Ask HN: Are there any low-stress computer jobs out there? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there any low-stress computer jobs out there?

23 pointspmoriarty21 comments

Always have an exit plan. There's a lot less reason to be stressed about your job if there are no meaningful consequences to being let go. Having an alternate job lined up and in your hip-pocket (or at least knowing that you can easily get an alternate) helps immensely.

Your best bet would be to find a job position that you're over-qualified for. You'd probably take a hit on salary but at least you could coast everyday. Alternatively, find a government gig.

> Alternatively, find a government gig.

I wonder if that holds true worldwide.

Oh yes it does (Italy here)

My experience on the "over-qualified" bit has been the opposite. More senior roles are more flexible about hours, get more leeway to define their job description, choose sane projects, and aren't treated as badly by middle managers and over-zealous PMs.

Also, more money also reduces stress in other areas. It's fairly easy to spend money to reduce stress in your life, if you have it; on the contrary, money being tight is a major source of stress for most people, even if they don't realize it.

If someone find their current job too stressful, it's probably the company and the specific people you work with, not the level of the technical work. If so, finding a similar or slightly higher level job at another company with a better culture is probably the right move. (If I'm wrong and it really is the technical side of things that are stressing you out, then obviously this doesn't apply!)

You're as stressed as you allow yourself to be. You can work for a startup or a video game company and not be stressed while everyone is losing their mind. It comes down to your mindset. I ask myself, what's the worse that can happen? After many funerals, job loss ain't so scary. ... and if we die, most of the time the company carries on as if we never existed.

It can really depend on the culture of the company/team you are in. If your boss is a psychopath, stress will come no matter what.

Otherwise you are correct, stress is more self controllable.

I suspect that stress is "baked into the corporate cake" - in other words, most corporations are quite toxic to mental and physical health by their very nature. A lot of the stress is caused by things like changing requirements, unrealistic deadlines and poor management - you know, the usual stuff. Something like sys admin in a University might be less stressful, but it's been a long time since I worked in academia and I left because things were changing drastically (and not for the better). If you want really low stress you might be better off outside of the software industry altogether...

Deadline driven development is leading cause of 90% of my professional stress. I would understand if deadline was due to some external factors like customer demands or security vulnerability. But I hate when I ask why such a tight deadline and the answer is well higher ups fault.

Apply for a job at a place like MIT Lincoln Laboratory and try to get hired into their ballistic missile defense division. Your primary responsibility will be to shit-grin back in the face of military commanders from the Pentagon while assuring them that the next round of multi-billion dollar contracts headed Raytheon's way are going to keep America safe in the event WWIII breaks out. One of my former colleagues claims it's the closest thing in corporate america to "doing gay porno" on the job.

lol!

please go on I want to hear more

please

Stressful for you, may not be stressful for someone else. Also, in my exp your manager, boss, lead has alot to do with the amount of stress. Also, try to not let these things stress you out.

This. It's all about what kind of boss or manager or lead you have.

When you start having phone interviews, make sure you ask the hiring manager this question:

How many people do you manage? how many people have left your team (for any reason whatsoever) in the last 12 months. This number is quite telling. Good companies and good teams don't have attrition and don't have problems keeping employees.

> Good companies and good teams don't have attrition and don't have problems keeping employees.

Not always true. My last team was atrocious but nobody ever left because they were held all captive on their H1-B.

> Also, in my exp your manager, boss, lead has alot to do with the amount of stress.

To explicate a little, I've found stress mostly relates to the expectations of people around me, and has very little to do with the difficulty of what I'm being asked to do.

That's literally the definition of stress. Stress occurs when you feel that you cannot (or just might not) meet the expectations set on you. The expectations can be external or just come for yourself.

Alternative perspective worth entertaining: how do I personally become strong enough to overpower work stress.

Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, MA, is now posting advertisements for new employees throughout the city's bus terminals since there appears to be no end to the money that they can steal from taxpayers, regardless of how criminally negligent they are in spending it. Draper has recently started to heavily prioritize affirmative action over technical competence in its hiring decisions and internal promotions. The advantage of this for someone seeking an "easy job" is that the managers often cannot tell what is real from what is complete bullshit, including how many hours it took to complete whatever useless form of busywork that you were assigned for the week. As a case in point, the kind of junk research that Draper recently asked a Northeastern graduate student to undertake is described more fully here: https://news.northeastern.edu/2013/02/27/a-radar-for-emotion... That's American tax dollars hard at work folks!

I'm in one now. It pays about 25% less than my expectations. I came from freelancing before this, where I'd work about 4x faster to justify my rates. Now I just work half my usual pace and it's still double the average productivity.

In my experience, if you are a better-than-average software engineer at Google or Facebook, and you have an average or better manager, and you don’t have any ambition to get into management, the job is pretty unstressful.

Government, hands-down.

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