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Mental health impacts of a big tech job

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Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#161

Post by emdowling »

avalys wrote: post #69
ggregoire wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the other curious: https://epicflightacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/maj... https://epicflightacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/car... It's way higher than what I expected.

I’m hardly an expert, but I understand it could take 15-20 years of a flying career before you reach the point of being a “first-year captain” at a major airline (the first column in this chart).

Yes, exactly. Expect to spent at least 10 years as a first officer before getting a shot at Captain. I’d wager that Covid has pushed that out to 15 years. I have family and friends who are pilots, and the landscape is brutal with yearly pay rises falling far short of inflation in a lot of cases, and bonuses being minimal or non existent for the last few years

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#162

Post by martindbp »

jjav wrote: post #137

To me the industry has become so extremely toxic to mental health since agile became a thing. Must "sprint" 100% of the time, keep that velocity up at the maximum sustainable in short periods but forever. A marathon runner can't have the pace of a 100m sprinter but software engineers are expected to maintain sprint pace for perpetuity. And give detailed status reports Every.Single.Day. So there's no possibility of a…

Indeed, daily standups are the worst for so many reasons. First of all, everyone's just focused on what they're about to say to justify their employment, and nobody's paying attention to what the others have to say, which was ostensibly the whole point. The only one paying attention is the manager/lead, whose real, not so secret job is to make sure nobody's slacking off.

The second is that productivity in a creative occupation just doesn't work that way. We're not factory workers assembling widgets on a conveyor belt. Einstein didn't give fucking daily updates on his theory of relativity. No, we're not Einstein, but daily updates ensure that we're not thinking meaningful deep thoughts, instead giving in to short-sighted thinking like a starving beggar looking for their next meal.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#163

Post by ghaff »

ikiris wrote: post #99
random314 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not true. Big Tech is struggling to hire - which is why the offer packages are so fat now.

Big tech is struggling to hire in a situation of its own making, by making the interview process so awful, and not caring about retention.

I wouldn't lay retention entirely at the feet of big tech. Yes, there is changing jobs to get a bigger pay bump than staying but that's been true to greater or lesser degrees in a lot of places for a very long time.

But what's also been true for a very long time is that, outside of some of the older larger companies, Silicon Valley has normed job tenures for a lot of people that would seem ludicrously short most other places and would, in fact, possibly make those people unhireable.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#164

Post by spdionis »

avalys wrote: post #40

> but the big difference between then and now was that when I was home, I was home. Work stopped, and I could do something else for a bit and didn’t have to worry about anything until the next work day. I didn’t feel much of the mental fatigue I do now. This really has nothing to do with Big Tech and is a nearly universal characteristic of any job that requires mental effort instead of physical. Yeah, if you're getti…

Agreed with every word of your comment but

> your brain doesn't wear out from thinking the way your back wears out from carrying boxes.

this is not obvious at all.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#165

Post by abc_lisper »

hiyer wrote: post #151
sg47 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a H1B holder who's also a cancer survivor and suffering from severe health issues, I can tell you it's hell. I cry at least once a week at the fact that I cannot take a break without having to destroy my life and my family's life and 20+ years of life built up here. Everything this person said is absolutely true. The high compensation comes at a very high cost. It's not just mental or physical but also moral. You…

Just curious - how come you haven't got a green card or citizenship if you've been there for 20+ years?

Possible if you are from India. I am on the same boat

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#166

Post by coffeefirst »

jjav wrote: post #133
mathgladiator wrote: post #2

So, recently I achieved happiness because I just don't care about the job anymore. I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. I got a Meets-Most, and I've never been happier. I'm writing my final proposal as one final swing at the bat and the title is "XYZ or Bust" where either I get buy-in or I'm leaving. I've never felt better in my entire career. This is made possible because I'm old…

> I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. I got a Meets-Most, and I've never been happier. Can't recommend this enough. I've nearly always opted-out of performance review dance. Just don't do it. In most companies I get pushback to do it but then they give up and it doesn't matter at all. Still get my promotions.

This is less crazy than it sounds. Any half-decent manager would read your poem, laugh, and write a fair and accurate review.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#167

Post by dekhn »

evmar wrote: post #9
Ocerge wrote: post #7

> This may seem outrageous to someone that hasn’t experienced this type of situation, but in the Big Tech world this expectation is normal. I work at a FAANG, and it's probably a team-by-team thing, but that is absolutely not normal in my experience. That's a particularly shitty circumstance, and it's a bummer your management didn't stick up for you.

I worked 17 years at Google on lots of different things and with one exception* never let work stuff interrupt my life when I wasn't at work. I certainly kept odd hours at times and would do things like stay late some days if I had broken something that I thought I could fix before leaving, but once I was done with work I was done. * The one exception was when I was on a team where we had a rotating pager duty for ou…

these days many managers will plead ignorance of on-call bonus pay. our manager tried to put us on oncall and I had to show everybody on the team the page that said they would be gettng bonuses. Suddenly it wasn't an "oncall" but a "unpaid developer rotation"

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#168

Post by throwaway5752 »

https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/report_2720/... "SERIOUS MENTAL ILLNESS AMONG ADULTS BELOW THE POVERTY LINE" (this is simply the first result I found in a large body of research on the mental and physical cost of poverty)

It is worth focusing on the ways in which you are lucky, and it puts some of the stress in perspective. We are living in challenging times - environmental, economic, and societal change. Everyone is experiencing this stress in different ways.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#169

Post by reedlaw »

jjav wrote: post #137

To me the industry has become so extremely toxic to mental health since agile became a thing. Must "sprint" 100% of the time, keep that velocity up at the maximum sustainable in short periods but forever. A marathon runner can't have the pace of a 100m sprinter but software engineers are expected to maintain sprint pace for perpetuity. And give detailed status reports Every.Single.Day. So there's no possibility of a…

One of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, Ron Jeffries, suggests developers abandon the word Agile [1]. Instead, we should recommend and practice "Manifesto Agile".

1. https://ronjeffries.com/articles/018-01ff/abandon-1/

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#170

Post by mlvljr »

coffeefirst wrote: post #166
jjav wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. I got a Meets-Most, and I've never been happier. Can't recommend this enough. I've nearly always opted-out of performance review dance. Just don't do it. In most companies I get pushback to do it but then they give up and it doesn't matter at all. Still get my promotions.

This is less crazy than it sounds. Any half-decent manager would read your poem, laugh, and write a fair and accurate review.

..that would rhyme, too
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