Stress makes programmers dumber? | Hacker News Reader

Stress makes programmers dumber?

messel.typepad.com

16 pointsmessel9 comments

Try phone interview at google to get that "really dumb" feeling after an hour of answering tricky questions - all of which are real easy when relaxed, but not when there is an "invisible interviewer" waiting on the other end.

Just an update I moved the blog to http://www.victusspiritus.com/ this post is now at http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/04/12/stress-makes-progra...

One "kind of dumb" that worries me is based on http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making "Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain".

If I spend all day programming, making micro-decisions like if i should refactor some code, if i should put the extra effort into some code or if i am not going to need it, pondering what to benchmark, deciding on how to unit test something... how good of a decision maker am i when i leave work?

Interesting cross-links between this article and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=559411

Duh. Stress makes everyone dumber.

The linked series of blog articles on the-programmers-stones.com goes into great detail about the stress process.

They were written from the context of: "Here is how to build a team of rockstar programmers out of otherwise ordinary programmers, if you can create these specific necessary conditions." Talk about a competitive edge right there.

I was knocked off my chair the first read through, hence the blog post. This is just something programmers don't talk about. You just assume everyone is stressed, you never look into the neurological systems, but that's precisely what a good programmer would have done!

I was kinda dismissive of your blog post ... out of random impulse, I clicked through the link and was just as impressed as you were. There's a lot of interesting things in there. I've been talking to my business partner and my friends about it ... and trying to apply it elsewhere too.

Later that day, I stumbled through Steve Blank's blog and greatly enjoyed that too. One particular article, http://steveblank.com/2009/04/09/supermac-war-story-6-the-jo... ... has much of the same ideas, though it didn't go into the details of the neuroscience. Based on the neuroscience from the juxtapositional thinking blog though, it definitely explained why SGB was able to build such a great team.

Thanks for linking this. It's going to affect a lot of what I set things up from now on.

It was my sincere pleasure. Thanks for taking the time to read it.

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