Mental health in software engineering
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Put another way, I don't think i've ever seen a customer walk from a product because it wasn't released on a cadence, in fact many aren't actually happy about upgrades unless they are fixing a problem they have requested. And sales/POC cycles are such that frequently the customer may not actually have an alternative solution, or if they do, the chances they will switch to your product simply because you have X this year instead of next year isn't something that hinges on small factors that can be done by the engineering team in short cycles. You win because the product is better/etc and that doesn't happen overnight.
So, stressing and working endless 80 hour weeks likely is going to have the opposite effect and creates a low quality product that people are trying to get rid of because it keeps breaking.
Yes. As are most tasks, in my experience. Looking back on your almost 30 years, what percent of tasks could have been skipped entirely and, in the long run, it wouldn't have mattered?
For me, it's easily >50% ... catch me on a grumpy day and I'd say it's closer to 90%.
Taking the view that none of the software you wrote is still running is a bit like an automotive engineer who thinks none of the car models she worked on at the start of her career are still in production. Well, no, they're not: but does that matter? Millions of kids got driven to school by cars she helped design.
As per Shelley:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Does a lawyer not take pride in a well-written contract that shielded their company when the client turned adversarial?
Does a former mayor not visit the parks they opened, the civil works projects that they helped organize or brokered deals for?
Does a salesman not remember their biggest sale? Their wildest outing? Their most critical conversation where they saved (or lost) a deal?
Does a restaurant manager not eventually sit down in a quiet corner of the restaurant, eat a meal in peace, and enjoy the background murmur of their patrons?
Does an electrical engineer not smile when they drive by a substation they helped design?
Does a teacher not remember their most successful students? Does a parent not remember their children?
Why would a software developer not want to know how long their projects lasted? Why would they not measure their impact in terms of messages sent, or mean-time-between-failure, or ROI / cost-to-benefit ratio, or smiles-per-hour? I'm not saying every line of code I write was one I was proud of, but I have dug into thorny problems, crafted solutions that were good enough, and been happy to see the code stay in service with only a very light touch needed to keep it on track. Of that, I am proud.
But the software is a tool used by customers to do the actual equivalents of the things you listed. As you said for the lawyer: They're happy the the contract fulfilled its purpose, not that it's still sitting on a shelf somewhere.
Probably even the 99th percentile HN user couldn't do anything lasting and noteworthy if they somehow were blocked from relying on inertia, sheer dumb luck, obscure chains of fortuitous happenstance, etc...
e.g. probably no one reading this can even hold the full Bluetooth spec in their head and understand all the tricks and pitfalls and obscure corner cases. Let alone do any useful work based on that.
For the vast vast majority, progress happens in the form of millions of monkeys bashing typewriters in the hopes of getting a gem.
Video games are still sold at retails stores (Target, Best Buy, ...). Those stores have to coordinate what is going to be on their shelves months in advance (6+)? So you promise your game will be ready and in a package and at their loading dock by November 15th. If you miss the deadline their shelf is empty of product since its spot was reserved for you.
Other customer electronics have similar issues. Promises are made to coordinate. They're generally made before the product is actually finished. Now a deadline exists. It's not trivial to change it.
The same is true for ads or was (TV ads in particular). They have to be scheduled well in advance. You pay for ads to run 6 months in advance because if you don't buy them in advance all the time slots will be sold out, no ads for you. But now you've added a deadline. If your product is not ready to buy when the ads run you've just wasted a bunch of money.
I agree that for many standard IT projects, deadlines can be kind of BS but I can also see why they tend to exist in retail products.
A solution could be, don't even start negotiating for shelf space before the product is 100% finished. Unfortunately few if any companies seem to be able to do this. For one, they need the money from the orders to make payroll. For another, if they waited until the product is done, then order ads and shelf space which won't be available for 6 months, what do they're employees do during those 6 months? They have no customers to fix bugs for yet. If the switch off the product to the next product there will be a big cost to pay to try to switch back the previous product they stopped working on 6 months previously when it actually ships and they need to actually support it.
We are not isolates who just subsist by ourselves. The modern world is a massively complex interconnected and interdependent system and we rely on the glue of capitalism to ensure that everyone still looks out for themselves but makes it all work for the system.
Were the massive chip shortages causing a massive reduction in car availability and increase in prices "arbitrary"?
Was the Suez canal blockage causing weeks of shipping delays "arbitrary"?
If companies promise to pay for a stall at the next expo, but then don't actually make it because they don't ship their products in time, and now the expo loses revenue because they can't fill the stall at the last moment, is that also "arbitrary"?
What's your exchange rate for expo revenue loss vs employee physical and mental health?
Time and time again, news breaks out about terrible working conditions and crunch culture being so ingrained and standard in this industry. Many cases come from studios that mainly distribute their games digitally. So many AAA titles nowadays are released half-finished, broken and rushed for the sake of meeting next quarter's quotas at the expense of the company's employees mental health (Ubisoft for instance), and in some cases, their lives (Activision Blizzard).
The fact that some developers are unjustly taking heat, blame and pressure from their own playerbase is not the saddest part. Video game journalists are disincentivised from talking about it from fear of being blacklisted.
I find that looking at it from the traditional brick-and-mortar perspective misses a dark side of this industry that is often entirely ignored, or treated as an open secret. Crunch can be avoided. Nintendo and Mojang have delayed releases to avoid crunch, yet one of the two also deals with physical retail copies. This is a management/investor pressure/culture/people issue.
As someone that has done work for indie studios, you very much still have to align marketing and distribution with the development cycle with online marketplaces. Shelf-space and shelf-life aren't any less real because they are virtual - if anything, they're scarcer resources. Anyone who's actually sold things online can attest to this; customers' patience and attention spans are horrendously short. Not making it into the first page of results can be a straight-up death sentence for a project.
Finish it, then 6 months later you release.
To add to this, many manager/leaders assume some kind of deadline is needed for every tasks.
They themselves manage their schedule by timeboxing and setting arbitrary due dates, feel extremely productive doing so, and expand that insight to the whole business. The base assumption is a task won't be done in a timely manner if there isn't a threat with a time limit on it.
On a human level, I also understand the appeal of having a set date for something to be done: there's a warm and fuzzy feeling of a well oiled machine churning stuff on a predictable schedule. But it's just cruel to subject so many people to a forced schedule just to manage someone's anxiety and scheduling OCD. Reality is complex, longing for making it fit into neet boxes is delusional and unproductive.
It goes both ways.
Even with highly self managing people, it's always safer to have some idea of how much time it could take, and check for some kind of status midway to know if it's too different from the rough estimate (sometimes you learn they didn't touch the task for various reasons)
What frustrates business is when there is no warning and engineering suddenly announces out of the blue that an imminent deadline can’t be hit.
Or even worse, the constant drip of, it’s almost done - just one more sprint…
The knee jerk current reaction of “we’re just not going to do estimates anymore” and “it’s done when it’s done” really don’t help in any way.
Then again, I also never worked a 80 hour week. Maybe that's a US thing (I'm in Europe)?
That said, I've had deadline in literally every place I've ever worked (including my own companies). Even if they're artificial, deadlines are important. Without them, procrastination can all too easily take root.
Now, they're a burden to be avoided or procrastinated.
It's a marathon, not a sprint.
Unless you do "Agile", in which case it is an endless sequence of sprints.
All of these have their specific stressors, all of these professions have loads of articles about how people are leaving these professions due to how hard they are.
All of these jobs tend to lead to them consuming your free time if you don't set boundaries, all have deadlines that lead to stress.
>You cannot take a sick day by telling your team, “I have mental issues and need a day off.”
This hurt me to read on behalf of the OP.
I'm now 20 years into my career and never once have I come across this attitude. People take sick days all the time for mental health. I feel terribly for this person that they felt like they couldn't but this is far and away the exception rather than the rule.
Has any company come out against mental health in the past 20 years?
We had an employee that used this technique. Too often. When the company needed to lay off people to cut costs, their name got on the layoff list before anybody else's.
Businesses are not charities. They need to make money. And if an employee is not pulling their weight, sooner or later they will be let go. Using the law to extend your stay can only go so far.
Doctors, lawyers, teachers, and professional athletes all experience social reward and/or social contexts to their work. Software engineering is interfacing with an unthinking, unfeeling machine for many hours a day.
Furthermore, the whole point of the vast majority of software engineering is to sell loot boxes to kids to increase shareholder wealth for a pittance of the wealth created (or something not too different from that for at least 60% of companies). How many mainstream software companies are contributing to building a society that you yourself would like to live in?
To put it bluntly, many bad parents abandoned their kids to the internet where they found solace. Software engineering is a natural extension of spending too much time using the internet and becoming curious how it works.
Poor mental health is a function of unmet needs... not feeling attractive, not feeling like you are contributing to the world or society at large, not getting laid, not feeling loved, not feeling worthy of love. All of these represent unmet needs, and I think software engineers struggle with these things more than a significant number of other professions because they are frequently intrinsic to why people become software engineers in the first place, machines don't care how socially inept you are, patients, clients, and judges do.
Software engineering is an incredibly people-focused career. You will need to be able to work with other devs, stakeholders, support, users.. everyone really. Going into a tech career thinking that it's somewhere you can avoid people is never going to work out well.
I enjoy working with people, actually. My current role is rapidly changing that.
Whereas in, say, government, people can just believe any stupid idea they want for an indefinite period of time.
As you can tell, I’m great with people. :)
Yes, you really can go into a tech career and avoid talking to people much, much more than other careers. Just stay out of management if you don't like talking to people.
They are not starved of engineers who "give enough fucks to speak up", they are starved of management who are invested and take enough responsibility to solicit direct feedback from the "assembly line" engineers and then make short term concessions on behalf of long term interests in defiance of what shareholders prefer.
Here is a quote from (imho) one of the top 5 greatest engineers of the 20th century, if not the number 1 greatest engineering leader:
> A major flaw in our system of government, and even in industry, is the latitude allowed to do less than is necessary. Too often officials are willing to accept and adapt to situations they know to be wrong. The tendency is to downplay problems instead of actively trying to correct them. Recognizing this, many subordinates give up, contain their views within themselves, and wait for others to take action. When this happens, the manager is deprived of the experience and ideas of subordinates who generally are more knowledgeable than he in their particular areas.
It's also worth reflecting on Pournelle's Law of Bureaucracy: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
The only result of fighting the incentive structure put in place by management (far too often: punishment for pushed deadlines, reward for cutting corners) as an engineer is mental illness.
Here is Paul Graham using the word "nerd" and talking about the greater more complex idea: https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
This is just your perspective and, IMO, it's pretty warped. Software engineering is not a low-status position, even compared to doctors and lawyers. You aren't lacking in status or not having sex because you're a software engineer getting paid $200k/year instead of a doctor paid $200k/year.
> Furthermore, the whole point of the vast majority of software engineering is to sell loot boxes to kids to increase shareholder wealth for a pittance of the wealth created (or something not too different from that for at least 60% of companies).
Lawyers have to defend clients they know are guilty to help rapists and murderers walk free, and file IP lawsuits for patents they know are bullshit so that their client can siphon off a settlement from a large company, just because it's cheaper than a court battle. Lawyers have been widely (and unfairly!) regarded as one of the most despised professions since Shakespeare.[0] Professional atheletes have long been subject of the media debate over being paid "too much" compared to the value they bring to society. Even if they were broadly perceived as providing negative value to society, which I don't believe, software developers would not be unique.
> To put it bluntly, many bad parents abandoned their kids to the internet where they found solace. Software engineering is a natural extension of spending too much time using the internet and becoming curious how it works.
This is becoming less and less true. Many junior devs who were born post-2000 that I talk to never had a computer growing up other than their phone, and their first real experience with PCs came in high school and university.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_kill_all_the_lawyers
I find that it definitely points to a time period when someone entered maybe not workforce, but the "IT world" let's say.
There was a time when programming in many places had definitely "unsexy" vibe among general population, with a lot of, well, painful "jokes", and all of that definitely set a "theme".
fast forward a decade or so to 2010 and suddenly IT is no longer that place where only losers go.
But the IT world is meaningfully different from software engineering. IT infrastructure (as distinct from creating software) pays less, generally, and is also regarded as much lower-status. IT is like auto mechanics to software engineering's automobile design. It's the blue collar equivalent, especially at the low level. At the high level, as far as I understand, it morphs with "cloud-engineering" or just general management and becomes higher-status.
Unfortunately, I think this comes from how the entrance into IT is gated by working on low-level ("have you tried turning it off and on again?") problems, and putting slightly awkward, new-to-the-workforce nerds in a position where they need to help a lot of people with their computer problems. Many of whom are (understandably!) frustrated that their computer systems aren't working and/or don't totally understand why they won't work. So IT gets to see people at their worst and most frustrated, and people get to see IT at its most awkward and least experienced. So hostility forms on both sides. And first impressions sometimes last very long.
Before that, some hugely successful people in software outside of "nerd" circles were discussed often in terms disconnected with tech and more as just other (if wildly successful, like Bill Gates) business people.
It’s not “you’re a loser”. It’s “you make a lot of money while ruining the world for everyone else.” Look at the jokes about Zuckerberg imitating a human.
He’s obviously one of the most powerful people in the world. But looked down upon by creating a socially harmful product. Like cigarette company or oil company CEOs.
Pay is not status. Software currently pays quite well, but in most companies today a developer is at the very bottom of the status curve. Developers are no longer allowed any say in what to build or how to build it, they are micromanaged by product managers and program managers and team managers and required to give daily status reports ("agile").
(I say "used to" because in the 90s developers were a high status role. You got to make all decisions and execute on them with great independence. Pay was much lower but respect was much higher.)
The other stress factor is that developers get decreasing respect every year they age. This is in contrast with basically every other professional role where experience is highly valued. Nobody wants the rookie heart surgeon, everyone wants the 60 year old who has done it thousands of times. But nobody wants a 60 year old software engineer.
I don't see how this is a bad thing, for a large and complicated product. For a small company where a team of 5 people can do the whole thing, sure, you don't need all this management, though I think some parts of the Agile methodology can be useful just for keeping people in sync. I worked in a small-ish team a while ago using an Agile methodology and it was fine: the program manager basically told us the feedback from the customer, and then it was up to us to decide what features to make to keep the customer happy and how to do it and how to schedule it. The Agile methodology just forced us to have regular meetings, and made it easy for the outside stakeholders to keep tabs on us and attend our meetings when necessary. Having daily habits in your life isn't a bad thing for many people, and that's basically what Agile was, in my experience: a way of having habits.
>Pay was much lower but respect was much higher.
No, it really wasn't. Maybe within the profession, but not to society at-large. Developers back then had little respect, until they started making lots of money in the dot-com boom, then people starting respecting the profession a bit more. Software development has never gotten the respect that doctors and lawyers get.
>Nobody wants the rookie heart surgeon, everyone wants the 60 year old who has done it thousands of times.
This might have some truth, but it's a bad view: generally, older surgeons prefer to use older surgical techniques that they learned decades ago, since they weren't trained on the newest techniques. The newer techniques generally are much less invasive and have faster recovery times. It's better to go with younger surgeons who have more modern training, but still some experience (i.e., not fresh out).
This is your own perspective, and again, it's extremely warped. If you think developers are at the very bottom of the status curve, go sign up to be your company's janitor, receptionist, HR/"talent acquisition", junior accountant, or any "operations"/"administration" role. Someone's gotta order and restock all the free beer and snacks in your office, you know.
And other than the janitor, those positions are all still likely 9-5 salaried positions that pay decently. Go be a retail worker, hotel staff, or waiter/waitress and enjoy being shit on by both your manager and your customers all day. Then come back and talk about how being a software dev is low status.
My sister is in medicine. Her entire day, down to each 30 minute block, is prescheduled for her. Often, she is forced to see multiple patients at once to increase revenues. The services that she is allowed to provide are governed by a completely separate insurance company. Strict metrics are tracked about the outcomes of each visit, including things like "how often did you see somebody for 35 minutes because that way you could charge for a full hour but spend less of your time."
This is far worse than anything I have ever experienced in software regarding tickets coming down from PMs or tracking of the amount of code committed in a week.
But then, I did not say that.
I said doctors get more respect as they gain experience, which is true.
This is what makes software developers a low status profession, i.e. many developers are glorified assembly line workers with little agency over their work (they do not make decisions).
Doctors and lawyers might have some form of management layer, but this is mostly a support function.
If you don’t think male doctors have more opportunities with women than male software engineers, other things being equal, I can’t take you seriously.
When you take a sick day, you're not supposed to say what's your issue.
A lot of the comments here seem to use the term mental health days without irony quotes. A mental health day is not a psychological crisis. It is a plea for a timeout from the workaday grind.
I was interviewing at a company recently and they called out that they offer 1 mental health day per month, in addition to other benefits.
The steps are the same. First they pile on more work on you, then gaslight you in believing your workload is the same as a junior employee and/or is subpar, then take you on a journey of “helping” you improve, document every small thing as a major flaw and then get you in that meeting with the HR.
Most places I've been at will suffer with known weak developers for a long time because a weak developer with domain knowledge is still more productive than many new developers without it and there's always the risk the new hire will turn out to be a dud as well.
Sorry but this is really naive. They won't come out and say it explicitly, because they can't, but many companies will just find a way to quietly replace you or hold you back in the organization if you are public about any mental issues.
I'm in an environment (military) were we actively work to prevent this. I have lots of kids (18-20yo) with mental health issues that are not helped by being allowed to take time off so casually. Our mental health experts want to keep people working because having them sit at home drinking/gaming does nothing. I have seen kids actually react well to increased "stress" on the job. Think basic training stuff. They are worked hard, go home tired and then actually sleep. Sending them home not tired leads to drinking and late-night gaming sessions after which they do not sleep and come to work the next day like zombies. Our people know how to spot this and adapt their schedules specifically to break the cycle. It wouldn't work for everyone, but we do need to accept that we are each not necessarily our own best therapists. If given more time off, many of us will simply amplify negative behaviors. The better answer is not I "need a day off" but rather "I'm booked to see the counselor at 08:00 tomorrow".
Having served I agree that a military environment where your day is full and you're basically told what to do all the time, and you're maybe working extremely hard, can override some "bad thoughts". That said, it's not unheard of for soldiers to commit suicide, harm themselves or others, and generally suffer from stress related to the military environment.
I agree that simply taking a day off is not a fix and if you are worried about getting stuff done at work it might even make things worse. That said, being in a workplace where it's considered ok to take a day off if you need to, maybe go hiking or something, is probably something that alleviates stress from the employees.
Basic training is a nothing thing in the military. It does not represent what military life is like. It is just a temporary proving ground for new employees. That said, many units still do unit PT in the afternoons specifically so that people head home reasonably tired. Remember too that in the military, especially for young single people, "home" is wherever you rack out.
As to the GP's question:
> Has any company come out against mental health in the past 20 years?
Certainly not, but there are innumerable companies, software and otherwise, that while paying useless lipservice to the concept of taking care of employees, absolutely do not follow through. I have one friend who's simply unable to attend therapy because his insurance is shit and he's in too much debt to take on another. His employer has all kinds of things to say about how much they take care of their own, but he gets shit from his manager for taking "mental health days" so he doesn't, he just says he has the flu. Mind you he's no burger flipper, he's a seasoned sysadmin.
And, lest we forget that outside our IT professions, it's even worse. My wife is a cook and has bounced from one awful workplace to another many times, her treatment running the gamut from benign neglect to outright hostility at the notion of needing mental healthcare.
> I have one friend who's simply unable to attend therapy because his insurance is shit and he's in too much debt to take on another.
> he gets shit from his manager for taking "mental health days" so he doesn't, he just says he has the flu
Are we talking US military here? I think I recognize the pattern you're talking about when you say:
> I have lots of kids (18-20yo) with mental health issues that are not helped by being allowed to take time off so casually. Our mental health experts want to keep people working because having them sit at home drinking/gaming does nothing. I have seen kids actually react well to increased "stress" on the job. Think basic training stuff. They are worked hard, go home tired and then actually sleep. Sending them home not tired leads to drinking and late-night gaming sessions after which they do not sleep and come to work the next day like zombies.
You aren't actively doing anything. You're saturating their day so that they're distracted from whatever underlying problems they face. They're too tired to deal with them so they sleep and repeat. I'd be curious to see your solution play out in the ten years post separation, but the VA may be ahead of you. For context (if you're not American) TAPS is what you take as you separate: https://benefits.va.gov/TRANSITION/docs/pstap-assessment.pdf (Section 4.C should have some relevant quotes).
I remember at some point a Navy Corpsman explaining to me that the goal of Navy medicine isn't to make you better, it's to keep you in fighting shape. Fighting shape doesn't need to be the best or most optimal shape, just enough to do the job the military needs you to do.
There were little activities to do on my base other than drink. I was paid very little, little enough not to afford a car. The cities I was stationed in were sounded by all kinds of loan sharks as a result. There were very few activities funded by the military that weren't somehow childlike or oriented for people with families. I was forced to live in a very old barracks that at times, frankly, barely functioned. While living in the barracks you can be summoned for duty at any time, unlike people who live off-base (married people). My life was as a Marine, so I'd be curious to hear an Airman's perspective. The services also tend to attract people who are actively attempting to leave home, so read from that what you will. None of these things are really unknown to the military or military leaders.
Would you let a troop take a sick day if they were any of those things?
I'd say I'm far from fully burnt out (we've all had our moments) but I think there is some career saturation point where people feel ownership over their free time and treat it with respect instead of "drinking/gaming".
Is wasting days off a symptom of youth? Is it because military employees lack autonomy? Is it just natural after years of selling your time to an employer?
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This sounds more like like papering over the underlying causes and likely exacerbating the problem; the fact that they're drinking heavily may be as an escape from the environment in which they are operating. I wouldn't call this active mental health prevention.
During undergrad, I had a lot of anxiety over my future career prospects, and I recognized that the best outlet for the excess "energy" was schoolwork that would keep my mind busy. So doubling down helped there.
On the other hand, my team at work just got done a month-long process that involved training another team from the ground up, while their supervisor was traveling for work, four of the five we were training were fresh out of undergrad and speedrunning every rookie mistake possible, and the fifth was a middle-aged man who thought he knew more than he did, and his constant rebuffing of our attempts to impart institutional knowledge made this process harder for everyone. Both of my immediate supervisors had to take a couple days off during this mess to decompress. Backing off was the correct response there.
Nobody ever actually came out and so, but I realize now that it was pretty common.
Our skillset becomes so uniquely tied to the company we work at that replacing a veteran engineer would take more than a year minimum. The differences between operations at two hospitals is probably minuscule compared to two tech companies.
It also feels like managers have received training in "burnout" so the few times I have uttered those words usually leads to some temporary white glove treatment.
Companies/managers have gotten alot smarter about this. The strategy is to hire enough and be managed to a degree such that the operation of any single system is never left leave to any single engineer.
So if your company is smart, yes you are replaceable.
It's a corollary of "the market can remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent".
In code the equivalent of this is having some bloated thing that's been touched by one too many shitty people who are only willing to learn just enough to mark their tickets done. That code turns into a ball and chain that no one wants to work on. Turnover becomes normalized
One of the reasons why most important stuff happens in open source
Certainly not for a single day!
I accept everyone's personal experiences with bad management, unreasonable timelines, and uninspiring projects, but those things are everywhere. Now add in patients and their families having the worst days of their lives in your presence day after day, high-pressure decision making, not getting even the chance to sit or go to the bathroom for nearly a whole shift. To top it off, if you have an "off day", that can earn you a lengthy investigation +/- a court case.
While it may sound insensitive, software engineering is nowhere near as complex or stressful as many (but not all) medical roles. It is both mentally and physically less taxing.
The attitude we should have is: yes, Mr. Successful Boss Man, you are a better human than me: you are more disciplined, don't have a problem with anxiety while dealing with a lot more stress, make more money and even look better. But these facts do absolutely nothing to change that I am crumbling and need a break. If you are so good at dealing with stress - write the software (or stitch up that patient) yourself, surely it would be easy for you, the superhuman?
But we won't do that. Instead we'll pretend we are 10x engineers or genius doctors until we either mess ourselves up, or make a big enough mistake. The realization needed to wake up is: the people pushing us to work harder need us. They actually couldn't have their successful business empire or their big fancy hospital without our work.
This can be said so many times over regarding so many unproductive comparisons. Two wrongs, I've heard all my life, don't make a right. Nevertheless, people insist on dismissing wrongs that aren't, as it were, up to snuff.
Well, we as a society can both walk and chew bubblegum. If the OP isn't in here begging us for scarce resources, then he's wrong to interrupt our exchange of lived experiences.
I think stressors in the medical industry should be talked about. That seems important. And when they are, I won't be in the comments whining about software on-call.
The insane hours are actually counterproductive, but many people view them as a badge of honor. It's an odd metric to compete on (I can work more hours for the same pay!), and yet the competition is definitely there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libby_Zion_Law was enacted only after the daughter of a somewhat famous author died due to an egregious medical error made by severely sleep deprived residents. One has to wonder how many less famous people and their relatives have died prior to that, and what exactly is the benefit of having exhausted doctors running the show. And yet after the law was enacted many hospitals figured out workarounds to keep residents working insane hours (usually by requiring paperwork to be done after hours, unofficially), and many supported the insanity as a necessary rite of passage.
What makes me take it less seriously is framing it as a crisis in mental health. As much as people don't like comparisons the marketplace for our labor is inherently comparative, and people will optimize for the most money with the least hours/stress. I get that I'm providing anecdata but like I've said in previous comments, the stuff that software engineers I know complain about is from a much more privileged position than other occupations. Burnout is real, but if your version of burnout is someone else's idea of a mildly challenging day (which is my experience) it doesn't have the impact you want it to have. You may not realize it but there are roles in medicine where the work itself is inherently stressful regardless of how many concessions your employer provides.
If your goal is to argue that software engineers deserve higher compensation and better hours and more autonomy given the value they provide, it would garner more sympathy from someone like me. Proclaiming your suffering is at a boiling point feels like a lack of awareness.
> Software Engineers and Tech co-founders, like us, are more prone to hitting the lows.
I don't see where anyone was comparing software engineering/engineers to another profession. I certainly don't see where it was proclaimed a crisis.
I don't think it's productive to tell people others have it worse when they are promoting a discussion around mental health. I also don't think being well paid and having what appear to be great working conditions preclude you from having mental health issues.
As much as I respect your personal experience, I think you make a mistake in assuming that it is universal. Further, you are also making the mistake of invalidating other people's individual experiences based on your perception of what the average worker does.
In other words, it is trivially easy to find software engineers who are burnt out to a much nicer crisp than the average doctor, and your dismissal of their suffering won't change a thing for them.
This isn't a contest to see which profession is most toxic to its workers. Our aim should be to find ways to prevent and mitigate these situations.
That said, I would argue that you underestimate the number of people in medicine who are burnt out. Many of my colleagues stay because it is a sunk cost financially/time-wise/reputatationally. You can pull up the numerous studies on burnout rates that have been done.
I'd anything it affirms my statement that you don't realize how much worse it could be. Like I said, there's a difference between taking down prod for 6 hours and getting sued for accusations that you killed a living being. This isn't intended to be a competition but it does become a bit absurd to watch people in the software world act like burnout from a micromanaging PM, unrealistic stakeholders, etc is the pinnacle of human suffering.
> On the whole I would rate the average software engineer as having a less stressful life than the average doctor
Those are very different statements, and I don't even disagree with the second.
Consider the possibility that the software engineers complaining the most about burnout are likely not experiencing the average amount of stress, so your casual dismissal of their suffering is really rather misplaced. Just as an example, a coworker of mine committed suicide, leaving behind his wife and two kids under ten. He didn't have it very very good.
I do entirely agree about software engineering being a lot less stressful though.
It's called "disagreeing". It doesn't "invalidate" anything.
If you want to bring medical profession stressors to light, go right ahead. This is an article about a real phenomenon. Not every complaint must be universal or superordinate.
You don't sound "insensitive," you sound juvenile. If your profession is harmful to practitioners, perhaps attempt to cultivate solidarity instead of actively working to demolish it?
As someone who's familiar with artisanal cobalt mining in the DRC, I can attest that medical practitioners have it good, but I won't because that would be unconstructive in a conversation about the latter's working conditions. Grow up.
Remember anything you experience, there will always be some wanker trying to one up you or dismiss you
I'm sorry but this is exactly what I meant by my original post. You don't realize that 4hr blocks in flow is an enviable luxury.
Granted my time was in a high acuity setting but let me cast it in more relatable terms.
Software 1 is brought to you with a complaint of the billing system dropping occasional transactions over the last 4 months. Now it is dropping 1 in 100 transactions. They use the Stripe API. It's your job in the next 15 minutes to debug and determine if there will be a complete service outage occurring within the next couple hours. If there will be an outage, you are expected to push a temporary fix to prod immediately and refer for continued review. If not, you must determine which parts of the billing system require referral for revision. Mind you that every decision you make can be reviewed years after the fact and can be litigated as they please.
Your assistsnt comes over with softwares 2 through 5 that were just submitted for your review. Software 2 has issues with a simple deadlock that could have been handled by someone other than you, but now it's your problem to deal with. Software 5 has been inexplicably ported from Delphi to Angular, and they've seen 2 others before you about why some of their native functionality broke, but now it's a big problem and they need you to look at it. There were some patches made by other devs but the stakeholders don't have access to them right now.
As you are looking into software 4,the assistant tells you "Dr zenzero, devops is on line 1 for you". They tell you that software 1 has more problems than described and it looks like it needs to be refactored in multiple areas. Software 3 keeps complaining to your assistant that you're ignoring them.
So no, "Most doctors are not spending solid 4hr blocks in flow focusing on a highly complex problem" because they don't get that luxury.
I get to do that now and it's bliss.
If you live in a bubble of 16 year olds gifted new brand new cars and you complain openly how yours got dented, it's only fair that everyone else outside of that bubble rightfully calls you out and tells you to appreciate what you have.
> This hurt me to read on behalf of the OP.
Indeed. Taking time off for mental health reasons is no less legitimate than taking time off for physical health reasons.
I've never actually told any bosses that I'm taking a "mental health day" or anything, though. I just take a sick day, because that's what it is.
I am.
I worked alongside lawyers for almost a decade, providing them with non-engineering professional services. I also have a couple decades of experience in software engineering and startups.
The pressure in software engineering is something entirely different, and far worse, than what I experienced in the legal environment.
By and large lawyers are lawyers, not managers. Yes, there's a hierarchy of junior associate to senior-most partner but it's lawyers all the way up and down the chain. You don't have lawyers working under managers. And there's something about this that makes the pressures different. Pressures are there, hours are long, spouses are unhappy because the lawyers are always at work or distracted at home... but I never had anxiety attacks or mental health issues working in the legal environment whereas in the software and startup environments I did.
In legal, everyone knows the drill and you do the drill. And your superiors have done the drill.
In software, you often don't know drill. You just grind, often to satisfy someone who hasn't done the grind themselves. A company I once worked for – a successful public company – has constant openings for senior software engineers for this very reason.
For lawyers, it's a clear meritocracy based on how much you can bleed. For doctors, a kind of "virtue" in the work that cancels out some of the stress/BS. For software, it can be like temporarily joining the popular circus that's in town (similar to a lot of meme crypto companies)
I don't think it really matters what jobs are "harder". Nothing in the article is making the claim this is unique (or for that matter universal). The author's experience was in engineering management, and that's what they're writing about.
It's relevant to our industry insofar as it's reflective of an experience in the industry. I'm personally a bit cautious around claims of what is harder or easier because they tend to be pointless comparisons mostly used to dismiss valid criticism with whataboutism.
> I'm now 20 years into my career and never once have I come across this attitude. People take sick days all the time for mental health. I feel terribly for this person that they felt like they couldn't but this is far and away the exception rather than the rule.
I have definitely worked at organizations with a tech-bro startup culture where working non-stop (and drinking heavily) were idolized and anyone talking about mental health would have likely gotten a "man up"-esque speech (regardless of their gender, though shockingly these companies are mostly men). I have also worked at places where mental health was nominally respected but, like anything else, substantially more leeway was given to people perceived as high performers. I'm glad you haven't had to encounter anything like that, but I wouldn't even call it uncommon, nonetheless exceptional.
Who claimed it was?
Why does that even matter?
Whether you stepped in shit or are knee deep in shit, you're still in shit. Instead of having competitions about who is covered in more shit, why don't we help clean each other off? Stop comparing, we're not in a situation we need to triage. You are allowed to be sympathetic or empathetic to others, even if on average they have it better off than you. We're all humans. We benefit by coming together.
>Has any company come out against mental health in the past 20 years?
Where do you work?
> This hurt me to read on behalf of the OP.
> I'm now 20 years into my career and never once have I come across this attitude. People take sick days all the time for mental health. I feel terribly for this person that they felt like they couldn't but this is far and away the exception rather than the rule.
> Has any company come out against mental health in the past 20 years?
I'd say this is a cultural thing. For example, I have never heard of anyone taking a mental health day off. You just take vacation time and hope you come back normal.
Technically, you can take a sick day and the employer doesn't need a reason but if you work in an office environment, especially a small one, everyone knows everything. People know when you're sick and wonder if you're okay. They care and they ask.
My experience, your experience, Vadim's experience--interesting as anecdotes but none of it tells us anything about the "profession" without numbers.
So my intuition is that Vadim overstates the case as a whole, but it's still interesting as an anecdote because what I think he's feeling is pretty common and it's interesting enough to read what worked for him and what advice he has for someone who feels like that.
I do think that in reality it's rare for an engineering leader to take "mental health" days off but all of my engineering leaders have taken plenty of time off and encouraged others to do the same. I haven't worked at a death march cadence in probably almost a decade (and I quit that job pretty quickly when it started). I don't think your experience is homogeneously true, I think people are pretty reticent to take time off (it's why "unlimited PTO" even works in practice) and it's probably worth it to continue asking why.
It's the nerd version of college football/basketball recruiting.
It's like the entire system is desperate to keep optimists optimistic and pessimists pessimistic.
Why is it that investors actively seek out starry-eyed individuals?
It sounds like an economic bubble factory. If every new person who joins elite circles is optimistic to a delusional level, then that level of optimism may be contagious and propagate delusional beliefs among the elite.
There are people in the tech sector who were very successful decades ago and are now in their 40s and still haven't come out of their highs. They have the same worldview as I had when I was 15.
Tech VC's are in the business of selling business futures, not building mature businesses. The buyer they sell to can install a practical CEO and worry about actual operations when that time comes.
In the meantime, enthusiastic kids provide a relatively cheap, manipulable, supply of powerpoints and pizazz -- whereas sober, mature professionals often need more personal income and tend to focus more on executing the business that they have experience in (mostly irrelevant to the VC's own business) instead of matching the investment pitch for upcoming rounds (all that matters).
Is the company slowly declining into unprofitability? Sell it off and cash that big payout.
Can't sell it off? Scrap it for parts and scavage the remains, cash that big payout.
Did it implode in on itself in a spectacular fashion? Sue leadership to recoup your losses.
As the saying goes, the house always wins.
It might not be in the best interest of the company, it just needs to be a hype train long enough for the VC to get theirs. The Greater Fool meets real life. The VC doesn't care one way or another if the founder benefits in the end, as long as it doesn't affect their ability to make their next play.
There are good reasons for this: their parents were last season's elites and want to pass it on, their classmates will likely be good contacts in other elite institutions, and they've already been trained to please establishment figures enthusiastically (or they wouldn't be Stanford wiz kids).
Not to sound like a crank, but information technology is now (and, really, has been since it's inception) an important theater in the class war, and elites are recruiting for it the same way they always have.
The only thing stopping me from being an angel investor is that I don't have $1M burning a hole in my pocket. But if I did, suddenly I could sit down in a conference room, put a polo shirt on, dangle the money from a fishhook, and people would take what I said about their business idea seriously. It's such a joke.
Not actually the case. The average Silicon Valley founder is in their 40s. It’s just the young ones that get all the press (because they need it).
Why is it that investors actively seek out starry-eyed individuals?
> Apart from the fact that pessimists are not founding companies, the answer is: narrative. There’s a ready-made place in our society for the hero’s story - the lone individual who (like ourselves) is special and has a unique vision. We have multiple millennia-old religions based off this same narrative. It works. It gets press, it gets followers. Humans naturally take any boring story and fashion it into this shape if they can. It takes the large, confusing, abstract or confusing and makes it personal.
Having the ability to pay every month for health insurance doesn't do much to protect you from losing everything to health-related bills. Unless, of course, you are rich enough to afford the 'Cadillac' health plans.
So yes, I agree the general lack of regulation is part of why America has "high innovation", but it comes at a great cost to society, and yields a highly stratified society with a lot of losers, and this causes society to be rather dangerous, with a lot of crime, homelessness, drug abuse, etc.
GE actually had real business units. Energy, aerospace, consumer, industrial, healthcare, you name it, they had a presence. Welch couldn't squeeze enough money to meet Wall Street's expectations out of these units, and didn't innovate when microcomputers were coming onto the scene in the 90s, so he cannibalized the company to boost share price at the expense of the business being able to continue long-term. Of course, he would be dead by then.
The guys in the valley are the opposite because many of them don't actually have a product, or even business, to sell - or they do, and the product itself is realizing it doesn't want to be sold. We've had social media and ad-based online services for 20+ years now and it's generally seen as a net negative for society. The subscription-based business model wouldn't work for most social media companies as it would limit the network effect and thus the TAM of the company's business. They're having to find more and more creative ways to monetize eyeballs when the eyeballs don't want to be monetized anymore.
Then you have the people who are swapping out their FLOSS licenses for proprietary ones on software offerings (looking at you Redis) because they realize if you just give stuff away for free, there is no monetization route, and dammit, they want - nay, deserve - their massive payday like the Steves and Bill and Larry got.
TL;DR Jack had a lot to sell at the expense of GE as a long-term going concern; SV has nothing to sell but wants to be a long-term going concern.
Late 20s early 30s anxiety ridden workaholics that make life miserable for everyone. They work their ass off to move up, then figure they'll get a team full of "thems".
Yeah no. You were promoted because the "thems" were wise enough, or otherwise unwilling to damage their health.
You're better and get more money power, congrats. Now lie in your bed that everyone else pulled the sheets off of and spilled crumbs.
I think one key tricky part is that -- even if the 25yo starts with being all-around smart, and unusually aware&humble, yet nevertheless tackling something big -- is that it's very hard to know when they should listen to team/advisors (and which), vs. when they should do a contrary thing that they think is the smart thing.
Maybe that's doable well enough, if they have all those good qualities, and happen to be exposed to a good team/advisors.
(Side note: It doesn't help that various facets of the fields are filled with bad practices/advice, as well as outright intentional deception and manipulation. If you read PG's essays early on, that was a time when you might expect a fellow techie and businessperson to have smart and well-intentioned advice, wanting you to succeed. That's absolutely not the norm anymore: you're much more likely to get bad advice today, no matter where you look, and more likely to encounter individuals and institutions trying to manipulate you. Even when you can filter that out first-hand, you're still getting a lot of it second-hand, through their influences on smart&decent people who you do let influence you.)
There's exactly one: Learning takes time.
The smartest, kindest, most level-headed 25 y/o is not going to be as good a leader as their 35 y/o self, assuming they continue to build on their leadership skills.
Now we could say, well, maybe those 25 year-old CEOs overwhelmingly exhibit degraded leadership skills by the time they're 35. That's a statistic that's possible. But I think it would point toward some seriously prevalent burnout, not an inherent benefit of being 25. It may be easier to be positive at 25, but I don't think the ceiling for positivity is higher at 25 than at 35.
But yes, if you meant a "good" start CEO as in "good for the startup" then yeah I would say what you said is possible or likely.
But how could we validate this assemblage of opinions about how they are to work at that I've gathered?
At a certain point you have to just build a queue and start the next highest priority thing next. Too much WIP kills you.
When they eventually switch back to the original thing they are always surprised to know it’s been completed.
Of course, I never had the clout to force that to happen...
"You're costing us a lot of money!"
It isn't just about helping sell the customer. It is also about saying no to overeager salespeople.
I called it "Monster of the Week", as I was watching a lot of X-Files at the time. Still like that term for it.
The CEO said "no you don't" - which led me to ask why he thought this and he said he had thought up a new "must have" feature over the weekend - which was clearly very technically challenging. He then asserted that anything could be built in 48 hours....
I'm amazed I lasted as long as I did in that job.
Why even have a Director of Engineering position then?
I was chastised for being unprofessional and embarrassing the department. Didn’t care then; no regrets now.
"Ah, new highest priority feature. Lets do a mini discovery session and it looks like this work can be represented with 20 sticky notes. Our historical team velocity is 10 sticky notes every two weeks. So we'll probably be done in four weeks. If we take down all the existing work in progress. Lets go to each existing sticky and you can confirm that we can stop working on it."
The stakeholders are still allowed to make decisions, but (hopefully) it forces them to be realistic and understand what they're asking the team to do.
I found it remarkably effective at getting business folks to actually prioritize. They don't believe you, but they'll believe the computer.
> best weapon against complexity spirit demon is magic word: "no"
> "no, grug not build that feature"
> "no, grug not build that abstraction"
> "no, grug not put water on body every day or drink less black think juice you stop repeat ask now"
> note, this good engineering advice but bad career advice: "yes" is magic word for more shiney rock and put in charge of large tribe of developer
> is ok: how many shiney rock grug really need anyway?
also, wolves and sabretooth tigers get hungry, need grooming, need vet, etc. picky about food too, want expensive organic stuff. sometimes mrs. grug buy animal skins for wolves even though they have perfectly fine pelts of their own. and don't get grug started on lil' gruglets (which this grug not have).
then no pile of shiny rock for rainy day, when shiny rock stop coming and cave mortgage is due.
shiny rock very important. get as much shiny rock as can without compromising values. happy mrs. grug = happy grug.
I recently caught myself excitedly showing grugbrain to a younger dev, quoting the microservices section - and realized that I've come full circle, and now I'm the old bearded dev passing on some piece of thing that I found inspirational / exciting.
The CEO is doing that because they don't understand how things work in your org. If you're the one communicating with the CEO, then its your job to be persuasive when telling them why what they're asking can't happen the way they're envisioning.
If they come back with "make it happen" then you weren't persuasive enough.
"Quality or quantity?"
"Yes"
These types are some of the most insufferable people imaginable
Many times, stress is created artificially. It hurts our performance and deteriorates our ability to think.
Encountered numerous situations where work was "urgent" and would likely land a contract or sales for the company, and everyone would be a superstar if they delivered this "crunch".
After 2 months of pulling all-nighters and sleeping for 3/4 hours, we deliver the project ahead of time. Apathy begins to set in after management/decision makers keep on giving these gifts we call "crunches".
To help the company and go the extra mile is something most of us have done in the past and will possibly do in the future. However, it's like the story of the boy who cried wolf, if everything is urgent and every task is to be done NOW, then there are bigger issues at play.
Like everything in life, there is usually a limit/budget of money, time and effort. By abusing these limits and tolerances, people will lose respect for the people crying wolf and will put less effort into their work.
> After 2 months of pulling all-nighters and sleeping for 3/4 hours, we deliver the project ahead of time
In my career, none of these have ever paid off. Every time I've crunched this way on something dramatically urgent like this, it has turned out that the "if we can deliver this, this huge moonshot sale is a sure thing" turns into a no-sale
The sales person never seems to get cut loose for diverting the entire R&D towards a longshot for months and burning people out, though
And you can bet the sales person isn't putting in weeks of overtime for the duration, either
I basically refuse to do overtime anymore unless I'm working extra to make up for my own screw up. I'm not putting in extra to hit some other assholes unrealistic deadlines ever again
But in reality no one really cares much, you'll get the same raise everyone else gets, your bonus is still gonna be capped by your contract, and you will be better off finding a new job if you want more money
Man sometimes I want out of tech so badly it hurts but I don't generally think it's better anywhere else
I went over my head, did probably the most complex code in my life, massively parallel, over weekends and evenings. That wonderful cathedral didn't move performance a zilch, just made debugging and further changes much harder. After few hours of actual debugging afterwards he found out vendor defined responsible DB table in such an obscure and bad way way that we had to literally copy whole table to another more sane one, and perform all the work there in maybe 5% of the time. In fact I suggested exactly same thing initially but it was quickly dismissed by him, and who questions the guru, right.
This didn't even come from management just colleague's incompetence/ego, hard deadlines, tons of pressure to deliver, and starting project already 2 months late. Closest I've been to burnout yet. I am still a bit pissed off on him, but I know it was not malice so that eases emotions quite a bit.
And to similar request coming from the top - been there, done that too, regretted that time & energy put in it. These days, 8 hours days, if I am not making it on time, I communicate early & clearly and that's it. They handle it, and if they don't, well there is always next job. Life is about priorities.
Yes, you can. You can say you need a mental health day. Adults will understand.
I am usually cynical about big corporates and their people policies, but this is one I can applaud.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
You're in a bit of a bubble. This is not the case for the majority of jobs.
I think that level of executive dysfunction and “catchup” is problematic
But it also enables mental illness when you encounter problems that cannot be solved that way -- for me, it was divorce. But life is full of intractable problems.
Unfortunately, I also think that many of the problems are both simultaneously solvable and intractable at the same time, which is particularly crazy making if one is so inclined.
As someone who has used a lot of psychedelics, it is transformative, once you realize everything is literally all in your head. That no matter the pain and suffering you're going through, life can be beautiful, and lovely, and enjoyable. Psychedelics can even show you the things, issues, and parts of you that you've been running away from.
But then the onus is on you. You have three options: go back to your normal life, and continue going through the same cycle of suffering (uncommon); continue (ab)using psychedelics to reach the same state (common); or take what you've learned and start making changes to yourself and your life, so you don't have to use them again (rare).
Today I work as an engineer at a known American corporation, slowly but surely moving up the ladder. Not everything goes smoothly, but I earn more than the rest of my elementary school peers combined and my prospects are bright.
I do not wish upon anyone the amount I work I had to put into achieving this position. Looking back, I'm in awe how this was possible. I basically dedicated 100% of my life to one goal. It's not just about studying all day all night. It's about tuning your core emotional responses to motivate you to keep reaching higher and higher at all costs. I can confidently say that I was right on the edge of going insane, and the entire experience caused irreparable damage to my mental health. It's only now that I'm learning to slow down.
It's strange. On one hand I don't think I'd change anything. I'm proud of the path I took. On the other hand, if I had a child, I just couldn't send it the same route, knowing how much it hurts.
That's not a healthy work life balance, that's not even a lifestyle, it's a deep core aspect of these people. The most effective engineers i know come from a military background, and not because the military somehow makes you a better coder, but because it can give you the attitude to persevere adapt and overcome intense mental and emotional challenges. Building products is great, I have nothing but love for those who sign off at 5pm - But every day including weekends the small group of so called "10x"ers are staying in touch long after the day is done and already done with the first round of work before the 8am standup.
It's not fair to ask those who just want to take care of their children to rise to meet this level of commitment, and the engineers doing this usually are working hard to establish their own products and startups but the true ultimate goal of that is to be paid to write whatever we want, and the money is the means to the end of writing more code.
Rest in peace to those who have not made it to their goals and no longer have the chance to try. Best wishes to those who want to have a home or family life yet compare themselves to those who have sacrificed everything for this life.
Why do they do it? Most often a deep sense of duty, or some deep sense of unease that the soft glow of the terminal evokes. Perhaps both.
All this to say that your pain and suffering is real and the true payout is just more pain and suffering. To those thinking about this life I recommend Musashi's Five Rings and to honor the Bushido.
This is what I hate about modern workplace. The society clearly needs people who migrate databases at 3AM, but it never rewards them, instead just squeezes as much juice as possible before moving onto the next young motivated freshman. I'm not talking about financial reward, I'm talking about creating a work environment where migrating the fucking database FEELS rewarding. I truly miss the rush I had at the university when turning in a difficult project I had spent nights on. Instead I get to stare at a poster "remember that HR is there to protect the company from you, we pay you to shut up".
Nowadays I try giving as few fucks as possible, and I'm looking for happiness in other areas of my life, which isn't easy. I'd rather see my passion die than witness it being exploited by the very same people who make me feel misunderstood.
I am very much butthurt about how the society functions but I also realize I cannot do anything about it, so my next goal is to learn how to just relax, do nothing, and be happy about it.
We KNOW that using your brain like that leads to mental exhaustion, in exactly the same way we know a tradey kneeling while they do carpet all workweek will have fucked up knees in twenty years. We also have clear scientific study that you physically cannot do knowledge work effectively for 40 hours a week, and actually start LOSING productive knowledge work performance after about 36 hours a week.
The way that I describe it to people is imagine you really like Sudoku puzzles, but now you have been contracted to do the hardest possible Sudoku puzzles you are capable of for 40 hours a week. Sure monday might be a blast, but by thursday your brain HURTS, and is physically tired. The human brain chews through A LOT of energy, and puts out A LOT of metabolites while doing hard thinking stuff, like knowledge work. Then you take your weekend where you desperately try and catch up on the household stuff you've been putting off because you get off work and FEEL dumb, because your brain desperately wants to turn off, so you scramble to get some of it done, and then it's monday again.
Meanwhile, the whole time that you're struggling with using something that isn't meant to be used 8 straight hours a day (unlike our heart or leg muscles which ARE optimized around constant usage), you're basically being gaslit by the whole system. "This task is a medium" except it wasn't groomed properly and of course there's twice as much work, but you aren't allowed to modify the ticket or change how you are working on things because a guy who spends all day putting numbers into a premade Excel sheet tells you that your "predictability" is going down, or that your "throughput" is inconsistent, as if there even SHOULD be consistency in a software project that does very different things and systems in different stages of the project, and after you spent 16 years learning ironclad math rules and 4 years learning Computer Science at your school of choice, you go into the field, and find that ANY bug is possible in modern computing, and every bug WILL be insane and flow through thirteen different abstraction layers and whisper demonic thoughts into your ear and now you get fucking PTSD whenever your mom asks you "how could this bug happen in my iPhone" and you're like "hey man IDK probably the bluetooth stack corrupted the vibration motor controller and now your phone will play only country music whenever you get a text from your brother in law", or your main app crashes because there's a damn bug in uWSGI where if you use any other C based code, it will inevitably fucking SEGFAULT because uWSGI goes out of it's way to dealloc during shutdown and manages to dealloc things that don't belong to it and the group who builds uWSGI has ignored the bug for a decade, and nobody fucking gets it because in other knowledge based work fields, nobody scoffs when you say "no you cannot use chemistry to turn lead into gold", and you don't find that occasionally your simple adding NaOH to water actually results in an acidic solution somehow because a completely disconnected reaction happened in the other room where someone used the wrong brand of sulphuric acid in a reaction and now the entire lab is cursed...
Fuck I still have like 35 more years of this until I can retire and I'm borderline useless at anything else
I think there are blue collar jobs that aren’t too hard on your body that have some of the elements we enjoy in SE while having more concrete results (and a clear “it is done” point). I’m personally looking into HVAC installation and maintenance: some engineering, some tech (computers are everywhere), a shortage of qualified people and good long term trends, the option to run your own service business… it seems saner than wha lt SE has devolved into. But the grass is always greener so who knows.
I think i have figured this out :-) It is a combination of multiple factors; the major ones are listed below (note that the articles linked to are not specific to software developers but the factors in the studies can be extrapolated);
1) Biology - We Humans are evolved for Activity and Motion. Long periods of prolonged sitting (the norm in the software industry) and physical inactivity are injurious to both physical and mental health. There have been lots of studies validating this; here is one done during the covid-19 pandemic - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8190724/
2) Biology - Messing with our Circadian Rhythm ruins our health. We Humans are not evolved for staying indoors but need to be outdoors in direct sunlight at specific periods of time everyday. Most software folks hardly step out in the Sun during the day. The circadian clock is central to our physical/mental well being and needs to be respected. Here is Sachin Panda (one of the foremost experts on circadian rhythm) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fciGNBN0nKM
3) Psychology - Software Development Management/Processes/Methodologies have devolved into stimulating "constant chronic stress" as opposed to "episodic acute stress". There have been many studies linking the former with depression/anxiety disorder/etc; here is one - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3380803/
4) Lifestyle - Junk food, Energy drinks/Caffeine, Alcohol, Lack of proper nutrition, Too many distractions/context-switching, Too much exposure to artificially lit screens, Lack of sleep etc. etc. Here is a relevant study - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10771855/
Finally, a pdf on implementing "Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes" by Roger Walsh is helpful Lifestyle and Mental Health - https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-66-7-579.pdf
Yep, exactly this. It is not really the stress that I hate, but rather the fact that it never ends. A bit of stress is okay, if you can take a break afterwards and relax. But what follows after the end of a sprint is another sprint. That metaphor itself is insane... have you ever seen an actual sprinter start running a new sprint immediately after the end of a previous one?
Sounds like trying to cope at a shitty nightmare job at a shitty company, and blaming yourself.
No trust in the team. Always doing shit themselves. No discussion. Backdoor discussions. Always bending to the will of management. Everything is “important”/“critical”. It’s micromanaging to the worst degree.
At the same time, I would likely fail in the same way if given the position. Albeit, to a much lesser degree. I think management often puts us in these impossible positions without any good reason other than “to look good to X.” What’s even worse if it’s was just to earn fucking brownie points with some no name mid level director.
This is why I think unions in tech would be great. To set realistic expectations, approach management from a collective point of view.
Unfortunately companies today only aim to get that VC money with a quick exit and IPO. I think the general sentiment amongst the vultures is a union would make the quick exit less of a reality.
This is one of the most counterintuitive things about leadership roles IMO.
If you get promoted there, it’s often because you got a lot of things done yourself in an IC role. And then the fewer things you do yourself, the better off you, the company, and your reports are once you’re in a leadership role.
So you have to learn that feeling idle compared to what you used to feel like isn’t a sign that you’re doing a bad job.
As such if you have time to work on engineering (which you should make to stay sharp) it needs to be something unimportant to the business so that you can be late. Trying to add a new warning to your static analysis tool, checking out the latest framework to see if you should switch to it in the future - and other such things that you really want and long term are good but short term won't pay the bills.
I kinda disagree w/ this. I get better results from helping people understand this:
https://www.techtello.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/decisio...
And then making sure that they're taking action when they should take action and getting help when they should be getting help. This means they are wrong sometimes but it's better for them to be wrong sometimes and learn than to be interrupting with too many questions when they should just be doing their best.
Admittedly at this point my only direct reports are bosses themselves, but they vast majority of questions they have for me go into a shared 1:1 doc that we address monthly. Everything else they take action on and report as needed.
sure you shouldn't just ask for every problem, but don't struggle too long when someone knows the answer.
So many people who move into management don't make this mental shift and keep their hands on the steering wheel because that's how they got there in the first place. But if you don't let others drive, you won't be able to keep the car on the road for long. If you go into that role your job is to mostly get your hands off the nuts and bolts of the software system and create people systems of motivation, trust, and organization to get your team members working well on them instead.
I've never made the transition myself but have increasingly thought about it.
Much easier said than done but it was a real Aha moment for me as a boss.
Yup, I've had a boss like this. Maybe my company was particularly dysfunctional, but I didn't have much experience with the projects and tasks I was being assigned. I definitely was not hiding it either. Then when I spent time trying to figure things out on my own, my boss would simply do the work himself and provide no feedback.
Do you think it's easier for your manager that you do the things than that he does them themselves? Have you tought of ways that you would make it easier for them for you to do the things?
Lucily I'm not really manager but I do have some responsibility of projects with other people.
You will most likely always be more efficient than the people who are less senior/just starting out. So then: when do you decide it's worth it to help those less senior team members become more efficient? Will you ever want to delegate? My experience was probably unique, but this kind of management style 1) undermines my work/communicates a lack of trust, and 2) communicates that you're not willing to invest in other people. But maybe the difference is that I was being explicitly delegated work, having my boss complete it unbeknownst to me, and then just getting silence.
A major problem I encounter is that people I delegate to don't say when they don't understand something or don't reach out early enough when they get stuck. I always say that come to ask if you get stuck on something for more than a half a day or so. Unfortunately most people don't even when I ask them to.
I do understand that they may think that they don't want to bother by asking. But in reality when they ask soon, it's usually very easy for me to answer but when they don't, they either don't progress at all, so I may have to do it anyway to stay in schedule, or they get into a mess that's a lot harder to fix.
And it's not really to blame them. I notice myself acting similarly when I do stuff I'm not experienced with. What I do try to consciously do is to tell when I don't understand something, although I probably fail at this too quite regularly.
I've definitely done this before, and in retrospect, having moved on to other roles, it's obvious to me now that the workplace & overall company was actually the problem. People reach out early when they're engaged and feel comfortable.
What? The person in this scenario wouldn’t be in the union once promoted. Unions don’t do anything for manager to director dynamics.
You wouldn't expect a manager (from a non-technical background) to just start coding, so why would you expect a coder to just start managing.
Who knew? An MBA mindset contained inside a 1 hour mindset!1 Why did these MBA guys spend $250K!?
https://www.codeleadmanage.com/articles/20230919-lead_mentor...
1. Dual career ladders. You should recognize/reward some level of technical role (i.e. staff or similar) the same as management. Every senior person is a leader; I argue ICs have a tougher job because they don't have the "because you report to me" hammer.
2. Lead mentorship program. Potential managers need experience; you need to coach and validate. They need a chance to manage a single person over time, do a performance review cycle, 1:1s, feedback conversations,etc. Co-ops/iterns are great for this because it's a fixed time period! You need 3 conditions to promote someone into management: 1. the need, 2. the individual's desire, 3. the individual's skills & experience. An LMP gives you signal on all.
I'll add 1(b): People need to be able to move laterally between ladders. This is in everyone's best interest; having an amazing staff dev muddling through as a team lead just means they're going to quit soon.
This is a REALLY LONG way of saying I agree with the parent, but the solution is both known and doable. I'll get down off my soapbox now.
Say, "the CEO". The same CEO who is trying to manage through deadline pressure, placed into leadership someone who could be managed through deadline pressure. And who would transmit that pressure down the chain.
Why? Because the CEO believed that this is how people should be managed. Which means that a leader who refused to accept that pressure would have almost certainly resulted in the CEO replacing said leader with someone who is more compliant.
And now that we're done placing blame in the right place, can we talk about the actual problem here? Which is that people really do wind up working under too much stress and pressure. And this comes with a huge and absolutely real cost.
I think this is a very broad principle that applies all over. For a very different example: I have seen police depts make dramatic turns - from pretty okay to dangerously awful to hugely better, entirely due to changes in sheriffs/chiefs.
Usual caveats apply. Bigger orgs take more time+effort to turn. Down is easier than up.
High performing teams require trust. Workers need to trust that management has a sense of what's reasonable, not take estimates out of context and generally listen to the pain points/challenges on the ground. Upper management needs to trust that teams understand the vision enough to make the right tradeoff, not sandbag every estimate or fixate on the wrong details (because ground-level details matter, but some more than others from the business perspective).
I realize many people have spent their whole career in such adversarial circumstances between workers and management that the above sounds like a fairy tail. I will say though, that it is possible, but requires a healthy understanding of the limitations of human communication, and the recognition that good intent is necessary but not sufficient to avoid dysfunction. You need a critical mass of folks spread throughout the org, able to do the necessary bridge-building, and (at times) emotional labor to work through all the challenges and differences of opinion. It's very easy to describe a problem and solution from one person's perspective, but much harder to prioritize and solve the 10 most important problems out of a group of 100 people where viewpoints differ and cooperation is needed to improve anything.
So lets not criticize for what did not actually happen.
Turning to management, your view on management reflects what works for tech. People who need to engage in complex thought will do their best work in an environment that reduces unnecessary pressure.
But not everyone does that kind of work. People in sales do better when they are pushed to meet a big audacious goal which is probably not realistic. Micromanagement is appropriate for people in a level 1 call center. And so on.
This means that a healthy organization should have multiple styles of management in play. And that means that it is important to have leaders in tech who can push back on the rest of the organization to enable the right style for software developers.
And now that we've talked about management a bit, mind talking about mental health? Because sure, bad management can cause mental health problems. But so can being a parent of children who are part of the current teen mental health crisis. So this issue is important, even if you fix management.
its also a big culture question. I personally view the model where the manager is 'in charge' as being fundamentally unhelpful, and alot of organizations as a whole promote this model.
that alternative being 'the supporting adult in the room that trying to help the team do their best work and make hard decisions if absolutely necessary'
My take from the linked article is that this person had the will and ability to grow but they lacked an internalised reassurance that it's okay when things don't go to plan and aren't perfect. Importantly, they were open to learning about emotional reasoning.
In my mind a good training course can provide that reassurance in the form of a statement like
> It is absolutely normal for managers to be constantly juggling a large number of nebulous demands, to finish most days without wrapping anything up, and to feel like there are a large number of unknown and uncontrolled variables. Do not work excessive overtime or refuse to delegate tasks in order to avoid this.
It's also incredibly exclusionary. If you have the slightest neuroses, never be a leader!
You'll find this is often a race to the bottom too. While presumably not applicable to him, you'd be surprised how many people and organizations have opinions about how impossible it is to hire anyone with mental health problems.
Then it becomes "just flip burgers like a loser and go to prison addicted to stimulants you useless eater, all of you people"
Nobody should be a "leader". Maybe we can't avoid hierarchy (because societies/groups that don't use it tend to be outcompeted by those that do) but we don't have to sprinkle it with holy water and pretend it's sacred.
Management comprises:
- Performance evaluation (inc. salary negotiation, promotions etc...)
- General admin (sick days, annual leave)
- Fostering teamwork, communication, and individual learning
- General management workflow (prioritisation, goal-tracking, delegation etc...)
- Hiring and firing
- Contributing vision and ideas
- Technical guidance to management (e.g. giving technical feedback on interviews or individual performance)
- Code ownership and responsibility (e.g. maintaining conceptual coherence)
I really don't think that's true. Software engineers can spend their whole career just checking off Jira cards, having no overarching ideas about the company's technical direction. And that's great. But leadership is specifically about leading others. That can mean establishing new processes, making global architectural decisions, mentoring juniors, and owning and driving an internal technical product roadmap. It also means having a general attitude of "how can I help the rest of the team succeed". If you learn something slightly obscure from a colleague, or a helpful language feature, document it on your internal knowledge base or make a post in Teams/Slack before moving on.
This is the kind of crap that stops people writing blog posts about vulnerable topics like mental health.
I mean really? Author opens up about a terrible shit show and their role in it, and your response is “yeah you suck at that, don’t do it.” I dont think that’s very constructive.
I often don't write about things I'm feeling because I can already hear the responses of everyone who will intentionally miss the point in order to draw attention to something else, as if I'm completely oblivious to that other issue.
Being able to express what we're feeling without having our thoughts dismissed or disregarded simply because of how we arrived in our current situation is very important for mental wellbeing.
Don't get me wrong, I do understand the point being made above, it's just doesn't seem very helpful, as you said.
The toxic positivity about it is not helpful either.
This was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn. And when coaching other would-be leaders it often is a roadblock for them as well.
As one moves into a leadership role it becomes critical that you learn to be ok with people doing things not the way you'd do them. You need to learn to accept close/good enough from your underlings. And the "enough" in close/good enough is going to be a larger delta than you think going into this learning process.
The tech industry would just hire abroad more.
If they ever did decide to hire union workers for whatever reason it would just be another layer of bureaucracy killing the company and stressing out employees.
Workplaces suffer from compulsions by MBAs, who prioritize shareholders and exec bonuses above the welfare of employees/consumers/company. A union has an ability to raise the priority of employees in this equation - and ease MBA pressures to exploit consumers and degrade the company.
But because unions are groups of people, they are subject to the same corrupting principle that afflicts every group of people.
Nobody, anywhere wants to clean their own house.
A union can be a force for good, as long as it's leaders+members continue to fix the internals that need fixing.
Given my experience with HN this type of criticism is high likely to result in scrutiny by the admins. The biases on this site really need to be re-evaluated.
You can. I started doing this years ago and it has been an overall positive experience. Others on my team told me about their own struggles because I took the initiative to open up about mine.
Hustle culture is not challenging, it does not help anyone grow, it simply exploits people. It's common, banal stuff.
Sometime during my tenure, her prescription started becoming unfillable; the pharmacies are only legally allowed to carry a limited quantity to combat substance abuse issues.
What was happening? Turns out the Meta office was staffing up rapidly and taking more floors in the building, and all of the engineers needing anti-anxiety medication started consuming all of the local supply.
This is a serious problem that we do not take seriously. Broadly speaking, startups in particular are aggressive and there's still an air of machismo and bro culture (from which Meta was born) that prevents caring for one another in this way.
in Europe it usually makes sense to contract if you only have smaller projects.
Maybe not outright amounts, but if you count in things like sickness, holidays, off for kids, social contributions, being treated better among colleagues, and for me personally having much more freedom whenever personal I need to do like bureaucracy (but that may be current circumstance only).
But the big money in tech is in your options/RSUs, not base pay. And contractors don't get options. (Usually anyway; I've been given options as a consultant once but usually don't see that.)
This is so important. Our work is an extension of us. Our state in the moment will bleed into all areas of life. There is nothing more important. As we are limitless potential. But only if we are living in the here and now.
I won't make any comments on their fitness/accomplishments/whatever. I am not in their shoes, and can only appreciate the honesty of their exposition (which they seem to be embracing and using as their platform).
> In business, there’s no place for perfection. There’s no space for having everything under control. In fact, not only can’t you influence most of the things around you, but most of the things are uncertain.
I have found this to be true for life, in general; especially when dealing with other people.
Thus, ensnared in this labyrinth of urgency, our protagonist wrestles with the specter of impossibility, urged ever onward by the mantra, "Make it so." A counsel of despair, for within the crucible of incessant toil, the spirit wanes and the flesh wearies.
In this odyssey of turmoil, the narrative delves deep into the quagmire of mental strife that ensnares those who toil in the shadow of unyielding expectation. It casts a light on the sanctity of boundaries, the paramount importance of safeguarding one's inner citadel, and the somber realization that, though we may strive with Herculean fervor, the fates of our endeavors lie beyond the realm of our dominion.
Herein lies a clarion call to the sentinels of the digital frontier: to honor the sanctity of mind and spirit, to question the altars of perpetual labor upon which we lay our offerings, and to seek a horizon where success is measured not by the quantity of our toil, but by the quality of our lives.
Many software shops/enterprises don't value the necessity of embracing failure and making space for curiosity. That's fine, but then these shops should be strict about using Boring Technology they can just buy support for. If such companies have too much product ambition in the mix, then you need to give devs the ability to be engineers by giving them space to fail, try new things, refactor, rewrite.
We can't do that when the pressure is on to ship in unsustainable ways! Failure is not an option. We spent all that money writing that MVP, what do you mean you need a team to just maintain it? We have features to build!!
Not everyone is competitive enough to work with excellent engineering culture and we trade mental health in for it sometimes.
Not sure I buy it, but indeed the dentist was telling me clenching is common in particular types of work like software engineering because of something to do with brain waves.
“I’m taking the day off.”
Your coworkers don’t need a reason. If your employer demands one, then that’s a different issue.
Note well: I have never had this at any other job. But if you need the day, take the day, even if it has to be vacation.
Just say you’re not going to be there.
This is also a rare circumstance where having a disability is an advantage. Companies are legally required to allow me to prioritize my health over my job without discriminating against me. They aren't allowed to ask.
I wish it didn't require having a disability to be treated like a human being instead of a disposable resource on somebody's balance sheet.
> Companies are legally required to allow me to prioritize my health over my job without discriminating against me. They aren't allowed to ask.
Assuming you're not in the US?
In the US, companies are required to provide reasonable accommodations for disabilities as part of ADA but can and (often) do ask for documentation of the disability and the specific accommodation requested.
I dread having a mandatory talk therapist and am not sure how that helps social anxiety. Free book warns to not trust psychiatrists because you may go in for stress and never be allowed out. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ocxbp8l5uo6anu7us7fjw/quackLa...
Negotiate prohibitively high overtime rates.
All you can do is your best, and if you fail, there is little safety net to help you. At least in the U.S. major items are tied to your job.
You can also be put in situations where people want you to sacrifice like you have equity in the company, but at the same time treat you like you are replaceable.
There is also a lot of people that are willing to over promise and blame you when things fail. At the end of the day it is the company over everyone.
"What do you think about mental health in software engineering?"
"I think it would be a good idea."- Automation is the rule, not the exception. Replace your own work with a script, whenever you can.
- Our work product in theory works forever (i.e., until conditions change). You really are not needed when you're done. Script monkeys can copy and fix your stuff.
- New technologies and platforms: hardware drives software and vice-versa, leading to frequent choices whether to upgrade to enjoy new benefits. Your skills become dated, and the process of upgrading requires whole-world knowledge no one has.
- High competition: with low barriers to entry, you can do great stuff but still be a smidge worse, and lose the entire race. Close is crazy-making.
- Low management: with automation the professional process, the employee-manager ratio tends to be very high, typically with senior technicians enlisted for administration (which also makes them more compliant). As a result, employees are not buffered from business forces.
NO other profession has all or even most of these features. The closest I can think of is the bench scientist (and they might be in a worse position b/c they have very few alternatives). And AI will amplify both automation and new technologies and will likely increase the employee/manager ratio.
But ironically, few professions offer as much leeway for mental derangement. I'm shocked how off some people are, but they still function just fine, because the main determinants of productivity is whatever weird programming model evolved at the company: master that, and you can perform well, so long as you avoid triggering your manager or someone important.
And while I can't speak for every kind of mental health issue, software engineering is not even close to being one of the worst professions when it comes to job-related depression and suicide risk. There are whole fields that are known to turn workers into high-functioning alcoholics (see e.g. hospitality, construction and law). I feel like one has to be pretty deep inside the tech bubble to not realise just how off plenty of people in other professions are.
Hardly.
What I've found to work best in such scenarios is to always chop up the task at hand to essentials and nice-to-haves[0]. If another task comes up before you're finished, chop it up as well and ask your leadership what's more important: the essentials from this new task or nice-to-haves from that previous one.
It's never the nice-to-haves.
Also it always helps to not promise something you can't deliver - this applies to every level in the hierarchy.
[0] Sometimes, if essentials are the vast majority, you can produce versions of them which are simpler, but still workable from a business perspective, and have bringing the full-featured versions as a nice-to-have.
This was the problem. I saw it myself in one place. The sales guys go out and promise the moon on a stick. After all, they're incentivised to sell, and the won't be one ones stressing to get the job done. They probably have no clue that that one feature they've just agreed to is massively complicated and probably not that important anyway.
Unless a decision is made with the CTO/an architect in the loop, forget it.
If it was and is unreasonable just tell them and then forget it.
You only get stressed if you accept other peoples' made up deadlines. They probably get you to do this with the promise of a meagre bonus or something. Just don't buy into any of that nonsense.
The other source of stress for a founder is the illusion of control. Just do what you can and keep shipping. It's a marathon. Be kind on yourself.
My only addition and I'm very curious as to your opinion: I think mental health / physical health is more impactful in software engineering than most other professions. At least for me, if I'm sick it directly impacts my working memory and ability to focus. I always tell my friends I could do yard work just fine, yeah I'd feel like crap still but I could do it. If I'm trying to code something difficult often times I can end up making zero progress or arguably negative progress if I'm sick long enough as I lose context of code changing around me.
The same holds true if I'm stressed or anxious or whatever.
This can probably become a cycle with the things you mentioned that makes it easy to trend downward.
Thanks for sharing your story :)
So I go back to him and he accused me of lying and went and told the CEO. The CEO, a pretty chill guy with a doctorate, I was expecting to have a rational discussion about with but not he screamed at me too. I was downtrodden emotionally so I sheepishly said yeah I'll have another look and went back and started at it for another couple of days. No it was impossible. At that point I was stuck in a situation. I've got unemployment on one side and I've got getting screamed at inevitably. I just sat there in a depressed little hole with no options. I was angry, isolated and had no one sympathetic around. I suspect many people end up here.
Slept really badly that night. Woke up, got in the car and drove into the office. Got half way and got distracted by a cafe and decided I'd get breakfast and think some more about it. Sitting there eating a fat sausace, something just went ping, I SMS'ed John and the CEO with "fuck you I quit". I moved back in with my parents, did fuck all for 6 months, got another job, which was 80% less shit and the company I worked for went down the shitter about a year later because they couldn't deliver it.
If you feel like shit in a job, just leave. It's not worth it.
However, that seems to have taken a pause. Higher interest rates mean the free money buffet is over and the FAANGs have spent the last year flooding the job market with engineers of the highest pedigree. I'm not quite job searching right now, but my understanding is that it's not the cake walk it used to be.
That's terrible, I'm so glad you got out of that situation.
Hands down the best part about working in a field like tech and building up a cushion of savings has been that I haven't had to put up with coworkers who yell, accuse each other of lying, or any other immature, boundary-pushing behavior.
In the past I worked for the military, academia, theater, etc and there were times when I felt a strong esprit de corps and others when I felt stuck because I was a cog in a large machine and had granted jerks immense power over my life -- working on a contract in a war zone, needing approval from certain professors to further my career, needing a job to pay the rent, etc.
Whereas in tech it's easier to fix situations like this. In one case I went home early to send out resumes and left a few months later. In the other I just sent a record of the conversation to my boss and she dealt with the issue appropriately.
A major career regret is having put up with jerks. No matter how much the customer/company pays or how interesting the work is you can find other work that pays just as well and is just as interesting except you get to spend more of your exceedingly short lifespan with kind, smart, well-adjusted people.
Caution though, the CEO may recognize this as a classic CEO subterfuge.
If they are impressed, or believe they can draft off of your hubris, you may still be able to pull this off.
Something someone was doing in excel scaled up to taking all the energy in the universe? That does not sound right.
> So, I will repeat it again: our greatest asset isn't the code we write. It’s us, alive, and living the life.
Happy people work harder, get more done, are more creative and ill less often.
It pays off for employees as well as employers to put life happiness first.
Like for deadlines : most of the time it isn't. People can get new jobs. You can found a new company.
But burnout is like losing a limb : you will never be able to operate at the same level again (not to mention the months it's going to take before you can start do even part-time work again).
There are very few situations where such a sacrifice would be worth it. Probably only those involving family members, and consider that after that they will have to deal with your now relatively crippled status for the rest of your life.
That means standing up and saying "No" and sticking to it. Overtime it will show that your people perform better than others since they have a sane person ensuring that they are not on death marches to failure.
Or it can mean losing your job, in some instances.
What would you rather do?
Kill your team by imposing impossivle tasks, due to pressure form the top in order to climb higher in the hierarchy or at least maintain,.
Or be straight and honest, and if nescessary take one for the team-+
just on to the next project :/
What I found in my career is that the good managers do empathize and even sometimes try to improve the situation, but they simply can't.
More often than not the cause of the issues come from decisions done at the top levels of the company.
White Knight Syndrome is very real... The trick is knowing you have a problem.
Best of luck out there, =)
But being oncall for a shakey infra stack? That shit is hell. No deadlines, just the threat of incidents or downtime at any time of day.
Actually, that is exactly what you _can_ do. It just takes more transparent communication about your needs and desires and more trust and safety within you r company and team...
If we can even discuss my mental health, there's no way I'll be able to work there.
The action item is always disappointing: some flavor of "take care of yourself."
If we were trees in a forest fire, then yes. Making ourselves more fireproof is the best we can do.
We're not trees, though, are we?
* It's hard to predict how long something will take so you stress out when you take longer. Even if requirements are clear, all sorts of things can delay implementation: debugging, build issues, plugging in dependencies, bugs in underlying libraries. All these can take a limitless amount of time.
* Complexity can be overwhelming. Staring at a thousand line, convoluted class can make you shut down, just because it's too much.
* Being new and not able to produce at the same level as others. This one hopefully goes away after some time as you ramp up, but you might be new at different projects in the same team.
* Changing requirements, increasing scope.
* Priority inversion - you depend on another team for your work, but they aren't working on it, and you have to answer for that.
* Having to give an update at a status meeting when you know you haven't made as much progress as you'd like.
* Feeling bad about your productivity, so you don't take care of yourself (wasting time at night), are tired, and aren't able to be productive the next day. This whole loop can last for a long time if you can't break it.
* You can't ask for help because you feel like others will think you're stupid for asking those questions. And you can't make progress bc you really need to know those things.
Many of these things are exacerbated by life circumstance, social position, personality, previous mental health history, and management/peers. The way you can improve this stuff for yourself is by having a solid wellness routine (exercise, sleep, diet), good communication with your peers/manager (this is a chicken/egg situation), and pushing for reasonable organizational changes. Of these, only wellness is totally under your control. The others require people around you to change, which may not be possible.
Most health insurance system do seem to think there is a difference. Just like teeth seem to be luxury bones and eyesight is kinda optional.
Why aren’t all these things first class in most health systems? Coverage is usually pretty decent for physicians, but if you have a problem with your mind (or teeth, or eyes) then good luck here is a fraction of what the therapy costs and don’t bother us with it again.
> This one time, for example, when our deployment crashed halfway through right before a major release. The CEO emphasized how important this project was, so we were all hands on deck, trying to get it back up, fearing the worst, that the client would go ballistic if he found out we were delaying the release. I was stressing big time, thinking we had to pull off a miracle, and of course we did.
> But you know what? After all that chaos, it turned out the relevant stakeholders were away on vacation that week, and the release wasn't even checked for many days after that.
A CTO should have some power to push back and set priorities. If you're just doing what you're told you're not really a CTO but a team lead with a fancy title.
This a general problem with young people in leadership positions. They don't have the confidence to say no as often as they should nor the perspective to identify what's really important - every setback feels cataclysmic.
Agreed wholeheartedly on both points, though I'd say a general problem with people new to leadership positions rather than make it about age. Society as it exists now (at least as I've experienced it) is very strong on rule following and it's a pretty massive shift to be the person setting the rules.
The CEO should've been empowering, too, and it might well be a symptom of the same malady: imagining the way you want things done, then pushing harder and harder until the world is that way regardless of cost. Human psychic cost is real and will cost you your best people.
Consider instead if the CEO said to the team "We definitely need this done, but I don't want you to burn yourselves out. Please keep at it as your top priority during working hours, all other goals are on pause until we have a release, and keep me up to date at the end of each day with progress until we're there. I don't want anyone working after hours. Don't worry about the client; I'll handle them." When the story unfolds from there the client doesn't even notice, the team feels supported and heard, and the work still gets done. Everyone wins.
Works for me.
> , especially those of us who've taken on the challenge of leadership.
Nope.
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