Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

zarar.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 286 posts

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#61

Post by sillysaurusx »

For what it's worth, I'm not sure this is a mental breakdown, and it might give the wrong impression to people who do legitimately suffer breakdowns related to stress about tech.

For me it's only happened once. It was an anxiety attack, and I'm very lucky my wife was there to talk me through it and help me understand what was happening. She's had them many times, but it was my first (and thankfully only).

It turns out that this sort of thing happens to people, and that there's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't mean you're defective or weak. That's a really important point to internalize.

Xanax is worth having on hand, since that was what finally ended it for me and I was able to drift off to sleep.

I guess my point is, there's a difference between having intrusive thoughts vs something that debilitates you and that you legitimately can't control, such as an anxiety attack or a panic attack. You won't be getting any work done if those happen, and that's ok.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#62

Post by JohnMakin »

everdrive wrote: post #54
JohnMakin wrote: post #13

Working as a SRE for a year in a large global company broke me out of this "panic" mode described in this post. To a business, every problem seems like a world-ending event. It's very easy to give in to panic in those situations. However, in reality, it's rarely that bad, and even if it is, you'll probably survive without harm. The key in these situations, and what I try to do (totally relate to breaking out in a swe…

Bear in mind that when something "breaks" a business can freak out, but they're not freaking out about lots of other arguably more important problems: - The software they purchased doesn't do anything because it was never staffed or configured correctly. - Employees as a whole lose thousands of hours a year to terrible UX or meaningless requirements. - Some capability doesn't actually do anything, but no one cares en…

One of the funnier situations (funny now, wasn't so much the first time I saw this) that I run into at new gigs or contracts is when a business has absolutely zero monitoring or alerting. Go into their backend, it's predictably a dumpster fire. Start plugging in monitoring and the business realizes everything is on fire and PANICS. It's very difficult to explain to someone who definitely doesn't want to hear that it's actually been broken for a long time, they just didn't care enough to notice or to invest in doing it right the first time.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#63

Post by [deleted] »

roywiggins wrote: post #39
foodevl wrote: post #34

> This is no good. Let me just try reverting to a version from a month ago. Nothing. Three months ago? Nothing. Still failing. A year ago? Zilch. Reverting your own code, but still using a broken PostHog update from that same day? For me, the lesson is to make sure that I can revert everything, including dependencies.

It seems that PostHog just always loads the latest version of this piece of itself: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/24471#issuecomment... Though you can opt to bundle it yourself: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/24471#issuecomment...

[deleted]

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#64

Post by Etheryte »

timgl wrote: post #35
jonnycat wrote: post #23

Great post, but kind of buries the lede: PostHog is having a CrowdStrike moment.

PostHog cofounder here. This affected users that did not have a specific version of the JS library pinned and deployed a new version, or were using the snippet, and had network capture enabled, (a feature we introduced very recently and is only enabled on 3% of projects), and had recordings enabled on that particular session (for most customers, only a small percentage of sessions are recorded due to sampling or bill…

You're trying to phrase this as if those conditions make it any less bad, but they don't. This affected users that were using the latest version and used... features? Give me a break. Every product has bugs, but trying to downplay the issue after you've just read a distressed user of yours struggle with it is definitely not what you should be doing.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#67

Post by Muromec »

mtnviewer wrote: post #46
minkles wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the entire risk: being fired and financially in trouble. I spent 5 years eliminating that risk. Now I don't give a single fuck. There is no fear. They get better, more rational work and I have security.

How did you get to this point? I have $2M+ net worth, and while I live somewhere rent controlled, $2M isn't that much in the Bay Area. I'm still scared to lose my job.

Why do you even bother to work if you have 2M ?

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#69

Post by VBprogrammer »

timgl wrote: post #35
jonnycat wrote: post #23

Great post, but kind of buries the lede: PostHog is having a CrowdStrike moment.

PostHog cofounder here. This affected users that did not have a specific version of the JS library pinned and deployed a new version, or were using the snippet, and had network capture enabled, (a feature we introduced very recently and is only enabled on 3% of projects), and had recordings enabled on that particular session (for most customers, only a small percentage of sessions are recorded due to sampling or bill…

Not your customer, just a random person on the Internet, but I hope you can see that a lot of that is through luck more than judgement.

I personally would have like to see a bit more contrition rather than trying to minimise the issue.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#70

Post by lifeisstillgood »

everdrive wrote: post #54
JohnMakin wrote: post #13

Working as a SRE for a year in a large global company broke me out of this "panic" mode described in this post. To a business, every problem seems like a world-ending event. It's very easy to give in to panic in those situations. However, in reality, it's rarely that bad, and even if it is, you'll probably survive without harm. The key in these situations, and what I try to do (totally relate to breaking out in a swe…

Bear in mind that when something "breaks" a business can freak out, but they're not freaking out about lots of other arguably more important problems: - The software they purchased doesn't do anything because it was never staffed or configured correctly. - Employees as a whole lose thousands of hours a year to terrible UX or meaningless requirements. - Some capability doesn't actually do anything, but no one cares en…

That is a great perspective - thank you
Post reply on HN