Asklemmy

There is no one perfect solution unfortunately.

Meeting a therapist will definitely help to identify the root cause, and eventually will help.

Also, see my post YSK: Understanding the work burnout experience, treatment and preventions

That said, also recognize that not every new skill or tool is necessarily appropriate for a particular task. You should still learn them, though, otherwise when they are appropriate, you may not even recognize it.

Yup. It's definitely always about people. The people using it.

I've worked in software support, QA, and technical writing.

A LOT of developers who come in as devs from the very start of their careers know very little about how the average person might interact with the software they are creating. And what they know of, they can (sometimes) be so sneering and dismissive of that it actually impacts their design decisions. Like, "I don't care, the user is stupid, I'm doing it the RIGHT way." Even when the "stupid user" is like 90% of the population that'll use your widget.

A new (and old) dev should read past customer tickets and talk to your customer support people, as they'll have the actual real-world experience and examples with non-technical users that can give you insight into how to better create the thing that you are creating.

To make a comparison...say you were a furniture designer making chairs, and you're 6'3". Sitting in the chair yourself and proclaiming it's fine isn't enough if your users are children, women, guys shorter than you, people lighter than you, people heavier than you, and the disabled. You need to actually understand how people who navigate the world in a different way than you do interact with the thing you're making. A chair that works fine for someone who is 6'3" with two working legs might be unusable for a 11 year old who broke their foot, or a 4'11" grandmother who can no longer move heavy things around (say if the chair is solid and heavy and something a 6'3" dude could easily move).

With technology, it means average non-tech users will flow through menus differently than you, might have vision or hearing problems that you don't have that make signals from the widget difficult to decipher, and people in general who are non-techie can also be more risk-adverse when it comes to things like clicking strange buttons. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Trying to use technology to control people clocking in on time or making the IT department the company computer police

If you're irreplaceable, you're probably doing something wrong, at least in tech.

All technical fields especially should have a high bar for documenting what you do and how you do it, requiring documentation in every form and for every aspect. In my field, IT support/sysadmin/network admin, process, procedure, common fixes, system set up, network design, etc should all be documented. The only down side to having to replace me should be the long lead time for the new person to chew through the documentation to fully understand what's going on and how it's all interconnected, and not much more.

IMO, person to person "knowledge transfer" as my current employer currently implements, is unviable, and should not be allowed to be the norm. There should never be only one person at an org that knows the job, and the current state of affairs and why the current state is what it is.

If any org does have that single worker point of failure in knowledge, then they're just one incident with a bus away from significant risk of their systems entirely collapsing. I call this the individuals "bus factor", aka, if you're hit by a bus, how fucked is everyone else? An IT person's bus factor should always be low since almost all businesses are data management companies that make money doing X; everything from users Rolodex, to the CRM, to their communications and daily working tools, are almost always entirely dependent on IT, in some way, shape, or form. Less so for companies doing non-computer controlled manufacturing, but any desk job, or white collar office would entirely collapse if their IT staff was suddenly unavailable and their IT environment was to go down. At that point, just close up shop.

UPDATE: I added some clarifying points in light of getting some of this wrong. I believe the underlying point still stands.

No. I believe I understand why you think so, but just no.

At best, covering your ass means gathering evidence about how much you tried to warn the people making decisions, in order to avoid or deflect blame when things go wrong and someone starts wandering the countryside looking for people to blame. I'm not suggesting that. I'm not even suggesting saying "I told you so." when things go wrong.

Quite often, at least how I've seen it, covering your ass involves not even trying to do the right thing or, perhaps, pretending in public to do the right thing in order to have a plausible excuse when things go wrong. That's also not what I'm advising.

I'm advising not to accept responsibility for other people's bad decisions. If you genuinely did your best to influence their decision and they chose poorly anyway, don't take responsibility for that choice. The responsibly remains with the person who had the authority to decide.

For example, if the OP decides to listen to you instead of to me, that's not my responsibility. I've tried to explain my position, but the responsibility for choosing what to believe belongs with them. I'm most definitely not covering my ass; I'm recognizing that I'm not responsible for replacing OP's judgment with mine. If they ask me for more information, I have the responsibility to provide it. If they ask me to clarify my position, I have the responsibility to do that. But I am not responsible for convincing them nor for their final decision.

After a number of years with my first company (a household name), I quit and got an 80% raise. Based on how quickly my new company accepted my salary request, I'm pretty sure I could have asked for more.