Transcript
So quite a while. We've had some years to see the trends. And for the 2026 edition, more than a thousand IT pros were surveyed at the end of last year. I think a lot of our listeners are probably, or viewers are some of those people, so shout out to you. And today we're going to kind of take a gander at some of the stats and what they tell us. Wait, Andrew, let me just guess really quick. Everyone is really happy and fulfilled and they feel like they're getting paid really well. They're appreciated and they're not going to change jobs anytime soon. Does that sound right? Tara, you read my notes. Oh my gosh. Were you here last year? Sorry. Go ahead. I fixed everything. I just solved it all. Yeah. Oh, look at that, Tara. Stress. It is still top of mind. 57% of people are feeling more stressed than last year and 31% you're holding strong, maybe you're a veteran and you've kind of seen these trends go on. Cause I think like numbers wise, it always seems to be getting stressful, which I don't know if it's possible to always be getting more stressful. There has to be an upper limit. What do you think? There's gotta be an upper limit, right? Is there? I mean, I think it just comes with the job of being in IT. Stress. That should be like the number one job description. Do you enjoy stress? Be a sysadmin. I just think realistically, you're never going to ask that question and have someone say, yeah, come to think of it. I'm so much less stressed than I was last year. I think we're always just kind of conditioned to, to feel this stress and feel like it's, you know, it's there. It's more, it's, you know, it's not going to get better. Or you, maybe you become numb to it or used to it. I actually think you're pretty good at that. You handle it really well. I think. Truthfully. Yeah. I guess Josh has been through enough bad days to know that, you know, there's a good day on the other side of it. Not everything will blow up just cause one thing blows up. But, and if it does, it's okay. Yeah, exactly what you just said. Yeah. I think that where it gets slippery though, is the security aspect because okay, security incident happens. We all feel super scared. And if we don't have good visibility into our environments, maybe not a very supportive culture, those concerns can turn into stress really quick. Especially if you're not navigating that landscape properly. I'm not speaking about you, Josh. I'm just speaking about sort of what I've seen with people in the industry at large. Yeah, that's a fair, that's a fair assumption of a, it's like a fear of the unknown, right? Like it's, it's easier to be more calm and relaxed if you are confident in what you like have visibility and know what's coming next. Yeah. Well, also I might be skipping ahead, but do you have the support that you need? Sure. The staff that you need, the money that you need, those all factor into it. Yeah. Yeah. If you see a burning pile of garbage, can you actually take the steps to fix it? Do you have access to water? Cause if they're not going to pay the water bill, good luck putting out the fires. But I think a part of that is also, there's just a recurring work that you have to do. So the stress and workload, these are everyday tasks that people report that they're doing regularly. So we got timely security patches, monitoring, responding to security things, troubleshooting our lovely end users, which is just great. They never make mistakes with their devices or dump coffee on them. Keeping up with compliance and audits, which can be a fun thing. And then managing legacy systems, which we did the MDT webinar yesterday. And I was surprised there weren't a ton of people who had like Windows XP, uh, based on the anecdotal things people posted in the chat, but yeah, a handful here and there, one person said he's completely on like the Windows 11 and server 2025 on all of his like thousand plus workstations, which that'd be a nice environment. I'd be like expecting to find like some Windows seven embedded systems. Like that's like the new flavor of XP floating around. So I'm surprised. Yeah. Some people out there, maybe our list viewers right now, uh, have that going on burnout, burnout, burnout, risk retention and burnout are a concern. So there's the bus factor, that thing on the left, 70% people worry about being a single point of failure. I think this can point to teams being a little bit understaffed at times and people having a not very well-documented processes and a lot laying on their shoulders. And I think that not only if you're a single point of failure, it's a business risk, but I think it's just a stress risk as well. How do you take time off? If you know in your head that X, Y, and Z system are going to crash and you care about them and there's no one else who can do it and there's no plans of getting there. What do you all see about that? Do you see a lot of people struggling? Will you explain that single point of failure? Does that mean like if Josh dies tomorrow, PDQ goes up in flames? Is that what that means? Can, if Josh was doing his job, not very well, can I win the lottery instead of dying? Okay. So that means you feel, no, sorry, you're dead. That means that you as a person, you're the only one that knows how to do your job. And you fear if you, you are gone, everything goes to crap. Right. No redundancy for staffing. I think there's a lot of interplay between that and like stress level though. Right. Because like I have all of this stuff to do, uh, that I have to do it to stay on top of it. So that means that I can't document or offload things so that I can not be a single point of failure. So now I'm a single point of failure and I have all this stuff to do and my stress lever just keeps going higher and higher and higher. Like I think these are like compounding issues. They're not like separate distinct things. I totally get that. And I feel the pain, but for me, I'm going to put my manager hat on. That's the manager's job to make sure people are trained redundancy. Everybody should be trained doubly, triply on everything. Sure. If at all possible. I think that makes sense when you're an IT team, but when you're an IT staff of one or an IT staff of two, then what? Yeah. That's difficult. You, you actually are probably a single point of failure. Yeah. I get that. It's hard. It's hard. It might be a risk that the business chooses to take on though, because you know, they, they don't have that much that they spend on it, uh, but not a great spot to be in. And I think that also to tag along with what you're saying, Josh is the reactive work we saw earlier. And if you're the best person who's troubleshooting, if you're the single point of failure, you're probably an asset in a lot of other ways. And if things always feel like they're on fire, you're probably always being tapped into other things and just really hard to make that progress on planning out projects, such as like documenting your processes and training other people. That work can be really hard to do when you are in firefighting mode. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's actually really hard to get out of that firefight mode. Like that's a, that's a hard thing to do. It definitely is. I think it's so helpful to have community though, where you can have external points of authority who are like encouraging, who have already made those changes. Because if you're living in a, working in an environment where everything's sort of on fire, it is hard to do that for the first time and to sort of even see the path to make that happen. Yeah. Yeah. That actually makes me really mad for people that are in that situation. That's just bad leadership. I think to expect that of your admins. Yeah. Sorry, Andrew, keep going. I think it's bad leadership, but also, you know, we have a responsibility to communicate what's going on in IT. And I don't know if everyone always does the best job of communicating that to the leaders above them. What do we got here? We got concerns, we got stress, we got risk of burnout, we got single point of failure, and we have a lot of concerns along the way. Security breach is the number one, which, I feel like everyone's sort of worried about that. And I think a lot of people, that's when they actually think they're going to get security stuff implemented is after some big event happens, that's going to be the day they get the budget, they get the consultants and all that good stuff. You got outages, always stressful, unaware risks, delayed security patching, and a whole bunch of other things to go along with it, which are pretty shared. If you look at the numbers, like, that's a lot of people sharing similar concerns. Which is obviously the worst time to get the budget for it is after the event actually happened. So, I mean, I'm just, I don't want to put you on the spot, but I'm going to. How do you convince leadership that you need the budget now, before? Like, I mean, that's crazy to me that that's a high number. It comes down to like a operational and business risk tolerance, right? And sometimes the business decision is to take the risk. And if the business decision is to take the risk, like you need to just do everything you can to mitigate it. But it's also on you to educate the business why you're advocating for it. Yeah. Right. IT people tend to have a lot of context about the cascading failures or the if this than that, and like can just go from A to Z exceptionally quickly, where Z is, I just need money to do the thing. Yeah. You need to bring people on the entire journey with you. Yeah. Why do I need to get to Z? Let me take you through all of the steps. These cascading failures cause this process to fail and this to fail. And then this doesn't happen. That's where, like I've seen in my career, a lot of disconnect is it's just, I'm going to go and ask for money because I need to solve this problem because I know everything that's going to happen. Yeah. But, and I'm the one that's going to clean it up, but you're the one that's going to pay the money to clean it up. And when the business fails, bye bye. But like you're just jumping to so many conclusions along the way and that's where people fail. So the journey is what gets them on your team. Yeah. I love that. Okay. Because I mean, I'm not going to lie. I'm listening and I'm having some bad thoughts because if I go to leadership multiple times and say, Hey, I need money. Hey, I'm overworked. Hey, I'm burned out. I need more money for my team and we need a disaster recovery plan. And I keep hearing no, no, no, no, no. Guess what I'm doing? I'm looking for a new job. Yeah. But you're also not the only person that's doing that to, to like leadership, right? Yeah. Every other department's doing that. I need more money. I need more of this. I need more of this. The departments that are able to execute and like get the money are the ones that are able to bring the business on the journey. Yeah. They're effective in their messaging. They're effective in their messaging. They're effective in telling the story. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Sorry, Andrew. Go ahead. We're going off on a diatribe now. Continue, please. I mean, we're having fun. I think we're ready for the next slide because there's hope in our future. There's a, you know, a lot of bad things. A lot of things to be stressed about automation and tools. Hey, oh, we got some tools. We could like automation around here. This is where people are versus what they want to be. Okay. Current state. We're not super automated on the right. That's where we'd like to be. Everyone wants to be fully or mostly automated for all their processes, which sounds really good on paper. But like you were saying earlier, Josh, executing on these things, making the headway when you're constantly in reactive mode is challenging. Uh, learning new skills when you aren't making time for it is really challenging. It can be very hard to do the things that are the right thing to do when you're super stressed out. Uh, I think this represents, uh, that sort of numbers wise, but we've got to think about that path forward. Yeah. I'm curious, like, uh, like from the audience perspective, what does, what does that feel like? What does fully automated feel like? What is 50% automated feel like? What is 75% automated feel like? Like, what are those in those tasks and individually? Like, and, and what is, what is done like, or what is good enough? Well, and I'm going to add to that. What feels scary to automate? Sure. That's a big thing for me. Yep. If you've never done automation, I think everything can feel scary. Yep. But one thing I think the good it teams do is they're actually okay with making changes and you know, they're not sort of always in freeze mode, which I've seen some orgs do you have to not saying make raw changes all the time in your environment, but you have to have that be part of your processes. You can't be afraid of everything. Well, guess what takes time? Automation. And it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of trial and error. If you don't have time, if you're already overloaded, if you already burn out, this can feel overwhelming. Yeah. It has to be part of a bigger play. I think you need to be talking to your management, your leadership to say, Hey, here's the problem. We have limited amount of time expanding resources that we need to sort of manage. In order to make headway on this, I need to start dedicating time to automating these processes. It's going to give slow return on investment early, but longterm, it's going to get us out of a tough spot. And security wise, we're going to be postured for a much more happy future with hopefully less terrible tax and less stress and burnout. Cool. Um, I'm curious, like what, like, so this next slide talks about like what's not being automated. I think maybe this ties into like Tara, some fear or like freeze mentality. Do you see the same kind of trends in this as you look at it? Yeah. Yeah. I'm also reading our, um, our comments and I'm laughing myself because I literally wasted two days of my week, fully obsessed with these automations. And I finally had to get Kelly and say, make me stop because I was going down so many rabbit holes just to figure out this one automation. And I, I said this to myself, I'm like, use Josh's mantra. I have 10 minutes. I have 10 minutes and 10 minutes only. It can take forever to figure out these automation things, but I was just like so committed to get it to work. So, um, yeah, I think mine was a very safe environment. I wasn't going to blow anything up, but I was like bound and determined to figure it out. So now imagine you're in a business critical environment. Um, so yeah, huge amounts of fear. So you do have to test it. You do have to start with your test machines and make sure you're not going to blow something up. And you're like, okay, I'm okay. Now I can move on to my medium critical machine. So I absolutely think there's a lot of fear. Thanks for watching this segment from PDQ live. If you like this, you'll love the full show. Check it out every Thursday at 10 a.m. Mountain. Oh, and like, and subscribe, please.
