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

171–180 of 286 posts

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#171

Post by a_e_k »

JohnMakin wrote: post #141
sb8244 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the worst mistakes that I saw were from over-reaction in an active incident. One of my programming mantras is "no black magic." If I don't understand why something works, then it's not done. I take this same approach to an incident. If someone can't coherently identify why their suggestion will have an impact, I don't think they should do it. Now there may come a time that you need to just pull the trigger on…

I have a similar mantra - "if you don't know why a fix worked, you may not have fixed it." I'm willing to throw shit at the wall early in the triaging process, but only when they are low-impact and "simple" things. stuff like - have we tried clearing cache? have we checked DNS resolver for errors? have we restarted the server? etc. I try to find the "dumb" problems before jumping to some wild fix. In one of the worst…

That mantra reminds me of "Any problem that goes away by itself can just as easily come back by itself."

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#172

Post by sethammons »

gcommer wrote: post #147

I know solo projects always have an infinite list of "nice to haves". But personally I never skimp on vendoring dependencies. In my experience, not vendoring has _always_ led to breakages that are hard to debug and fix. Meanwhile, vendoring is quite easy nowadays. Every reasonable package manager, and even npm, can do this near-trivially.

the argument is always "the pr that pulls in the dependency is gross to review with dependency updates" -- and there are ways to mitigate that. I vendor dependencies. My customers want stability and that means a bit more process in managing dependencies. Easy win.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#173

Post by RHSeeger »

maeil wrote: post #164
RHSeeger wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're scared about your financial situation with over a $2M net worth either you are prone to paranoia or you're living well above your means. As someone who was layed off and went without a job for 13 months (tech bubble), I am _always_ scared about my financial situation. Sure, if I lose my job, I have the resources to hold out while I find another, but - It _will_ impact my lifestyle, because I'll need to be…

You intentionally moved to that area, and it even sounds like you own real estate there. Yes, it will impact your lifestyle, and you may have to be more careful about what money you spend, depending on how you're currently spending it. So what? 99% of people on earth live like that, and most do just fine. The fact that having to live a non >$2M net worth lifestyle would make your family unhappy sounds concerning.

1. The discussion of what I've gone through, where I am in my life, and how the idea of losing my job (again) is concerning to me... is totally separate from the discussion of someone having $2M in net worth and living in an expensive area. Neither of those are true about me.

2. The vast majority of people, if they suddenly had to live with $0 income for a while, would be concerned, regardless of how much they make now.

3. The vast majority of people, if they suddenly had to live with 1/2 their normal income, would be concerned, regardless of how much they make. People make life decisions based on their income, and having that thrown up in the air generally causes people worry and stress.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#174

Post by pknomad »

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…

One of my VP's (one of the coolest dude I know) would often say "slow is smooth and smooth is fast".

You're absolutely right that fear interferes with one's ability to reason rationally but I'd also add that fear is highly infectious. If ICs sees their leaders/managers/colleagues panicking, they will often panic too. Thankfully my VP was always level-headed and prioritized clarity over action.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#175

Post by threecheese »

simpaticoder wrote: post #47

This person's stress was caused by a single line of code in PostHog. This is the reversion: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog-js/pull/1371/commits/7598... Highlights two lessons. 1. If you ship it, you own it. Therefore the less you ship, the better. Keep dependencies to a minimum. 2. Keep non-critical things out of the critical path. A failing AC compressor should not prevent your engine from running. Very difficul…

Even worse, it appears that PostHog dynamically updates their part of their code at runtime - not bundling it at build time. Their docs note an Advanced Option where all dependencies are bundled in the build. I mean, I get why, and maybe I am misunderstanding but as a user I would expect lazy loading of executable code to be an optimization rather than the default. And used only if fully bundling was a serious delivery delay.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#176

Post by DowagerDave »

pknomad wrote: post #174
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…

One of my VP's (one of the coolest dude I know) would often say "slow is smooth and smooth is fast". You're absolutely right that fear interferes with one's ability to reason rationally but I'd also add that fear is highly infectious. If ICs sees their leaders/managers/colleagues panicking, they will often panic too. Thankfully my VP was always level-headed and prioritized clarity over action.

>> One of my VP's (one of the coolest dude I know) would often say "slow is smooth and smooth is fast".

Apparently you worked for a Navy Seal, so yeah, likely a very cool dude :)

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#177

Post by burningChrome »

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…

>> 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

THIS.

Worked for a huge corporation when I first started contracting as a developer. This was a daily occurrence. Someone would push some stuff to prod and it would break their very large e-commerce site. Sometimes it was minor stuff, other times it would cripple the entire site. Most of the time, nobody GAF at all.

I remember sitting at my desk one day and my senior dev walking by my desk like Lumbergh in Office Space. Coffee in hand and just casually said to me, "Looks like someone broke the build, most of the video game pages are throwing 404's right now, going to lunch, see you soon." and then just walked away.

I also found out one day one of the CDN folks that was running the Akamai account quit and then a month later, we found out one of our secondary content servers had been down since the day he left. When dude left, he never transferred any of his knowledge to the other team members so once they found out the server was down, it took another two days to get in contact with someone at Akamai who was handling our account.

At my previous job if something went down on our site, it was a four alarm fire, war room, and all hands on deck to get it resolved or heads would roll. It was so dysfunctional to work somewhere when something broke or stopped working, nobody was in any hurry to fix it. Several times I just thought, "Is this what they mean when they say "the inmates are running the asylum""?

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#179

Post by recursive »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #163
hn83746 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes especially... interesting reading to those of us from the global South. To make $2 mil at my current salary, I will have to work for about 100-150 years, saving every penny and spending nothing, and I make decent money by our standards. There's even no relatively safe way to make some smart investments (which I imagine is how most of this money was acquired) because of incessant economical crises and non-exi…

(Who are Eathlicans? I find no search results.)

Earthling maybe?

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#180

Post by kayodelycaon »

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?

It really doesn't take much to be effective if you don't take it regularly. It takes over a week for it to be addictive.

One of the potential side-effects of the medication is after you stop taking it your baseline anxiety will be worse for a while as your body resets. Similar to caffeine and feeling tired.

Depending on how long you're trying to use it you may need to slowly increase the dose to offset increased baseline. This isn't really dangerous using for say.. one week every two months.

It is possible to get psychologically dependent by frequently using it instead of strategies you would learn in therapy. This also happens with things like alcohol.

Using medication to deal with occasional severe anxiety or panic attacks is far safer than substituting it with alcohol.

Post reply on HN