Do they include burnout and depression as injuries?
> Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”
> They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming.
When you get to the Senior+ level in software, the buck often stops with you, and if you can't figure something out it can be a big ego hit. I never woke up or went to sleep wondering if I would be able to do landscaping or stock shelves the next day, but I often fall asleep stressed about how to architect something at work.
Ownership of problems is worth a lot of money, thats why CEOs get paid so much. In most other jobs you can blame a chain of managers and processes, but with engineering if you fail the blame falls straight on you.
But CEOs don't seem to "own" any problems, do they? However bad they fuck up, they still get to sail away into the sunset on their "golden parachute" separation deal.