So it's that time of year again, appraisals - the part where you sit down with your manager, he tells you just how useful you are and how you don't quite get a bonus because you never exceeded the goals set despite the fact that exceeding the goals set would require changing the laws of physics. Part of this cycle of horror is "career development" which always makes me laugh as, so far, I've never been allowed to 'stretch myself' to the areas that I want to try my hand at yet every 6 months we go through the same dance...

Anyway, with the advent of the Appraisal coming I decided to start looking at the job market again an found that most of the ads were the same:

"Seeking person to look after servers, storage, VMware, service desk, support calls, other people, animals, wash boss types car, work under pressure to tight deadlines. URGENT!!"

And there it is. Three phrases I hate:

"Work under pressure" - basically means the boss will tell you that something needs doing five minutes after it should have been done. On a Friday. at 16:55.

"tight deadlines" - This is a negotiation that happens up and down the country. Boss type says project x will require six months. His boss says "great but you have 3 months" which then gets passed down to the team with some hokey speech about teamwork, pulling together and camaraderie.

"URGENT!!" - I hate this word more than any other in the English language. In nearly 16 years of IT work I've come across a handful of truly urgent situations. Most of the rest are because someone didn't plan, panicked and needs to cover it. Any job ad that shoves "urgent" in there is (in my mind anyway) incapable of planning for even the short term.

Depressingly most places seem to use the above three phrases interchanably. It seems that IT jobs are not real IT jobs unless those three phrases are used.

I think that maybe I'm getting just a little bit jaded with the IT sector these days as for something that's considered an Engineering discipline it doesn't seem to be maturing in the same way that the engineering sector has.