IT professionals report being overworked as job vacancies continue to hit highs

Long hours and staff shortages are increasingly defining the tech job market.

That’s according to recent studies from Kaseya and CyberSeek, which found that IT professionals are working long hours to hit goals, as the industry is having trouble making up a sizable labor shortage in the cybersecurity sector alone.

Kaseya’s report surveyed 1,318 IT professionals, the majority—89%—from the Americas. Respondents primarily worked in software and hardware development, manufacturing, healthcare, education, and financial services; half were in leadership positions.

Of those surveyed, 62% reported having to work holidays and weekends, 46% reported pulling all-nighters, and 39% said they had worked consecutive 50+ hour weeks.

“The discontent with work-life balance is front and center,” the report’s authors wrote. “In response to a question about how they feel about it, three out of four respondents expressed a lack of optimism and enthusiasm. Conversely, only 26% of respondents considered their work-life balance to be good.”

Given the shortfall between open tech jobs and the number of people available to fill them, that overwork is perhaps unsurprising. CyberSeek, a joint initiative of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s NICE program, Lightcast, and CompTIA, estimates that the cybersecurity job shortfall stands at 466,225.

CyberSeek’s data, accessible via the site’s heatmap, found the supply-demand ratio stands at 69%—i.e., 69 workers for every 100 postings—with 663,434 cybersecurity openings posted from May 2022 through April 2023. CyberSeek’s study comes on the heels of May’s jobs numbers, which showed tech hiring as a whole up by 45,000 jobs across the economy, even as the sector lost 4,725 jobs.