuscule number in comparison to the rest of the company. So one of the issues to realize when in the field of IT and getting hired at a company is that there are simply not going to be very many of us.

For example, if you go into a sales or marketing department for some of these companies, you can walk in and see an entire floor taken up by sales and marketing people. There will be people stacked on people stacked on people. That is just the machinery of the company. So if you are a sales or marketing person or something like that and the company has a lot of you, if you have an issue dealing with a customer or client or not being able to close a sale, you can go and talk to like 50 other people.

If the sales calls annoy you for some reason, you can go talk to people. If the systems aren’t working properly or if you are just kind of upset that day, you can go talk to people. Again, if you go into any organization with a big sales force or even a sales force, it will probably be a decent chunk of the company, so when the sales people go in, they have a lot of people to talk to, and the same thing with managers and administrative support if you’re going to have warehouse workers. If you have a lot of different types of employees in a company, there would generally be quite a few of them, whereas with IT people, we get hired on in less than handfuls most of the time, just the number of us as a percentage of the company is small. In technology companies, even our numbers can be small because, even in a tech company, it isn’t really about technology; it is about business. So even if a company is selling technology, you have sales, marketing, accounting, lawyers, managers, and warehouse workers.

Logistics staff, you have all these other people. The actual technology staff supporting the company, including engineers or developers, is a smaller percentage. So one of the issues when you get into the field is that it can be lonely, and it can also be isolating, simply because there are not that many of us. The other issue that we run into, and that is compounded by the fact that there are very few of us, is that the way you have to think in order to be very successful in technology is fundamentally different from the way other people think.

I have seen this a lot when I was an outside consultant or doing other freelance work. I’m all for going to a client and if the client wanted to pay me a hundred dollars to go and fix a printer issue I’m more than happy to do that normally. There would be times, when I would just be way over my head with work, and I didn’t want it. I knew they were willing to give me a hundred dollars, and I knew it was really easy to get, but I didn’t want it. So I would do things like type up little instructions, and I remember doing this a couple of times where I would email the client to say, I see you need me to come out, but listen, I don’t have the time, but here are the instructions with three steps. You could just do this. If you do this, it will be fixed, and you will save a hundred dollars. I will not charge you.

I would send that, but a lot of the time I would get the reply back that they just were not comfortable following the instructions, so you can see where you get into this problem of thinking differently and not being customer or client focused, so I would watch out for that.

I remember talking to this woman in HR who was working for some enterprise, and she thought she was being funny, which she was. I do have a sense of humor, but I was a bit isolated at the company at the time. Since this was a decent-sized company, there were only a few IT staff. I was young yet, and sure, I liked beer, but everyone at the company always goes out and drinks together, so I was talking to this woman and said, I don’t mind drinking, but why not a comedy club or top golf? Why only go to bars or clubs? I remember her looking at me and smiling, saying, Well, that’s really nice. Well that’s why we leave you in here… She closed the door on me in the server room, and I just sat there looking at this closed door, thinking, I guess that is that.

So, you have all these different types of employees, and they have similar mentalities to some degree. When you throw in the IT people, we look at the world in a different way.

Normal employees, they think it’s about the argument more often then not. They think it’s about, you know, well, if I can convince you of my way of thinking, then I should be right. For technology professionals, it’s just not. As far as our servers are concerned, either you checked off the right checkbox or you did not check off the right checkbox, you can’t argue with a server to say the reason that you should be able to talk to the computer on another subnet is you either have a router to route the traffic to another subnet, or you don’t have a router to route the traffic to another sub that server does not give it right.

So that’s the thing is for us is we think a lot differently, so this can create a lot of issues and in a lot of ways it’s things that we don’t necessarily always realize at first because in our field If you’re doing well you are possibly getting paid well, and you get prestige you get to talk with management when you’re really young. You get the ability to interact with things that most other professions won’t.

So for a lot of those things, you feel like, well, I should be feeling good. I feel I should feel awesome. Look, I’m getting paid good money. I’m getting all these benefits. I get the respect. You know, I talk directly to the managers. Why. why is there that gap? Why is there that something that’s missing, right. And that thing that’s missing, it’s something that you long for. I’ve noticed this and why this comes up for me and topically in the IT world.

Most Western societies, most societies, value a lot of things, and we envy a lot of things that aren’t necessarily that valuable. But then we dismiss the things that are. So again, you know, if you’re 25 years old, and you’re making $200,000 a year, and you’re up there with the management, and you’re building things out and everything On the surface seems like it’s going great. But then you just feel that this massive sense of just lack, if you feel this massive sense of loneliness, if you feel that that empty thing.

So how to deal with some of these isolation issues to keep you going? We are not computers. We are the ones who speak for the system, but we are not the system itself. One problem that many geeks and many technology professionals run into is that they get so used to dealing with computers and so used to dealing with servers and so used to dealing with networks that they then almost try to become mechanical.

They start to think that these emotions and all of these things don’t matter. Um, and then they really start to go kinda nutty. One person I did work for that was a counselor who gave some great advice. One of the things that he said is that humans need to be humans.

What he found was that the people were repressing all of their, their desires, all of their needs. And the reason that they started going nutty in weird ways was because of that repression, you know, they weren’t having fun.

They were lonely. They, they, they didn’t have their needs met in these normal human ways and then what happens is that psychologically there’s a backlash and then you start becoming bizarre in all of these things. Technology professionals. Again, if you wanna be successful, you gotta be happy. You gotta be excited. Your head has to be in the game.

If you’re kind of depressed or angry all the time again, that doesn’t help you at all. There are a lot of different environments that you’re going to be working in. And there are a lot of ways to avoid the whole issue of loneliness and isolation or at least to mitigate it to make the damage as small as possible.

Now, the first environment that most of you guys are gonna be thinking about going into is basically the team work environment. So this is the environment most of you guys are thinking about going into, and what I’ll tell you is this is not the environment that many of you will end up in, right? There’s this idea like I’m gonna be on the team and that’s great for large companies. But for many professionals, you actually don’t get into teams like that.

The big thing, though, is if you’re going to be joining a team and if you’re concerned about isolation and loneliness, realize that all companies and all teams have their own personalities. Some personalities are, for example, like Google with ping pong tables and video games and all kinds of stuff. Some just want to go home at the end of the day. Right? So somebody like me, you know, I want to go in, I wanna do my nine to five or whatever. Then I would like to go home. I’ve got a wife and a kid. I’ve got other things to deal with. I don’t want to be in the building all day. Then you have the militaristic people, the people that are like this is the mission we are going to take over the world, right? You gotta be here 16 hours a day. That’s a different environment.

So if you’re gonna be working in a team of any sort, the first thing that I would say is make sure that you have a good cultural fit for that team. Cultural fit is massive. If you’re trying to build your career, if you’re trying to be a professional, it’s important that whenever you take a job, you look at more than simply what they pay you.

If you’re gonna be going for a help desk position, you’re gonna be going for a desktop support position. If you’re becoming a programmer, see how they are and see how you fit into that culture.

to be continued….