Tips for stroke-surviving software engineers
blog.j11y.io
blog.j11y.io
For me, I usually try to avoid anything where the working practices are strongly defined. Agile has long been a bad word.
I'm glad you're doing well now.
I see older devs being active in the trade well into their 60s but even as I much younger person I don't see how agile development is sustainable for a ~50-year career.
Pretty much everything that's been layered on top though has either nothing to do with the manifesto, or actively breaks it. i.e. there's a burning issue, I'll get to that after my sprint commitment, which was sold to let me finish work, but now only exists to stress me out to squeeze more widgets per unit of time, where the widgets pretty much never actually map back to anything actually tangible.
...and that /is/ topic of discussion every time this discussion happens
Every agile criticism conversation goes like this
A: agile as practiced is bad
B: but the manifesto is solid
It's predictable as the sun rising
Scrum is like Spaghetti Carbonara in America. The ingredients are simple and there's a tiny bit of technique involved that anybody can figure out after a few tries. For some reason though almost everybody that makes it decides that they know better than the people that invented it and so adulterates it with peas and onions and garlic and cream and cream cheese and Italian seasoning and parsley and chives until it ends up being Olive Garden Alfredo. If they wanted Carbonara then they would have cooked the Carbonara, not the waterfall with a bunch of JIRA workflows and four-hour meetings layered on top. They just did what they would have done anyway while attempting to sound fancy via obfuscation.
DevOps is a culture. It can also be the specific subset of highly skilled individuals who were part of or an outcome of said cultures cross pollination. Today DevOps most often means fairly unskilled person hitting pipelines with hammer.
In the end, the same old people with the same old commercial interests adopted the term in a way that benefited them but changed the meaning of the term because change was not actually something anyone wanted.
C: Therefore you’re doing it wrong.
And once an “agile guru” enters the conversation:
D: You need my book / seminar / services.
(Not for any deeper reason, only that whenever socialism fails, people tell you that 'real socialism' hasn't been tried, yet.)
Or: liberal democracy (I'm sure you can find a synonym that ends in *-ism) has been tried. It's been doing ok-ish. Obviously it has warts and all. But more importantly: approximately no one ever seriously claims that 'real liberal democracy' hasn't been tried.
Similar for constitutional monarchy, or 'social market economy', or dictatorships, etc. People can mostly agree that the real deal has been tried.
Inasmuch as Agile was adopted at companies, it's because it was sold to them as a way to provide greater transparency, accountability, and control into a chaotic software development process. The vice president behind the company's "Agile Transformation" probably can't even name point one of the manifesto; "we're doing Scrum with JIRA, therefore we're agile" is the extent of his concern.
A lot of young guys like that D-Day style work, then goof off for a while, but not me. Continuous sustainable work is much preferred.
If the tool is used wrong most of the time, it's at least partially to blame.
Only if there were other tools that didn't fall victim to the same business incentives, but they all do.
I've had PMs that find a balance with the business incentives and make it work. If you’re human and make the wrong choices, then most people, including me, will likely call you bad in that context. If they can't stand up to find balance with the business incentives, then they're a bad PM. That doesn't make them a bad person.
To be clear I am not claiming that SAFe is necessarily the best possible methodology. There is certainly room for improvement. But empirically it can work in real life.
Are you talking about Agile, Waterfall, or project management in general?
I've seen Agile work just fine. I've also seen it fail miserably. I've seen both of these at the same company with the main difference being how aggressive/delusional the leadership is. The easy test is if your leadership is legitimately ok with your team going home early if you complete your sprint commitment early, and it actually happens on occasion.
SAFe is just an attempt to mush something that like looks like agile to delivery teams together with something that fits into more traditional program management, governance, and strategic direction lifecycle models.
There's no particular magic to it, and it's probably better to think of it in terms of being an "enterprise variant of agile" rather than a "humane variant of agile".
The reality is that in some domains there just aren't many developers who are highly motivated, self directed, and thoroughly understand customer needs. Those people just aren't widely available in the labor market regardless of wages or working conditions. So if management doesn't impose a fairly strict methodology then then the program will collapse.
But leadership has to incentivize not just being a ticket monkey, and needs to mindfully empower people. You can't just flip a switch in a feature factory and say "fly my pretties, be free!"
Why would someone with these qualities work for someone else?
It’s not like my great grandparents had a passion for farming in South Dakota and that’s why they did it until they dropped dead. It’s all they knew and what they did to survive.
If you gave them the option to tap on a keyboard in an air-conditioned room for 10 or 20 of those years they would’ve taken it.
Too much software and you start turning into a computer, which obviously doesn't work very well.
That doesn't make it endless.
I'm grateful I've managed to avoid this so far. My favorite place to work has been more akin to "we need X done in Y system before Z date, but how and when it's done is up to you".
Tech sucks. It's filled with talentless hacks who think "because we use computers" means you've got a blank check to make every individual do the work of three individuals. And then your company gets gutted by private equity anyway, because it turns out hiring talentless hacks and overworking has consequences.
This is a weird take, but I genuinely and deeply believe the world would be a far better place if everyone experienced a life-threatening but recoverable major medical event and/or had children, while young. Perspective-shifting events that are core to the human condition and help ground your reality in work not being everything. By the way: The businesses our society would build would also be stronger.
I’m facing a similar set of health-based restrictions, it’s edifying and impressive how you’ve pushed through. I’m curious: how do you broach this with potential employers and shape your job search/career path around it?
Applying for pure remote positions puts one in direct competition with younger people who can pull obscene hours with no accommodation needs. Leading with disability/accommodation needs feels like the opposite of the ‘best foot forward’ honeymoon phase salesmanship associated with new jobs, and kinda soul crushing regurgitating the circumstances for chronic illness while hoping for a job. And uncontrollable management changes can eliminate medical protections and acceptable working environments, leading to an enhanced need to be able to hop jobs (exacerbating both the previous situations).
I’m fortunate my primary skills are amenable to straightforward accommodations, but you gotta get the job to do the job…
I have to do this every time now because I have a resume gap. I don’t have to explain in detail, but even revisiting those three years for a brief explanation sucks.
I’m sure there’s an implicit realization that I will likely ask for accommodations when I explain the gap which likely reduces my chances of being hired.
Could you get the job without these conditions and then drop the bomb on them as a disability accomodation
Well, I said "I'll never do IT again"... and when I say never, it usually happens in the end ;-)
I remember the first months, trees felt exhausting to look at because of their complexity, and I couldn't watch an action movie because it felt too intense.
I don't think most people wouldn't be able to, financially.
Pretty sure you'd be covered in a lot of western countries, and if not you have relatively cheap insurances that cover these things.
It's just an European viewpoint... I know for americans it's like a sci fi movie but it's very real here lol
In France you get ~67% of your salary for 36 months, after that it's case by case.
In Germany you get ~70% of your salary for 78 weeks, private insurances will cover more/longer too, for like < 50 euros a month
Also before you tell me how good social security is in France :-) you must know my doctor likely caused or amplified the stroke by giving me the wrong treatment at the wrong time, and by not telling me to go to the hospital before 3 full days... and then they let me out. I returned urgently the week after, when a neuro-surgeon freaked out.
Impressive.
I'll modestly add that my sight was getting better and wasn't really an obstacle. It started with an activity of carbon ink large format B&W art prints for other photographers... then I became one too.
The "irony" didn't appear to me at that time, someone had to tell me it was ironic!
- I was under severe stress at work - I woke up with aura, realised it when looking at the mirror, I had only one eye - visual symptoms (aura) didn't go away after 1 hour. That's the limit where you MUST seek medical advice - having "a migraine" that day raised my stress level... because work... - symptoms persisted... and after getting better over a year, what was left became permanent (blind spot where the migraine started in my field of vision)
DO NOT take triptans during the aura. DO NOT take any vasoconstrictors during aura, since it's a phase where blood flow is restricted. That could have caused my stroke.
When a migraine hits, I take aspirin, stop all stressors, ALL stressors, try to calm down (I've used anxiolytics occasionally), breathe and rest. I'm often off for 2 days. It happens about once a year.
Again, migrainous infarcts are VERY rare. You'll be fine, just let the aura pass, and know to seek medical attention if it doesn't.
You give me some hope things will get better for him.
Sounds like senior management
Just don't do that. I used to do that just fine and that's why I thought I was OK. I mean, I USED to go on in huge coding benders, did'nt I ? Well apparently not at 55, when the pressure has been on for months instead of weeks.
Other things to watch -- diet! With the work came less free time, put on weight etc and all the good habits I had built for years, disappeared.
And the worst bit you can think of is "Oh but I'm so CLOSE to being done, I'll just fix it up later when I can relax". Just don't.
I lost all sensation on the right side. It is coming back slowly. I can still work, didn't lose speech or mobility or strength, I consider myself super-mega-lucky in that.
This is what bites. I have some really narrow interest areas that I can end up being obsessive about, to my own detriment. We have to be careful.
Glad you didn't lose mobility and speech! I also feel lucky. I met others in neuro-rehab in far worse situations. For three months I couldn't walk and now thankfully do so with a stick and ankle brace. The hard stuff isn't the stuff you can see visually though. People see my floppy leg, and might presume that's the main thing, but nope. The big thing is the epilepsy, this constant monster present in the background. It's the invisible stuff that's often hard.
It... sucks. I've still progressed my career and made significant strides, and come to appreciate things that I never would have noticed if I kept on my previous trajectory, and while I don't think about it much anymore, for years it ate at me.
But it does get better with exercise. I was able to reduce weekly headaches to about 1/month.
It is unfortunately very common and becoming more common with the rise of PE.
I also see some advice about listening to your body after the fact, which I fully agree with. In my case, without going into too much detail, the stroke might not have happened if I had listened to my body beforehand, as it was caused by an injury I could have prevented.
So if I could give any advice from this place of experience it would be to listen to your body, and try to hear it when your fears and ego are shouting.
As I understand it, post-COVID a lot more people are having strokes at younger ages, primarily from PFOs. 10–15% of us are walking around with a small pathway between the atria of our hearts, and if a clot happens to form, it can pop into the other side of your heart and get pumped straight to your brain.
I was exceedingly lucky in that it cleared up on its own after about an hour. I was unable to speak and unable to move so much as a finger or toe on the right half of my body. I was completely incapacitated. They had me in the CT when it cleared up, and I immediately was back to my original self with no lasting defects.
Indeed. My first thought was "....just how common is this?"
Open-floor offices, non-stop emails and chat messages, several meetings scattered throughout the week and the day.
This kills productivity and increases stress and fatigue for people that need to concentrate to work on complex stuff. There's also the time you need to properly switch contexts.
I turnt the post-it note sideways, wrote `FOCUS TIME`, and put it on my temple, to block out my vision in that direction.
I joked about it with my team before, and then just did so when I felt comfortable enough with them. I utilize this strategy at home for deep focus in a chaotic living room setup.
2x Post-its, baseball cap, and over-the-ears noise-cancelling headphones is peak `focus-time` I've found.
I occasionally use them while I’m working for the reason you mention.
I love my pash. Highly recommend.
I feel I always have less stamina than other people.
So this list is close to what I have always preached.
Time as in energy is my most precious resource.
Don't let processes suck the life out of you. They're there to serve the people not the other way around.
I watch for burnout in my teams, and become burned out myself at times, but if you're burning out, tell somebody and get moved elsewhere. Coder doing some star-coder stuff the last 6 months, but can do sysadmin/devops things? Switch to that for a few weeks and come back mentally rested.
Legal protections against burnout I'm not aware of but the illness associated with elevated stress levels and 'burn out' do create other health complications.
Burn out is bad, bad stuff. Once somebody's burned out they can't do _anything_
It turned out I had Advanced Neurological Lyme disease. It took a couple years to recover from it. I also have Cluster Headaches, one of the most painful medical conditions known to science. Losing my the ability to think clearly, was worse.
As someone who uses my brain for work, the depression that arose from losing my mental faculties was very significant. I searched TFA for depression and did not see a mention. If anyone is dealing with a neurological issue like this, I would imagine that second order effects like depression are common, correct?
Pre Texting, Pre Email in the 90s I believe this kind of work was normal. All this self motivated, hyper context switching jobs we all do are relatively new compared to human evolvement. And we see the tax on us.
Reading this, I'm reminded of the idea that we should all care about accessibility, because barring death or radical advances in restorative medical technology, we will all rely on accessibility tech in some way eventually.
Besides what is listed here, have you observed anything that your coworkers or managers can do to help accommodate you? i.e. Is there a version of this for folks working with stroke-surviving software engineers?
We should try to do better.
Even when I was young, I discovered that after a certain level of fatigue my coding became garbage, and after a night's sleep I had to delete it and redo it. After this tipping point, I just stop doing the hard stuff. If I still want to work, I work on routine things that didn't take much concentration.
I never understood how people can write complex code when fatigued. I just get negatively productive trying that.
My best work happens at 2am, at about 4am I am too tired and get slow and get stuck, I think even then code quality suffers only a little bit.
That's just my experience, I believe it happens because if I am working at that time, I am hyped and or in the zone. There is a sort of second wind involved. The lack of distractions also helps I guess.
Slow down. Prioritize your own health and well-being. Focus on the essentials and cut out everything else.
If you are in pain, see a doctor before you end up in urgent care like I did.
One thing I struggle with is that the only time I seem to really get in the flow is when no one is around and no one else is working. Some form of stimulant is needed, but no stimulant I can use gets me to the point where I can get into more flow than I can when no one is around. I sometimes dream of how much I could do if I just lived at my office alone. This is sad and frustrating, because I don’t want that life where I cannot have a life of my own and where I cannot interact with people at work or it disables my ability to get things done.
Nutrition and some form of exercise are also incredibly important, especially as you get older. Not everyone needs the same things, so don’t let others tell you what is the “right thing for everyone”- there’s no such thing.
ah this age where "not alone" means "AI"...
How about, enjoy good connections with nice people. Both in personal and work. Maybe those people can even see the warning signs and tell you to stop before you have a stroke.
I'm not talking about meetings. relationships do not reduce to zoom meetings
and this is not about "knowledge offloading". that's a text file can do it. the key word is "help". the thing people did for each other;)
A couple points I'd add/double down on:
1. Find yourself a team of really good folks to work with who treat you as a human - At the peak of my epilepsy acutely interfering with my life, I was at a startup that, after being devastated by lockdowns, decided to scale down from 100 employees to 6 and start over. When I told the founder I'd need a month off twice within the span of 4 months for some very invasive surgeries, I fully expected him to let me go, as he was legally permitted. He told me to take all the time I needed, and for that I'll forever be indebted.
2. Avoid the urge to "other" yourself - the only brain we're exposed to 24/7 is our own. That makes it easy to lose track of what's baseline and easy to assume every time you forget something or otherwise "glitch," it's a sign you are flawed in ways others aren't. That's not true, everyone forgets things.
3. It takes time to recover emotionally - This week marks 3 years since my last big surgery, and I'm just past 2 since things started to really stabilize. Only in the last few months have I stopped walking around constantly viewing myself through the lens of a condition and with a sense of self-doubt and "othering". So be kind and patient with yourself. It takes time.
4. Reddit has some very supportive communities to help answer questions and remind you that you're not alone (including r/epilepsy). But don't get overly involved in them for too long, because then it becomes easy to define yourself and your tribe through your medical condition.
5. If epilepsy or some other condition prevents you from getting a driver's license, there's a lot to say for living in NYC or SF. Two of the only places in America where it's completely normal to live without a car and you wont stand out or feel excluded.
Very much self experimentation but they do work in mouse models as well as Russian medicine. I'm not encouraging anyone to experiment, just interested to see if anyone that has undergone experiences like OP's has experimented.
I have not experienced a stroke or similar but I just started a 6 - 8 week Dihexa course, low dose to test tolerance and I find I am experiencing benefits such as improved recall. I am learning guitar as my test suite. Something I have attempted multiple times before and given up on relatively quickly. 2 weeks in so far.
My intention is to drop the Dihexa at week 8 and then switch to Semax. The theory being that Dihexa improves synaptogenesis but inhibits pruning. Semax allows for pruning but optimizes the efficiency of existing used synapses. Dihexa is an experimental Alzheimer's medication and Semax is a Russian post stroke drug
As a stroke/neuro rehab speech-language pathologist that is married to a web dev/engineering manager (that obviously sent me this blogpost), everyone reading needs to listen to this author's sound advice for prevention of CVA as well as for post-stroke management. We are seeing younger age strokes more frequently, especially those with jobs that are high stress and low physicality (read: you folks!). Thank you to the writer for spreading this info and awareness… I can confirm it is not as niche as one might think and for best outcomes you have to respond FAST (look at Face, Arm weakness, Speech difficulty, Time to call 911). PSA of the day!
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/dmso-could-save-millions-...
This is excellent advice for anyone with knowledge based work though. Distractions, messages, pop-ups, asks, meetings, etc. are the leading reason I don't get as much done as I could. Some of your items could definitely help here.
Isn’t that needless cogitation something that helps creating new links in your brain and helps against cognitive decline in later ages?
But if you are sick you cant do X "healthy thing for normal people". If you are sick you cant get that hour of exercise a day and do weight lifting and work out your brain etc.
But if you feel like you won’t speak up because it’s not that bad, remember the next person who will come after you. When you have the capacity to push systems to do better, it’s better for everyone if you exercise it.
I'm wondering if some underlying mechanism in the brain is similar between having ADHD and having suffered a stroke. Or maybe it's just the conscious effort how to handle the symptoms that's similar.
As you would know ADHD is a problem with regulation, not capacity however with this stroke it appears that his capacity has fundamentally changed and is further impacted by the dysregulation.
It's still early, and we haven't seen the specialist yet but I'm taking this hypothesis to them and (if I remember to) will update/edit here with their response.
I’m still able to work as a software engineer, and my career has progressed, but the condition has held me back in a lot of ways.
Quite a recovery. No it's not me, just a dev that works in the same field.
Discrimination doesn’t have to be racial. You can be discriminated because of a handicap.
From Cambridge dictionary
> discriminate verb (TREAT DIFFERENTLY) > to treat a person or particular group of people differently, especially in a worse way from the way in which you treat other people, because of their race, gender, sexuality, etc.
Love this!
I've now recovered enough that I can type/edit faster, but I still use it; I keep a Worksheet.md tab around and keep a whole running log of stuff, LLM prompts etc
Not sure why some people can only (mentally but brain drags rest of the body along) exist in extremes, when basically always some sort of moderate middle path is best in all aspects of life.
Obviously you also get those on non-keto diets since non-keto people also get strokes, heart disease, fatty liver...
An apple can easily have more carbs in it than you are permitted in a day.
Keto however has numerous well researched negative health outcomes such as elevated LDL, ApoB, etc and these can be dramatically elevated in hyper-responders. Though, the science is also out on if mildly elevated LDL is anything to worry about. It's not a panacea but rather a trade off. Most people can stick to keto better because fats simply taste better and keep you feeling full longer and the alternative is much harder to stick to long term.
It is only known to be effective for treatment resistant epilepsy. Any other benefit either can be equally attributed to the control (CICO + exercise) or are pseudoscience.
(Can always try reader mode, if you just want to read the content without worrying about fixing it.)