Work continues long after the workday is done, the pressure is intense, management is in chaos, and vacation is only a dream. Welcome to the glamorous life of an information-technology professional.

It may not come as a surprise to those who work in IT, but a recent survey conducted by Cohesity Inc. has found that burnout remains an ongoing concern as the technology world grinds relentlessly onward. The survey results will be presented as part of a session on work/life balance scheduled to held at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco.

“We’re in a 24/7 world, and the cloud is there,” said John Troyer (pictured, right), chief reckoner at TechReckoning Inc. “IT only gets its notice sometimes when things go wrong, and that’s a resume-generating event. There’s a lot of pressure.”

Troyer spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, at SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio in Palo Alto, California. He was joined by Michael Letschin (pictured, left), director of technical advocacy and principal technologist at Cohesity, and they discussed the difficulty of taking time away from the job, a feeling of pressure from the computing community, and lack of discussion around coping with potential burnout (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

No time away

The survey compiled responses from 360 IT professionals globally. Among the results was a disproportionately high number of people who just could not unplug and/or take time away from the business.

“There are a number of people who do not disconnect and are on there 24/7 with their personal needs and their work, especially in North America,” Letschin said. “It was incredibly high. I thought it was pretty shocking to see how little people took vacation.”

The pressures are relentless for many people in IT. The need for more certifications, training, or just blogging support often come from not just the company a professional works in, but also from the computing community at large.

“People weren’t always seeing that they could get away from it,” Letschin said. “A lot of people came back with comments that some of the issues were that the community actually pushed them into needing to do more. They were doing their day job and still had to do more.”

The survey results also found there was a lack of programs to help IT professionals cope with the stress and not a lot of discussion around the issue of job burnout.

“For the most part, people aren’t really talking about it,” Troyer said. “There is more automation as we grow our data centers up in the cloud, but it just means people are doing more.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Cohesity Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cohesity nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE