Where Can I Reach You?

Bob Miller finds a recent survey showing that 23% of IT managers and staff have been called while on vacation quite surprising.

Only 23%?

"In four years, there hasn't been a vacation where I haven't been called while I'm away," says Miller, a systems engineer and network services manager at Palomino Technologies Inc., an IT services provider.

Vacationing IT pros probably got more calls than usual last week, with the MSBlast worm tormenting IT systems. But it's not just the phone calls that bother them. According to the survey of 228 IT managers and staff by CoreProtect, an IT recovery-services company, 72% are apprehensive about returning to work after vacation because of the problems they expect to face.

Miller supports close to 50 customers that outsource their network services to Palomino. When planning vacation, he knows to keep his schedule clear the week he returns to take care of problems that occurred while he was out of the office.

The survey finds that the most common problems IT managers and workers are apprehensive about when returning from vacation include application and hard-drive corruptions, unauthorized downloading of applications, security breaches, user errors, lost data and configuration settings, server failures, virus attacks, backup failures, and E-mail and Internet connection interruptions, including spam issues.

Carl Flemister, manager of technical services at supply-chain software developer CGW Inc., can relate to the anxiety IT employees feel when they return to work after a vacation. "I'd say some people's apprehension extends to pre-vacation: They're afraid of going away because of what might happen while they're gone," he says. Flemister counters much of his catching-up concerns with his early-bird tendencies when he returns to the office. "I come in early, at about 6 or 6:30 a.m., to organize myself and check into what needs to be tackled," he says.

Flemister's employer is small, but even at former IT jobs with larger employers, Flemister says it was tough to get away. "Even if the company doesn't feel that I should be--I always feel I'm available 24-by-7," he says.

Companies may be getting the message that they need to give their IT people a complete break from work. The number of hours managers and staff clock hasn't changed much in recent years, but their on-call time actually dipped last year, according to InformationWeek Research's 2003 National IT Salary Survey of more than 14,000 IT workers. Staffers work a median of 46 hours per week and managers 51 hours. But on-call hours fell in half for staff this year--to a median of 10 hours per week from 20 in 2002--and to 15 hours for managers down from 24, the InformationWeek Research survey says.

Dale Schwemmer, a systems engineer at Verizon Services Corp., wrote in an E-mail interview that the company has a formal on-call schedule, with each person on for a week running from midnight Thursday to the next midnight Thursday.

There's also an informal agreement: If someone's off for a day or two, he or she keeps the pager on, but everyone tries not to call; if someone's on vacation for a full week, the pager stays off, and the person isn't on call for the weekend on either end. "In the last 16 years, I can only think of two occasions where one of us had to be called while on vacation," Schwemmer, who does the on-call scheduling for her team, wrote. "I believe very strongly that vacations are sacrosanct and a necessity to avoid total burnout."