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Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone track their stress levels whilst programming?

Anecdotally and non-scientifically I’ve noticed that my health (stress related illness) has vastly reduced since moving from being a staff engineer to engineering management.

It’s not that I’m less stressed but the stress is a different pattern.

Whilst programming I noticed that my day was a series of spikes of frustration and stress and then a severe drop off once I solved a problem.

Essentially a dopamine - serotonin feedback loop all day every day.

My stress now is generally a more flat and smooth line.

I often thought it would have been interesting to actually track it using a medical device but was unsure if anything like that even exists.

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I had the opposite experience. Frustrations whilst coding could be severe but were mostly things within my control. Sure, we had major failures and outages which spiked stress, but these were rare and we learned and grew from them.

As a manager, I was constantly dealing with things way outside my control with much more severe consequences: other people's emotions, people quitting, budget cuts, layoffs, political posturing. At one point I was told to layoff an entire team of very talented, very productive Ukrainian engineers because Russia had decided to invade their country and my company didn't want to deal with the _possibility_ that they'd become unproductive.

I know it's entirely dependent on the type of work and the organization, but from a stress-reduction standpoint I'll take staff engineer over people manager every time.

Same. The two big stresses as an IC are "I have a difficult problem and I might need to ask for help or admit I can't do it, but there's no deadline closer than the end of the day" and "Production is on fire, which means I get to feel like a hero for a few hours and then do a writeup begging for time to fix our stupid problems." Stressful, but not too scary since there were no other humans involved.

When I briefly tried to manage my own team the problem was, "The whole team is staring at me during this boring-ass meeting and it turns out the company's problems are not something I can solve as quick as I thought I could"

Letting down customers is stressful, too. When we had big customers quit I took it kinda personally.

A lot of hubris involved I guess

Interesting. Anecdotally agree.

I’ve been trying to improve my mindset when coding. I find myself worrying about solving the problem correctly, and I’m trying to change that so my focus is more on slow, correct practice. Easier said than done, but the idea is that it will be less stressful and reduce the frustration peaks you mentioned

This is something I have been thinking about a lot since moving from programming into management. Some sort of device to measure the data on this would be really interesting, if only just to see that other people in the same position experience the same thing.

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