Ask HN: Struggling with Anxiety as a Developer – What Are My Options?

Don't accept a job where teams do Scrum.

Scrum is an anxiety-inducing never-ending marathon. If people without anxiety make it work for them, great - but it doesn't work for me, so I reject it.

More broadly speaking, figure out if you have other boundaries you need to set, and make discovery of whether or not those boundaries would be crossed a part of any interview process. Decline jobs that cross them.

I find that smaller companies outside of the startup world are better. Look for bootstrapped small software shops, or an internal IT department of a non-tech company. Find a place where you are helping the business run, but not directly producing the product that defines the business. Or work on enterprise platforms - Salesforce, SAP, etc. Such platforms tend to need work more along the lines of configuration, scripting, and data updates, which results in a different type and pace of work.

Claire Weekes, who somebody else in this thread recommended. She's the pioneer of the approach. She wrote mainly in the mid-20th century but her work is still accessible.

Also look at Kevin Majeres' work, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGa-jQJazpY

Also look at the DARE Approach to anxiety: https://www.youtube.com/@DareResponse

They all say variations of the same thing, which is that you need to train your brain not to fear your anxiety.

This approach ought to be the standard -- it really works, and is well-demonstrated in the literature.

Also exercise every day, or as often as you can. Both weight-training and cardio are good. Swimming is excellent.

Don't spend much time analysing some deep-seated reason for your anxiety. A little bit is fine, but going too deep is a waste of time, and can actually make it worse. You want to train the rational part of your brain to disregard the anxiety signals coming from your amygdla; and over time, the amygdla's messages will become less and less intense. If you spend time thinking 'why why why am I feeling this way?', your brain starts treating the anxiety signals as important, which is the opposite of what you want.

I would strongly recommend against changing careers. You will not be making good decisions while anxious, and other careers will not be less stressful.

On a side note, what they put in the posting about being "fast paced" and stuff is almost always fluff. I don't know of any slow paced dev jobs, but the degree of pace doesn't seem to be correlated to the use of "fast paced" in the posting. It seems random.

I feel like I'll probably get fired and end up working at Walmart. Hope you have better luck.