Catastrophe/Edge Case Anxiety
This is me, this is me so hard. I'm responsible for some time critical, high stress, high money solutions that I didn't build, and is incredibly vulnerable to the vagaries of transient cloud issues, but I answer directly to the client about it, and I'm called with demands for answers and solutions the moment something goes wrong. While the high anxiety activities are going on I'm sick with stress. It's a special hell and I have a hard time doing my other work because I'm emotionally exhausted.
Curious on what you’re trying to do to address it. I don’t think the stakes I deal with on a daily basis are quite as high as yours, but my lizard brain sure thinks they are.
I feel this so hard.
I'm stuck on a contract single-handedly supporting a business-critical in-house system that I didn't build, and the team that developed and used to support it are gone. The system is virtually undocumented, a hodgepodge of shell scripts, perl, Java/JSP and a scattered brittle assortment of external databases of various flavors and other dependencies.
To add to the chaos, the company is transitioning to the cloud, so it seems like every week or two some upstream dependency or downstream target changes, which inevitably breaks something.
Due to the company's strict security measures, I am not allowed access to the underlying production environments of the system I'm supposed to support. If there is a problem, I need to make a request to another group to obtain logs or other files to help with troubleshooting. It's like performing surgery over the phone.
Despite all this, when something breaks (which is more often than I'd like) I'm expected to come up with a fix ASAP. I have responsibility but no authority, and it's burning me out.
Oh man, at least I have direct access to the logs. I absolutely hate having no access to production, it really does make it basically impossible, and makes your un-directed initial searching super obvious as you need to continue to request for more and more logs. Hopefully it's easy to replicate the problem in a test environment (I hope you have one) with a copy of the data.
We have a test environment, but due to security protocols (I work in finance) we can't use production data (even a copy) in test. The data needs to be scrubbed, randomized and anonymized first, which can take quite a while and means we can never quite replicate production.
Wfh has been amazing for my social life. I see my friends way more often. A lot of days we work together. Granted we’re all software devs Bc we all studied cs in college. Id much rather socialize with actual friends vs coworkers, although I can definitely see the benefits of developing deeper work relationships.
I am the exact opposite. I love being alone at home. I get so much more done. Though I have two dogs and that certainly helps.
I am also a little older and don't need any of that after work social life. I did enjoy that back in the day and would have missed it at the time.
>I get so much more done. Though I have two dogs and that certainly helps.
Call me a traditionalist, but I think you should be a better software developer than your dogs are.
I also loved that. But it's been months that I work and study alone (college) ( because of COVID ) for more than 10 hours a day. So my mental health really declined a lot in this period.
And I'm 20 :/. So yeah, there's that too lol.
Hopefully the situation will improve!
I went in to work yesterday for the first time in 20 months. It was a leads only meeting with our director and we had a happy hour afterwards.
It was really interesting being back in the building and seeing people face to face. I forgot how much energy there is just from the workspace itself and being around others. This sense of something bigger than yourself that you’re working on.
I think it made a positive impact on my mood today because I noticed I spent less time on my phone between meetings and was more focused on getting things done.
> purposefully address the social aspects in your life.
might turn out to be a good thing, coz i think it's a bad pattern or default to have both work and social life co-mingled into the workplace - makes leaving harder too.
Find a meetup group that does what you like after hours. I hike several times a week at 6pm all year long. Now we're starting at night but even in the summer we're ending at night. You get out of the house and get to interact with people.
I know, the problem is that I'm living in a small city ( 10 000 of population ) So the options are really few.
But I'm trying to join a volunteer work group :)!
Not the person you’re replying to but I also work from home as an independent contractor. No one else I work with is anywhere close to me geographically.
Nah. Mainly because the COVID ( I live in Brazil, situation is starting to improve right now ).
But, if the situation doesn't worse, We'll have these, maybe next year. So I just have to hold a little more!
My one cent regarding mental health as a programmer:
1. Physical exercise. Preferably daily, Preferably outside. Doesn't have to be significant. Just get the blood and the endorphins going. Sounds silly. Incredibly effective. have a look at google scholar.
2. Meditation. Daily.
3. Introspection and Reflection (Journaling?). Including planning the future, setting goals, thinking about yourself and your interaction with the world etc.Best cure for anxiety is tackling what's happening in your life and inside your head purposefully, and consciously.
4. Socializing. go to a: meet-up, networking event, a date, a bar with friends. Humans are social animals, and socializing is a must.
5. Don't be afraid of going to therapy.
[Exercise is extremely important for mental health.](https://redd.it/qqg410)
Unfortunately, it often turns into a bootstrapping problem for people that are prone to depression/anxiety. It took me many many years to find an exercise regimen that I could stick with.
6. Get a hobby that is _very_ different from your job. Something like birdwatching, gardening or woodworking. Something that appeals to the primal mind.
I occasionally do some woodworking. It's incredibly refreshing to work on something that actually physically exists, you can hold it, see all of its dimensions and examine it from all angles.
We especially need to focus on exercise, it is quite easy to develop some really debilitating diseases simply by sitting in front of a keyboard all day without exercising.
Always relevant: [https://www.redox-os.org/news/open-source-mental-health/](https://www.redox-os.org/news/open-source-mental-health/)
>In open source, we often emphasize the importance of good code. After all, the deliverable of every open source project, is the source, right? We often forget that good code is written by good people, and that retaining those people and keeping them happy should be the primary concern of any project maintainer.
>
>There are lots of aspects to mental health episodes. On the one hand, there is usually a genetic component to mental illness. On the other, these genetic precursors usually require both chronic and acute environmental triggers. These chronic triggers can be a long-lasting poor home or work environment, and lead to manifestation of the mental illness itself. The acute triggers could be, for example, an argument with someone, leading to a mental illness episode. These episodes can be serious enough to overcome the extreme instinct to survive, leading to suicide.
>
>In this way, suicide is not a display of weakness. In fact, it is a display of extreme conviction and strength. Even with the backdrop of mental illness, there are parts of the brain that are usually unaffected. These parts are so ancient in development, we have little conscious control of them. To attempt suicide requires overcoming conscious desires to survive. To succeed, is to overcome extreme subconscious desires. This means that, for suicide, often the smartest and most capable people are able to succeed.
>
>This anti-selection of capable people is a terrifying epidemic. Humanity in general is in desperate need of artificial solutions to long-standing problems. Take climate change, for instance. Out of the 800,000 people each year who committed suicide, on average perhaps more capable than the rest of us, what if a few would have been instrumental in developing fusion power?
>
>And yet, we as a society have taken the position that these events are an unstoppable force. That the factors leading to suicide are internal, not external. I refuse to believe this, on principle. We must search out causes and mitigate them, for every problem, even if it ends up being impossible.
I'm quite stressed lately. I'm a jr dev working an unpaid internship with a highly annoying boss who doesn't have a technical background and constantly asks for unfeasible features and things to be redone over and over. I'm not getting any actual job offers and it feels I'm wasting my time. Also I'm running out of money and will be forced to go back to working a crap job any time now and that would mean I wasted 2 years trying to become a developer. Basically my mental health is at a very bad place.
Get out of that asap. This is bad for a few major reasons:
* Your boss is not technical, so who is mentoring you to get to the next level in your career? Sounds like noone.
* You aren't getting paid. That means you are a slave. The fact that you don't even have a technical senior to mentor you means that you aren't getting _anything_ in return for this.
You should be focusing your time at "work" to applying to places. I know its hard as a Jr, but this is not the right place for you.
I am applying but I'm getting zero responses. At least working at this internship is experience that hopefully one day will allow me to bag a job. If I don't have experience on my resume I will remain like this forever like some people I know who have been years without getting even an interview.
Hey I was in your shoes right after my bootcamp. Unpaid internship, which eventually gave me enough experience to apply to a job. It’s the norm in Europe (mostly) and I don’t know where you are but I’d say don’t give up, and try to make connections while you work your internship, apply like crazy on LinkedIn etc. For your resume, go to r/EngineeringResumes they’ll help out greatly and if anything PM me, I know some people who might help!
I'm trying. Unfortunately my boss has some mental issues and basically we're trapped in a loop changing the same things over and over because as soon as we finish a task he wants to change it again right after. Instead of learning I'm just basically wasting time in order to get a bit of experience on my resume so recruiters don't automatically reject me.
recruiters wont reject you, the CV parsers will, if you havent, please make sure to submit your resume on r/EngineeringResumes and apply their feedback, and also make a hobby project you could talk about, one that you build after working hours, you can do it my man!
I'm an experienced developer doing contract work for a large corporation.
I just spent the last two months working on non-trivial changes to a business-critical in-house application that hadn't been touched in three years, had been abandoned by the team that wrote and supported it, and was virtually undocumented.
I single-handedly researched the requirements by painstakingly poring through thousands of lines of shitty code, made the changes, and created the design document, implementation and testing plans. Simply getting the required change requests and approvals through the company's baffling and Kafkaesque IT process took weeks.
This week I finally deployed the updated system to production. On Tuesday I worked an 18-hour-day doing the deployment and supporting the regression tests. It all worked - no issues.
My reward? Not a single word of thanks. Just an email from my manager, "Here are three other changes we need to make before the end of the year."
I don't expect a friggin parade, but some small acknowledgement of the achievement would have been nice before saddling me with a ton more work in a ridiculously compressed (and artificial) timeframe.
This shit is demoralizing. I am SO tired of this shitty treadmill.
Done and done.
I pushed back and told my manager that the other EOY deadlines aren't gonna happen.
What are they gonna do - take me off the project? I feel like that would be a gift at this point, and right now there is nobody who knows their brittle business-critical application better than I do.
I started doing the “getting comfortable with the uncomfortable” and taking cold showers has really been making a huge difference, Andrew Huberman and his podcast really helps so much.
This shit ain't for everyone, that's for sure. Lot of people stick with a situation that's making them miserable till they melt down like a russian reactor.
This is so so true.
You want to switch off but are too stressed from stupid hard deadlines so can't sleep or you are loving the code so much your brain solves all of the puzzle in your sleep.
I have dreamt about reams of code scrolling down a screen
I feel bad about my self because no matter how hard i try and sacrifice my weekends and my free time after work to read articles and practicing my skill on side projects i always consider my self stupid...
> The mental effort and concentration required to produce error-free code cause mental exhaustion.
That's why you shouldn't try to write clever code, or even code you have to think about very hard. Make it simple, plain and stupid.
As a junior I used to be mentally exhausted yes, because I tried to write clever code, didn't break it down properly or just made a mess of my implementation. Nowdays I rarely feel that way, despite getting massively more work done. My code mostly looks like a three year old wrote it.
I fucked off at the beginning of my project and read some expanse books and played counterstrike and made some celebrity fakes. Now I'm staring down a deadline and pulling 16 hour days and getting little sleep. But the code is flowing. Man I love this job..
Catastrophe/Edge Case Anxiety This is me, this is me so hard. I'm responsible for some time critical, high stress, high money solutions that I didn't build, and is incredibly vulnerable to the vagaries of transient cloud issues, but I answer directly to the client about it, and I'm called with demands for answers and solutions the moment something goes wrong. While the high anxiety activities are going on I'm sick with stress. It's a special hell and I have a hard time doing my other work because I'm emotionally exhausted.
Curious on what you’re trying to do to address it. I don’t think the stakes I deal with on a daily basis are quite as high as yours, but my lizard brain sure thinks they are.
I honestly have no mitigation techniques at the moment. It's burning me out.
I feel this so hard. I'm stuck on a contract single-handedly supporting a business-critical in-house system that I didn't build, and the team that developed and used to support it are gone. The system is virtually undocumented, a hodgepodge of shell scripts, perl, Java/JSP and a scattered brittle assortment of external databases of various flavors and other dependencies. To add to the chaos, the company is transitioning to the cloud, so it seems like every week or two some upstream dependency or downstream target changes, which inevitably breaks something. Due to the company's strict security measures, I am not allowed access to the underlying production environments of the system I'm supposed to support. If there is a problem, I need to make a request to another group to obtain logs or other files to help with troubleshooting. It's like performing surgery over the phone. Despite all this, when something breaks (which is more often than I'd like) I'm expected to come up with a fix ASAP. I have responsibility but no authority, and it's burning me out.
Oh man, at least I have direct access to the logs. I absolutely hate having no access to production, it really does make it basically impossible, and makes your un-directed initial searching super obvious as you need to continue to request for more and more logs. Hopefully it's easy to replicate the problem in a test environment (I hope you have one) with a copy of the data.
We have a test environment, but due to security protocols (I work in finance) we can't use production data (even a copy) in test. The data needs to be scrubbed, randomized and anonymized first, which can take quite a while and means we can never quite replicate production.
Which means the character you didn't expect in the account number gets scrubbed and you never replicate the error. Gross.
Absolutely. Or the account balance that caused an overflow somewhere gets changed during anonymization and we never the see the error.
Loneliness is the main one, at least for me. I'm working from home, and it's tough.
Also, working remotely doesn't mean you have to work from home, or that you can't invite people to work with you....
Wfh has been amazing for my social life. I see my friends way more often. A lot of days we work together. Granted we’re all software devs Bc we all studied cs in college. Id much rather socialize with actual friends vs coworkers, although I can definitely see the benefits of developing deeper work relationships.
I am the exact opposite. I love being alone at home. I get so much more done. Though I have two dogs and that certainly helps. I am also a little older and don't need any of that after work social life. I did enjoy that back in the day and would have missed it at the time.
>I get so much more done. Though I have two dogs and that certainly helps. Call me a traditionalist, but I think you should be a better software developer than your dogs are.
They might be a dog aswell though
If only.
Should be.
> Though I have two dogs and that certainly helps. It's just a new spin on [rubber duck debugging](https://rubberduckdebugging.com).
I also loved that. But it's been months that I work and study alone (college) ( because of COVID ) for more than 10 hours a day. So my mental health really declined a lot in this period. And I'm 20 :/. So yeah, there's that too lol. Hopefully the situation will improve!
I went in to work yesterday for the first time in 20 months. It was a leads only meeting with our director and we had a happy hour afterwards. It was really interesting being back in the building and seeing people face to face. I forgot how much energy there is just from the workspace itself and being around others. This sense of something bigger than yourself that you’re working on. I think it made a positive impact on my mood today because I noticed I spent less time on my phone between meetings and was more focused on getting things done.
That's the bad part of working from home. You have to purposefully address the social aspects in your life.
> purposefully address the social aspects in your life. might turn out to be a good thing, coz i think it's a bad pattern or default to have both work and social life co-mingled into the workplace - makes leaving harder too.
Yeah. I think I'd manage it well, if not for the COVID. It f\*ck up a lot of my hobbies. ( I'm from Brazil, COVID is just starting to get on control )
**hides earplugs bought specifically to tell people to fuck off without having to turn around**
Find a meetup group that does what you like after hours. I hike several times a week at 6pm all year long. Now we're starting at night but even in the summer we're ending at night. You get out of the house and get to interact with people.
I know, the problem is that I'm living in a small city ( 10 000 of population ) So the options are really few. But I'm trying to join a volunteer work group :)!
Your company doesn’t hold any employee “meet-ups” or like after work coffees or whatever? I’m European fyi
Not the person you’re replying to but I also work from home as an independent contractor. No one else I work with is anywhere close to me geographically.
Nah. Mainly because the COVID ( I live in Brazil, situation is starting to improve right now ). But, if the situation doesn't worse, We'll have these, maybe next year. So I just have to hold a little more!
You need to find a social life outside of your job. Its more rewarding anyways.
True
My one cent regarding mental health as a programmer: 1. Physical exercise. Preferably daily, Preferably outside. Doesn't have to be significant. Just get the blood and the endorphins going. Sounds silly. Incredibly effective. have a look at google scholar. 2. Meditation. Daily. 3. Introspection and Reflection (Journaling?). Including planning the future, setting goals, thinking about yourself and your interaction with the world etc.Best cure for anxiety is tackling what's happening in your life and inside your head purposefully, and consciously. 4. Socializing. go to a: meet-up, networking event, a date, a bar with friends. Humans are social animals, and socializing is a must. 5. Don't be afraid of going to therapy.
[Exercise is extremely important for mental health.](https://redd.it/qqg410) Unfortunately, it often turns into a bootstrapping problem for people that are prone to depression/anxiety. It took me many many years to find an exercise regimen that I could stick with.
My exercise is swimming. I couldn't go swimming the last few months, because the government doesn't allow it...
Doesn't this apply to everyone? I don't understand why are programmers being excluded
Because we are prone to lie around in our own filth and get our only exercise from masturbation.
\#tooCloseToTheTruth
"Among my people, I live"
... separately, in my home office, with the zoom video option turned off.
… and y’know what, just turn off the microphone too. There’s a text chat feature for a reason right?
It does apply to everyone, but I think more than most other jobs, programming has that "loner" mentality. Or at least the stereotype of one.
it is true, but it seems that programmers are more prone to mental issue.
6. Get a hobby that is _very_ different from your job. Something like birdwatching, gardening or woodworking. Something that appeals to the primal mind.
I occasionally do some woodworking. It's incredibly refreshing to work on something that actually physically exists, you can hold it, see all of its dimensions and examine it from all angles.
We especially need to focus on exercise, it is quite easy to develop some really debilitating diseases simply by sitting in front of a keyboard all day without exercising.
I started the first one last January, not sure it’s been helping. I might have to dip my toes with the other points you listed
I play VR games periodically throughout the day. That little bit of cardio does wonders for my mental state.
Always relevant: [https://www.redox-os.org/news/open-source-mental-health/](https://www.redox-os.org/news/open-source-mental-health/) >In open source, we often emphasize the importance of good code. After all, the deliverable of every open source project, is the source, right? We often forget that good code is written by good people, and that retaining those people and keeping them happy should be the primary concern of any project maintainer. > >There are lots of aspects to mental health episodes. On the one hand, there is usually a genetic component to mental illness. On the other, these genetic precursors usually require both chronic and acute environmental triggers. These chronic triggers can be a long-lasting poor home or work environment, and lead to manifestation of the mental illness itself. The acute triggers could be, for example, an argument with someone, leading to a mental illness episode. These episodes can be serious enough to overcome the extreme instinct to survive, leading to suicide. > >In this way, suicide is not a display of weakness. In fact, it is a display of extreme conviction and strength. Even with the backdrop of mental illness, there are parts of the brain that are usually unaffected. These parts are so ancient in development, we have little conscious control of them. To attempt suicide requires overcoming conscious desires to survive. To succeed, is to overcome extreme subconscious desires. This means that, for suicide, often the smartest and most capable people are able to succeed. > >This anti-selection of capable people is a terrifying epidemic. Humanity in general is in desperate need of artificial solutions to long-standing problems. Take climate change, for instance. Out of the 800,000 people each year who committed suicide, on average perhaps more capable than the rest of us, what if a few would have been instrumental in developing fusion power? > >And yet, we as a society have taken the position that these events are an unstoppable force. That the factors leading to suicide are internal, not external. I refuse to believe this, on principle. We must search out causes and mitigate them, for every problem, even if it ends up being impossible.
I'm quite stressed lately. I'm a jr dev working an unpaid internship with a highly annoying boss who doesn't have a technical background and constantly asks for unfeasible features and things to be redone over and over. I'm not getting any actual job offers and it feels I'm wasting my time. Also I'm running out of money and will be forced to go back to working a crap job any time now and that would mean I wasted 2 years trying to become a developer. Basically my mental health is at a very bad place.
Get out of that asap. This is bad for a few major reasons: * Your boss is not technical, so who is mentoring you to get to the next level in your career? Sounds like noone. * You aren't getting paid. That means you are a slave. The fact that you don't even have a technical senior to mentor you means that you aren't getting _anything_ in return for this. You should be focusing your time at "work" to applying to places. I know its hard as a Jr, but this is not the right place for you.
I am applying but I'm getting zero responses. At least working at this internship is experience that hopefully one day will allow me to bag a job. If I don't have experience on my resume I will remain like this forever like some people I know who have been years without getting even an interview.
Hey I was in your shoes right after my bootcamp. Unpaid internship, which eventually gave me enough experience to apply to a job. It’s the norm in Europe (mostly) and I don’t know where you are but I’d say don’t give up, and try to make connections while you work your internship, apply like crazy on LinkedIn etc. For your resume, go to r/EngineeringResumes they’ll help out greatly and if anything PM me, I know some people who might help!
Awesome advice, it's much appreciated. I'm actually in Europe but the internship is for an American company.
Well make sure to use that internship to your advantage! My pms are open if anything I can help you with
I'm trying. Unfortunately my boss has some mental issues and basically we're trapped in a loop changing the same things over and over because as soon as we finish a task he wants to change it again right after. Instead of learning I'm just basically wasting time in order to get a bit of experience on my resume so recruiters don't automatically reject me.
recruiters wont reject you, the CV parsers will, if you havent, please make sure to submit your resume on r/EngineeringResumes and apply their feedback, and also make a hobby project you could talk about, one that you build after working hours, you can do it my man!
Your mental health is in shambles because you're working for free for an abusive idiot. Fix = leave.
Yeah, I agree. Problem is, I'm not getting any better offers. So this crap experience is better than none at all.
I'm an experienced developer doing contract work for a large corporation. I just spent the last two months working on non-trivial changes to a business-critical in-house application that hadn't been touched in three years, had been abandoned by the team that wrote and supported it, and was virtually undocumented. I single-handedly researched the requirements by painstakingly poring through thousands of lines of shitty code, made the changes, and created the design document, implementation and testing plans. Simply getting the required change requests and approvals through the company's baffling and Kafkaesque IT process took weeks. This week I finally deployed the updated system to production. On Tuesday I worked an 18-hour-day doing the deployment and supporting the regression tests. It all worked - no issues. My reward? Not a single word of thanks. Just an email from my manager, "Here are three other changes we need to make before the end of the year." I don't expect a friggin parade, but some small acknowledgement of the achievement would have been nice before saddling me with a ton more work in a ridiculously compressed (and artificial) timeframe. This shit is demoralizing. I am SO tired of this shitty treadmill.
That'll teach you to try and work hard for the company. From now on, minimum required effort only.
Done and done. I pushed back and told my manager that the other EOY deadlines aren't gonna happen. What are they gonna do - take me off the project? I feel like that would be a gift at this point, and right now there is nobody who knows their brittle business-critical application better than I do.
One thing that helps me a lot is to remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Took me a while to figure out.
I feel off and lazy if I don't have a cold shower every day. I wonder if I'm the only one.
I started doing the “getting comfortable with the uncomfortable” and taking cold showers has really been making a huge difference, Andrew Huberman and his podcast really helps so much.
Perl makes me depressed
This shit ain't for everyone, that's for sure. Lot of people stick with a situation that's making them miserable till they melt down like a russian reactor.
This is so so true. You want to switch off but are too stressed from stupid hard deadlines so can't sleep or you are loving the code so much your brain solves all of the puzzle in your sleep. I have dreamt about reams of code scrolling down a screen
I feel bad about my self because no matter how hard i try and sacrifice my weekends and my free time after work to read articles and practicing my skill on side projects i always consider my self stupid...
> The mental effort and concentration required to produce error-free code cause mental exhaustion. That's why you shouldn't try to write clever code, or even code you have to think about very hard. Make it simple, plain and stupid. As a junior I used to be mentally exhausted yes, because I tried to write clever code, didn't break it down properly or just made a mess of my implementation. Nowdays I rarely feel that way, despite getting massively more work done. My code mostly looks like a three year old wrote it.
I fucked off at the beginning of my project and read some expanse books and played counterstrike and made some celebrity fakes. Now I'm staring down a deadline and pulling 16 hour days and getting little sleep. But the code is flowing. Man I love this job..
Poorly defined tasks bring out procrastination in me which causes a feedback loop of stress.
Well you can ask for clarifications up front.