CIO studies factors that lead to IT stress

17.08.2006
William Cross sees stress as a major problem for IT employees, who often must deal with sudden problems the same way emergency first responders do. Cross, the CIO of Seminole Electric Cooperative Inc. in Tampa, Fla., first became interested in the topic more than 20 years ago after attending a stress management session at a user group. His doctoral thesis in information sciences at Nova Southeastern University was on the relationship between stress and programming.

In addition to working as an IT manager, he is active in the IBM Share user group, conducting sessions at this week's Share conference on the importance of reducing stress. Cross spoke with Computerworld about the issue today. Excerpts from that interview follow:

Cross is a different kind of CIO. He has a Ph.D. in information sciences, and he did his doctoral thesis on how stress affects programming. He found that the more stress a programmer deals with, the lower the quality of the code.

What makes IT a stressful occupation? IT is a stressful occupation for a lot of reasons. One of the big reasons is we work very closely with computing equipment that in today's world doesn't fail. That's high stress because if there are errors, they are probably ours. We also have this high desire to please others and that tends to get IT people to put in more hours and take things more seriously then perhaps another group.

Is this stress across the board, or are some IT jobs less stressful than others? Certainly, jobs vary. There are some jobs that are more stressful then others. Some of it is how the person reacts to the job. There are jobs in some the tech support areas, for example, that may be more stressful then a job in a scheduling group or a computer operations group. But they all have different stresses.

Does IT attract people who like stressful jobs to begin with? I believe so, yes. I believe one of the things that gets us into this business is that attraction.