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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

I've come to believe that there's something about the practice of software development that causes, or can cause mental illness. I've seen a few colleagues over the decades have some very serious issues. It's really quite a serious problem in our industry, imho.

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I think Software Engineering attracts neurodivergent people. I am an adhd software engineer, and know a disproportionate amount of adhd software engineers.

I think that level of executive dysfunction and “catchup” is problematic

I have a hypothesis about that, based on prior battles with depression. A characteristic of many people who struggle with depression is revisiting things over and over in your mind, looking for what is often a non-existent solution. This is a very, very useful trait in a software engineer. It helps us think of solutions to hard problems, to see options that are not initially obvious.

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.

Yes and to add to this, I think also the longer you stay in the industry, the more you realize that the industry itself has intractable problems (at least on the scale at which you can effect change). The tension is whether or not to accept those problems or leave the industry.

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.

+1 I spent most of my childhood and teenage years feeling depressed due to traumatic experiences. I failed at mostly everything until I started programming. I took some mushrooms last year that helped me stop this constant cycle of repeating thoughts.

It seems like there's an increasing degree of awareness (in some parts of the US) that psilocybin mushrooms can be transformative for treating PTSD and/or depression. I'm curious if you live in a US state, and what your experience was like....

Psychedelics force you to break out of mental loops, and give you a new way to look at things (one that is already possible and intrinsic to you, but locked away by bad experiences) -- meaning a new, better way to live and experience life is possible.

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).

I was born in a tiny village in a poor country where local politicians literally banned wifi in schools because apparently "radiowaves cause autism and homosexuality". I'm not joking. This was the official governmental position. In 2017. You can imagine technical literacy of anyone I had contact with as a child, years before that.

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.

War, war never changes. Once you think about what we do as a form of combat, be it sparring in a classroom setting with kid gloves on or an all out bare knuckle street brawl, what we do is a form of grappling combat. You are right about dedicating 100% of your life to be where you are. In my experience in the industry there are two types of developers, those who do it as a job and those who live it as a life. No disrespect to those who are just there to take care of their family, but they are of a different breed. Programming is in a weird place where it's literally brand new in terms of the scale of human history and yet already "established" as an industry. Most of the engineers that I look up to and respect are the ones that will be coding from a wet cardboard box should it come to that, but darn it the code will be pushed to main no matter what.

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.

Pfsh. I sign off at 1700 and then code on my own stuff. |]

> All this to say that your pain and suffering is real and the true payout is just more pain and suffering.

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.

Where else is that mental revisiting useful? I'm very much in love with someone who has that trait and is a successful software developer. They say they want to get out of the industry in a few years. I want to know other places they can work.

You need wins to feel good. Or, projects with finish lines. But many projects go on year after year with no finish lines, ever, unless you or the company runs out of juice, or you move to a different company to do the same thing. In web dev, launch day is the closest you get, but it’s not a real finish line. Hitting kpi targets sort of counts, but it’s not psychologically satisfying like finishing a table or a piece of pottery or harvesting a crop and selling it or serving it for dinner.

Only because programmers use up thier artistic juices at work. Plenty of my friends who are payroll or work in warehouses do not have any mental investment into work and use that energy outside of work to write, quilt, or do stimulating activities of thier own choice. For me after work I put on Judge Judy and let my brain rot

This is real thing I'm glad you've acknowledged as more than just a figment of my imagination. There are things I want to do outside of work programming that are there own level of mental taxing and/or creative...side projects, competitive Magic the Gathering...and I while usually find some juice to squeeze into these, I do agree that it seems like many other professions leave a lot more in the tank.

Indeed! Software development is both knowledge, and creative work, but the industry treats us like replaceable cogs in an assembly line, which is NOT knowledge or creative work. We even utilize work tracking systems made FOR assembly line work, like kanban.

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

This is how I feel. But I’ve had enough. I’m seriously considering leaving the field, it doesn’t bring me joy anymore.

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.

Electrical installation of commercial camera and security systems. Networking running lines but not programming.

The industry is fundamentally about converting conscious thought into capital as efficiently as possible. So that it's bad for your mind makes sense to me.

I think a lot of the stress comes from the responsibility for making something work while the definition of that something can radically change based on the whims, lack of foresight, or poor planning by one's coworkers.

Well after all it's mostly writing that we do. Go check how well-adjusted the other writers are. Especially the ones who spend much of their time writing stuff they know is worthless, because rent.

> there's something about the practice of software development that causes, or can cause mental illness.

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

> Software Development Management/Processes/Methodologies have devolved into stimulating "constant chronic stress" as opposed to "episodic acute stress".

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?

While "Stress at Work" is inevitable; its frequency, duration and intensity have increased exponentially in the Software Development Industry. They have forgotten that we are "Biological Organisms" first (with all its natural limitations) and "Software Developers" last. Instead of devising systems/methodologies/processes for "Emotional Humans" everything is being tailored towards a "Rational Automaton" which is plainly wrong. In my own career starting from early 90's i have seen/studied how this change in environment has affected me personally for the worse (notwithstanding the effects of ageing) and am willing to bet that it is the case in general.

They say that pessimists see the world more accurately. And, I often think about how programming makes you see the world more accurately. Because, when you're programming, over and over and over again the computer tells you when your program doesn't work. No amount of wishing or insisting will change it. Yelling at your computer is unlikely to fix your program. People who work in other careers, like if they mainly deal with people, can more easily believe in wishful thinking and that everything will just work out because you want it to.

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