There’s been a great debate on social media and online forums about stress in the IT sector.

Per usual, various factions emerged, each saying their job was the most stressful. As fascinating as such discussions are, they bring little value to understanding who is the most stressed, how often, and why.

That’s why we went a step further and surveyed IT and non-IT professionals to understand the big picture and dive into the details.

We paid close attention to DevOps because they are closest to our hearts. Also, some strong voices suggested that DevOps is arguably one of the most stressful areas in the IT world.

Read on to learn more about stress levels in the IT sector versus the rest of the world.

We asked 1,142 respondents to tell us:

• How often they felt stressed at work
• What they regarded as top stressors
• What symptoms they experienced most often
• How they coped with work-related stress

Here’s what we learned.

Key Findings

• IT professionals are significantly less stressed than the general population. 34% of them feel constantly or frequently stressed by their work, and this is 20% points less than the non-IT sector.

• Women working in the IT sector experience much less stress than those in non-IT jobs (35% vs. 53%).

• Around 31% of employees in the entire IT sector missed a workday because of stress.

• The most stressed IT area is Data Science & Machine Learning, which is 16.16% points more than the average in the IT sector. The least stressed are IT Project Management & Business Analytics.

• DevOps engineers are more frequently stressed than the IT average. Over 40% of them admit to being stressed “often” or “very often” compared to 34% of the IT average.

• Heavy workload is the top stressor at work, with an average of 51% of all respondents identifying it as such.

• Over 39% of DevOps engineers admit that work-related stress impacts their personal lives. This is the highest percentage in all segments we surveyed, with the others ranging between 21% (other IT) and 12% (non-IT).

• DevOps are also the most stressed because of insufficient skills to do their jobs (13% of them compared to 8% among IT average and 9% non-IT).

• Irritability has been pointed out as the most common stress symptom among IT professionals, especially DevOps (55% of them selected this answer). For non-IT professionals #1 stress symptom is depression.

• Listening to music is the most common way of coping with stress for both IT and non-IT professionals (73% and 66%).

• However, for DevOps, playing video games is the most popular stress coping mechanism, ranking at 62%. Over 45% of IT said the same.

• Almost 60% of DevOps choose to blame themselves as a way to deal with stress. No other group was revealed to be as self-critical.

• The IT sector doesn’t work weekends and is less interested in changing jobs. 66% of DevOps and 52% of IT never or rarely work on the weekends, whereas only about 25% of non-IT could say the same. 39% of DevOps and 43% of IT would never or rarely consider changing their jobs (with only 25% of non-IT).

• DevOps are also the ones who take off the most time. And those who don’t take any time off are on average 35% more frequently stressed than their IT counterparts.

See the full report at https://spacelift.io/.