Mental health in software engineering

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.