21–30 of 307 posts
1. It's okay to make mistakes. Pain + reflection = progress.
2. Try to shift your perspective so your sense of worth isn't tied to your work.
3. Anytime you say "I should", "I need to", usually this is sign you are blindly following some sort of cognitive script [0]
Most of y’all need to buck up. If day to day engineering tasks are so challenging for you maybe the anxiety and depression you’re feeling is your system telling you that you are in misalignment. Why are you an engineer if you are struggling to complete the basic tasks? Are you meant to be doing what you are doing?
The different usages of I or i though ... please fix the LLM type checking it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point was that there are people who don't need all this extra work, it just comes naturally. And they are more suited to engineering than people who need to spend a lot of energy on emotional and mental regulation as well.
Yes - you are identifying a non-depressed engineer. A depressed engineer can become one of those by removing the depression.
I know this pattern from myself. I'm doing alright as far as my career goes, not great, but okay. Which is disappointing because me and everyone around thought I'd do great, because I/they thought I was a great software developer, since I'm smart and I know my tech and my programming. Unfortunately working as a software developer is a different story entirely, I found many times that my chase for good simple code tak…
If you recognize yourself in that post, then what you recognize is called negative self talk . The only advice I have for you is to learn to recognize how this pattern makes things worse and to learn (or be taught) how to stop that pattern. The blog post is a textbook self-flagellation and I have no doubt author returns to it to feel worse about themselves in some twisted attempt to motivate positive change.
Something I have been struggling with all my life is deciding whether I am flawed in some way, or the other party/the environment is - because my immediate reaction is always to feel responsible and inadequate, and it takes a lot of energy of confidently feeling superior or right about something. Like, is it a pattern, or am I reflecting to avoid being ignorant?
So it's not really mental, it's literally a disease of the physical body. The brains are then affected as a side effect.
You can look up low carb, carnivore, heavy metal elimination groups etc... and you will find thousands of real testimonials.
The problem is that many if not most of these are hard if not impossible to diagnose since the modern medical science is lacking completely at this plus the combination of arrogant doctors not taking these people seriously and gaslighting them makes it 10 times worse, so experimentation is needed and then a commitment for a year or two.
Many improve in 4 to 6 months. Some take longer.
I know several people who suffer with ADD, who are extremely intelligent and talented, and felt the exact same emotions before they were diagnosed. Those emotions were _much_ alleviated once treated, mostly through pharmacological means. Anecdotal but seems a strong pattern to me.
This could be due to ADD, I am still getting tested. Granted, that's a diagnosis, not a root cause.
The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute.
(In some places, bupropion can be prescribed as an antidepressant. It has effects that also help with executive dysfunction, so you may find it to be more effective than serotonin-based antidepressants.)
I thought I was depressed but then I got divorced and realized my depression was situational from being in an awful relationship. Consider causes like this as well, it is hard to see when you're inside it.