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Mental health in software engineering

vadimkravcenko.com

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Re: Mental health in software engineering

#111

Post by joelfried »

AlexandrB wrote: post #78
dakiol wrote: post #72

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.

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, th…

> 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.

Re: Mental health in software engineering

#112

Post by btilly »

steve_gh wrote: post #54
xyst wrote: post #11

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 likel…

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.

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.

Re: Mental health in software engineering

#113

Post by btilly »

jghn wrote: post #84
xyst wrote: post #11

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 likel…

> 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…

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.

Re: Mental health in software engineering

#114

Post by np- »

ryandvm wrote: post #49
cjk2 wrote: post #10

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…

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…

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.

Re: Mental health in software engineering

#115

Post by btilly »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #15
datadrivenangel wrote: post #5

"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."…

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...

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.

Re: Mental health in software engineering

#116

Post by jampekka »

dvdbloc wrote: post #55
zero-sharp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

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.

Re: Mental health in software engineering

#118

Post by np- »

surfingdino wrote: post #31
redmattred wrote: post #4

“Your lack of planning is not my emergency”

"It was. Now you are fired." how it typically goes at startups.

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...?

Re: Mental health in software engineering

#119

Post by jacques_chester »

Verdex wrote: post #70
datadrivenangel wrote: post #5

"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."…

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 c…

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.

Re: Mental health in software engineering

#120

Post by baron816 »

mdgrech23 wrote: post #99
xyst wrote: post #11

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 likel…

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.

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.
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