[HN Gopher] Mental health in software engineering
___________________________________________________________________
Mental health in software engineering
Author : cmpit
Score : 193 points
Date : 2024-04-11 11:50 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vadimkravcenko.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (vadimkravcenko.com)
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| link appears to be dead
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > link appears to be dead
|
| Works for me.
| ekaryotic wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240411131046/https://vadimkrav...
| redmattred wrote:
| "Your lack of planning is not my emergency"
| surfingdino wrote:
| "It was. Now you are fired." how it typically goes at startups.
| hiatus wrote:
| Then the startup has to ramp up a hiring pipeline to backfill
| or dump the work onto someone else. Either way they won't get
| what they want.
| np- wrote:
| A startup that is firing engineers on the spot who dare to
| disagree probably won't last much longer anyway. Best of luck
| with their "critical" deadline then...?
| willcipriano wrote:
| I was worried about getting fired at these sort of places
| until I saw how they behaved when I quit a few of them.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I must say that I prefer the slightly longer wording: "A lack
| of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on
| mine"
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| "An example of uncertainty in business is when your CEO tells you
| they promised a feature to your biggest client and it needs to be
| built ASAP as highest priority, so all hands on deck. Then a day
| later they tell you another feature, completely contradictory to
| the first one, needs to be built as well and is also highest
| priority. When you tell them they both can't be highest priority,
| the answer is: make it happen."
|
| At a certain point you have to just build a queue and start the
| next highest priority thing next. Too much WIP kills you.
| submain wrote:
| As a manager, if upstream changes priorities on me but what
| we're working on is almost done, I just go ahead and finish it
| anyways.
|
| When they eventually switch back to the original thing they are
| always surprised to know it's been completed.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Worse is when it's a salesman, not the CEO. It's infuriating. I
| always wanted to tell that salesman that _he_ got to go back to
| the customer and tell them that we weren 't going to do it,
| since _he_ was the one who promised it without finding out
| whether and when we could do it.
|
| Of course, I never had the clout to force that to happen...
| Clubber wrote:
| It's always sales it seems. We're doing stuff under the gun
| right now because sales promised a huge new client we had
| something that wasn't ready yet. They didn't bother to ask
| us, they just promised so they could get their commission.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Good salesmen can sell the product that we already have.
| Terrible ones can't, and instead sell a product we don't
| have and then frantically beg R&D to make that product
| right away.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I've been so much happier ever since I took a position in an
| organization that doesn't feature a sales department.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Speculatively build a feature that you know a customer
| somewhere would want (but maybe not the customer you have
| now) and then demand he find someone to buy it within a month
| before the AWS bills for it are due.
|
| "You're costing us a lot of money!"
| btilly wrote:
| And this is why you need sales engineers. To look at what was
| promised, see that it meets the customer's needs, and is
| doable on your end.
|
| It isn't just about helping sell the customer. It is also
| about saying no to overeager salespeople.
| csmattryder wrote:
| This was my last job, anyone in this position for any longer
| than necessary should be looking for another role. You're on a
| path to burnout or apathy, either way.
|
| I called it "Monster of the Week", as I was watching a lot of
| X-Files at the time. Still like that term for it.
| arethuza wrote:
| At one point many years ago I was Director of Engineering for a
| company that was planning a major new version of their product.
| After I'd been there a few weeks I said to the CEO that I
| thought I had a pretty good understanding of the scope and
| challenges for the new release.
|
| The CEO said "no you don't" - which led me to ask why he
| thought this and he said he had thought up a new "must have"
| feature over the weekend - which was clearly very technically
| challenging. He then asserted that anything could be built in
| 48 hours....
|
| I'm amazed I lasted as long as I did in that job.
| coldtea wrote:
| The CEO tells the Director of Engineering how long a time a
| feature "could be built" in? A new one, they suddenly pulled
| out of their asses too?
|
| Why even have a Director of Engineering position then?
| eschneider wrote:
| To take the blame, so, so obviously.
| coldtea wrote:
| Ah, of course!
| spacemadness wrote:
| Because the world of business runs on hubris.
| Verdex wrote:
| This is one of the reasons why kanban is my favorite project
| management methodology.
|
| "Ah, new highest priority feature. Lets do a mini discovery
| session and it looks like this work can be represented with 20
| sticky notes. Our historical team velocity is 10 sticky notes
| every two weeks. So we'll probably be done in four weeks. If we
| take down all the existing work in progress. Lets go to each
| existing sticky and you can confirm that we can stop working on
| it."
|
| The stakeholders are still allowed to make decisions, but
| (hopefully) it forces them to be realistic and understand what
| they're asking the team to do.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| Pivotal Tracker does something like this with release
| markers. You can set markers between any two stories and,
| optionally, set a date. Tracker does a very simple moving
| average projection and if the stories before the marker will
| take too long, it turns bright red.
|
| I found it remarkably effective at getting business folks to
| actually prioritize. They don't believe _you_ , but they'll
| believe the computer.
| koonsolo wrote:
| If both have high priority, it's the same as both have low
| priority.
| fatnoah wrote:
| And, as happened to me recently, the customer states in the
| demo that it's useless to them and let's just all move on to
| the next release.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| One of the strongest skills as a business facing developer is
| being able to say no.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| Many people misunderstand this. Just saying 'no' and being
| firm won't make you successful, it's not a very useful.
| Saying 'no' while convincing others that 'no' is actually the
| best strategy is a great skill.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| A good way to say "no" is, "yes, but then the thing I'm
| working on will not be done".
| epiccoleman wrote:
| https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-saying-no
|
| > best weapon against complexity spirit demon is magic word:
| "no"
|
| > "no, grug not build that feature"
|
| > "no, grug not build that abstraction"
|
| > "no, grug not put water on body every day or drink less
| black think juice you stop repeat ask now"
|
| > note, this good engineering advice but bad career advice:
| "yes" is magic word for more shiney rock and put in charge of
| large tribe of developer
|
| > is ok: how many shiney rock grug really need anyway?
| bitwize wrote:
| when mysterious packages (new sandals, new animal skins,
| etc.) keep arriving at cave door for mrs. grug, grug not
| save very many shiny rock.
|
| also, wolves and sabretooth tigers get hungry, need
| grooming, need vet, etc. picky about food too, want
| expensive organic stuff. sometimes mrs. grug buy animal
| skins for wolves even though they have perfectly fine pelts
| of their own. and don't get grug started on lil' gruglets
| (which this grug not have).
|
| then no pile of shiny rock for rainy day, when shiny rock
| stop coming and cave mortgage is due.
|
| shiny rock very important. get as much shiny rock as can
| without compromising values. happy mrs. grug = happy grug.
| ijwann wrote:
| This is why good developers are hard to find. There aren't a
| whole lot of developers who have the required technical
| abilities while also being able to communicate with
| clients/leadership effectively.
|
| The CEO is doing that because they don't understand how things
| work in your org. If you're the one communicating with the CEO,
| then its your job to be persuasive when telling them why what
| they're asking can't happen the way they're envisioning.
|
| If they come back with "make it happen" then you weren't
| persuasive enough.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's not an example of uncertainty in business, it's an
| example of incompetence in leadership. The problem is not one
| of software engineering, it's one of rampant bad management and
| business practices.
| edding4500 wrote:
| Kudos for speaking out
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anPb6X-sXxI
| vlan0 wrote:
| >So, I will repeat it again: our greatest asset isn't the code we
| write. It's us, alive, and living the life.
|
| This is so important. Our work is an extension of us. Our state
| in the moment will bleed into all areas of life. There is nothing
| more important. As we are limitless potential. But only if we are
| living in the here and now.
| west0n wrote:
| As the founder and CEO of a two-year-old startup, seeking
| certainty in the direction amidst uncertainty (determining which
| products can bring customers and profits) should become my
| instinct.
| cjk2 wrote:
| I'll dump this one here as it's still annoying me a bit. So one
| afternoon I'm sitting there and our sales guy John came in (you
| know who you are if you're reading this) and described what he'd
| managed to sell a client. I sat there and I scribbled on bits of
| paper for hours, did some research and went back to him with the
| point that it wasn't possible from an algorithmic perspective.
| Basically he'd assumed that if it worked for a couple of steps in
| Excel it'd be fine up to a few hundred. I scribbled out the
| mathematics a few times, wrote some prototype code and no the
| scalability characteristics approached "all the energy in the
| universe" levels of compute pretty quickly. O(wtf!).
|
| So I go back to him and he accused me of lying and went and told
| the CEO. The CEO, a pretty chill guy with a doctorate, I was
| expecting to have a rational discussion about with but not he
| screamed at me too. I was downtrodden emotionally so I sheepishly
| said yeah I'll have another look and went back and started at it
| for another couple of days. No it was impossible. At that point I
| was stuck in a situation. I've got unemployment on one side and
| I've got getting screamed at inevitably. I just sat there in a
| depressed little hole with no options. I was angry, isolated and
| had no one sympathetic around. I suspect many people end up here.
|
| Slept really badly that night. Woke up, got in the car and drove
| into the office. Got half way and got distracted by a cafe and
| decided I'd get breakfast and think some more about it. Sitting
| there eating a fat sausace, something just went ping, I SMS'ed
| John and the CEO with "fuck you I quit". I moved back in with my
| parents, did fuck all for 6 months, got another job, which was
| 80% less shit and the company I worked for went down the shitter
| about a year later because they couldn't deliver it.
|
| If you feel like shit in a job, just leave. It's not worth it.
| TimPC wrote:
| It's good advice if you have the appropriate financial
| resources or support network, but plenty of us don't have the
| option to move back in with our parents for six months and need
| to adult on hard-mode.
| cjk2 wrote:
| Yeah I learned that security was pretty important after that
| and security means not buying nice shiny things until you
| have no money and having a decent buffer zone.
| weakfish wrote:
| That may be, but it sounds like the GP was just sharing a
| story.
| silverquiet wrote:
| Sometimes you don't leave by choice and staying ahead of the
| layoff treadmill takes its own toll on mental health.
| Probably doesn't hurt to patch things up with the parents if
| possible.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I figured most of us in software would have at least a few
| months of buffer. Of course I don't have kids so
| jajko wrote:
| That's the gist, with kids (and potential mortgage) the
| buffer is so huge, even if its there it creates its own
| pressures. Nobody normal likes to burn through tens of
| thousands if not more, so they often stave it off, for
| better or worse (and worse it usually is)
| nick7376182 wrote:
| I'd be curious what the algorithm was. Were/are there any
| approximate algorithms that could have approached the problem?
| cjk2 wrote:
| It was proximal routing optimisation in this case to decrease
| operating costs. They already had good approximation
| algorithms but they sold better than possible for a higher
| price than competitors and couldn't deliver.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Sounds like the sort of thing that if you had invented it,
| it would be silly to part with it for a simple wage.
| lioeters wrote:
| Sadly, a lot of people are too nice to do this, and instead
| have a mental breakdown trying to solve an impossible
| situation. Despite the popular expression, "Never give up,"
| sometimes it's important to know when to say fuck it and quit.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I wonder if this hits self-taught or "code boot camp"
| developers harder because they may not have the theoretical
| background to notice "oh this is the halting problem" or "oh
| this is TSP" before getting too far into the weeds.
| ryandvm wrote:
| For the last 20 years, employment in the software engineering
| field has basically been a dream scenario for the job seekers.
| Great wages and every company was always trying to hire.
|
| However, that seems to have taken a pause. Higher interest
| rates mean the free money buffet is over and the FAANGs have
| spent the last year flooding the job market with engineers of
| the highest pedigree. I'm not quite job searching right now,
| but my understanding is that it's not the cake walk it used to
| be.
| np- wrote:
| While software engineers have definitely had a few good
| recent years (especially during the work from home boom
| during COVID times), I would say it was equally dire around
| 2009-2012 post-financial crash. And 20 years ago was 2004 -
| just off the heels of the dot com bust, where the job market
| was much much worse than today. Anecdotally, from what I
| hear, I would agree it's not a cake walk anymore like it was
| in ~2021 but it's also not quite a hopeless situation either.
| asoneth wrote:
| > So I go back to him and he accused me of lying and went and
| told the CEO. The CEO, a pretty chill guy with a doctorate, I
| was expecting to have a rational discussion about with but not
| he screamed at me too.
|
| That's terrible, I'm so glad you got out of that situation.
|
| Hands down the best part about working in a field like tech and
| building up a cushion of savings has been that I haven't had to
| put up with coworkers who yell, accuse each other of lying, or
| any other immature, boundary-pushing behavior.
|
| In the past I worked for the military, academia, theater, etc
| and there were times when I felt a strong esprit de corps and
| others when I felt stuck because I was a cog in a large machine
| and had granted jerks immense power over my life -- working on
| a contract in a war zone, needing approval from certain
| professors to further my career, needing a job to pay the rent,
| etc.
|
| Whereas in tech it's easier to fix situations like this. In one
| case I went home early to send out resumes and left a few
| months later. In the other I just sent a record of the
| conversation to my boss and she dealt with the issue
| appropriately.
|
| A major career regret is having put up with jerks. No matter
| how much the customer/company pays or how interesting the work
| is you can find other work that pays just as well and is just
| as interesting except you get to spend more of your exceedingly
| short lifespan with kind, smart, well-adjusted people.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The Silicon Valley Machiavellian TechManager way to deal with
| this situation is to say "Yes, we will do this, but only if I
| get an up-front bonus and a team of twenty." The CEO instead
| gives you 6 headcount and a bonus schedule with performance
| milestones. You put the team together. Drag things out as long
| as you can, managing upwards with bullshit and a charismatic
| smile, faking the goals when you can, while the team is on a
| death march. Finally, when it's obvious that you'll never
| deliver, blame the team and parachute away to a different
| company with whatever bonus money you managed to get your hands
| on, where they offer you a "Director" title and $1M in stock
| because you were a "leader."
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _the scalability characteristics approached "all the energy in
| the universe" levels of compute pretty quickly_
|
| Something someone was doing in excel scaled up to taking all
| the energy in the universe? That does not sound right.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| His point was they'd only done a small set in Excel as a POC.
| It's plausible that with an O(2n) algorithm you'd be looking
| at this kind of thing.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| I just can't imagine what results someone would need that
| would mean a mandatory unscalable algorithm.
| dboreham wrote:
| Haha that was a great post because I was reading from the
| beginning thinking "gonna follow up tell this person they don't
| need to take abuse from sociopaths" then got to the end. Good
| job. Not every employer is a psycho but many are.
| xyst wrote:
| This is a person that should have never been in a leadership
| position. I have worked under these types of people that were
| great engineers themselves but couldn't lead worth shit.
|
| No trust in the team. Always doing shit themselves. No
| discussion. Backdoor discussions. Always bending to the will of
| management. Everything is "important"/"critical". It's
| micromanaging to the worst degree.
|
| At the same time, I would likely fail in the same way if given
| the position. Albeit, to a much lesser degree. I think management
| often puts us in these impossible positions without any good
| reason other than "to look good to X." What's even worse if it's
| was just to earn fucking brownie points with some no name mid
| level director.
|
| This is why I think unions in tech would be great. To set
| realistic expectations, approach management from a collective
| point of view.
|
| Unfortunately companies today only aim to get that VC money with
| a quick exit and IPO. I think the general sentiment amongst the
| vultures is a union would make the quick exit less of a reality.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Always doing shit themselves
|
| This is one of the most counterintuitive things about
| leadership roles IMO.
|
| If you get promoted there, it's often because you got a lot of
| things done yourself in an IC role. And then the fewer things
| you do yourself, the better off you, the company, and your
| reports are once you're in a leadership role.
|
| So you have to learn that feeling idle compared to what you
| used to feel like isn't a sign that you're doing a bad job.
| bluGill wrote:
| In addition as a leader your best use is often to be
| interrupted with questions from junior engineers. This means
| you can never (or rarely) get into a flow where you are
| productive, as you are getting close someone interrupts your
| thought with a question.
|
| As such if you have time to work on engineering (which you
| should make to stay sharp) it needs to be something
| unimportant to the business so that you can be late. Trying
| to add a new warning to your static analysis tool, checking
| out the latest framework to see if you should switch to it in
| the future - and other such things that you really want and
| long term are good but short term won't pay the bills.
| paulcole wrote:
| > In addition as a leader your best use is often to be
| interrupted with questions from junior engineers.
|
| I kinda disagree w/ this. I get better results from helping
| people understand this:
|
| https://www.techtello.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/03/decisio...
|
| And then making sure that they're taking action when they
| should take action and getting help when they should be
| getting help. This means they are wrong sometimes but it's
| better for them to be wrong sometimes and learn than to be
| interrupting with too many questions when they should just
| be doing their best.
|
| Admittedly at this point my only direct reports are bosses
| themselves, but they vast majority of questions they have
| for me go into a shared 1:1 doc that we address monthly.
| Everything else they take action on and report as needed.
| bluGill wrote:
| Kindof, but a lot of time has been wasted figuring out
| something that someone else already has done.
| paulcole wrote:
| Better to figure things out on your own than learn that
| you can always interrupt someone else when you get a
| little stuck.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The best advice I heard about the switch from regular
| engineer to mgmt role was this: A software engineer works to
| build harmonious productive stable software systems. An
| engineering manager works to build harmonious productive
| stable _people_ systems. The _product_ is different.
|
| So many people who move into management don't make this
| mental shift and keep their hands on the steering wheel
| because that's how they got there in the first place. But if
| you don't let others drive, you won't be able to keep the car
| on the road for long. If you go into that role your job is to
| mostly get your hands off the nuts and bolts of the software
| system and create people systems of motivation, trust, and
| organization to get your team members working well on them
| instead.
|
| I've never made the transition myself but have increasingly
| thought about it.
| paulcole wrote:
| Yeah this is a big point in High Output Management by Andy
| Grove. That to be a manager (or to do any job really) you
| need to understand what you're producing and how to measure
| the quantity and quality of that output - ideally
| identifying issues with output before they become costly to
| fix.
|
| Much easier said than done but it was a real Aha moment for
| me as a boss.
| zero-sharp wrote:
| >No trust in the team. Always doing shit themselves. No
| discussion.
|
| Yup, I've had a boss like this. Maybe my company was
| particularly dysfunctional, but I didn't have much experience
| with the projects and tasks I was being assigned. I definitely
| was not hiding it either. Then when I spent time trying to
| figure things out on my own, my boss would simply do the work
| himself and provide no feedback.
| dvdbloc wrote:
| Currently have a manager like this and trying to determine
| how to deal with it. I'm basically just waiting for him to
| burn himself out from his own constant dysfunction and leave.
| He's so engrained in this behavior I don't even know how I
| could provide him constructive feedback to help him.
| jampekka wrote:
| I do someting like this quite a bit. If I deem it's easier
| to do it myself than to instruct or supervise someone else
| doing it, I do it myself. This is quite often the case. I
| don't see how doing it the harder way would somehow help
| with not burning out.
|
| Do you think it's easier for your manager that you do the
| things than that he does them themselves? Have you tought
| of ways that you would make it easier for them for you to
| do the things?
|
| Lucily I'm not really manager but I do have some
| responsibility of projects with other people.
| zero-sharp wrote:
| >I do someting like this quite a bit. If I deem it's
| easier to do it myself than to instruct or supervise
| someone else doing it, I do it myself. This is quite
| often the case. I don't see how doing it the harder way
| would somehow help with not burning out.
|
| You will most likely always be more efficient than the
| people who are less senior/just starting out. So then:
| when do you decide it's worth it to help those less
| senior team members become more efficient? Will you ever
| want to delegate? My experience was probably unique, but
| this kind of management style 1) undermines my
| work/communicates a lack of trust, and 2) communicates
| that you're not willing to invest in other people. But
| maybe the difference is that I was being explicitly
| delegated work, having my boss complete it unbeknownst to
| me, and then just getting silence.
| jampekka wrote:
| If it's not something urgent or someting that will not
| blow up on my face, I try to delegate. And delegation
| does work fine for many cases. I also do like to help,
| especially in form of pair programming or similar hands-
| on. There are some that don't seem to like this kind of
| help though.
|
| A major problem I encounter is that people I delegate to
| don't say when they don't understand something or don't
| reach out early enough when they get stuck. I always say
| that come to ask if you get stuck on something for more
| than a half a day or so. Unfortunately most people don't
| even when I ask them to.
|
| I do understand that they may think that they don't want
| to bother by asking. But in reality when they ask soon,
| it's usually very easy for me to answer but when they
| don't, they either don't progress at all, so I may have
| to do it anyway to stay in schedule, or they get into a
| mess that's a lot harder to fix.
|
| And it's not really to blame them. I notice myself acting
| similarly when I do stuff I'm not experienced with. What
| I do try to consciously do is to tell when I don't
| understand something, although I probably fail at this
| too quite regularly.
| lurking15 wrote:
| > A major problem I encounter is that people I delegate
| to don't say when they don't understand something or
| don't reach out early enough when they get stuck. I
| always say that come to ask if you get stuck on something
| for more than a half a day or so. Unfortunately most
| people don't even when I ask them to.
|
| I've definitely done this before, and in retrospect,
| having moved on to other roles, it's obvious to me now
| that the workplace & overall company was actually the
| problem. People reach out early when they're engaged and
| feel comfortable.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I've seen shitty engineering leaders go for decades in
| their chaotic ways. Don't hold your breath
| shultays wrote:
| People are promoted to their level of incompetence
| jampekka wrote:
| Ergo all CEOs are incompetent. Explains quite a bit.
| kortilla wrote:
| > This is why I think unions in tech would be great. To set
| realistic expectations, approach management from a collective
| point of view.
|
| What? The person in this scenario wouldn't be in the union once
| promoted. Unions don't do anything for manager to director
| dynamics.
| giantg2 wrote:
| But it would shield the team under them. In which case it
| could alter the manager-director relationship through second
| order effects.
| steve_gh wrote:
| And this is an organizational failure, because the organisation
| has just promoted, without training someone to be a leader.
|
| You wouldn't expect a manager (from a non-technical background)
| to just start coding, so why would you expect a coder to just
| start managing.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Most places that "train" just have some online courses, maybe
| an in-person or two. I don't know of anywhere that has some
| sort of real training like apprentice program.
| xyst wrote:
| lmao - this is what I have experienced as well. Somehow
| these online courses with no way to ask questions will
| magically contain everything you need to know!
|
| Who knew? An MBA mindset contained inside a 1 hour
| mindset!1 Why did these MBA guys spend $250K!?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I'll post this only because this is an area where I'm
| really passionate, and you're right and that the current
| state most places sucks. I've tried to address it as a
| manager who strongly believes that engineering management
| needs to be viewed as a discipline. I've implemented a Lead
| Mentorship Program at two places; one very successfully and
| the other with some progress (still hustling for
| engagement/commitment):
|
| https://www.codeleadmanage.com/articles/20230919-lead_mento
| r...
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| This happens all the time because management is viewed as a
| promotion so you reward your best developers by giving them a
| job where they might suck and/or hate it. I think there are 2
| big levers you need to address it:
|
| 1. Dual career ladders. You should recognize/reward some
| level of technical role (i.e. staff or similar) the same as
| management. Every senior person is a leader; I argue ICs have
| a tougher job because they don't have the "because you report
| to me" hammer.
|
| 2. Lead mentorship program. Potential managers need
| experience; you need to coach and validate. They need a
| chance to manage a single person over time, do a performance
| review cycle, 1:1s, feedback conversations,etc. Co-ops/iterns
| are great for this because it's a fixed time period! You need
| 3 conditions to promote someone into management: 1. the need,
| 2. the individual's desire, 3. the individual's skills &
| experience. An LMP gives you signal on all.
|
| I'll add 1(b): People need to be able to move laterally
| between ladders. This is in everyone's best interest; having
| an amazing staff dev muddling through as a team lead just
| means they're going to quit soon.
|
| This is a REALLY LONG way of saying I agree with the parent,
| but the solution is both known and doable. I'll get down off
| my soapbox now.
| jampekka wrote:
| Management of course thinks that management is promotion
| from non-management and they manage the promotions. They
| are managers because they are better. How would they
| otherwise rationalize their higher salaries and power over
| other people?
| btilly wrote:
| Don't say "the organization has just promoted". That's taking
| the face off of where the blame belongs.
|
| Say, "the CEO". The same CEO who is trying to manage through
| deadline pressure, placed into leadership someone who could
| be managed through deadline pressure. And who would transmit
| that pressure down the chain.
|
| Why? Because the CEO believed that this is how people should
| be managed. Which means that a leader who refused to accept
| that pressure would have almost certainly resulted in the CEO
| replacing said leader with someone who is more compliant.
|
| And now that we're done placing blame in the right place, can
| we talk about the actual problem here? Which is that people
| really do wind up working under too much stress and pressure.
| And this comes with a huge and absolutely real cost.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Say, "the CEO". The same CEO who is trying to manage
| through deadline pressure,
|
| I think this is a very broad principle that applies all
| over. For a very different example: I have seen police
| depts make dramatic turns - from pretty okay to dangerously
| awful to hugely better, entirely due to changes in
| sheriffs/chiefs.
|
| Usual caveats apply. Bigger orgs take more time+effort to
| turn. Down is easier than up.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Sure, the buck stops with the CEO. That said, if things are
| so dysfunctional that your only goal is to ascribe blame--
| which, incidentally, is a common behavior of bad managers--
| then you are already fucked.
|
| High performing teams require trust. Workers need to trust
| that management has a sense of what's reasonable, not take
| estimates out of context and generally listen to the pain
| points/challenges on the ground. Upper management needs to
| trust that teams understand the vision enough to make the
| right tradeoff, not sandbag every estimate or fixate on the
| wrong details (because ground-level details matter, but
| some more than others from the business perspective).
|
| I realize many people have spent their whole career in such
| adversarial circumstances between workers and management
| that the above sounds like a fairy tail. I will say though,
| that it _is_ possible, but requires a healthy understanding
| of the limitations of human communication, and the
| recognition that good intent is necessary but not
| sufficient to avoid dysfunction. You need a critical mass
| of folks spread throughout the org, able to do the
| necessary bridge-building, and (at times) emotional labor
| to work through all the challenges and differences of
| opinion. It 's very easy to describe a problem and solution
| from one person's perspective, but much harder to
| prioritize and solve the 10 most important problems out of
| a group of 100 people where viewpoints differ and
| cooperation is needed to improve anything.
| btilly wrote:
| I did not see the post itself as ascribing blame. The
| Head of IT here was very clear that he was hearing the
| messaging from the CEO, but the CEO was passing along
| pressure coming from the client. And clients learn to do
| this because the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
|
| So lets not criticize for what did not actually happen.
|
| Turning to management, your view on management reflects
| what works for tech. People who need to engage in complex
| thought will do their best work in an environment that
| reduces unnecessary pressure.
|
| But not everyone does that kind of work. People in sales
| do better when they are pushed to meet a big audacious
| goal which is probably not realistic. Micromanagement is
| appropriate for people in a level 1 call center. And so
| on.
|
| This means that a healthy organization should have
| multiple styles of management in play. And that means
| that it is important to have leaders in tech who can push
| back on the rest of the organization to enable the right
| style for software developers.
|
| And now that we've talked about management a bit, mind
| talking about mental health? Because sure, bad management
| can cause mental health problems. But so can being a
| parent of children who are part of the current teen
| mental health crisis. So this issue is important, even if
| you fix management.
| afpx wrote:
| What are the qualities of the best leaders you've encountered
| or worked for? Which ones are most effective at getting things
| done while keeping the team and senior leadership happy?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| fifty percent of managers, manage through fear .. an industry
| veteran once said .. "virtue stories" will ignore this ugly
| fact of hierarchical commercial services
| n4r9 wrote:
| It's an oversimplification to say they "should have never been"
| a leader. In truth, they could have used specific training in
| prioritisation, delegation, and emotional intelligence. I find
| it's rare that this sort of training is provided. Instead, good
| performers are thrown into the deep end to see if they can hack
| it.
| convolvatron wrote:
| maybe? the worst managers I've had are expressing real
| substantive emotional or general dysfunction. I don't know
| that training is really going to help with that.
|
| its also a big culture question. I personally view the model
| where the manager is 'in charge' as being fundamentally
| unhelpful, and alot of organizations as a whole promote this
| model.
|
| that alternative being 'the supporting adult in the room that
| trying to help the team do their best work and make hard
| decisions if absolutely necessary'
| n4r9 wrote:
| No doubt there are some managers like that.
|
| My take from the linked article is that this person had the
| will and ability to grow but they lacked an internalised
| reassurance that it's okay when things don't go to plan and
| aren't perfect. Importantly, they were open to learning
| about emotional reasoning.
|
| In my mind a good training course can provide that
| reassurance in the form of a statement like
|
| > It is _absolutely normal_ for managers to be constantly
| juggling a large number of nebulous demands, to finish most
| days without wrapping anything up, and to feel like there
| are a large number of unknown and uncontrolled variables.
| Do not work excessive overtime or refuse to delegate tasks
| in order to avoid this.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| I have no idea where he's getting it from either. Dude seemed
| to just stress himself out too much. Organizations encourage
| it, and promote people that do it.
|
| It's also incredibly exclusionary. If you have the slightest
| neuroses, never be a leader!
|
| You'll find this is often a race to the bottom too. While
| presumably not applicable to him, you'd be surprised how many
| people and organizations have opinions about how impossible
| it is to hire anyone with mental health problems.
|
| Then it becomes "just flip burgers like a loser and go to
| prison addicted to stimulants you useless eater, all of you
| people"
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| It also makes everyone's life harder. Engineering leaders
| who agree to insane and constant deadlines doom the company
| to be in constant fire fighting mode (at best). One of the
| most important things they do is expectations management
| and explaining tradeoffs to senior management
| skrebbel wrote:
| > This is a person that should have never been in a leadership
| position
|
| This is the kind of crap that stops people writing blog posts
| about vulnerable topics like mental health.
|
| I mean really? Author opens up about a terrible shit show and
| their role in it, and your response is "yeah you suck at that,
| don't do it." I dont think that's very constructive.
| malfist wrote:
| They're also making the judgement (you suck at management)
| from a single blog post about mental health with no other
| context. There just isn't enough information here to make
| that judgement. This is nothing short of bullying someone for
| talking about their mental health, I hope the author doesn't
| see this.
| g4zj wrote:
| This point hits home for me.
|
| I often don't write about things I'm feeling because I can
| already hear the responses of everyone who will intentionally
| miss the point in order to draw attention to something else,
| as if I'm completely oblivious to that other issue.
|
| Being able to express what we're feeling without having our
| thoughts dismissed or disregarded simply because of how we
| arrived in our current situation is very important for mental
| wellbeing.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I do understand the point being made
| above, it's just doesn't seem very helpful, as you said.
| xyst wrote:
| Huh?
|
| The toxic positivity about it is not helpful either.
| jghn wrote:
| > No trust in the team. Always doing shit themselves.
|
| This was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn. And when
| coaching other would-be leaders it often is a roadblock for
| them as well.
|
| As one moves into a leadership role it becomes critical that
| you learn to be ok with people doing things not the way you'd
| do them. You need to learn to accept close/good enough from
| your underlings. And the "enough" in close/good enough is going
| to be a larger delta than you think going into this learning
| process.
| btilly wrote:
| It is not just "not the way you'd do them". You were promoted
| for doing your work better than others. Those others did not
| improve because you got promoted. So you have to figure out
| how to get useful work out of people who are doing things in
| a worse way. And let them do things that way even though you
| already know what's wrong with it.
| jghn wrote:
| Yes that's also a challenge, and while in similar it's not
| quite the same.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| It is psychologically tricky to go from an engineer to a
| manager or lead. I also used to just feel guilty like I was
| offloading my work on other people who already had plenty to
| do. I did then later improve by managing their workloads and
| the long term roadmap to make sure everyone is working
| reasonable hours
| sublinear wrote:
| A union wouldn't change anything for the better (in the United
| States).
|
| The tech industry would just hire abroad more.
|
| If they ever did decide to hire union workers for whatever
| reason it would just be another layer of bureaucracy killing
| the company and stressing out employees.
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| I'm glad you came to the realization that we need unions. We're
| also overmanaged because the actual managers e.g. the C suite
| thinks we need to be watched over. Historically the rate of
| workers to managers was way lower.
| baron816 wrote:
| You think unions would solve this problem? Adding unions
| would just insert a whole other parallel management team
| that'll tell you what you can and can't do. They're not going
| to simplify anything.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Unions insert a _potential for improvement_ because they
| come with critically different motivation.
|
| Workplaces suffer from compulsions by MBAs, who prioritize
| shareholders and exec bonuses above the welfare of
| employees/consumers/company. A union has an ability to
| raise the priority of employees in this equation - and ease
| MBA pressures to exploit consumers and degrade the company.
|
| But because unions are groups of _people_ , they are
| subject to the same corrupting principle that afflicts
| every group of people.
|
| Nobody, anywhere wants to clean their own house.
|
| A union can be a force for good, as long as it's
| leaders+members continue to fix the internals that need
| fixing.
| ninininino wrote:
| Someone with the intellectual arrogance to proclaim someone
| unfit for a job after reading a single blog post by them is
| also unfit for leadership.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| I'm saddened to see such disgusting ablism at the forefront of
| HackerNews. More evidence that SV is filled with close minded
| fascists. These are people, not useless eaters.
|
| Given my experience with HN this type of criticism is high
| likely to result in scrutiny by the admins. The biases on this
| site really need to be re-evaluated.
| your_mommy wrote:
| industrial revolution broke backs, tech revolution breaks brains
| Bloating wrote:
| That makes sense... And the preeminent result of the tech
| revolution: social media.
| CartyBoston wrote:
| This piece teaches me almost nothing about Vadim but shows me a
| ton about the environment he worked in. Someone built that
| culture, who are they? Why did they do it? Was Vadim complicit?
| Why did he feel so little control?
|
| Hustle culture is not challenging, it does not help anyone grow,
| it simply exploits people. It's common, banal stuff.
| paulcole wrote:
| > You cannot take a sick day by telling your team, "I have mental
| issues and need a day off."
|
| "I'm taking the day off."
|
| Your coworkers don't need a reason. If your employer demands one,
| then that's a different issue.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| At my current job, I can. Up to three days a year, I can take a
| mental health day and charge it to sick time.
|
| Note well: I have never had this at _any_ other job. But if you
| need the day, take the day, even if it has to be vacation.
| paulcole wrote:
| My point is that no individual you work with (again aside
| from perhaps HR if the company is hella annoying) needs to
| know if it's a mental health day or if you have the flu or
| whatever. It's not their business.
|
| Just say you're not going to be there.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I like using Out of Office for everything not work related. It
| shows up when anyone tries to schedule a random meeting on me.
|
| This is also a rare circumstance where having a disability is
| an advantage. Companies are legally required to allow me to
| prioritize my health over my job without discriminating against
| me. They aren't allowed to ask.
|
| I wish it didn't require having a disability to be treated like
| a human being instead of a disposable resource on somebody's
| balance sheet.
| paulcole wrote:
| I just say "Taking PTO today."
|
| > Companies are legally required to allow me to prioritize my
| health over my job without discriminating against me. They
| aren't allowed to ask.
|
| Assuming you're not in the US?
|
| In the US, companies are required to provide reasonable
| accommodations for disabilities as part of ADA but can and
| (often) do ask for documentation of the disability and the
| specific accommodation requested.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't clarify, they can't ask why I'm taking
| leave for a disability. I definitely had to provide HR with
| documentation. That was a pain in the ass.
| hrnnnnnn wrote:
| > You cannot take a sick day by telling your team, "I have mental
| issues and need a day off."
|
| You can. I started doing this years ago and it has been an
| overall positive experience. Others on my team told me about
| their own struggles because I took the initiative to open up
| about mine.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| >You cannot take a sick day by telling your team, "I have mental
| issues and need a day off."
|
| Yes, you can. You can say you need a mental health day. Adults
| will understand.
| sesm wrote:
| In most companies I worked for the standard "I'm not feeling
| well today, taking a day off" was enough. Nobody asked for
| details.
| albert_e wrote:
| one of the big companies recently replaced "sick leave" (only
| you can be sick to avail this, not a family member you care
| for) with "wellbeing leave" (you dont feel up to a day at
| work, take the day off - no questions asked) and doubled them
| from 5 days a year to 10 days a year.
|
| I am usually cynical about big corporates and their people
| policies, but this is one I can applaud.
| fnordian_slip wrote:
| 5 vs 10 days is still ridiculous imho. I've just read an
| overview about the us system [0], and it does seem rather
| absurd, when you're looking at it from a German
| perspective.
|
| [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_leave
| taejavu wrote:
| I'm in Australia and get 10 days. However, at my company,
| I could use all 10 at once without having to see a
| doctor. Can you do that in your company in Germany?
| badpun wrote:
| In Europe, you don't generally get "sick days" - you're
| entitled to stay at home or in hospital for as long as it
| takes for you to get better (even for years, if necessary).
| In the meantime, your salary is paid by the state, so
| you're not an unproductive burden for your employer. At
| least that's how it works in Poland.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| True, but that also means you cannot take a day off
| because you're not feeling it. You need at a doctor to
| attest that you're physically incapable of working. And
| in Germany, the employer has the right to demand a
| doctor's note from day one.
| badpun wrote:
| You can take a day off when you're not feeling it and
| don't want to go to the doctor, but it will be subtracted
| from your paid vacations. You can do that for up to four
| days a year. It's not that much different than the sick
| days in the US, which are often bundled together with
| vacation days into PTO (Paid Time Off).
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Are you talking about Germany? Because if you want to
| take a vacation day, it is subject to approval by the
| employer. They can deny if they have a good reason. And
| in many cases, like in my case, a short term absence
| would ruin a customer project and would thus certainly
| not be approved.
| badpun wrote:
| I don't know about German law, I was talking about
| Poland. In Poland, the employer cannot refuse to give you
| a day off (even if your request it on the very day), four
| times a year.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| My understanding of Germany's rules is hat a policy about
| needing notes from day 1 has to be in the contract,
| otherwise the requirement kicks in on day 3 or 4 (I
| forget which). And the doctor's note doesn't have to
| claim that you're "physically" incapable - mental health
| problems also qualify.
| PJDK wrote:
| Some people even take a day off sick when they are actually
| not feeling sick at all!
| westmeal wrote:
| Maybe where you work but I just straight up tell them I'm not
| coming in. If I said this to my lead or boss they'd ask me why
| the hell I'm not coming in.
| ijwann wrote:
| > Adults will understand.
|
| You're in a bit of a bubble. This is not the case for the
| majority of jobs.
| whoomp12341 wrote:
| you can also take a wellness day for the same reason
| surfingdino wrote:
| I used to be in (moderate) awe of young college drop-out CEOs.
| Then I worked for a couple of them. Now I refuse to work for
| startups that have 20-somethings at the top, because they really
| do not know how to manage or lead. They are motivated by fear of
| failure and having accomplished nothing so far they treat others
| like garbage. Avoid.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| The phenomenon of showing up at Stanford and telling some
| 21-year-old that he's Jesus Christ and that you're going to
| give him millions of dollars is a wen on the American business
| culture matched only by corporate raiding.
|
| It's the nerd version of college football/basketball
| recruiting.
| jongjong wrote:
| It's so weird. I started to think that maybe this is
| intentional. It looks as though investors want to invest only
| in over-optimistic people who believe that we're living in
| some kind of utopian paradise; at the same time they avoid
| investing in anyone who has had so much of a faint whiff of
| how the sausage gets made.
|
| It's like the entire system is desperate to keep optimists
| optimistic and pessimists pessimistic.
|
| Why is it that investors actively seek out starry-eyed
| individuals?
|
| It sounds like an economic bubble factory. If every new
| person who joins elite circles is optimistic to a delusional
| level, then that level of optimism may be contagious and
| propagate delusional beliefs among the elite.
|
| There are people in the tech sector who were very successful
| decades ago and are now in their 40s and still haven't come
| out of their highs. They have the same worldview as I had
| when I was 15.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Not investors: venture capital investors in tech. It's a
| particular kind of investment in a particular industry.
|
| Tech VC's are in the business of selling business futures,
| not building mature businesses. The buyer they sell to can
| install a practical CEO and worry about actual operations
| when that time comes.
|
| In the meantime, enthusiastic kids provide a relatively
| cheap, manipulable, supply of powerpoints and pizazz --
| whereas sober, mature professionals often need more
| personal income and tend to focus more on executing the
| business that they have experience in (mostly irrelevant to
| the VC's own business) instead of matching the investment
| pitch for upcoming rounds (all that matters).
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I mean, VC exists because they need to diversify their
| investments and literally can't find anywhere to put their
| money? I got the impression from the outside that VC money
| is just gambling on March Madness for the elite.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Deploy $5m to 20 companies and only one of them has to
| hit for it all to be worth it.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| Because those investors (rarely) ever lose if the company
| goes belly up.
|
| Is the company slowly declining into unprofitability? Sell
| it off and cash that big payout.
|
| Can't sell it off? Scrap it for parts and scavage the
| remains, cash that big payout.
|
| Did it implode in on itself in a spectacular fashion? Sue
| leadership to recoup your losses.
|
| As the saying goes, the house always wins.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I think it's because you need a figure-head that _truly_
| has zero doubt that what they are doing is the best and
| most correct thing. Because it has to sell, and it can 't
| sound like a car-salesman pitch.
|
| It might not be in the best interest of the company, it
| just needs to be a hype train long enough for the VC to get
| theirs. The Greater Fool meets real life. The VC doesn't
| care one way or another if the founder benefits in the end,
| as long as it doesn't affect their ability to make their
| next play.
| __loam wrote:
| Using smart children who have degrees from reputable
| institutions like Stanford is a value signal that VC uses
| to get more people involved with their plays. It's
| borrowing legitimacy and adding to the Jobsian mythology
| of the company, while also getting someone who has no
| idea what they're doing into a position where they will
| listen to a board who will tell them what to do.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| It's because the emperor has no clothes. Most of the VCs
| I've met have been complete airheads.
| ryandrake wrote:
| All it really takes to be "an investor" is to have money
| or be able to get money. There is no prerequisite of
| intelligence, business sense, product taste, operations
| wisdom, or sound judgment. Although they all seem to act
| as if they magically have these, as if the Investor title
| suddenly imbued them with these traits.
|
| The only thing stopping me from being an angel investor
| is that I don't have $1M burning a hole in my pocket. But
| if I did, suddenly I could sit down in a conference room,
| put a polo shirt on, dangle the money from a fishhook,
| and people would take what I said about their business
| idea seriously. It's such a joke.
| hnfong wrote:
| The VC investors don't need a startup that accurately
| predicts its odds, because most startups fail. So what they
| need are starry-eyed kids who have a distorted view of
| their chances of success, and in the small chance that they
| actually succeed beyond anyone else's wildest dreams (but
| within expectation of the distorted perspective -- which is
| the only way you can continue executing without being
| overwhelmed), the VC reaps the profits.
| bongoman42 wrote:
| In some ways it is similar to buying lottery tickets which a
| fairly large number of people indulge in. Though, in this
| case, there are modifiers to the base probability due to
| insider knowledge, knowing which fool to offload crap to
| before it implodes, and piling on the same startup because
| others are doing as well.
| slily wrote:
| Are you serious? That culture is why America still has high
| innovation while other Western and "culturally Western"
| countries that do not are largely stagnant. I'm amazed at how
| often I see people (largely Americans I'm guessing) criticize
| the very things that make their country a world superpower.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| I think there's too few 21 year olds being handed big
| investment dollars to form the majority of what causes
| "America to still have high innovation". The average age
| for founders starting successful businesses is somewhere
| between 35 - 45 years old:
| https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-
| wha...
| threetonesun wrote:
| I'm still waiting for the USA to "innovate" on a way for
| everyone to get health care, although sometimes I suspect
| the lack of a solution there and general lack of regulation
| at large is part of why American has such "high
| innovation".
| Clubber wrote:
| We're pretty close. Obamacare covers a lot of people and
| employers are required to provide it if they have over 50
| employees. Any hospital is required to treat anyone who
| comes in, regardless of ability to pay. It's sloppy and
| it's expensive if you don't qualify for ACA subsidies,
| but if you want healthcare/health insurance in the US,
| you can most likely get it if you try.
| fwip wrote:
| Conflating health insurance with health care is a common
| American mistake.
|
| Having the ability to pay every month for health
| insurance doesn't do much to protect you from losing
| everything to health-related bills. Unless, of course,
| you are rich enough to afford the 'Cadillac' health
| plans.
| __loam wrote:
| That and Welchism are two big reasons why the business
| culture in the valley sucks.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| Yeah, even some of the young middle managers really grinded my
| gears. Not even that young.
|
| Late 20s early 30s anxiety ridden workaholics that make life
| miserable for everyone. They work their ass off to move up,
| then figure they'll get a team full of "thems".
|
| Yeah no. You were promoted because the "thems" were wise
| enough, or otherwise unwilling to damage their health.
|
| You're better and get more money power, congrats. Now lie in
| your bed that everyone else pulled the sheets off of and
| spilled crumbs.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| Data-driven ageism against old people --> OMG the industry is
| so ageist. Data-driven ageism against young people -->
| :crickets:
| grvdrm wrote:
| Let me add: you never need to be in awe of someone who treats
| anyone else like garbage - whether they are 20 or 60. I'm just
| out an experience with a 49 year old founder/CEO. Will be
| looking for all signs of garbage in future opportunities.
| neilv wrote:
| I suspect that there's no good reason that a 25 year-old can't
| be a great startup CEO.
|
| I think one key tricky part is that -- even if the 25yo starts
| with being all-around smart, and unusually aware&humble, yet
| nevertheless tackling something big -- is that it's very hard
| to know when they should listen to team/advisors (and which),
| vs. when they should do a contrary thing that they think is the
| smart thing.
|
| Maybe that's doable well enough, if they have all those good
| qualities, and happen to be exposed to a good team/advisors.
|
| (Side note: It doesn't help that various facets of the fields
| are filled with bad practices/advice, as well as outright
| intentional deception and manipulation. If you read PG's essays
| early on, that was a time when you might expect a fellow techie
| and businessperson to have smart and well-intentioned advice,
| wanting you to succeed. That's absolutely not the norm anymore:
| you're much more likely to get bad advice today, no matter
| where you look, and more likely to encounter individuals and
| institutions trying to manipulate you. Even when you can filter
| that out first-hand, you're still getting a lot of it second-
| hand, through their influences on smart&decent people who you
| do let influence you.)
| xerxesaa wrote:
| In theory, yes. But in practice, is it true? Are Amazon and
| Oracle better places to work than Facebook and Stripe?
| fragmede wrote:
| And even then, how do you get valid data on that? My
| impression is that Amazon is not good to work for; no comment
| on Stripe, Facebook is good, but it's Facebook. Oracle is
| good if you want to rest and vest.
|
| But how could we validate this assemblage of opinions about
| how they are to work at that I've gathered?
| dvas wrote:
| I think it is so important to be able to disconnect from whatever
| it is that we are doing, even for a very short period of time. Go
| for a walk, brew a coffee or simply close your eyes and breathe.
|
| Many times, stress is created artificially. It hurts our
| performance and deteriorates our ability to think.
|
| Encountered numerous situations where work was "urgent" and would
| likely land a contract or sales for the company, and everyone
| would be a superstar if they delivered this "crunch".
|
| After 2 months of pulling all-nighters and sleeping for 3/4
| hours, we deliver the project ahead of time. Apathy begins to set
| in after management/decision makers keep on giving these gifts we
| call "crunches".
|
| To help the company and go the extra mile is something most of us
| have done in the past and will possibly do in the future.
| However, it's like the story of the boy who cried wolf, if
| everything is urgent and every task is to be done NOW, then there
| are bigger issues at play.
|
| Like everything in life, there is usually a limit/budget of
| money, time and effort. By abusing these limits and tolerances,
| people will lose respect for the people crying wolf and will put
| less effort into their work.
| snarf21 wrote:
| This is the hardest lesson to learn. Sometimes you won't be
| afforded the ability to do it "right", either for the company
| or the product or the customer. Eventually, you'll decide to
| just show up and ask what is most important today and work on
| that. Then clock out _completely_ when your work is done and go
| find meaning and personal satisfaction in your personal life.
| Go exercise or volunteer or get a hobby or be present for your
| family. The best way to have work /life balance is to separate
| them. This is also one of the reasons why I hate wfh. The drive
| to/from is a great separator and decompressor for me.
| life-and-quiet wrote:
| I think this is so hard to learn because it's counter to
| human nature, and only necessary due to the artificial
| conditions of the modern world. We're programmed to want to
| be useful to our tribe. But we don't live in tribes any more.
| Our brains get confused and burnt out because we perform and
| perform and perform, but we don't get love and status and
| security in return, we just get this abstract thing called
| money, which it doesn't really understand.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Encountered numerous situations where work was "urgent" and
| would likely land a contract or sales for the company, and
| everyone would be a superstar if they delivered this "crunch".
|
| > After 2 months of pulling all-nighters and sleeping for 3/4
| hours, we deliver the project ahead of time
|
| In my career, none of these have ever paid off. Every time I've
| crunched this way on something dramatically urgent like this,
| it has turned out that the "if we can deliver this, this huge
| moonshot sale is a sure thing" turns into a no-sale
|
| The sales person never seems to get cut loose for diverting the
| entire R&D towards a longshot for months and burning people
| out, though
|
| And you can bet the sales person isn't putting in weeks of
| overtime for the duration, either
|
| I basically refuse to do overtime anymore unless I'm working
| extra to make up for my own screw up. I'm not putting in extra
| to hit some other assholes unrealistic deadlines ever again
| np- wrote:
| Agreed. Even if by some miracle you do deliver, and are
| considered a superstar, then what? What do superstars get?
| Probably just even more crunch work, since you've proven
| you're willing to do it.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| You imagine that it will catapult you ahead in your career,
| your income will skyrocket, you will be respected and loved
| by your company and peers
|
| But in reality no one really cares much, you'll get the
| same raise everyone else gets, your bonus is still gonna be
| capped by your contract, and you will be better off finding
| a new job if you want more money
|
| Man sometimes I want out of tech so badly it hurts but I
| don't generally think it's better anywhere else
| chrisweekly wrote:
| This reminds me of the scene in Schindler's List where the
| SS officer asks the enslaved factory worker to show him how
| fast he can assemble a particular component. The terrified
| worker races to assemble it in record time, anxious to
| please and impress the nazi -- who responds to the effect
| of: "if you can make them that fast, why is your daily
| quota so low?"
| jajko wrote:
| Absolutely 0 had ever paid off. Probably worst was trusting
| too much a colleague perceived by everybody as Oracle/plsql
| guru, when troubleshooting vendor's abysmal performance of DB
| queries during some bigger migration (up to half an hour
| easily, for trivial 30 million rows). He didn't see any issue
| on DB side, pointed to useless oracle hints, crappy JDBC
| drivers, spring's jdbc templates, possibly my not-optimal
| code etc.
|
| I went over my head, did probably the most complex code in my
| life, massively parallel, over weekends and evenings. That
| wonderful cathedral didn't move performance a zilch, just
| made debugging and further changes much harder. After few
| hours of actual debugging afterwards he found out vendor
| defined responsible DB table in such an obscure and bad way
| way that we had to literally copy whole table to another more
| sane one, and perform all the work there in maybe 5% of the
| time. In fact I suggested exactly same thing initially but it
| was quickly dismissed by him, and who questions the guru,
| right.
|
| This didn't even come from management just colleague's
| incompetence/ego, hard deadlines, tons of pressure to
| deliver, and starting project already 2 months late. Closest
| I've been to burnout yet. I am still a bit pissed off on him,
| but I know it was not malice so that eases emotions quite a
| bit.
|
| And to similar request coming from the top - been there, done
| that too, regretted that time & energy put in it. These days,
| 8 hours days, if I am not making it on time, I communicate
| early & clearly and that's it. They handle it, and if they
| don't, well there is always next job. Life is about
| priorities.
| arnonejoe wrote:
| The way to get around some of this is to work on contract. I have
| found I am most free being a contractor. I go in to the gig
| knowing it has a definite end and do not care about any of the
| internal politics. It's not a perfect solution but much better
| than being an employee where I have granted a company a monopoly
| on my time.
| kortilla wrote:
| How do you find gigs that actually pay like FTEs?
| tossandthrow wrote:
| at least where I am at, the contractor rate is more than
| double the FTE rate.
| jghn wrote:
| Yes. Contractors typically get more per hour. It still
| works out cheaper for the company as they don't have to pay
| for the benefits, PTO, and that sort of thing. And of
| course the contractor still has to pay for insurance,
| covering their own PTO, etc.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| I think it is a bit different depending on you country. I
| believe it is comparable in the us with the steep
| Healthcare prices.
|
| in Europe it usually makes sense to contract if you only
| have smaller projects.
| jajko wrote:
| Did both in few parts of Europe. Initially its normally
| better to contract (but you need to have some chops,
| nobody hires juniors on contract), but not all countries
| make this easy or even viable. Once you want to settle,
| _if_ you want to settle, permanent job under normal
| circumstances offers better overall package.
|
| Maybe not outright amounts, but if you count in things
| like sickness, holidays, off for kids, social
| contributions, being treated better among colleagues, and
| for me personally having much more freedom whenever
| personal I need to do like bureaucracy (but that may be
| current circumstance only).
| tossandthrow wrote:
| yep, I am there myself. I seek to settle. as a part of
| that I also seek to transfer from having worked freelance
| for many years to take a regular job
| jjav wrote:
| > at least where I am at, the contractor rate is more than
| double the FTE rate.
|
| But the big money in tech is in your options/RSUs, not base
| pay. And contractors don't get options. (Usually anyway;
| I've been given options as a consultant once but usually
| don't see that.)
| coldtea wrote:
| > _This was my perfect storm in 2017 -- I was trying to control
| all of the uncertainty around me: (...) Trying to control the
| looming unrealistic deadlines. Writing a lot of the code myself
| to ensure we uphold our promises to stakeholders and none of our
| developers burn out. Which led to me working more and sleeping
| less. Worrying about next month's payroll and trying to control
| our runway. Maintaining developer velocity and tight budgets,
| juggling future growth and current issues. Trying to control our
| developer turnover and making sure our juniors grow. There were
| days I 'd be coding non-stop or in a series of back-to-back
| meetings, forgetting meals, sleeping, and even what it felt like
| to relax._
|
| Sounds like trying to cope at a shitty nightmare job at a shitty
| company, and blaming yourself.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| One thing I've realized more and more over the years: it's the
| operational roles (infra, SRE, Devops) that are actually most
| stressful. Sure, if you're building product, you get deadlines,
| but they are predictable and they come and go.
|
| But being oncall for a shakey infra stack? That shit is hell. No
| deadlines, just the threat of incidents or downtime at any time
| of day.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| You can develop a product and also do Ops for it, getting the
| best of two worlds.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| It's too triggering to do any more than skim the article, but
| having got the general gist of at least some of it, I shall write
| my top tip here in case it helps anyone (who manages to do it):
|
| Negotiate prohibitively high overtime rates.
| j33zusjuice wrote:
| Early in my career, I worked with a consultant who charged time
| and a half after hours, and double time after midnight. Every
| change we did was at like 10pm, and hardly any of them ever
| went well. I hope to one day find a way to do what he did.
| dboreham wrote:
| This is what psychologists call "a boundary", and there's
| nothing secret about how it works: you just don't do the
| thing your abuser is asking you to do.
| dakiol wrote:
| Morale of the story: don't apply for a CTO position. Apply for
| CEO: more money, less pressure, and you get to be as incompetent
| as you want.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| What I don't get is it sounds like he accepted the CEO's edicts
| unquestioningly:
|
| > This one time, for example, when our deployment crashed
| halfway through right before a major release. The CEO
| emphasized how important this project was, so we were all hands
| on deck, trying to get it back up, fearing the worst, that the
| client would go ballistic if he found out we were delaying the
| release. I was stressing big time, thinking we had to pull off
| a miracle, and of course we did.
|
| > But you know what? After all that chaos, it turned out the
| relevant stakeholders were away on vacation that week, and the
| release wasn't even checked for many days after that.
|
| A CTO should have _some_ power to push back and set priorities.
| If you 're just doing what you're told you're not really a CTO
| but a team lead with a fancy title.
|
| This a general problem with young people in leadership
| positions. They don't have the confidence to say no as often as
| they should nor the perspective to identify what's really
| important - every setback feels cataclysmic.
| joelfried wrote:
| > A CTO should have some power to push back and set
| priorities. If you're just doing what you're told you're not
| really a CTO but a team lead with a fancy title. > > This a
| general problem with young people in leadership positions.
|
| Agreed wholeheartedly on both points, though I'd say a
| general problem with people new to leadership positions
| rather than make it about age. Society as it exists now (at
| least as I've experienced it) is very strong on rule
| following and it's a pretty massive shift to be the person
| setting the rules.
|
| The CEO should've been empowering, too, and it might well be
| a symptom of the same malady: imagining the way you want
| things done, then pushing harder and harder until the world
| is that way regardless of cost. Human psychic cost is real
| and will cost you your best people.
|
| Consider instead if the CEO said to the team "We definitely
| need this done, but I don't want you to burn yourselves out.
| Please keep at it as your top priority during working hours,
| all other goals are on pause until we have a release, and
| keep me up to date at the end of each day with progress until
| we're there. I don't want anyone working after hours. Don't
| worry about the client; I'll handle them." When the story
| unfolds from there the client doesn't even notice, the team
| feels supported and heard, and the work still gets done.
| Everyone wins.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I wish this person luck.
|
| I won't make any comments on their
| fitness/accomplishments/whatever. I am not in their shoes, and
| can only appreciate the honesty of their exposition (which they
| seem to be embracing and using as their platform).
|
| _> In business, there's no place for perfection. There's no
| space for having everything under control. In fact, not only
| can't you influence most of the things around you, but most of
| the things are uncertain._
|
| I have found this to be true for life, in general; especially
| when dealing with other people.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > An example of uncertainty in business is when your CEO tells
| you they promised a feature to your biggest client and it needs
| to be built ASAP as highest priority, so all hands on deck. Then
| a day later they tell you another feature, completely
| contradictory to the first one, needs to be built as well and is
| also highest priority. When you tell them they both can't be
| highest priority, the answer is: make it happen.
|
| Hardly.
|
| What I've found to work best in such scenarios is to always chop
| up the task at hand to essentials and nice-to-haves[0]. If
| another task comes up before you're finished, chop it up as well
| and ask your leadership what's more important: the essentials
| from this new task or nice-to-haves from that previous one.
|
| It's never the nice-to-haves.
|
| Also it always helps to not promise something you can't deliver -
| this applies to every level in the hierarchy.
|
| [0] Sometimes, if essentials are the vast majority, you can
| produce versions of them which are simpler, but still workable
| from a business perspective, and have bringing the full-featured
| versions as a nice-to-have.
| whb101 wrote:
| It's great when this stuff is talked about.
|
| The action item is always disappointing: some flavor of "take
| care of yourself."
|
| If we were trees in a forest fire, then yes. Making ourselves
| more fireproof is the best we can do.
|
| We're not trees, though, are we?
| keybored wrote:
| A mental health article about the rank & file? Not about
| bloviators?
|
| > , especially those of us who've taken on the challenge of
| leadership.
|
| Nope.
| dboreham wrote:
| I've come to believe that there's something about the practice of
| software development that _causes_ , or can cause mental illness.
| I've seen a few colleagues over the decades have some very
| serious issues. It's really quite a serious problem in our
| industry, imho.
| PodgieTar wrote:
| I think Software Engineering attracts neurodivergent people. I
| am an adhd software engineer, and know a disproportionate
| amount of adhd software engineers.
|
| I think that level of executive dysfunction and "catchup" is
| problematic
| adamc wrote:
| I have a hypothesis about that, based on prior battles with
| depression. A characteristic of many people who struggle with
| depression is revisiting things over and over in your mind,
| looking for what is often a non-existent solution. This is a
| very, very useful trait in a software engineer. It helps us
| think of solutions to hard problems, to see options that are
| not initially obvious.
|
| But it also enables mental illness when you encounter
| problems that cannot be solved that way -- for me, it was
| divorce. But life is full of intractable problems.
| norir wrote:
| Yes and to add to this, I think also the longer you stay in
| the industry, the more you realize that the industry itself
| has intractable problems (at least on the scale at which
| you can effect change). The tension is whether or not to
| accept those problems or leave the industry.
|
| Unfortunately, I also think that many of the problems are
| both simultaneously solvable and intractable at the same
| time, which is particularly crazy making if one is so
| inclined.
| sh_hike wrote:
| +1 I spent most of my childhood and teenage years feeling
| depressed due to traumatic experiences. I failed at mostly
| everything until I started programming. I took some
| mushrooms last year that helped me stop this constant cycle
| of repeating thoughts.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| It seems like there's an increasing degree of awareness
| (in some parts of the US) that psilocybin mushrooms can
| be transformative for treating PTSD and/or depression.
| I'm curious if you live in a US state, and what your
| experience was like....
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I was born in a tiny village in a poor country where local
| politicians literally banned wifi in schools because
| apparently "radiowaves cause autism and homosexuality". I'm
| not joking. This was the official governmental position. In
| 2017. You can imagine technical literacy of anyone I had
| contact with as a child, years before that.
|
| Today I work as an engineer at a known American
| corporation, slowly but surely moving up the ladder. Not
| everything goes smoothly, but I earn more than the rest of
| my elementary school peers combined and my prospects are
| bright.
|
| I do not wish upon anyone the amount I work I had to put
| into achieving this position. Looking back, I'm in awe how
| this was possible. I basically dedicated 100% of my life to
| one goal. It's not just about studying all day all night.
| It's about tuning your core emotional responses to motivate
| you to keep reaching higher and higher at all costs. I can
| confidently say that I was right on the edge of going
| insane, and the entire experience caused irreparable damage
| to my mental health. It's only now that I'm learning to
| slow down.
|
| It's strange. On one hand I don't think I'd change
| anything. I'm proud of the path I took. On the other hand,
| if I had a child, I just couldn't send it the same route,
| knowing how much it hurts.
| kelsey98765431 wrote:
| War, war never changes. Once you think about what we do
| as a form of combat, be it sparring in a classroom
| setting with kid gloves on or an all out bare knuckle
| street brawl, what we do is a form of grappling combat.
| You are right about dedicating 100% of your life to be
| where you are. In my experience in the industry there are
| two types of developers, those who do it as a job and
| those who live it as a life. No disrespect to those who
| are just there to take care of their family, but they are
| of a different breed. Programming is in a weird place
| where it's literally brand new in terms of the scale of
| human history and yet already "established" as an
| industry. Most of the engineers that I look up to and
| respect are the ones that will be coding from a wet
| cardboard box should it come to that, but darn it the
| code will be pushed to main no matter what.
|
| That's not a healthy work life balance, that's not even a
| lifestyle, it's a deep core aspect of these people. The
| most effective engineers i know come from a military
| background, and not because the military somehow makes
| you a better coder, but because it can give you the
| attitude to persevere adapt and overcome intense mental
| and emotional challenges. Building products is great, I
| have nothing but love for those who sign off at 5pm - But
| every day including weekends the small group of so called
| "10x"ers are staying in touch long after the day is done
| and already done with the first round of work before the
| 8am standup.
|
| It's not fair to ask those who just want to take care of
| their children to rise to meet this level of commitment,
| and the engineers doing this usually are working hard to
| establish their own products and startups but the true
| ultimate goal of that is to be paid to write whatever we
| want, and the money is the means to the end of writing
| more code.
|
| Rest in peace to those who have not made it to their
| goals and no longer have the chance to try. Best wishes
| to those who want to have a home or family life yet
| compare themselves to those who have sacrificed
| everything for this life.
|
| Why do they do it? Most often a deep sense of duty, or
| some deep sense of unease that the soft glow of the
| terminal evokes. Perhaps both.
|
| All this to say that your pain and suffering is real and
| the true payout is just more pain and suffering. To those
| thinking about this life I recommend Musashi's Five Rings
| and to honor the Bushido.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Pfsh. I sign off at 1700 and then code on my own stuff.
| |]
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > All this to say that your pain and suffering is real
| and the true payout is just more pain and suffering.
|
| This is what I hate about modern workplace. The society
| clearly needs people who migrate databases at 3AM, but it
| never rewards them, instead just squeezes as much juice
| as possible before moving onto the next young motivated
| freshman. I'm not talking about financial reward, I'm
| talking about creating a work environment where migrating
| the fucking database FEELS rewarding. I truly miss the
| rush I had at the university when turning in a difficult
| project I had spent nights on. Instead I get to stare at
| a poster "remember that HR is there to protect the
| company from you, we pay you to shut up".
|
| Nowadays I try giving as few fucks as possible, and I'm
| looking for happiness in other areas of my life, which
| isn't easy. I'd rather see my passion die than witness it
| being exploited by the very same people who make me feel
| misunderstood.
|
| I am very much butthurt about how the society functions
| but I also realize I cannot do anything about it, so my
| next goal is to learn how to just relax, do nothing, and
| be happy about it.
| whateveracct wrote:
| The industry is fundamentally about converting conscious
| thought into capital as efficiently as possible. So that it's
| bad for your mind makes sense to me.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| You need wins to feel good. Or, projects with finish lines. But
| many projects go on year after year with no finish lines, ever,
| unless you or the company runs out of juice, or you move to a
| different company to do the same thing. In web dev, launch day
| is the closest you get, but it's not a real finish line.
| Hitting kpi targets sort of counts, but it's not
| psychologically satisfying like finishing a table or a piece of
| pottery or harvesting a crop and selling it or serving it for
| dinner.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Only because programmers use up thier artistic juices at
| work. Plenty of my friends who are payroll or work in
| warehouses do not have any mental investment into work and
| use that energy outside of work to write, quilt, or do
| stimulating activities of thier own choice. For me after work
| I put on Judge Judy and let my brain rot
| preordained wrote:
| This is real thing I'm glad you've acknowledged as more
| than just a figment of my imagination. There are things I
| want to do outside of work programming that are there own
| level of mental taxing and/or creative...side projects,
| competitive Magic the Gathering...and I while usually find
| _some_ juice to squeeze into these, I do agree that it
| seems like many other professions leave a lot more in the
| tank.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Indeed! Software development is both knowledge, and
| creative work, but the industry treats us like replaceable
| cogs in an assembly line, which is NOT knowledge or
| creative work. We even utilize work tracking systems made
| FOR assembly line work, like kanban.
|
| We KNOW that using your brain like that leads to mental
| exhaustion, in exactly the same way we know a tradey
| kneeling while they do carpet all workweek will have fucked
| up knees in twenty years. We also have clear scientific
| study that you physically cannot do knowledge work
| effectively for 40 hours a week, and actually start LOSING
| productive knowledge work performance after about 36 hours
| a week.
|
| The way that I describe it to people is imagine you really
| like Sudoku puzzles, but now you have been contracted to do
| the hardest possible Sudoku puzzles you are capable of for
| 40 hours a week. Sure monday might be a blast, but by
| thursday your brain HURTS, and is physically tired. The
| human brain chews through A LOT of energy, and puts out A
| LOT of metabolites while doing hard thinking stuff, like
| knowledge work. Then you take your weekend where you
| desperately try and catch up on the household stuff you've
| been putting off because you get off work and FEEL dumb,
| because your brain desperately wants to turn off, so you
| scramble to get some of it done, and then it's monday
| again.
|
| Meanwhile, the whole time that you're struggling with using
| something that isn't meant to be used 8 straight hours a
| day (unlike our heart or leg muscles which ARE optimized
| around constant usage), you're basically being gaslit by
| the whole system. "This task is a medium" except it wasn't
| groomed properly and of course there's twice as much work,
| but you aren't allowed to modify the ticket or change how
| you are working on things because a guy who spends all day
| putting numbers into a premade Excel sheet tells you that
| your "predictability" is going down, or that your
| "throughput" is inconsistent, as if there even SHOULD be
| consistency in a software project that does very different
| things and systems in different stages of the project, and
| after you spent 16 years learning ironclad math rules and 4
| years learning Computer Science at your school of choice,
| you go into the field, and find that ANY bug is possible in
| modern computing, and every bug WILL be insane and flow
| through thirteen different abstraction layers and whisper
| demonic thoughts into your ear and now you get fucking PTSD
| whenever your mom asks you "how could this bug happen in my
| iPhone" and you're like "hey man IDK probably the bluetooth
| stack corrupted the vibration motor controller and now your
| phone will play only country music whenever you get a text
| from your brother in law", or your main app crashes because
| there's a damn bug in uWSGI where if you use any other C
| based code, it will inevitably fucking SEGFAULT because
| uWSGI goes out of it's way to dealloc during shutdown and
| manages to dealloc things that don't belong to it and the
| group who builds uWSGI has ignored the bug for a decade,
| and nobody fucking gets it because in other knowledge based
| work fields, nobody scoffs when you say "no you cannot use
| chemistry to turn lead into gold", and you don't find that
| occasionally your simple adding NaOH to water actually
| results in an acidic solution somehow because a completely
| disconnected reaction happened in the other room where
| someone used the wrong brand of sulphuric acid in a
| reaction and now the entire lab is cursed...
|
| Fuck I still have like 35 more years of this until I can
| retire and I'm borderline useless at anything else
| biztos wrote:
| Well after all it's mostly _writing_ that we do. Go check how
| well-adjusted the other writers are. Especially the ones who
| spend much of their time writing stuff they know is worthless,
| because rent.
| itronitron wrote:
| I think a lot of the stress comes from the responsibility for
| making something work while the definition of that something
| can radically change based on the whims, lack of foresight, or
| poor planning by one's coworkers.
| lxe wrote:
| I haven't worked in a team or with a manager that wasn't
| receptive and empathetic to burnout or more serious mental health
| concerns. Guess I got lucky.
| Draiken wrote:
| Could they actually do something about it?
|
| What I found in my career is that the good managers do
| empathize and even sometimes try to improve the situation, but
| they simply can't.
|
| More often than not the cause of the issues come from decisions
| done at the top levels of the company.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| In the unforgiving realm of tech, where deadlines loom like
| tempests and demands soar higher than the tallest spires, a tale
| unfolds of a coder besieged by the storms of expectation.
| Leadership, with eyes set on horizons unseen, oft chart courses
| riddled with contradiction, whispering of features promised to
| titans, each deemed the pinnacle of priority. Yet, amidst the
| clamor for creation, a truth, stark and unyielding, emerges: to
| elevate two masters to the zenith is to court the abyss.
|
| Thus, ensnared in this labyrinth of urgency, our protagonist
| wrestles with the specter of impossibility, urged ever onward by
| the mantra, "Make it so." A counsel of despair, for within the
| crucible of incessant toil, the spirit wanes and the flesh
| wearies.
|
| In this odyssey of turmoil, the narrative delves deep into the
| quagmire of mental strife that ensnares those who toil in the
| shadow of unyielding expectation. It casts a light on the
| sanctity of boundaries, the paramount importance of safeguarding
| one's inner citadel, and the somber realization that, though we
| may strive with Herculean fervor, the fates of our endeavors lie
| beyond the realm of our dominion.
|
| Herein lies a clarion call to the sentinels of the digital
| frontier: to honor the sanctity of mind and spirit, to question
| the altars of perpetual labor upon which we lay our offerings,
| and to seek a horizon where success is measured not by the
| quantity of our toil, but by the quality of our lives.
| JTbane wrote:
| Anyone else feel like agile is partially to blame? The constant
| treadmill of work items, the stress of getting things done before
| sprint end, the demos failing, the anxiety when you get a bug
| report?
| fullstackchris wrote:
| yep, two week sprints with no break in between (I can't think
| of any sporting event where you sprint non stop!), and then we
| always say we'll "celebrate" when the project is done, but we
| never do
|
| just on to the next project :/
| chollida1 wrote:
| I'm not terribly convinced that software engineering is harder on
| someone mental health than being a doctor, lawyer, sales,
| engineer, professional athlete, teacher, or any other white
| collar profession is.
|
| All of these have their specific stressors, all of these
| professions have loads of articles about how people are leaving
| these professions due to how hard they are.
|
| All of these jobs tend to lead to them consuming your free time
| if you don't set boundaries, all have deadlines that lead to
| stress.
|
| >You cannot take a sick day by telling your team, "I have mental
| issues and need a day off."
|
| This hurt me to read on behalf of the OP.
|
| I'm now 20 years into my career and never once have I come across
| this attitude. People take sick days all the time for mental
| health. I feel terribly for this person that they felt like they
| couldn't but this is far and away the exception rather than the
| rule.
|
| Has any company come out against mental health in the past 20
| years?
| itronitron wrote:
| Many people don't know that they can tell their manager they
| will be out for health/medical reasons and do not have to
| provide any additional information (i.e. flu, back issues,
| mental wellness, etc...) . It would benefit a lot of people if
| they were taught basic laws related to employment while they
| are in school.
| nsguy wrote:
| Different in every country.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Doctor, lawyer, and athlete are "jock" professions, while
| software engineering is very much a "nerd" profession. These
| words represent status and general level of attractiveness and
| therefore access to attention and sex.
|
| Doctors, lawyers, teachers, and professional athletes all
| experience social reward and/or social contexts to their work.
| Software engineering is interfacing with an unthinking,
| unfeeling machine for many hours a day.
|
| Furthermore, the whole point of the vast majority of software
| engineering is to sell loot boxes to kids to increase
| shareholder wealth for a pittance of the wealth created (or
| something not too different from that for at least 60% of
| companies). How many mainstream software companies are
| contributing to building a society that you yourself would like
| to live in?
|
| To put it bluntly, many bad parents abandoned their kids to the
| internet where they found solace. Software engineering is a
| natural extension of spending too much time using the internet
| and becoming curious how it works.
|
| Poor mental health is a function of unmet needs... not feeling
| attractive, not feeling like you are contributing to the world
| or society at large, not getting laid, not feeling loved, not
| feeling worthy of love. All of these represent unmet needs, and
| I think software engineers struggle with these things more than
| a significant number of other professions because they are
| frequently intrinsic to why people become software engineers in
| the first place, machines don't care how socially inept you
| are, patients, clients, and judges do.
| tiznow wrote:
| It's weird, I've harped on a few of these points in
| conversations with others (usually when talking about "sexy
| careers", and why people don't hold coders in the same regard
| as doctors) but your words made me realize why I'm trying to
| become a developer. The dealing with the machine rather than
| people is something I'm willing to run with more than
| anything, right now. Not wholly a function of unmet needs,
| but addressing a specific change I'd like to make.
| onion2k wrote:
| _The dealing with the machine rather than people is
| something I 'm willing to run with more than anything,
| right now._
|
| Software engineering is an _incredibly_ people-focused
| career. You will need to be able to work with other devs,
| stakeholders, support, users.. everyone really. Going into
| a tech career thinking that it 's somewhere you can avoid
| people is never going to work out well.
| tiznow wrote:
| I don't exactly think that. It's more like I would like
| to transpose more of my energy into fighting with a
| machine, and less into people, because my job is 90/10
| dealing with execs and their bespoke, unmanageable
| concerns right now vs making something happen with
| technology. Could be a grass is greener thing. Maybe to
| current devs this comment looks crazy, I really wouldn't
| know yet.
|
| I enjoy working with people, actually. My current role is
| rapidly changing that.
| bxguff wrote:
| any person earnestly applying a nerd and jock mentality to
| adult life should find a nice patch of grass to touch and
| talk to more people
| hayst4ck wrote:
| The words are shortcuts for larger more complex ideas about
| primary motivations and goals. Reward structures learned as
| children and maturing young adults are definitely going to
| influence, subconsciously or consciously, adult behavior
| and understandings about how the world works.
|
| Here is Paul Graham using the word "nerd" and talking about
| the greater more complex idea:
| https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
| bxguff wrote:
| I don't think goals and motivations are a monolith just
| for people who like computers, or STEM, or who socialize
| less in high school because 'they didn't want to play the
| popularity game'. this worldview is reductive, and wholly
| unaware how growing up is different for everybody. Just
| be aware before you judge people.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > Doctor, lawyer, and athlete are "jock" professions, while
| software engineering is very much a "nerd" profession. These
| words represent status and general level of attractiveness
| and therefore access to attention and sex.
|
| This is just your perspective and, IMO, it's pretty warped.
| Software engineering is not a low-status position, even
| compared to doctors and lawyers. You aren't lacking in status
| or not having sex because you're a software engineer getting
| paid $200k/year instead of a doctor paid $200k/year.
|
| > Furthermore, the whole point of the vast majority of
| software engineering is to sell loot boxes to kids to
| increase shareholder wealth for a pittance of the wealth
| created (or something not too different from that for at
| least 60% of companies).
|
| Lawyers have to defend clients they know are guilty to help
| rapists and murderers walk free, and file IP lawsuits for
| patents they know are bullshit so that their client can
| siphon off a settlement from a large company, just because
| it's cheaper than a court battle. Lawyers have been widely
| (and unfairly!) regarded as one of the most despised
| professions since _Shakespeare_.[0] Professional atheletes
| have long been subject of the media debate over being paid
| "too much" compared to the value they bring to society. Even
| if they were broadly perceived as providing negative value to
| society, which I don't believe, software developers would not
| be unique.
|
| > To put it bluntly, many bad parents abandoned their kids to
| the internet where they found solace. Software engineering is
| a natural extension of spending too much time using the
| internet and becoming curious how it works.
|
| This is becoming less and less true. Many junior devs who
| were born post-2000 that I talk to never had a computer
| growing up other than their phone, and their first real
| experience with PCs came in high school and university.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_kill_all_the_lawyers
| p_l wrote:
| > This is just your perspective and, IMO, it's pretty
| warped. Software engineering is not a low-status position,
| even compared to doctors and lawyers. You aren't lacking in
| status or not having sex because you're a software engineer
| getting paid $200k/year instead of a doctor paid
| $200k/year.
|
| I find that it definitely points to a time period when
| someone entered maybe not workforce, but the "IT world"
| let's say.
|
| There was a time when programming in many places had
| definitely "unsexy" vibe among general population, with a
| lot of, well, painful "jokes", and all of that definitely
| set a "theme".
|
| fast forward a decade or so to 2010 and suddenly IT is no
| longer that place where only losers go.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > People take sick days all the time for mental health
|
| When you take a sick day, you're not supposed to say what's
| your issue.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| I go back and forth on this; on the one hand, yes, I don't
| owe my team an explanation about why I'm taking STO. On the
| other, me making it clear that I'm taking a mental health day
| may encourage another engineer (possibly a more junior one)
| to do the same if need be: emphasizing that mental health is
| a facet of overall health.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| The last 3 companies I've worked at over the last few years
| have all had "mental health days" in one form or another as a
| separate offering to sicks days. It's very common, at least
| in the UK.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| That's right, because the minute you say you're taking it for
| mental health, you get managed out. I've personally seen it
| happen at one of the major food delivery startup, at one of
| the big social media companies and at Amazon.
|
| The steps are the same. First they pile on more work on you,
| then gaslight you in believing your workload is the same as a
| junior employee and/or is subpar, then take you on a journey
| of "helping" you improve, document every small thing as a
| major flaw and then get you in that meeting with the HR.
| fatnoah wrote:
| This is very different than my experience at another FAANG.
| One of my reports was able to take a multi-week mental
| health leave and return without any negative impact on
| performance rating or career. Of course, mileage probably
| varies from manager to manager and org to org.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > Has any company come out against mental health in the past 20
| years?
|
| Sorry but this is really naive. They won't come out and say it
| explicitly, because they can't, but many companies will just
| find a way to quietly replace you or hold you back in the
| organization if you are public about any mental issues.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| > >You cannot take a sick day by telling your team, "I have
| mental issues and need a day off."
|
| I'm in an environment (military) were we actively work to
| prevent this. I have lots of kids (18-20yo) with mental health
| issues that are not helped by being allowed to take time off so
| casually. Our mental health experts want to keep people working
| because having them sit at home drinking/gaming does nothing. I
| have seen kids actually react well to increased "stress" on the
| job. Think basic training stuff. They are worked hard, go home
| tired and then actually sleep. Sending them home not tired
| leads to drinking and late-night gaming sessions after which
| they do not sleep and come to work the next day like zombies.
| Our people know how to spot this and adapt their schedules
| specifically to break the cycle. It wouldn't work for everyone,
| but we do need to accept that we are each not necessarily our
| own best therapists. If given more time off, many of us will
| simply amplify negative behaviors. The better answer is not I
| "need a day off" but rather "I'm booked to see the counselor at
| 08:00 tomorrow".
| nsguy wrote:
| You go home from the military during basic training? Curious
| what country that is...
|
| Having served I agree that a military environment where your
| day is full and you're basically told what to do all the
| time, and you're maybe working extremely hard, can override
| some "bad thoughts". That said, it's not unheard of for
| soldiers to commit suicide, harm themselves or others, and
| generally suffer from stress related to the military
| environment.
|
| I agree that simply taking a day off is not a fix and if you
| are worried about getting stuff done at work it might even
| make things worse. That said, being in a workplace where it's
| considered ok to take a day off if you need to, maybe go
| hiking or something, is probably something that alleviates
| stress from the employees.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| It varies from person to person, but speaking for myself,
| getting back to work is _incredibly_ good for me after I 've
| experienced something terrible. The structure, the feeling of
| "normal," is better therapy than many give it credit for. Now
| granted, a big part of that is because I thoroughly enjoy my
| work and my manager looks out for my well-being, as do I for
| my subordinates. I know plenty of people, friends and family,
| who loathe their return to work precisely because that's not
| the case for them.
|
| As to the GP's question:
|
| > Has any company come out against mental health in the past
| 20 years?
|
| Certainly not, but there are innumerable companies, software
| and otherwise, that while paying useless lipservice to the
| concept of taking care of employees, absolutely do not follow
| through. I have one friend who's simply unable to attend
| therapy because his insurance is shit and he's in too much
| debt to take on another. His employer has all kinds of things
| to say about how much they take care of their own, but he
| gets shit from his manager for taking "mental health days" so
| he doesn't, he just says he has the flu. Mind you he's no
| burger flipper, he's a seasoned sysadmin.
|
| And, lest we forget that outside our IT professions, it's
| even worse. My wife is a cook and has bounced from one awful
| workplace to another many times, her treatment running the
| gamut from benign neglect to outright hostility at the notion
| of needing mental healthcare.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I agree with you but I think the key point here is "go home
| tired and then actually sleep" which is not often the case.
| After a stressful day as a software engineer or other white
| collar job, your body is _not_ tired. Mentally you might be
| tired but that just leads to doomscrolling and social media
| and other dopamine hits. The key point here is that one
| should ideally be physically tired so that after they go home
| they want to sleep. This is why, for example, after a
| stressful day I make my body tired with a long run.
| oooyay wrote:
| > I'm in an environment (military) were we actively work to
| prevent this.
|
| Are we talking US military here? I think I recognize the
| pattern you're talking about when you say:
|
| > I have lots of kids (18-20yo) with mental health issues
| that are not helped by being allowed to take time off so
| casually. Our mental health experts want to keep people
| working because having them sit at home drinking/gaming does
| nothing. I have seen kids actually react well to increased
| "stress" on the job. Think basic training stuff. They are
| worked hard, go home tired and then actually sleep. Sending
| them home not tired leads to drinking and late-night gaming
| sessions after which they do not sleep and come to work the
| next day like zombies.
|
| You aren't _actively_ doing anything. You 're saturating
| their day so that they're distracted from whatever underlying
| problems they face. They're too tired to deal with them so
| they sleep and repeat. I'd be curious to see your solution
| play out in the ten years post separation, but the VA may be
| ahead of you. For context (if you're not American) TAPS is
| what you take _as_ you separate:
| https://benefits.va.gov/TRANSITION/docs/pstap-assessment.pdf
| (Section 4.C should have some relevant quotes).
|
| I remember at some point a Navy Corpsman explaining to me
| that the goal of Navy medicine isn't to make you better, it's
| to keep you in fighting shape. Fighting shape doesn't need to
| be the best or most optimal shape, just enough to do the job
| the military needs you to do.
| bblcla wrote:
| Honestly, I didn't realize until I was 2 or 3 years into my job
| that I was 'allowed' to take a sick day if I was going to spend
| it all miserable or even crying (I had a coworker who was a
| bully).
|
| Nobody ever actually came out and so, but I realize now that it
| was pretty common.
| ericmcer wrote:
| If anything Engineers would get the least pushback to taking a
| mental health day of those careers.
|
| Our skillset becomes so uniquely tied to the company we work at
| that replacing a veteran engineer would take more than a year
| minimum. The differences between operations at two hospitals is
| probably minuscule compared to two tech companies.
|
| It also feels like managers have received training in "burnout"
| so the few times I have uttered those words usually leads to
| some temporary white glove treatment.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| > Our skillset becomes so uniquely tied to the company we
| work at that replacing a veteran engineer would take more
| than a year minimum. The differences between operations at
| two hospitals is probably minuscule compared to two tech
| companies.
|
| Companies/managers have gotten alot smarter about this. The
| strategy is to hire enough and be managed to a degree such
| that the operation of any single system is never left leave
| to any single engineer.
|
| So if your company is smart, yes you are replaceable.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| There's strategy and there's reality though. They got other
| people to "operate" the thing, but "operate as well" is
| sometimes a pipe dream, which erodes the meaning of
| "replaceable".
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I can't remember any of my 10+ SWE jobs where anyone even asked
| what sickness my sick day was for.
|
| Certainly not for a single day!
| Zenzero wrote:
| As someone who crossed over from medicine, I can attest that
| software engineers have it very very good. Appreciate what you
| have.
|
| I accept everyone's personal experiences with bad management,
| unreasonable timelines, and uninspiring projects, but those
| things are everywhere. Now add in patients and their families
| having the worst days of their lives in your presence day after
| day, high-pressure decision making, not getting even the chance
| to sit or go to the bathroom for nearly a whole shift. To top
| it off, if you have an "off day", that can earn you a lengthy
| investigation +/- a court case.
|
| While it may sound insensitive, software engineering is nowhere
| near as complex or stressful as many (but not all) medical
| roles. It is both mentally and physically less taxing.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| And at the end of the day this is exactly the attitude that
| prevents people from asking for a day off. It's wrong in
| medicine and it's wrong here.
|
| The attitude we should have is: yes, Mr. Successful Boss Man,
| you are a better human than me: you are more disciplined,
| don't have a problem with anxiety while dealing with a lot
| more stress, make more money and even look better. But these
| facts do absolutely nothing to change that I am crumbling and
| need a break. If you are so good at dealing with stress -
| write the software (or stitch up that patient) yourself,
| surely it would be easy for you, the superhuman?
|
| But we won't do that. Instead we'll pretend we are 10x
| engineers or genius doctors until we either mess ourselves
| up, or make a big enough mistake. The realization needed to
| wake up is: the people pushing us to work harder need us.
| They actually couldn't have their successful business empire
| or their big fancy hospital without our work.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> While it may sound insensitive, software engineering is
| nowhere near as complex or stressful as many (but not all)
| medical roles. It is both mentally and physically less
| taxing_
|
| As much as I respect your personal experience, I think you
| make a mistake in assuming that it is universal. Further, you
| are also making the mistake of invalidating other people's
| individual experiences based on your perception of what the
| average worker does.
|
| In other words, it is trivially easy to find software
| engineers who are burnt out to a much nicer crisp than the
| average doctor, and your dismissal of their suffering won't
| change a thing for them.
|
| This isn't a contest to see which profession is most toxic to
| its workers. Our aim should be to find ways to prevent and
| mitigate these situations.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > >You cannot take a sick day by telling your team, "I have
| mental issues and need a day off."
|
| > This hurt me to read on behalf of the OP.
|
| Indeed. Taking time off for mental health reasons is no less
| legitimate than taking time off for physical health reasons.
|
| I've never actually told any bosses that I'm taking a "mental
| health day" or anything, though. I just take a sick day,
| because that's what it is.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| I agree and maybe I even take it further. I don't see any
| need to give a reason or justification. OOO or on vacation is
| all I say. I'm not a child or asking for permission.
| AppleBananaPie wrote:
| I have experienced most of what you have written about and have
| taken many similar steps :) The major difference being I would
| describe myself still at the level of a juniorish engineer.
|
| My only addition and I'm very curious as to your opinion: I think
| mental health / physical health is more impactful in software
| engineering than most other professions. At least for me, if I'm
| sick it directly impacts my working memory and ability to focus.
| I always tell my friends I could do yard work just fine, yeah I'd
| feel like crap still but I could do it. If I'm trying to code
| something difficult often times I can end up making zero progress
| or arguably negative progress if I'm sick long enough as I lose
| context of code changing around me.
|
| The same holds true if I'm stressed or anxious or whatever.
|
| This can probably become a cycle with the things you mentioned
| that makes it easy to trend downward.
|
| Thanks for sharing your story :)
| whoomp12341 wrote:
| mental health issues in swe can be rampant and it is a superset
| of just anxiety / burnout
| calderwoodra wrote:
| My wife is a dentist in the bay area - she can tell which
| patients work in tech based on how ground down their teeth are.
| wobbly_bush wrote:
| Same thing doesn't happen to say lawyers? Or any of the other
| white collar jobs?
| w10-1 wrote:
| What in software engineering adds more than the usual stress to
| working?
|
| - Automation is the rule, not the exception. Replace your own
| work with a script, whenever you can.
|
| - Our work product in theory works forever (i.e., until
| conditions change). You really are not needed when you're done.
| Script monkeys can copy and fix your stuff.
|
| - New technologies and platforms: hardware drives software and
| vice-versa, leading to frequent choices whether to upgrade to
| enjoy new benefits. Your skills become dated, and the process of
| upgrading requires whole-world knowledge no one has.
|
| - High competition: with low barriers to entry, you can do great
| stuff but still be a smidge worse, and lose the entire race.
| Close is crazy-making.
|
| - Low management: with automation the professional process, the
| employee-manager ratio tends to be very high, typically with
| senior technicians enlisted for administration (which also makes
| them more compliant). As a result, employees are not buffered
| from business forces.
|
| NO other profession has all or even most of these features. The
| closest I can think of is the bench scientist (and they might be
| in a worse position b/c they have very few alternatives). And AI
| will amplify both automation and new technologies and will likely
| increase the employee/manager ratio.
|
| But ironically, few professions offer as much leeway for mental
| derangement. I'm shocked how off some people are, but they still
| function just fine, because the main determinants of productivity
| is whatever weird programming model evolved at the company:
| master that, and you can perform well, so long as you avoid
| triggering your manager or someone important.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| To paraphrase a famous quote... "What do you
| think about mental health in software engineering?" "I
| think it would be a good idea."
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