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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

People don't talk about having anxiety or depression in the office, or mood changes. Its expected that you just hide it. Tech gives you more leeway to do your own thing most of the time which I'm thankful for, but I can't call out to work because I'm feeling extra anxious one day. I DO end up working at home those days, rare as they are. The stigma that would be attached to me as a "weak-willed" person that sometimes has anxiety issues would be devastating for my career - people do not allow others leadership positions unless they can demonstrate a steady hand. Simply the suggestion that you are facing internal strife enough to mention it in the workplace can be a very large hit to your perception as a solid worker.

Managers want consistency in the work output above all else frequently, despite all of our emotional hardware. Simply admitting that you have good days and bad days can sometimes feel like quite a feat.

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Daily standups and a fear of being "caught" on those days where you maybe spent the whole day getting around to doing something that would take you 30 minutes in the zone add to the stress. Standups become vague/dishonest to further hide the issue. The truth is sometimes you just need to blow off the whole day, maybe even a whole few days. A lot of devs actually understand needing to take random days off here and there even without having underlying issues. But it's hard to justify to managers taking those off, even if unpaid (let alone a random week off after you've determined Monday morning you're just not into it at all). I suspect a culture of open slack would make the stressed out employees a lot less stressed out, but it probably isn't great for the business. There was a startup that was hiring in the Seattle area a few months ago that stated upfront they only sort of want you to work 20 hours a week, very loose, I wonder how it's going.

This is even worse when you're recovering from burnout. If you reveal you suffered from burnout and are still recovering, you're effectively admitting your productive output is some percentage of what it used to be. Even if you used to be above average, you're implying that you're probably below-average now, and it'd make more economic sense to replace you or at least pay you much less. (And I bet a lot of devs actually would probably give up half their salary in exchange for only being expected to be around half the time, which may be a good compromise.)

From the business owner side I sympathize with wanting to have a workforce full of Carmacks. But realistically speaking, that's very hard to accomplish, and there's something to be said for giving even us somewhat defective mortals something constructive to do so long as we're not contributing negative value that isn't based on pure economic utility.

>A lot of devs actually understand needing to take random days off here and there even without having underlying issues.

Yeah a good manager should let people blow off a day or two once in a while. Especially since these days you are likely to get a text message at any time of the evening or even at night for you to fix something.

This reminds me of a time in 7th grade.

In that class we had these desks where you could flip up the top to access your books.

I was sitting next to Elissa who had a huge collection of wacky packages. [1]

You know how everything is funnier when you aren't supposed to laugh? Elissa and I both lifted up our desks, pretending to rummage around in there, and she would show me cards to make me laugh.

We both laughed uncontrollably and thought we were getting away with it too.

In reality there was no way the teacher didn't know we were goofing off, but since we rarely made trouble he just let us blow off some steam.

Each of us makes surplus value for the owners of the companies we work for. Humans need unstructured time, slack, to goof off, call it whatever you want, and not that fake nerf gun levity that tries to pass for it in most startups.

[1] http://www.wackypacks.com/

I like the "mob programming" concept because it offers a potential win-win here. Not that I've tried it yet... but it doubles down on what works with pairing and acts to diffuse the stress.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming

I work in a team of about twenty people. I imagine mob programming would be hilarious.

>> Daily standups and a fear of being "caught" on those days ...

Standups are mental health minefields. They are a hack evolution of an educational process best left out of the workplace. Law/med schools employ such tactics to deliberately create stress. That has a place in education, but to see it continue at a location where people work year after year is disturbing.

Startups that use standups also often miss the physicality of what they ask. They do not realize that they are disadvantaging people based on totally irrelevant criteria. There is a reason that, throughout history, people have sat down together to discuss important matters. Sitting is an equalizer. Sitting removes the threat of immediate physical violence. Save the standup confrontation junk for the courtrooms.

I think the point of standing up during a standup is to make it short. They're only supposed to last a couple of minutes. Where I work we can't do stand up meetings because there is no appropriate room, so we sit down. Inevitably they take 30+ minutes.

That is the goal, but those who use them don't see that getting everyone to stand emphasizes physical differences. Short people, women and lightweight people can come off as weaker when literally standing beside large male blow-hards. If everyone in management seems to be a 6-foot male fratboy, a culture of formal standups may be part of the problem.

Talk to anyone in a wheelchair. The one situation where I've seen this resulted in the physical standup rule being immediately abandoned in favour of a conference room. Everyone recognized the awkwardness of the situation.

A strange twist on the standup is the evil situation whereby the meeting occurs in a manager's office. Typically, the person in charge remains at their desk, like a king lording over a royal court, and groups of people come in to give quick presentations.

Do people actually take the standing part of the standup literally?

All the standups I've been in the majority of the people were actually sitting down.

I worked in one office where they did the standup standing up. Not sure it made any difference besides the pressure to not fall over on a tired day.

I do not know about in general but where I work we physically stand up during daily standups.

My impression is that the standing up part really works too. We usually get quite restless when the meeting exceeds the allotted 10 minutes. Of course that might just be because people are bored quickly too.

A question to those sitting down during your standups: Isn't it weird to sit down during a meeting that is literally called a standup? Have you tried or considered standing up?

Absolutely, that's part of the point. The standup is supposed to be short, standing up emphasizes this.

I find a lot of humour here in the "standup is supposed to be short, standing up emphasizes this" as a kind of fradenscheude commentary on the typically unhealthy office workplace environment of sitting down in front of a computer screen all day. I have a stand-up desk and spend most of my day standing, and I realize this is a luxury most people do not have, but I do find humour in the implicit space in your comment about standing being a kind of chore.

Yes, we're all simply unfit sloths, standing up is physically demanding and that's why standups must be short. :)

Seriously though, my impression is that standing up encourages brevity in other ways.

Standing implies that the meeting must be short because there apparently isn't even time to sit down before you start. It really does save time when you do not have to find a suitable and available conference room and let everyone pick a chair.

Standing also makes subtle signals of loss of focus very visible. You easily pick up on the small things, like when people start shifting their weight, look at their phone, turn around to look at other things, etc. Things that aren't as visible when sitting down.

There is also a implied invitation to walk away at any moment. You're already standing, walking away requires little effort, at least physically.

I have a theory about this stuff. Some programmers who need to "blow off" a day here or there spend it by lounging around on the sofa playing video games. I don't mean to rag on gamers because I'm one myself, but the point is I'm fascinated by the fact that many video games are also "mental challenges" that are similar in several ways to computer programming and use similar parts of the brain. What factor(s) then make the game-play enjoyable while the heavy-lifting dev-work feels sometimes more tedious ? Maybe there is a way to adjust our methodology to feel more game-like, relaxing, and fun.

I think I've actually stumbled upon a way to do this, allow me to explain: If you start to read about the statistics around social dynamics in MMORPG games then certain things fall out of the data, and game makers have picked up on these ideas and used them to make their games more fun and addictive, and I think these same insights can be applied to organize software development.

Lets start with World of Warcarft. The statistics prove that World of Warcraft is a highly addictive game for many diverse people, but almost everyone agrees that if you were to join an empty server you would find that it's not an addictive game in one player mode. If you take this a bit further and say.. "ok, now you're on a server with other people, but you're not allowed to join a group, but you are allowed to conference with several players, exchange weapons and loot, and message individual players. Well I think in this scenario people would agree that the game does indeed become more fun, beacause now it's social, but yet it's not as much fun as regular WOW.

I'll just cut straight to the point: Pair-programming is more fun even when it's done remotely, because it's like real-time grouping in World of Warcraft. The problem is, just like in World of Warcraft not every group that you join will be fun! The enjoyability of a particular group will depend on both the obvious factors such as the weapons, experience, and spells that the other members bring to the table, but also certain social factors which are perhaps more philsophical in nature and therefor difficult to talk about briefly.

I think that there is real hard evidence that this strategy works, and because of this it's actually the gold standard for the world's leading web-dev consultancies, at least in the Rails space which is my center of gravity.

examples (in no particular order): http://pivotal.io/labs/process https://thoughtbot.com/ https://hashrocket.com/ https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/effective-navigat...

> What factor(s) then make the game-play enjoyable while the heavy-lifting dev-work feels sometimes more tedious?

Speaking as a gamer, it's escapism. If my brain is so busy trying to solve the mental challenge on the screen (or in front of me as a board game), all other thought get pushed out and I'm not thinking about them. If I didn't have a sufficient mental challenge in front of me, then my subconscious would spend time working on those things.

Also, it's low stakes, so I don't have to be stressed out while I'm engaged in it. I'm not being judged on how well I do, or even that I solved the problem at all, I know I can put down the game whenever and no one cares. This is why I don't think gamifying work is too useful in the long run, because deep down we know we're expected to solve those problems and get results.

So yeah, gaming is essentially my alcohol, and part of the reason why I don't feel the need to drink or take drugs all that often (besides caffeine and aspirin).

> I'm not being judged on how well I do, or even that I solved the problem at all, I know I can put down the game whenever and no one cares. This is why I don't think gamifying work is too useful in the long run, because deep down we know we're expected to solve those problems and get results.

Well in World of Warcraft a lot of these players care deeply about their earned reputation, and the gameplay represents a huge chunk of their social life. I suspect that while these players are collaborating to clear a dungeon they are (emotionally) taking the gold and loot drops pretty seriously almost as if it were a real life salary on the line, but yet they're having fun.

There was a not-bad post yesterday about talking about feelings at work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070056. I don't know that I'd want to have a formal check-in process, but I look forward to the day when the barriers between emotional and professional expression aren't so rigid. It seems obvious that we're headed that way.

Imagine that you actually could "call out to work because [you're] feeling extra anxious one day". What else would be different?

You totally can, and it's even legally protected:

"Hi all - Woke up this morning not feeling too well, so I'm going to stay home today. Thanks, Mike."

I had a therapist tell me a few years back that I should call in sick every once in a while and go do whatever I want for the day, guilt free. Best advice I ever got. Doctor's orders.

Here in Australia we have the semi-serious phrase "taking a mental health day" which is exactly what you describe :)

I assumed that what taurath meant is not that he or she couldn't stay home, but that they couldn't be truthful about why. Your solution finesses that with ambiguity, which is fine if needed, but what if people really could just say what they feel?

"Not feeling well" is honest though broad. People shouldn't feel bad about telling their boss that. Bosses should feel bad for prying for details. The only point of that would be to judge whether the specific problem is a "real problem".

The typical policy these days is to transfer the employee to some sort of disability after certain patterns of absence (X days in a row, Y days over period Z). I feel that is a good compromise. It's also very good for small teams since it's a predictable insurance payment, not a risky hire.

At a previous job I was truthful about taking a day off just because. The job got upset and our argument escalated until I quit

Indeed, the social contract of the workplace is mostly still way too rigid for that to work. I think it's changing, but slowly—similarly to how the stigma around taking a nap at work has is gradually wearing off.

I guess the question is why you need them to know. I can think of a million other legitimate medical reasons that I'd never put in an email to my team. Why is this any different?

Also, you should consider that if everyone gets away with being consistently vague, you set a team standard that says people can stay home whenever they feel bad, for whatever reason, and it becomes harder for the company to legally crack down on someone who's doing it for emotional or psychological reasons.

Feelings aren't medical reasons, they're core to being human. If we cut that off from how we're allowed to be in the workplace, we can't really be ourselves. That causes problems. Imagine if people wouldn't let each other breathe properly. That's analogous to where we are with emotions at work.

Integrating feeling into the workplace doesn't mean sharing every emotion, any more than you'd share every thought or every story about your life. It just means being able to accommodate that information when it's relevant and respond appropriately, instead of seizing up with a taboo reaction. Then we'd trust each other more, be more creative, more satisfied at work, and so on. This would be good for productivity, so the most ruthless capitalist ought to be in favor of it in the long run.

But I think my comment may not have been clear. I'm imagining something that I hope will be possible in the future. It clearly isn't broadly possible at present.

The first time I worked in the Bay Area, I lived with my aunt, who used to take "blue flu" days and encouraged me at a young age to do the same. Totally agreed it's some of the best advice I ever got! ("Blue flu" meaning the sky is blue, it's a nice day out, too nice to spend in the office staring at a screen).

I find the stigma might be something to embrace in a non-emergency. While employers should absolutely keep an open-door and a supportive policy to these kind of issues, your friends and co-workers are not your psychiatrist or other mental health professional. Telling a depressed person that they should go home and relax with a stiff drink seems like a unreasonable thing to say, it has only become so (relatively) recently.

I will also mention that some people have boundary issues due to various conditions and a employer/employee relationship can not support a healthy recovery. Similar to how some psychiatrists don't take their patients out socially.

I mention all this as I hope that it makes it your choice to not share and not a onus to stay perfect all the time.

I don't know how it is in the Valley, but if someone told me "I'm suffering from extreme anxiety and if I try to force through it I'm worried the quality of my work would suffer, can I take today off?" I doubt I would say no.

Depression sucks, anxiety sucks, having both can be personally and professionally catastrophic.

Most of the time its not extreme enough to take a full day off. It just means you run at 50%, or 30% capacity. But you can't really speak up about not having that capacity, and if you take the day off it comes out of your vacation. At the end of the week though, the work is done because you buckle down.

This is why open offices and daily standups and constant micromanagement are terrifying to me - everyone is VERY happy with my work output and I'm considered an A player, but if you watched me on an hour by hour basis you'd have a much different opinion of me.

The last bit is funny since it's basically the same thing for people with impostor syndrome (which seems pretty common in the industry) but those people may or may not subjectively feel like they're trying their best regardless. A trick I think helps in either case is to compare with others -- are you obviously at the bottom of the pack by your own standards (which are probably too high)? If no, stop stressing. (For some reason this doesn't develop into an ego thing for me, or a devaluation of other coworkers whose work I think is less stellar than my own even though I'm not putting in 100%... But if that happened that would be a whole new problem.) At one job seeing a 95th percentile commit count per month that was less than 12 (with an average of about 4-5) made me worry a lot less about not committing anything for over a week. The job before that I was used to committing something every day or sometimes every other day.

At my previous job at a startup on a team of 3 developers, I accounted for 75% of the commits over a 6 month period. Many of these were big multi-week projects (one- and two-way integration with EMRs, or scraping the ones that didn't have an API).

I was the first one they "indefinitely furloughed" when their investor tightened the belt.

Were you paid more than the other developers?

When a previous company had a major layoff because of our only client tightening his belt, who got let go? Primarily the people who were paid more than the others, including veteran developers who were simultaneously developing and acting as project managers leading the teams. Only a handful of developers remained.

Nope, one guy made more than the both of us, but he was the team lead.

> everyone is VERY happy with my work output and I'm considered an A player, but if you watched me on an hour by hour basis you'd have a much different opinion of me

Same here, actually.

I've had days where I knocked out "estimated 4 hour" tickets in 20 minutes. I also have days where I can't focus for the first and last 4 hours worth a damn.

I'm similar

Modern work is more like a sprint than a marathon. If your not in the flow nothing gets done. But when you have flow, you just smash work.

Its quite frustrating that flow is so elusive.

For a lot of people with anxiety, I bet that message would be really hard to write if they didn't know explicitly up front that it would be accepted and understood.

For sure. :(

> People don't talk about having anxiety or depression in the office, or mood changes

Thats one of the many things I love about where I work currently: we can, and do, all the way up to the top. It makes life a lot easier when I've been able to be open and honest about why things are they way the are at a certain point in time.

And it's not just depression — also aggression. Being aggressive spreads mental illness to others fast.

What does that mean?

I take it to mean, "don't marginalize, punish, and otherwise manage like an asshole. It will ruin your team faster than layoffs."

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