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Precisely. We need more human care, for ourselves and others, not more software.

Hey, if you’re committed to find specific examples where general ones don’t work, you’re certainly going to find an endless supply of them. I cannot, will not and never have claimed to be able to provide concrete help for individual situations. In the end you’re entirely free to choose your own way, whatever that may be. I guess it’s just that knowingly choosing permanent depression in exchange for perceived financial stability is an unfathomable proposition for me.

I get where you’re coming from and empathize. I’ve been in that place for most of my life.

I believe the “food and shelter” argument to be a straw man though. My point is not about throwing yourself into destitution or even a situation in which the financial stress probably just replaces the job stress. That gains you nothing but more misery. There is plenty of middle ground between a good tech salary and starving homelessness.

However, if you permanently value living in a house of your own, driving an upper-class car, owning lots of tech gadgets and whatever else the millions of things are many people feel they need to be happy, over your mental health, this is not going to make much sense. Effectively, you don’t just sell your body for work, you sell your soul. This can even have disastrous results in retirement. I have met very well-off retirees who wouldn’t stop complaining about the “idiots” they had to work for and with.

It’s surely nice to be able to afford shiny things. It's certainly better to cry in the back of a taxi than having to take the bus in that condition. But if you’re willing to cut back and shrink your whole footprint, it is absolutely possible to find a different lifestyle and real contentment. I advocate for the Dieter Rams guideline of “less but better”. In fact, we need less of everything to keep living, with the sole exception of love – for ourselves and others. Everything else flows from that.

If you treat yourself well, others will too. And treating yourself well has very little to do with the amount of money you make or what you can afford. Treating yourself well flows from deep within. More money makes this easier and harder at the same time. The more stuff, the more distractions.

For me, it has become quite impossible to work on useless products and results. Most of what gets built, especially in software, is needless busywork. Just imagine if this energy could be channeled into solving real, hard issues facing us all. For now, that's a rather absurd pipe dream. Living in the real world, we have to adapt to what it is today — and ideally work towards a different tomorrow. So I for one am moving towards new horizons now, earning less than a quarter of what I made before. For me, that’s fine, because I cannot be different. That being said, I totally understand that many feel there's no alternative to the status quo.

If you code at a professional level, you are likely of above average intelligence. You are able to efficiently reason about complex systems to some degree. Those two skills alone qualify you for many jobs, especially when you’re willing to learn. What those are depends entirely on your interests and further skills.

Often, looking into a completely different direction is helpful. Ask yourself what you enjoy doing, apart from programming and computers. It could be cooking, gardening, talking to people, writing, teaching, whatever. Something that is not stressful for you to do. Something your friends maybe told you at one time or the other you’re good at without having to put great effort in it. Something that doesn’t drain you if you’re doing it for extended periods of time. Often that’s where you can find what’s truly important to you and your inherent skills are. Go from there. Let yourself be inspired. Those could be technical or entirely apart from what you’re currently doing.

When you start looking into unconventional jobs, you’ll be astonished what kind of work exists within reach. It often just looks like it isn’t because you’d have to leave your comfort zone to pursue them. That’s the issue with comfort zones: even if you feel like shit, it’s a familiar feeling. As humans, we tend to go with what we know, even if it leads to constantly feeling terrible. This way, we can at least make sense of what surrounds us. Going into the unknown is scary, sometimes it feels like mortal danger.

If you can afford it, take a sabbatical to clear your head. If you have a partner, talk to them about what you’re going through.

Why?

That’s a superficial argument. Is permanently exposing yourself to a level of emotional stress that results in a semi-permanent depressive state really worth the money?

I’d argue that if you have the skills to code, you are well suited for other areas as well, depending on your willingness to adapt. If you’re already depressed it’s harder to see alternatives and easier to feel trapped though.

No doubt. Depression is debilitating in so many subtle as well as visible ways. As parent is currently the most-upvoted comment, I believe it important to ask the obvious questions to maybe start a conversation.

> Sorry, that just turned into a rant at the end.

On the contrary, thank you. It’s the very context you wrote about that’s often missing in online conversations. Your anecdote beautifully illustrates the absurdity trap too much well-meaning tolerance eventually trips.

I’m reminded of a Red Dwarf episode (Timewave, S12E03). A crew of a space ship decided to outlaw all criticism on board, going so far as too construct a machine extracting “the inner critic” from everybody. The Red Dwarf crew encounters them and wants to leave immediately after, because, quote: “nothing works here, especially the people.”

It’s quite straight-forward that the posts’ author struggles with mental health issues. By their own public admission (and accounting for preferred pronouns) it is transgender, hates its body and is rather inconsistent and confrontational. All fine by me. I don’t care how you find happiness or whatever else. But it should be entirely possible to remark upon those facts without experiencing retribution.

Yet somehow any remark regarding their mental health state gets self-censored by the first mention of insensitivity, no doubt fearing said retribution.

I worry about that.

Wouldn’t the solution be to seek more of the rewarding parts of programming and re-evaluating exactly how destructive to your mental health working in that “professional” environment really is?

The latter part of your reply is important. My experience mirrors yours: the goalposts are constantly shifting. In such an environment you’re always going to find someone feeling offended by any remark. This inevitably leads to corporate gobbledygook and the loss of all meaning. Is saying nothing at all really a solution or just a way to avoid confrontation?

It was possibly insensitively worded, but the entirety of your now-deleted comment nevertheless hinted at some deeper, intuitive perception. No matter how hard we try to politically correct our speech, some impressions are just rather clear. For reference: https://catgirl.ai/pages/robot/ (see „why?“ section in particular)

I genuinely wonder how one can voice said impressions in a way that is considered acceptable, without being hurtful, at the same time not missing the mark.

Anyway, software ergonomics is not the answer to depression. I believe this to be rather clear as well.

Unless I’m misunderstanding it, what this study apparently shows is that when a mouse eats unhealthy foods for some time, digestive function changes. An eye-opening result indeed.

This is nonsense. Poland is a NATO member state. If Warsaw was attacked by Russia, it would trigger article 5 of the treaty, effectively declaring war on all member states. If the attack was carried out with a nuclear weapon, there would likely be a retaliatory strike. Voila, WW3.

Furthermore, however insane any leader of a nuclear power may be, I just got to believe there are competent, clear-headed people in the chain of command who would refuse to follow suicidal orders while not under immediate attack themselves.

So a group of developers gets their app and accounts banned because they violated the terms of service of a major platform. They built a third-party client for Instagram, fully aware that this use-case is a violation of the terms they agreed to. Now they complain because the obvious happened. Not only that, on Twitter they complain about Apple removing their app and not a dozen of similar but different apps.

All larger issues regarding infrastructure providers and user rights aside (and that’s a big swipe), this is childishly silly. It’s the equivalent of stealing some merchandise from a big box store, getting caught and claiming that it should be okay because “everyone’s doing it”. No, it is not okay.

And I say that as someone who fundamentally despises Facebook/Meta. Effective regulation needs to happen resulting in a different set of incentives driving actors like Meta. However, unnecessary stunts like this will only ever cause a storm in a glass of water.

Stunts like this are also intellectually dishonest – they confuse, twist and blend different issues together just to try to amplify their outrage potential until they dissolve into meaninglessness. If the developers are actually serious about this, I’m at a loss for words. Then again, maybe that’s today’s social media in a nutshell.

Many “content” sites are so annoying to use now that I almost reflexively click the “Reader” view and/or save it to Instapaper. If that doesn’t work, I abandon the site.

Thanks for this. I had originally written quite a bunch but realized it’s rather pointless to do.

Ultimately, no matter the stance or argument, it all boils down to the old Tolstoy quote for me: “As long as there are slaughterhouses there will always be battlefields.”

If you are unable or unwilling to muster the empathy to care for living beings you can easily dominate, how will you ever be able to emphasize with your enemies?

It’s also a lazy, pun-laden, misreading-the-room way to communicate. People who think of themselves as clever do that. It’s a preaching-to-the-choir style of framing. It undermines the intellectual concepts presented by not making the argument very well.

The main connecting IP was 195.113.175.41.

Storage or not is entirely irrelevant to robots.txt directives. It guides automated access. It must be parsed first and excluded URLs must not be accessed at all.

It was a crawler with the user agent "hgf AlphaXCrawl/0.1 (+https://www.fim.uni-passau.de/data-science/forschung/open-se...)", operated by the University Passau and Open Search Foundation named on your landing page. It would be a mighty big coincidence if this wasn't a project connected to this endeavor, especially when it confirms being an experimental crawler of said project at the UA URL.

While reading, I found the tone to be familiar. Came across “Amazon Swindle”, knew it was Stallman, scrolled to top, confirmed. No judgement on his personality here. I just find those “cute” names and straw men to be real annoying. There are of course valid points in there but this is not the way to make them.

I’ve already caught their crawler ignoring robots.txt directives on one of my sites, aggressively indexing explicitly excluded information.

This first happened to me in school. I had the misfortune of many rather incompetent teachers. Asking them genuinely interested follow-up questions would more often than not be met with an annoyed generalization. Still persisting to extract an answer reliably put them in punishment mode, so I quickly learned not to do that. Consequently, I lost all respect for them and the system. I was being punished for being curious.

A similar dynamic plays out everywhere, to this day. It can easily become a paralyzing minefield, especially when “safe spaces” are involved.

When I find myself in a potentially uncomfortable position like this, I remember the single most useful advice I’ve ever gotten from a sales coach: whenever you’re in the spotlight answering questions, be well prepared but remember that you cannot know everything. If you don’t know something this instant, say so. Compliment on the question if it’s a good one, offer to find out, then follow up personally. Instant pressure reliever, professional conduct and wise guy filter all in one.

I’ve said it before and will say it again: as long as there are no painful legal consequences, including jail time, for the responsible managers and C-suite, such behavior will not stop.

Thanks, that’s what I was aiming for. It’s kind of a litmus test what kind of professionalism you can expect in a place – if any. Especially when they have shown prior incompetence, as in OP’s example.

In all honesty, given that example, if I didn’t get immediate buy-in, I’d throw the towel right then. Over 15 years of experience show that train wrecks only ever get fixed when they are recognized as such from the start.

Nowhere were contracts mentioned. A proper proposal, for example, always has a date and to sign it if agreed to is just professional conduct. I’d be wary of any exec not willing to do that. Instant red flag.

Having stuff in writing is essential, for accountability on all sides. The exact format does not matter, neither does what passes as a signature in a company. My example was for broadest possible applicability. The point is the willingness to commit to something in writing and to take the time to reflect on the implications of doing so. If you cannot get that, you’ve already lost. There will be moving targets.

It’s interesting to see how all responses focus on the signature part as problematic due to its supposed formality. Is this an American work culture thing? I see signing off on an agreement as a signal of professional conduct and reliability.

Unless I’m missing something major, the article does not answer its headline question in any way. It just presents a bunch of examples but does not come to any conclusion.

Before anything else, getting buy-in for any kind of major change from the execs is key. Explain the situation and the effects. Have everything in writing, complete with date and signatures. Push back hard every time this commitment gets sabotaged because something is supposedly on fire. Get a guaranteed budget for external trainings and workshops, again in writing. Then talk to the team.

If you cannot get those commitments in writing, or later on get ignored multiple times: run. Your energy and sanity is better spent elsewhere. No need to fight an uphill battle alone – and for what? The company just revealed itself for what it is and you have no future there.

First I’d do that, then think about the engineering part.

In case someone is interested in the approach and uses Fish, I’ve created a simple autocompletion.

https://git.herrbischoff.com/dotpr0n/tree/.config/fish/compl...

I’m using “s” for a name instead of “sd” though, since there’s also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246069