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

111–120 of 286 posts

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#111

Post by StefanBatory »

justinclift wrote: post #89
sillysaurusx wrote: post #61

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 ou…

> Xanax is worth having on hand Doing a search online seems to indicate that Xanax can be addictive? https://www.drugs.com/xanax.html Doesn't seem to be the kind of thing to take lightly?

I think it's just a default warning; any drug can me. I am taking Sertraline for anxiety and even while I went through it with my psychiatrist about if it can be addictive (his statement was - no, not really - and for me that was true, I was able to stop taking it without any side effects), there's still that risk.

As with any medical thing, better consult it with a specialist anyway.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#112

Post by blastro »

vlunkr wrote: post #98
everdrive wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The zero-downtime culture is pretty out of control. Your flight can be delayed for hours, your roads can be closed for weeks, your internet can be out for hours because someone cut a line, that's all ok, but someone can't get into your website for 3 minutes to check the status of their order and we all must lose our minds and publicly apologize and explain in detail what happened and why it will never happen again.

Every time the stock market shits itself, the large brokerages seem to "go down"

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#113

Post by Alupis »

vlunkr wrote: post #98
everdrive wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The zero-downtime culture is pretty out of control. Your flight can be delayed for hours, your roads can be closed for weeks, your internet can be out for hours because someone cut a line, that's all ok, but someone can't get into your website for 3 minutes to check the status of their order and we all must lose our minds and publicly apologize and explain in detail what happened and why it will never happen again.

The obvious difference is no matter how long the county or city takes to reopen that road - you'll go right back to using it because you don't have an alternate choice.

For a website - particularly ecommerce websites - you have many choices. Rarely is a product only sold on a particular website. Being down when someone is trying to place an order can and does result in losing the sale, and potentially the customer forever. Customer loyalty is often fickle - why would they wait around for you to fix your stuff when they can simply place their order on Amazon or another retail website?

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#114

Post by [deleted] »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #105

Weirdly I think this is heavily related to social anxiety / shame - as in “everyone will knowingness me and point”. This is buried so deep in our brains it’s almost certain to do with herd behaviour. And it’s (IMO) why anonymity online is usually a bad idea - we need to learn, deep in our bones, that what is said online is the same as standing up in front of the church congregation and reading out our tweets - if you…

[deleted]

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#115

Post by caseyy »

silverquiet wrote: post #87
caseyy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this response called? I see it in many people. It’s like trying to catch a boiling mug of coffee when it falls — panic and not thinking leads to severe consequences; inaction would be better. It seems to relate to fight or flight, as opposed to freezing. All three are not great and can significantly escalate a bad situation.

Action bias and it seems rather fundamental to human behavior. You don't want to be seen as doing nothing when there are problems, but of course with a complex system, it can be very difficult to diagnose an issue, so you tend to screw things up if you just rush in. I think my favorite saying in that instance is, "don't just do something, stand there".

That’s a good one. I think my driving instructor told me something similar on my first lesson.

I’m talking about the brain fog more than the action itself, though. I no longer have it since I’ve been trained in emergency field medicine. That training course gave me enough exposure to stress to no longer get into this state of confusion. But I want to help others deal with it and it’s hard to find info online.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#116

Post by languagehacker »

I know that it's not a real post-mortem, but this is the opposite of what a good post-mortem looks like.

It includes:

* Blaming the tools (and the author)

* Not focusing on facts in the timeline

* Not considering improvements

But that doesn't make for engaging content, right?

> * At $TIME we observed HTTP POST calls failing

> * At $TIME customers reported inability to make changes to ticket prices and promo codes

> * $PERSON took the following steps to debug...

> * Root cause: an update to a vendor library resulted in cascading failures to the site

> * 5 whys (which might include lack of defensive programming, the use of a CDN without a fixed version, etc. etc.)

> * Next steps: pin the CDN version or pull the dependency into the build, etc.

Actually, that still looks like a pretty good story to me without any of the associated mania.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#117

Post by Apocryphon »

gosub100 wrote: post #108
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #105

Weirdly I think this is heavily related to social anxiety / shame - as in “everyone will knowingness me and point”. This is buried so deep in our brains it’s almost certain to do with herd behaviour. And it’s (IMO) why anonymity online is usually a bad idea - we need to learn, deep in our bones, that what is said online is the same as standing up in front of the church congregation and reading out our tweets - if you…

> you would not in front the vicar, don’t in front of the planet. Every tyrannical government in history would love this maxim.

Not really. One can be civil without self-censorsing oneself. Candidness is not the same as rank rudeness.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#119

Post by fragmede »

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.

That's a mindset problem. If you have $2M net worth, if $1M is in cash in a HYSA paying 5% APY you're making $3.5k/month on that alone. I don't know what your costs are; rent, healthcare, partner, kids, other dependents; if you caught long covid and became disabled and couldn't work another full day in your life, you'd still be making $3.5k a month. I don't wish that disability on anyone, but what helps the mental switch on what to do is to pull a years worth of living expenses out of savings into a cash account, and then just go do that for a year. Don't think about the rest of the pile, just sit with that year's worth of just living and doing no work.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#120

Post by flumpcakes »

I've been on my end of plenty of operational outages. I don't want to be harsh but this could have been written by one of my colleagues, the type of colleagues that I really wish I didn't work with. Console logging for hours? Randomly disabling things? Sometimes when you feel "imposter syndrome" you shouldn't ignore it and maybe up your game a bit.

In fact, I have dealt with an extremely similar situation where a bunch of calls for one of our APIs were failing silently but only after they had taken card payment transactions. Dealing with the developers of this system was like pulling teeth, after we got them to stop stammering and stop chipping in with their ideas (after half a day with this issue ongoing) it took 10 minutes to find the culprit by simply going through the system task by task until we got to the failing task (confirmation emails were unable to send so the API server failed for the entire order despite payments being taken etc.).

This only required 2 things: knowledge of the system, and systematic process to fault finding. You would think that developers who have at least the first, being the ones who wrote it, but sometimes even that is a big ask.

Maybe I'm just burnt out from this industry and incompetent people but... come on... no excuses really.

Post reply on HN