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The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

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Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#121

Post by fragmede »

prewett wrote: post #102
mtnviewer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is your $2m generating? For instance, if you invested in high quality dividend stocks, you can get 3% and it should generally grow about what GDP does (which should also include inflation effects). So that's $60k/year, or after 15% dividend tax + let's say 5% California state tax, for a net of $48k. If you're in somewhere rent-controlled, seems like even with a family you're not going to on the streets starving.…

if you're only getting 3% with dividends, can I interest you with an HYSA paying 5%?

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#122

Post by Der_Einzige »

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…

One thing I did not expect about working in enterprise tech companies was the amount of coworkers who popped Xanax regularly.

I've been an anxiety basket case my whole life and the idea that an addictive pill could take it all away terrifies me - I'd be hooked for life.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#123

Post by roywiggins »

StefanBatory wrote: post #111
justinclift wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sertraline is an SSRI. Tapering SSRIs can suck, but if you're unlucky, benzodiazapine (like Xanax) tapers can be really, really bad, and really long:

https://wapo.st/4fV2b2Y

> A safe taper typically takes much longer than a week-long detox or 28-day stay in rehab — an average of six to 12 months, experts say.

This is not to downplay SSRI tapers, which can be plenty awful if you are on them for a long time, but quitting benzos too abruptly can give you seizures. You have to be very careful to taper them safely.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#124

Post by photonthug »

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.

Great point. I honestly can't remember the last time that I've had a smooth experience with any kind of business or commercial thing, even when I'm the one paying for services. Bank declines transactions randomly when balance is sufficient, on vendors that have been used before. Orders of equipment over $10k are days late, no explanation provided, no number to speak to a human, just ineffective support robots. Planning days or weeks around other people's problems is pretty normal, but really, that just means that I get to postpone going to the DMV and getting the run-around from them.

Not sure if it's quiet-quitting or what, but the last few years (basically since covid) my consumer experiences in the US are feeling a lot more.. shall we say, European? And I guess that's fine, pretty much everything really can wait. But it's hard to maintain one's own sense of professional urgency to keep things smooth for others when literally nothing is smooth for you.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#125

Post by Keyframe »

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…

not saying you're wrong, because you absolutely aren't, but there's one key difference - usually freakouts are when it's client-facing related in combination with no control and/or information on what's going on and 'they' have to answer customer calls. That's when panic mode is activated.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#126

Post by zer8k »

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…

I shouldn't have to drug myself to cope with the stress of constantly half-assed released, features getting pushed in without thought, and 3AM pagerduty alarms because of these things.

We will likely see a large cohort of people who got into tech in the mid 2000s dying off from stress related disease.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#128

Post by fragmede »

caseyy wrote: post #81
agumonkey wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a few times I realized that everytime I step into blind-ish panic over a mistake, I should get as far as possible from the machines. Otherwise I try one bad idea after the other and create an actual catastrophic failure.

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.

I've heard "catch a falling knife" for this.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#129

Post by sameoldtune »

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…

I was once the primary party responsible for an accounting bug that would have cost Amazon around 100 million dollars in unselable inventory. I stayed up for two nights writing the most heinous regexes to scrape logs(1) and fix the months-long discrepancies. Ended up fixing the problem by writing a script that re-submitted an event for every inbounded shipment to every Amazon warehouse for the last few months. I took the next week off to recover physically and mentally.

Afterward I made a promise to myself to never get into such a panic again. But funny enough, when I feel like panic is immanent I just remind myself that whatever problem I have is absolute peanuts compared to that event. So for me at least having one truly bad event helps me put things into context.

(1) the logs had JSON-escaped JSON and I am slightly proud of those regexes because it is the only time I hopefully ever have to use 8 backslashes in a row https://xkcd.com/1638/

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#130

Post by StefanBatory »

roywiggins wrote: post #123
StefanBatory wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sertraline is an SSRI. Tapering SSRIs can suck, but if you're unlucky, benzodiazapine (like Xanax) tapers can be really, really bad, and really long: https://wapo.st/4fV2b2Y > A safe taper typically takes much longer than a week-long detox or 28-day stay in rehab — an average of six to 12 months, experts say. This is not to downplay SSRI tapers, which can be plenty awful if you are on them for a long time, but quitti…

I will apologise then - I was so sure Xanax is SSRI too that I didn't even bother checking that to be sure. Thank you for correcting me.
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