Security Pros Pursue Hobbies at Work

New research by global cybersecurity firm Kaspersky has found that IT security staff spend more time pursuing their hobbies during business hours than do their colleagues in other departments.

A survey of more than 5,200 IT and cybersecurity practitioners globally found that the IT security crowd dedicate six hours of their working week to hobbies, which is an hour more than staff across the company overall.

Researchers discovered that as much as 85% of IT security staff engage in leisure activities during working hours, with the most common activities including reading the news (42%), watching videos on YouTube (37%), and watching films or TV series (34%). 

Engaging in physical exercise and reading professional literature were distractions indulged in by only 31% and 33% of IT security staff respectively.

Of those 85%, almost half (48%) said that such behavior was not the result of a lack of work or boredom with the tasks on their “to do” lists. Instead, the security pros deliberately sought to distract themselves in between tasks to give their minds a break.

The research suggests that high workloads are switching people off from careers in cybersecurity more than in other company departments.

Almost half (46%) of IT security employees believe that their colleagues left a job because of heavy workloads, while 41% of employees across all departments shared the same opinion.

“I don’t think that it’s an issue that employees are distracted from work,” said Andrey Evdokimov, head of information security at Kaspersky. 

“There should be control over task performance, not how many working hours are spent on a hobby. Also, it may be normal for people to watch videos, as it may give insights into how to solve a problem.”

Evdokimov hinted that dull tasks or a lack of management skills may be causing some people to pull up YouTube clips of goats in pajamas while at work.  

“All in all, if work is not interesting for someone and there is a lack of task management, an employee will find a way to do something different, even from the office,” said Evdokimov.