1) This goes without saying, but avoid startups. The more established the company, the better. Big corps are much more likely to respect a 9-to-5 workday and much less likely to call you at 2 am.
2) Try to work in a BTB product, not a BTC. BTB means way fewer customers, and fewer customers means fewer eyes looking for bugs, which in turn means a lower probability of finding an unexpected bug that needs to be solved yesterday. This sounds a bit cynical, but really isn't because of my next point:
3) There is an even better way to avoid bugs in production: have a very good and thorough testing system. When interviewing, ask about the testing process and how likely are they to detect bugs before a client runs the code. If you are looking for a job as a tester, instead ask the following: how automated are the tests and the build system? The more, the better.
4) This might sound bad, but it's my best piece of advice about jobs: look for a workplace that has lots of women (yes, they exist. For certain charitable definition of "lots", at least). Especially older women. Bonus points if you see pregnant women. Double bonus points if people are allowed to work less hours in order to take care of their kids, and you know a few people taking advantage of this situation (IDK how frequent is this in the US. Here in Spain it's common and regulated by law). Triple bonus points if there are many women in managerial positions. I realize that all of this sounds sexist, but whether we like it or not, the weight of childcare and housekeeping still falls mostly on the shoulders of women. So, if you find a company with lots of women, it usually means that the company offers very good work-life balance. As a bonus, you avoid one common source of stress: the competitiveness that pervades certain brogrammer companies.
There are also some points to consider that apply to every job: learn to forget about work the moment you exit the office (have something to do on evenings. Something for yourself, something not related to your job); try to make commute pleasurable (walk to your job, use public transport so you can read, etc); avoid romantic relationships with colleagues, especially people you work closely with; etc.
EDIT: typo.
The first company I ever worked for was a sorta family business. The owner was also the CEO and was very responsive to the needs of employees. He would throw parties in their manor, and everyone knew each other well and there was much less rivalry/competition to climb the proverbial ladder. Very true about working for people who're married with kids; this gave the owner, and the company, a kind of professionalism that has served me well in my own career. They were really kind-hearted people, until it came time to make some serious decisions about the future of the company.
Often times family businesses are unwilling to sell or dilute their equity since their identity is so tied to the company. This became a huge deal when there were talks of taking the company public, accepting outside investment etc.
- People regularly take vacation time.
- They're happy to hear that you care about work/life balance and will not work more than 40 hours a week except in emergencies.
- You're not strongly invested in whether the company experiences long-term success.
- They have a moderately refined change control process (e.g. Scrum, but anything works as long as it collects all the work in one place to be prioritized and scheduled).
- You don't have to go on-call. (For many, this can be quite stressful.)
But, I wouldn't completely discount startups as an option. There are startups that respect their employees time and offer a great environment for low-stress workers, at least at the 10+ employee level. (I don't have much experience with startups smaller than that). If you value self-determination, a startup can be a great option.
I'm curious what everyone does for this. I've attempted to find a few things but nothing has strongly clicked with me. Most of my interests right now are on the computer, which makes it hard to disengage, and I definitely need to do more to get a handle on it.
My words, unsure if yours.
it takes some doing but it's well worth the effort to move your leisure time away from device-focused activities. the sense of life balance gained is palpable.
You've got 3 major types of welding you can learn (I'm going to skip torch welding, most people on HN can't keep a 45 in. tank of acetylene in their 4500$ a month studio apartments. ;D)
Stick welding - this is like the "low level language" of welding. Lots of greybeards recommend it to start with because if you suffer through getting good at it, you'll breeze through all the other weld types. The rig is also the cheapest way to start. You hold some plastic and copper salad tongs with a stick that looks like a sparkler in it. Then you spend ~20 hours trying to strike an arc on steel to get the stick melting without getting your stick stuck. It's a pain in the ass. If your primary goal is gaining non-developer related expertise through practice, get yourself a stick welder, I guess. If you goal is to affix two pieces of metal together, and you don't necessarily want to find a mentor or take a class, ehhh.. I'd skip it.
Mig Welding - The batteries included, jQuery of welding. Greybeards and enthusiasts will often guffaw at it, saying it ruins you as a welder (sound familiar?) while still owning one and using it whenever they put a trailer together. Instead of holding a stick you hold something that looks like a gas pump that feeds wire from a spool in the machine. You pull the trigger on the pump and wire comes out and gets all sparky. Oxygen is the enemy of good welds so you've got two subtype solutions to deal with this: flux core wire and gas. Flux core welds tend to look dirtier, but it's fewer categories of consumables to work with. Get the argon if you want to maintain some level of street cred with the "real" welders. 99% of welders are terrified about being excommunicated from the church of welding by real welders. The last 1% just want to go home and think only of retirement. If you just want to buy a thing and stick metal together, get a Mig welder and some spools of flux core. Also get an angle grinder, because your welds are going to be covered in flux crap. When you get tired of grinding, graduate to shield gas. Most good machines support both.
Tig Welding - This is the cool kid welder. You hold something that looks like it's straight out of a dentist's catalog. It's got a tungsten pencil tip inside a cup. Tungsten gets real hot cup directs shield gas around tungsten, you hold filler rod in your other hand. Filler rod, tig welder, and workpiece meet in a symphony of UV light, stacked dimes and magic. Tig welders are like distributed, containerized microservice developers. Their rigs accrete complication as time goes on. They get foot pedals to control amperage, whammy bars to add that rock flavor, flight sticks they can't even use because their hands are full. It's like spinning plates while chewing bubblegum. If you'd like to be able to turn filler rod into a Norman Rockwell painting, get a tig welder and take a class.
Torch welding. - Okay I've typed this much. Replace the fancy tig torch rig with an acetylene gas torch. Get this setup if you'd like to build a battleship in your backyard.
Here's the one thing that really does piss off the grey-beard welders worth listening to: do not endanger people by doing welds a professional should be doing. Say you get your steal-me-red lincoln electric and you get pretty good at it over a few weekends. Say you even make a nice bird house with it.
Do _NOT_ weld your neighbor's bisected lawnmower blade back together no matter how much he asks you to. Your weld will fail and he will lose his foot. Do _NOT_ weld your neighbor kid's swingset back together. The weld will fail and a kid will end up in the ER. The kid's parents will come find you and try to beat you up. Latch come off someone's chain link fence? Go ahead and weld that if you want. Basically just get a professional involved if a failed weld means injury / death.
Since they aren't, fantasizing about all the traffic I must be getting is enough.
I don't know if I should support such a vain activity, I read your first entry and I enjoyed it! If you haven't figured out the logs yet, you can add 1 to your manual hit counter.
A real high octane class might teach you how to read a phase diagram for different kinds of steels, how to normalize / quench harden / anneal and temper your work to achieve desired properties after you take off your hood. There's a lot decisions and knowledge that go into being safe at industry standards.
From a practical standpoint, I'm not a professional welder. If I can wack the workpieces as hard as I can against my driveway with no visible changes in my welds, I'll risk my nuts on a bike of my construct. The unforgivable sin is making that choice for _other_ people. So, until the Grand Vizier at the Local 10' gives you your welder's badge and gun, don't donate your bespoke, all natural, cage free bikes to the local ride-share.
Youtube, concentration, and a bit of perseverance can totally learn you enough to safely endanger yourself though!
I had the great fortune of working adjacent to a machine shop. I learned TIG on a work machine. A co-worker spent 15 minutes showing me setup and some example welds, then it was mostly seat time from there, with lots of YouTube and a couple of "hey, how's my weld look?" sessions.
Actually fabricating stuff can be an issue when you don't have machine shop at your disposal. Luckily, some metal shops have a CNC laser or plasma, so if you design something in CAD, you can shop out sheet metal bits and avoid the hassle. There are places that will laser cut and notch steel or alu tube so that you can sort of just hand-bend and lego your workpiece together.
One tool that's not obvious, but becomes indispensable especially to a homegamer is a portable bandsaw. Get a decent corded one-- it makes cutting tube stock etc accurate and fast. You can fabricate a stand for it and turn it into a static bandsaw as well.
though i like cooking, surfing and Brazilian jujitsu. recently started skating again. thinking about getting into yoga.
going to a class like martial arts or something similar where there's a teacher, you can improve, socialize and go regularly might help.
One piece of advice is to find something that you think might be fun or cool. Then stick to it for a while even if it's not that fun to start with.
For example most sports are quite miserable when you start out, but when you start to do progress and get a bit hang of it, it becomes fun.
Even computer stuff can force you to disengage; like gaming (especially on a console; it doesn't do mail or anything else productive :). But also, I like, as a hobby to work on small programming languages, type systems, proofs etc. Those things will never make it to production and will never make money, which is the point. I find them a lot of fun and during those it is very hard to get me to do anything work related as they all suck me in and keep me there until I sleep.
Unfortunately most of the people in my social circle do not understand why I open a book or am at my computer again when I come home. It is very hard for them to understand that I really love to get lost in my own thoughts or at the very least daydream.
That way I can't do work stuff at home, even if I wanted to. The only thing I have access to at home is my work email, so that I can email in sick if need be.
I have a neat trick that I started doing during my university time (ymmv as not everyone will be able to use it). I started with using exclusively linux for any programming and/or homework assignments. When I'm at my personal desktop - it's always windows, at work I'll use linux or OS X, depending on what my options are.
It works pretty well for me, as it's a context switch for my brain - native terminal = work, windows = fun.
As an additional bonus, a dog which I can't reasonably leave home for extended periods of time (bringing her to work would never be an option, even if my workplace is dog-friendly) and have to walk so that gets rid of anyone (including myself) trying to squeeze OT out of me, and gets me out of the house for regular walks.
I found that this really helped me to focus on my work when I am on Ubuntu, and in my free time it makes gaming much more enjoyable on Windows without constantly getting reminded of my work.
This actually works great for relaxation - I need to physically move to the couch to play games and the machine itself doesn't have any kind of notifications enabled, so I'm not distracted during gameplay.
Expose yourself to different things, be relentless - if you don't like some hobby/activity/sport after few weeks once you get a bit of a hold of it, move on. These days, there are way more things to do in life than one can possibly manage, even if not working at all.
I found out in my late 20s that adventures are THE drive for me. They have various forms - backpacking in remote parts of the world, doing sports like hiking, climbing, skiing, alpinism, ski touring, paragliding, diving etc. Add rigorous physical training to make this all happen and enjoy in safest possible manner.
It was not a sudden revelation, rather gradual process - after spending 16 days on Annapurna circuit in Nepal, something changed in me. Being at the right spot at the right time, meeting the right people along the route. It took a while for me to realize this, and I am continuously changing priorities - paragliding being newest hobby, the goal having pilot license and be self-sufficient. Its a long process, but one I want to undertake seriously. I mean, it's freaking flying! In cheapest manner possible, and for some even coolest. I can't manage to do more, there is simply no more free time.
I know I will not look back when dying and cherish those moments spent in front of the screen, in contrary. I will for sure remember every single peak climbed (the harder the effort the fonder the memories), every country experienced, the strong emotions when I proposed to my fiancee on top of Mont Blanc, the tears of joy on top of Matterhorn or Kilimanjaro etc.
New studies also show direct relation between running and having reduced stress levels and having antidepressant effects.
I really struggle with the office environment. I really love the open source development culture of mailing lists, IRCs etc. Handling different people face to face and their mannerisms always irks me a lot. Also being an introvert in a horribly extroverted workplace really puts a stress on me.
When I go home I really love to read and implement something at my own pace. These days I have picked up cooking which is a lot similar to programming and I really love it.
Choosing interesting and funny podcasts prevents me from getting bored of taking the same walking/jogging route daily. Some of the nice podcasts I enjoy and learn a lot from: freakonomics radio, tell me something I don't know, TED radio hour.
This! I worked for two huge (~60 and ~600 million page impressions per month) online communities for a total of 15 years. The level of stress induced by the users whenever something broke, was changed (even only slightly) or they just had a bad day was horrible and led to all kinds of fuzzy health problems (mainly panic attacks and hypertension). I was very attached to the product and always strived to make the users happy, and that played a big part in the problem.
Making slight changes to the interface oftentimes resulted in users insulting us like we had renovated their living room without permission. Can you imagine what it was like when a bug in Apache's mod_cache suddenly cached session cookies?
I always loved the job, but that made it so hard to draw a line and not letting it get to me.
Afterwards I switched employers and started working on a B2B platform in the banking sector. Of course, the enterprise has a different set of problems (in my case, no clue what the requirements really are), but your corporate users are just used to a different kind of standard (hint: way lower than your average Bootstrap frontend). They pay very good money, let you work on interesting things, technology-wise, and users are mostly easy to satisfy.
I've been inclined to work on BTC rather than BTB because I imagined it will have more impact than the other (e.g. facebook vs salesforce)?
Both communities were focused on everyday problems, one dealt with parenting and the other was about cooking (recipes). I wouldn't have stayed for over 10 years with the former if there were never any positive things. It always felt a bit like I was doing something for the greater good (I don't want to sound arrogant here). Seeing how women finally got pregnant after many frustrating months (or even years) with the help of one of our tools (a period tracker) was very rewarding. There were people supporting each other when one of them lost child after child during pregnancy for whatever reasons.
Most of the users that kept complaining about everything were long-time users. Many didn't have anything to do with the main topics of the platform. They just stayed because they liked the community and discussed politics or whatever in one of the sub-forums.
In the end, the company was bought by a large publisher, all the staff (12 people or so) was basically let go (after 10+ years) and nowadays it's an almost unusable user-interface mess with ads in every corner. Oh, and that one specific sub-forum the users used to complain about stuff? Yeah, that was shut down completely to just shut everybody up. What a simple and effective solution for a pesky "problem" ...
To be honest, I never liked the idea of being heavily dependent on advertisement to finance the platform, but sadly that's just the way the Internet works.
After I became a father of two, my priorities shifted towards my family and I'm now more interested in doing something good for and especially WITH my kids instead of working a stressful job.
I worked for about two years and a half in web development, and in one case the application was widely, widely used. Everything was on fire and users complained constantly. Saying that I don't miss it would be a big understatement.
I'd love to hear more about how such a system works, purely for engineering value's sake, because it happens to be a thing I find very interesting from an outsider's standpoint.
On the surface, as someone mostly naive about cellular RF, I know you're dealing with things like
- Given <n> buildings, how do you optimize for reception around (and, for 1000 bonus points, inside) said buildings, while minimizing echos (and, subsequently, in-band noise that the RF frontends can't mechanically filter) from signal reflections?
- Given a tunnel long enough to need a snake-antenna system (what are these properly called, and are they actually snakes? I just see long thick cables at the (dark) entrances to train tunnels), how should you place the towers near both ends of the tunnel to optimize handover?
- Given <random bunch of hills>, how do you optimize placement within terrain, elevation, landscape features, etc?
I'm guessing your system has access to highly-accurate databases of landscape/terrain and building geometry/geography (basically the machine-readable equivalent to Google Maps)?
The reason I mention the above is to characterize/elucidate this problem space to hopefully attract interested replies encouraging you to find out what details your boss will let you share. :D
Also I'm on vacation and I won't see my boss for another week :).
I worked for 10 years in the software departament of a large IT distributor. We had a B2B web portal to sell IT equipment. The clients were all business, ranging from small (~$1000/mo) to large ($10M/mo). Now, the clients were still complaining but not as much as I figure they do in a B2C environment. However, what made it worse, in my opinion, is that when they complained we had to listen. This is not a single _user_ out of 500k, it's a single _paying customer_ out of 5000. This resulted in us having to implement a lot of one-off features that were specific to a single or a couple of clients on a platform used by all of them. That in turn resulted in the codebase becoming a monstrosity and me being frustrated and tired by feeling like I had 5000+1 bosses. I stayed so long only because the software departament and the people in it were so awesome.
And yes, having to implement features that are rarely if at all used (and sometimes removed before they ever make it into production) is demoralizing.
I think it all depends on the customer(s) - be they business or consumer.
Regarding bugs: We were a very small team of just 2-3 engineers. One could argue that the business model was just wrong, but if we wanted to hire another 5+ engineers we'd have to dial up the ads like crazy (of course leading to even more user outrage). And back in those days (we're talking 1999-2012 here) our foremost problem wasn't bugs, but keeping up with the ever-rising traffic on a highly dynamic system.
You could ask during interviews "how many customers do you have? are they big?" and usually the company tries to brag that they have that one big brand name, but in my experience this is a red flag. Be careful.
There are pretty big cons to the bigger corporate world, B2B, etc., but money isn't as big of a difference as it first appears.
At the of the day, it's about being able to meet your needs, being able to save so you don't worry much about the future, enjoying your work and also finding time to enjoy life outside of work. If you're able to do this, it doesn't matter if you work 40 or 60hrs.
IMO, Optimize for TC and Happiness. If you can find joy in your work, it won't matter. It's easier to enjoy 80hrs of work that you love than suffer through 40hrs of work you hate.
If i know what i need to do, how to achieve it and and left the hell alone to do it where and how i want, i generally perform excellently. The daily "standup" google hangout as a check in on how progress is going works well.
When i'm expected to be in the office every day, given funny looks if i pack up my shit at 5pm, asked where i was if i didnt eat lunch at my desk, then quite frankly, i generally leave the contract early.
So yeah, its all about the place you work rather than the specific job you have. Being a contractor gives me the opportunity to move around and get a wide range of experience, which i enjoy. It also has the added benefits of being better paid and when you finish the contract, work related stress goes away. Might be worth trying?
This. I'm the same way.
Now I only take 100% remote contracts and now I'm 2-3x more productive than my former office-going self.
Fun tip:
When someone asks "Where are you?" Then the correct answer is:
"Who wants to know?"
There are 2 exceptions:
1. It's your Mother asking. She has a right to know because she gave you life.
2. Your employer, when you are on the click. Because they are paying for your time.
Since I always bill by the hour and time everything to the minute as I go...I can answer them "Where am I" and send them a URL to the thing that I worked on.
If they are asking when I'm explicitly not billing... then either:
A) I ghost them immediately and terminate the contract
B) Ghost them the day after and send them back files after wiping everything clean.
This is the value in having multiple streams of income (rental properties, small contracts and passive income)
If more people saved 30k to buy a multiplex (and lowered their standard of living) instead of buying a 40k vehicle (and accepted driving a $5k used vehicle)... then they would also have the same security of pulling income.
It will only take a few years of sacrifice and careful saving to achieve this. But it is worth it.
This is doubly right on.
I am the opposite of the original questioner: I like the high stress environment where I feel like we're all pulling hard on some intense goal+. BUT I like it when we're a team thus I don't care if someone is leaving or coming when they are; I just care that if I toss a ball their way they'll know what to do with it and if someone tosses a ball my way I will know what to do with it. That we're all working to get the job done -- which is no excuse for bullshit monitoring each other.
The other doubly right on: again, I'm not a contractor but I've hired plenty and they don't pretend to be committed to our large goal, only what they signed up for. And that's totally fair. A contractor (generally has to) has to hustle for business but has an easier time firing a customer they don't like.
+ original question was a good one and I was interested in the replies even though I don't seek out the same thing.
"Stress" is a weird word. I've seen people with jobs I thought were skate that were totally stressed-out. I've also seen people with jobs I'd never take who thrive.
Maybe discomfort is a better word. From what I've seen, all jobs involve some amount of discomfort. The critical factor is whether or not you feel in control over it.
I was on a short gig with a client a few years back where I was hired by the QA department. They were having problems with quality, but it really was about trust, attitude, stress (discomfort), and interpersonal relationships.
I was only there for a few weeks, but I never had a week with that client where they didn't complain about something. I wore jeans, which broke the dress code. Jeans were common all over the company, but for some reason this particular group cared about a dress code. I left an hour early because there was nothing to do and I didn't want to waste their time. They wanted me there until 5 every day.
It was seven or eight things like that over a few weeks. They were probably one of my top five worst clients ever. It was sad because when I worked with the dev teams there was this feeling of helplessness. It wasn't that things sucked. Things suck all the time. It was that they didn't feel like they had control over it. Instead it was just random sucky stuff showing up and everybody having to react. All the time.
It destroyed trust and made things miserable. People ended up in little cliques, controlling information flow and making sure somebody else got blamed for things. I pointed out that there were some severe environment issues that we needed to fix right away. Then I was corrected and told that they only wanted 1 or 2 tech topics from me, not advice on making a better work environment.
I was happy to leave.
That unpredictable, out-of-control, low-trust-environment is what destroys lives. (and team productivity). All of those adjectives are relative, however, and I've never seen a case where things couldn't get better. If people want things to get better.
Let me add if they require you to punch in and punch out on their awful ADP time tracking portal for lunch time...
For me, small companies or small teams where I am on team that has complete autonomy over the “how” is the least stressful. Of course you want some sensible standards.
I was more stressed out as the “Dev lead” with supposed authority where every decision had to go through red tape, a ticketing system and approvals than I was at a small company where I was “just” a developer who would let my team know my architectural thinking - just to make sure I wasn’t missing something - and then have free reign from development, devops, netops, etc. - I had admin access to their AWS infrastructure.
I also don’t do well in large companies. I can do it, but having to deal with large organizations stresses me.
I’m also a little nuerotic about not being competitive in the market and being “stuck” at a job.
A big software system is comparable to an aircraft in complexity, and it's not unreasonable to expect it to be handled like this.
To be honest, I was the architect responsible for software development for the company but didn’t know AWS from a hole in the wall at the time - but neither did the consultants. I wanted to contract someone on my team that had done development and devops on AWS and was certified. I already had approval to hire developers and my budget would have allowed it. But that was a turf battle.
Seeing the writing on the wall, I spent the next six months studying up on AWS even though I couldn’t use any of the services. It took so long to get anything approved and my neck was on the line to deliver the system by a certain date, I just asked for a bunch of large AWS EC2 environments and started using the same tools that I would have used in an on prem environment - Mongo (instead of DynamoDB or ElasticSearch), Consul/Vault for configuration (instead of Parameter Store), Fabio (for “load balancing” with internal services), Nomad for job execution and scheduling (instead of CloudWatch/lambda/Elastic Container Service) etc.
They ended up having a run rate on AWS that was much more expensive than if I had used AWS services. But, I followed all of the procedures, had complete control over my environments and servers without touching the AWS console, kept the netops team employed because they had to manage the monstrosity - Consul, Vault, Mongo, and Nomad were clustered. I got my pat on the back for delivering on time and on budget - since the AWS architecture budget fell on the netops team not mine - and got my bonus.
Then knowing what POS I was forced to create, I put my AWS certifications, my “successful” project, and my title of “lead software architect” that I negotiated for on my resume and got the hell out of dodge to a smaller company that paid me more where I was able to do everything correctly.
Fast forward a little bit, now I’m getting real -all I have to do is sign on the dotted line - lucrative offers for consultant roles for a “cloud architect” position because I’m one of the few people in my market that know AWS from a netops, devops, and development point of view. But I don’t want the stress or travel right now.
That’s the way the game has to be played to get ahead. Whether I like it or not....
The work can be a bit on the "boring" side, but it also provides great work-life balance and stability. If you live in California, look at some opportunities in the University of California system.
Downsides are generally lower pay, and as I mentioned it can be a bit boring.
When do we find ourselves stressed? Usually when faced with uncertainty. If you know exactly what to do, how to do it, the stress goes down. How do you know exactly what to do? By having crystal clear communication and have clear expectations. How do you know exactly what to do? By having trained for it before hand. Meaning, studying, practicing and having lots of experience.
If you know what to do and how and are still feeling stressed what could be the cause? Perhaps other unrealistic expectations, such as a tight deadline. Well, if you believe something is going to take 3 months and your boss believes it's going to take 1 month, then there's a break down in communications if you can't reach a consensus. You must learn to communicate and be diplomatic. What you find out is that those who have great communication skills/social thrive and are less stressed.
Let's say that you are great at communication and the deadline still persists, why stress? If you are highly skilled, have a great network, and sufficient savings, you can go get another job right? Well if you are not highly skilled and lucked into a safe boring job, have no network or poor savings, then you can't eliminate the stress.
A lot of stress and strain comes from within not outside, it's all about your mental toughness and approach to things. If you believe that these stress are external then you will have a tough time dealing with them, if you believe that you have control and most of it is internal, then you can change your mental approach and state towards them.
My first job was in a small 15 people startup that was later sold to larger company. The founder was in his 40's and while he had some technical skills, his people management skills were really extraordinary. I learned from him what it really means if you really believe that the people are the most important resource: you manage every person individually and change things around them to fit them in, not the other way around.
We basically changed the tasks and organization to fit the people who worked in the company every time new people came or left. We even changed the the main product to fit the skill set and opportunities that came along with the people who worked in the company.
Basically everyone you hire has something that makes them perform less than what their potential is. You can't really change people–they are what they are–but you can change their environment and work they do.
Make this more personal: what kind of things stress you out? Do you already work in tech? What stresses you in your current work?
1) Are you expected to perform intractable tasks? Given requirements / tasks by people who obviously don't understand technology or constraints (i.e., "I don't want to hear your excuses, just get it done).
2) Does it feel like a "frat club" that you aren't a member of? Such as people only listening to reason from others that are part of their in-group, but exclude you for some reason (i.e., you weren't there when critical parts of the company were being built, and they don't see you bringing anything valuable to the table).
3) Does every day feel like someone is looking for an excuse to fire you? This can happen at places with stack ranking, where managers hire in sacrificial lambs to throw to the slaughterhouse or when RIFs are required.
4) This goes along with point (1). Is your department not given enough tools / resources to do the job right, so you are always in firefighting mode (doing anti-work, which annihilates actual productive work).
Then do some informational interviews to find out actual working conditions for various jobs or at various target companies.
Consider the possibility that you may have a hidden disability. They can create areas where a person lacks flexibility and adaptability. If you have some kind of disability, you may mostly need control over things related to that.
Knowing exactly what your pain points are can help you figure out what works and what doesn't. You may not need a low stress environment per se. You may just need low stress surrounding X thing.
What I mean is, work in a domain you know something about, with tools and technologies you know well. Be comfortable with your skills and know they are on par with the task you've been given (and also know when they are not). Don't put more on your plate than you can take.
Of course, being too comfortable can result in stagnation. Sometimes, we need to push ourselves or be pushed in order to learn and grow. Let your superiors know when a task is outside your comfort zone. A good mentor will try to push you, but also let you fail gracefully.
2. avoid having to deal with backups. Think of all the warnings about test coverage. Or about advocacy for compile-time checks, and for more thorough checks, for information in the editor as you're coding. Backup systems are all about finding out that shit's broke after it's too late and when you most urgently need it. They are an incarnation of stress. And if you do it well, nobody will ever even know. It's not "heads - bonus, tails - no bonus", but "heads - you can come into work tomorrow for the same pay, tails - you can't".
On the flip side you might learn less than working on an high traffic application because high-volume creates a whole new lot of potential issues and things to watch out for. I think I would choose a chill job like this again when I'm older
“Well I’ve got 3 more years, then I can retire”
“I don’t care about that release date, I’ll be retired by then!”
“The reasons I like this place are, well, job security...”
“We know your coworker does nothing all day, but he’s about to retire next December, so why try to fire him?”
There’s a lot of variance in preferred working environments...
Then you might be able to narrow down a professional career that is in-line with the way you wish to live life.
e.g. for me personally, working a stable, boring job was more stressful since I felt like my talents, my opportunity to have an impact was being severely affected.
I've worked at a company with poor processes around code quality, testing, and deployment. Every release day, we know we would have a very late night because of all of the customer-facing bugs our inadequate QA processes didn't catch. We also had regular outages for the same reason, often in the middle of the night. We didn't have good monitoring systems so problems often came to our attention only after customers had been affected for hours. And we didn't have useful post-mortems so the same problems happened again and again.
Now I work at a much larger company, where the stakes for production problems are much higher. But I am not stressed out, because we do such a good job with testing and monitoring that (fingers crossed) I've only had one bad night troubleshooting production problems during the entire previous year. And when something goes wrong, we take steps to make sure it can't happen again.
The second corporate culture is the one you should look for it you want a low-stress job. You're more likely to find it at companies that have been around for a while, but there are younger companies like that too.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-low-stress-jobs-for-...
Maybe that's no longer the case or maybe it's solely isolated to Yelp's sales and marketing departments, but either way it doesn't seem to mesh well with having a good culture.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/03/is-yelp...
1) The external facing business image may be totally different to their internal workplace culture (this can go both ways).
2) for all the accusations I've seen of yelp, I've never seen anything more than a he said she said. None of the cases have ever gone to court in any country that I've seen. Anecdote incoming: I worked in a mom and pop shop. We constantly had issues with people threatening bad/false reviews on different websites (Facebook/Google usually). There was also some amount of 1 star reviews that came in from Google accounts with no visible profile info and no description. These things happen obline, and I'm sure yelp is no exception. Do they sell more visible placement to businesses? Yes as do Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor,booking.com, uber eats etc. Is there any proof of them artificially posting reviews to tank small businesses and then removing them when the businessess pay for sponsored listings? Not that I've seen at least.
Source: I'm developer, I have very little to no stress.
Generally work that has a direct customer and user requirements, like application design (closer to the front end of an application) is more stressful, with API/backend layer less stressful. There's less pressure to deliver features and it's easier to apply straight SE principles without having to care as much about the end product. Generally the further you get away from end user customer deliverables, the less stress there is.
What you may be observing is that the operations folks that make it to a later stage in their career that have not burned out permanently have adopted / maintained a mentality of simply not caring about work as much as possible.
A lot probably depends on the team you have to work with.
Maybe education? Producing content? Books, tutorial videos?
Also, specialize in some narrow field. Instead of being Python dev, you can be writing plugins/scripts for Blender. Maybe machine learning. That's not narrow, but much less people can do basic ML in Python than webdev in Python.
Maybe screw the programming, just do animations in Blender. Just make sure you don't specialize in something proprietary and headed into dead-end (like Windows Phone).
If you live in a place with low cost of living, freelancing must be the most straightforward way to land a part-time job eventually. Some (obviously small) companies just don't have enough work (and money) to hire full time. Some of them go to Upwork or Toptal. I'd like to know what are other ways for them to find talent (except job postings of course).
One company I worked for was known for being one of the lower cost vendors in its industry, and I experienced a pervasive back-stabbing culture, which I attributed to there being many employees who were especially fearful of losing the only job in the industry that they had been able to get. So I think in a lot of cases, the lower paying companies might have employees who are more desparate, and management who is used to having more-than-typical negotiating leverage, which they do exercise.
Perhaps it is an entry level job that is seen as a route to higher paid work.
Being responsible (of thinking you are responsible) without having full control to change a difficult situation.
Ask HN: Being Highly Sensitive (HSP), can I find fulfilling work in tech? [0]
Today, universities are run by professional managers. It is all about money. So you are writing papers, applying for grants, teaching a hundred or so students, working on 5-6 committees, involved in 2-3 conferences per year, etc. It is rare for an academic to work less than 70 hours a week and for far less money than in industry.
I was right. I got the job, and I was nearly 4 years unemployed at the time. This is my favourite job so far by far. The code is dirty, but it's something you just need to get used to (and my "Working with Legacy Code" is on its way). Collegues are smart (but we have 1 hardcore manipulator - to become immune to him, don't tell him anything personal and never try to please him). Deadlines are not a problem because with no unit tests (we do plan to write them) our client is afraid to breathe. Dirty code is not scary if you know how to approach it.
I also worked in a corporation which had mostly women. Women love mind games and politics. Those I worked with definitely did. Presence of women is not necessarily an indicator of a stress-free workplace.
It is imprecise to attribute intent to the politics and mind games that you may have experienced personally in an anecdotal case, using that kind of generalization.
Also it may have had nothing to do with the fact that they were women, just a bad culture in that company specifically. There are plenty of companies with men who suffer the same problems.
Overall it's an unfair generalization.
Yet overall, this workplace is the healthiest I worked in. You have to paint the overall picture. My boss cares about good software practices and treats people well. He appears honest. His expectations are realistic. Work time is very flexible.
It takes moderation to react to that and settle into some community norm. HN does have relatively cohesive community norms, but with so large and open and online a community, such norms can never be more than a statistical cloud, with large outlier regions. This is why I tend to react when people draw conclusions about the community from particular posts that appear—it leads to misleading conclusions. A better thing to draw conclusions from would be the flagging behavior, but this is harder to observe and takes time to show up.
Edit: There's another factor which is poorly understood, and which I think might have been at play in the comment you were reacting to above: HN is a highly international community. Norms on divisive issues vary greatly across countries. Many of us tend to assume that HN is composed of people mostly like ourselves (in terms of background), but that's far from true. After observing the data closely for many years, I'm convinced that many international differences come across as outrageous domestic behavior when we misinterpret who's speaking. Not that a statement would be more acceptable, necessarily, if we knew—but it would be less provocative, because people seem willing to adjust for this when encountering opposing views.
That counts as trolling and you'll get banned if you do it here, so please don't do it again.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics/wiki/faq#wiki_what_suppl...
I understand my opinion isn't popular, or easy to accept. However, some people (including me) have mild or severe anxiety, are ruled by fear in their entire lives. Having drugs doesn't mean they can eliminate what is encoded in their gene, but it can make dealing with their emotion more approachable, that's enough.
ps: I do L-Theanine, which can be found commonly in teas.
"having a healthy work life balance, healthy emotional management skills, and using safe and well-tested medicines are things that I strongly value. When I read your comment suggesting that people use nootropics, I felt scared / angry / <insert whatever your emotional response was here, related to your needs not being met>, because in it, I heard an invitation to not deal with a stressful job in a healthy way by ignoring the fundamental causes of stress and bypassing them by numbing oneself through the use of untested and unregulated products.
Would you be up for explaining more of your thought process as to why you think using nootropics is a good idea? And, how does this address what I'm hearing the in parent commenter's request to address the core causes of stress at work in a healthy, balanced way? Thanks for the conversation."
What do you think?
My point was not that non-confrontational language is better, per se - more that there's different ways to communicate the same things. You referred to the parent comment as "one of the dumbest responses" you've ever seen - which can be taken as a divisive statement (e.g. a type of "violence", in the parlance of NVC). And in that comment, I also heard some an expression of some of your values.
I believe that most of us, if not all, desire more connection versus more division, and this is one of the things that NVC can be really helpful in creating. A way to communicate our needs and how to ask for them that fosters connection. And it's definitely a practice! I'm by no means an expert or master.