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

Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

ramones.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 307 posts

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#81

Post by mayhemducks »

malfist wrote: post #54
travelalberta wrote: post #7

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?

Thanks! I'm cured! I'm glad you told me to man up, I'd never thought to do that myself. I know that this is a glib response, but really that's the only way to respond to these comments. They're farcical and we have long known them to be unreasonable. Mocking them is the only way to get some people to learn it seems.

[dead]

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#82

Post by HPsquared »

m1aw wrote: post #6

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…

Division of labour is THE big advantage of working with other people. So yes, focus on the bits you are good at and hand the other stuff to people who are good at that part. It's usually worth it.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#83

Post by mayhemducks »

kgwxd wrote: post #22
travelalberta wrote: post #7

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?

Very, very, very little of real-world software dev is anything close to "engineering".

You said it friend.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#84

Post by Hackbraten »

travelalberta wrote: post #64
yondys wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it was this easy. But mental health is as complex and multifaceted as our brain is. There can be more than one reason why a once happy engineer is now struggling to complete basic tasks, and they are often hard to find and explain or to relate to simple explanations like these (which is why more and more people are turning to therapy for answers). You raise good questions, but thousands more could be asked: Ar…

I think mental health is way over blown in terms of complexity. >My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these I'd argue these are all binary questions and pretty easy to answer: >Eating nutritious food? : Yes/No >Sleeping enough?: Yes/No >Are you taking care of your foundations? Yes/No based on above plus Yes/No to "Sufficient Exercise?" >Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you…

> An easy happiness formula is:

> [list of eight things that may be extremely difficult for people with depression]

.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#85

Post by theoreticalmal »

t43562 wrote: post #44

Work forces you to see your own motivations and character and you have to manage yourself like you might manage a very valuable employee that you cannot afford to lose. This means you need to see your strengths and understand how you are motivated and try to come up with ways of making the best use of those characteristics. There's no point feeling sad that you aren't X or Y. If you're Z then how can you make best us…

“Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping” - Jordan Peterson

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#86

Post by throwawayffffas »

My 2c, stop looking for excuses, stop assigning your self worth to the quality of your work.

Mistakes happen, bugs are impossible to avoid. You may need to add rigid processes to your work to avoid the most egregious examples, but you just have to live with the fact that you will write bugs.

If you find you write more bugs than your peers and they have more impact than your peers, that's fine maybe you are not cut out to be a "systems engineer" maybe move to something more forgiving like frontend or something, you will probably be happier.

There is a reason that I am not working on avionics or respirator firmware. I don't have the discipline to follow the processes required to minimize the chance of accidentally killing people and I don't want the legal liability.

You don't have to be working on "important" stuff, John Carmack one of the best and most celebrated developer of our time spent most of his career working on games.

Be mercenary, do not take pride in your work, do your work for money. You will be happier, take pride in who you are and what you do outside of work.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#87

Post by corytheboyd »

JTbane wrote: post #80
corytheboyd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> untreated ADD causing repeated failures, repeated failures causing depression realized this one about myself earlier this year, it really helped to boil it down to something besides “I am just inherently bad at things.” that attitude worked as a dumb single kid, but it was harming my adult life and relationships. therapy helped me get there. I have been on bupropion for about a year, and recently started on methylp…

> quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook for a while I am also fantasizing about this and am only holding off from doing it because of the social stigma (what idiot would quit a well paid full-time job). My biggest issue with the software industry is the feverish shiny-new-thing syndrome that AI is causing (and my current company is all in on this, with "Hyper-Velocity Engineering" panels). Maybe…

pretty much every day I feel that tickling of “what the hell did I just do?”

but I don’t care. I put 15 years into my tech career. I am good at building software, and I will not let this ridiculous “resume gap” problem stop me from taking a break for my mental health. any tech employer that wouldn’t want me because of it is a place I wouldn’t want to work anyway.

also, to be honest, I’m writing more code now than I ever did in the last year of my tech job… working on a full CMS and custom website combo for my friends bar, such that I can copy that template over for future projects (want to help local businesses escape the bullshit machine). also building a cool web development desktop app. and more! I’m having a great time

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#89

Post by pphysch »

theoreticalmal wrote: post #85
t43562 wrote: post #44

Work forces you to see your own motivations and character and you have to manage yourself like you might manage a very valuable employee that you cannot afford to lose. This means you need to see your strengths and understand how you are motivated and try to come up with ways of making the best use of those characteristics. There's no point feeling sad that you aren't X or Y. If you're Z then how can you make best us…

“Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping” - Jordan Peterson

Nice basic advice but ironic coming from him

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#90

Post by throwawayffffas »

pphysch wrote: post #89
theoreticalmal wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping” - Jordan Peterson

Nice basic advice but ironic coming from him

Broken clocks and all.
Post reply on HN