As a follow up to our post on 25 Reasons Why it’s Great to be an IT Guy (or Girl), I thought I’d contrast that a bit, and list out some reasons why it’s not so good to be an IT Guy. 

Fair is fair, and no matter how thinly you slice it, there are always two sides to every situation. 

If you’ve been around the IT game for any length of time, many, if not most, of these will make sense to you.  So let’s take a look at some of the reasons why it sucks to be the "IT Guy".

1. No one understands how long something actually takes. Most end users just come in and sit down at their desk, and everything works.  Great.  What they don’t see (or understand – or care) are the hours of work you put into getting things working correctly, fixed, restored, or whatever the task happened to be.
2. You’re never "off-duty".  Even if you work 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, when you come home or go out someone will still stop or call and ask you a computer question.  They would never dream of asking their friend the dentist to look at their rear molar if they happened to see them out at the mall, but they have no trouble asking you about the annoying message that keeps popping up on their PC or why their sound suddenly stopped working.
3. People think if you’re in IT, you know everything about every type of computer or program.  Most people understand there’s a difference between a regular car and a tractor trailer.  They don’t just assume that because you know how to drive a car, you can drive a Mack truck.  For some reason, however, if you’re the IT guy you must know how to fix a computer (PC and Mac), design a database, write an application, create a website, fix an xbox, hook up a wireless router, and so on.
4. You periodically hear from people you haven’t seen in years.  That would be nice if they called to say hi, wanted to catch up and have some drinks, or actually wanted to offer you something.  In reality, it always go the same way.  They start off with, "Hey how’s it going", "How’s the family", "How are the kids" and then they jump right into it..  "Hey why I have you on the phone, I have a computer question for you…."  Thats when my battery on my cell phone magically goes dead and I can’t receive calls for an hour or two (I hate when that happens)!
5. There’s very little separation between work and home.  Most professions have a separation between on and off hours.  When your an IT person, you usually work on computers all day, and then come home and more than likely work on them all night as well.  In some respects it’s great that you can do what you love, but it doesn’t hurt to get out and get some fresh air sometime!
6. You usually have way too much junk laying around the house.  As a IT guy or girl, you tend to accumulate a lot of spare parts and junk over the years, and you never throw it away because you’re just certain you’ll have a need for that 9-pin serial cable or that 2400 baud modem at some point. 
7. You always have to keep updating your skills.  This can be good or bad, depending on how you look at it.  In IT, things change pretty quickly and if you don’t update your skills you can become dated pretty quickly.  Yes you were an absolute wizard with Windows 3.11 for workgroups, but not much call for those skills anymore skippy.
8. Your family and friends can’t stand to watch a movie or TV show with you if it has anything to do with tech or IT.  You have a comment for every scene, whether it’s Jack Bauer getting Chloe to send detailed streaming satellite imagery to his PDA in real-time, or the movie star saving gigs of data to their thumb drive in seconds using operating systems that don’t exist with lots of scrolling numbers and graphics that don’t mean anything floating in the background just before the villain walks in.  Just remember, it wouldn’t be much fun to watch people struggle with installing drivers when they’re rushing to copy those stolen files, or have their cell phone die in the middle of the satellite update because they hit a dead spot.  Suspend belief for awhile and relax! 
9. You always want the latest gadget.  Yes you just bought a dual-core PC with latest video card and gigs of RAM just six months ago.  But now there is a quad-core system with a faster video card, bigger monitor and faster memory you have your eye on.  Remember, no matter what you buy, it will be obsolete in six months, so draw a line in the sand and enjoy what you have.  Unless of course it’s an iPod, in which case it will be obsolete in three months with a newer version that’s smaller with twice the storage and half the price.  That’s the nature of tech. Live with it.
10. No matter how sharp you are, you’re kids WILL be better than you one day.  Yes you make your living in IT.  Yes you keep up with most of the latest tech and gadgets, but one day your kids WILL beat you at your own game.  Probably sooner than you think.

So there you have our 10 reasons why it sucks to be an IT guy or girl.  Can you relate?  Have reasons of your own?  Post a comment, we’d love to hear them.