Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by transfire | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

transfire

Why do we keep losing all these good men at such young ages?

* Ian Murdock (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock)

* Michael Hastings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_%28journalist...)

* Aaron Swartz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz)

View on HN

A few days before Christmas, I was emailing a friend and wrote about how it seems like the odds of a liquidity event are about equal to the odds of having at least one founder try to commit suicide. That is likely an exaggeration, but like you, I feel like we are losing too many of our people.

I'm not qualified to speak to why. I have suffered and many of my issues were due to a bad combination of burnout and 'I'm killing it' culture. Simply, admitting weakness in our field feels career ending and so the tendency is to push through burnout and depression. But, I wonder if the fear of admitting weakness is endemic of our culture of if it just a symptom of the disease.

In light of my past, I have started emailing my friends, telling them that I care about them, and letting them know that if shit looks bad, they can tell me. They don't need to kill it, or be ultra successful. They just need to be.

I've also wondered if something like that could become sort of a volunteer organization. Kind of a founders helping founders organization??

I seem to remember reading about an organization whose aim is to help startup founders battling depression, but I cannot seem to find the reference. I did, however, come across this article from last year:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/30/founders-on-depression/

In any case, I believe those endeavoring on leading ambitious projects almost entirely on their own must have a strong personal circle of friends and colleagues that are always supportive and know how to encourage preventative measures. Easier said than done, but maybe providing incentives for startup founders and investors would be one way to encourage a program like this.

'founders helping founders'. Not to make fun of a terrible disease that is depression, but a better name must be made. It's is just SO techy sounding and first-world-problem-ish. I like the idea, but then again, not a soul on earth is making you be a 'founder' other than the one in the mirror.

Maybe go book a fly fishing trip in Montana?

I tossed 'founders helping founders' out to describe an idea. Don't worry, I haven't bought the domain yet...:)

Because people die.

"We" are probably not losing young people at any greater rate than the general population.

It would be interesting to see the rate of suicide (I'm not sure Ian's death is certain to be suicide yet, and I don't wish to speculate.) amongst tech-industry positions, and other industries as a whole, and whether the rate is increasing.

I've struggled recently with burnout, and add that to personal struggles such as relationships and friendships, I've been in a bad place more than once. Talking helps; though with Ian everything happened so quickly, and with Aaron also, the law was seemingly involved with both.

There must be FOI requests that can be made for this sort of data, and some analysis might indicate an underlying problem which could begin to be addressed.

I don't think you need FOI requests for this info. What you'll probably find is that occupations exposed to "seeing the worst" (doctor, soldier, cop), and those with rising rates of unemployment, have the most suicides.

Suicide statistics are tricky. What you do or don't count as a death by suicide isn't always obvious. And there's a bunch of data that isn't always collected, or has only just started to be collected. (Was the person gay? Were they trans?)

When we look at work we think that jobs affected by economic downturn are risky (builders, vets, farmers). We also think that some other jobs are risky because they provide access to means and methods (doctors, vets, farmers).

There are some risk factors for programmers: young; single; male; intelligent enough to research methods;

For England there are these sources:

Office of National Statistics.

these numbers are robust, and good quality. They very clearly define what they do count as suicide and what they don't count. They also clearly define how they define the year - the year of registration, which may not be the year the death happened.

Searching for suicide returns a lot of information, some of which is provided under FOI request.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/search/index.html?newquery=suicide

Suicides in the UK (2013 registrations) http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health4/suicides-i...

Suicides in the UK (2012 registrations): http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health4/suicides-i...

National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness

http://www.bbmh.manchester.ac.uk/cmhs/research/centreforsuic...

There's also information available from Public Health England.

http://fingertips.phe.org.uk/profile-group/mental-health/pro...

http://www.phoutcomes.info/public-health-outcomes-framework#...

EDIT: Here's the link to the CDC stuff: http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/statistics/

http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/definitions.ht...

This also reminds me of Luke Arduini, who took his own life by jumping off the Golden Gate bridge on January 1st 2014. Yahoo even hired a private investigator to find him. He also left (in hindsight unsettling) tweets shortly before his death.

In case someone is interested in the background story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7048249

https://twitter.com/luk

https://the-pastry-box-project.net/charlie-robbins/2014-sept...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2536683/Yahoo-hires-...

Wikipedia has an index of programmers who were reported to have committed suicide, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Programmers_who_commi...

People die. We don't have forever. Make use of it. These gentlemen did.

* Ilya Zhitomirski

Reply on news.ycombinator.com