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The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

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Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#181

Post by agumonkey »

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.

In my case it wasn't an emergency reflex. More like a strange curiosity to fiddle with something that was already in failure mode. Every attempt was fuzzy, say for a server, something shows a warning, you attempt a live fix, you try to get into a special superadmin UI you don't master, some operations run flaky, but you keep trying more. Before you know it you locked yourself out or bricked the machine.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#182

Post by pknomad »

DowagerDave wrote: post #176
pknomad wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

How did you know?

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#183

Post by ejs »

rockyj wrote: post #5

All monitoring comes at a cost and adds complexity. I wish people realized that, I struggle with this in my own team, we keep adding layers upon layer of monitoring, metrics etc.

I had these issues before for plenty of things, it just hurts the most when it's something non-essential. I've had outtages because silly system updates to slack broke and took things down. I run metrics and such out through logs these days because UDP don't care.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#184

Post by antisthenes »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #41
minkles wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the entire risk: being fired and financially in trouble. I spent 5 years eliminating that risk. Now I don't give a single fuck. There is no fear. They get better, more rational work and I have security.

Was fired, worked out but only through luck (the firing was humane, so credit where credit due). Your advice is spot on: derisk financially, do your best work, but don't care when you get walked out. It's just a job, it doesn't matter. If it matters because you need the job, treat your financial situation like an emergency until you don't need the job. It will be a cold day in hell before I am ever on call or in a pa…

My manager told me this during the first "emergency" we had where the client was wildly over-reacting.

We're not doing open-heart surgery or launching people into space. They can wait 1-2 hours extra.

Earned a lot of my respect on that day :)

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#185

Post by kayodelycaon »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #122
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.

It depends on the type of anxiety and how you're using the medication. If you it routinely to handle everyday stress, you're heading down a very bad road. If you have events a few times a year that are extremely stressful, medication can really make a difference.

I had the same fears and I'm not gonna say you should try medication, but I will share it my psychiatrist did. She wouldn't let me have more fifteen low-dose pills at any one time.

Consider your relationship with alcohol. If you already have a problem with it or completely abstain from it, I would strongly recommend avoiding medication.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#186

Post by kayodelycaon »

digging wrote: post #154
Der_Einzige wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I'd be hooked for life. I mean, that's how a lot of prescriptions work anyway. I take daily medication to prevent anxiety and depression. It's not addictive, but I try pretty hard to never miss a day, because anxiety and depression will get in the way of me living my life. Assuming Xanax is safe to take daily (I have no idea), the only difference is that a supply disruption would have side-effects. But if I run out…

Xanax is safe short term, but extremely addictive if taken for too long (~1 month?).

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#187

Post by ziddoap »

languagehacker wrote: post #116

I know that it's not a real post-mortem, but this is the opposite of what a good post-mortem looks like. It includes: * Blaming the tools (and the author) * Not focusing on facts in the timeline * Not considering improvements But that doesn't make for engaging content, right? > * At $TIME we observed HTTP POST calls failing > * At $TIME customers reported inability to make changes to ticket prices and promo codes > *…

It's also not a good fantasy novel or stage play.

It seems pretty silly to look at a blog post that is very obviously not meant to be a technical post-mortem and criticize how it isn't a good one.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#188

Post by ThinkBeat »

Whenever I am dealing with a 3rd party services, I like to write a small adapter for it that bridges the connection point and can keep an eye on a few things.

Primary I use a code generator to write most of it.

For huge services it may not be practical, but for most it usually provides a heads up if something stops working. with an integration.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#189

Post by toomuchtodo »

antisthenes wrote: post #184
toomuchtodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was fired, worked out but only through luck (the firing was humane, so credit where credit due). Your advice is spot on: derisk financially, do your best work, but don't care when you get walked out. It's just a job, it doesn't matter. If it matters because you need the job, treat your financial situation like an emergency until you don't need the job. It will be a cold day in hell before I am ever on call or in a pa…

My manager told me this during the first "emergency" we had where the client was wildly over-reacting. We're not doing open-heart surgery or launching people into space. They can wait 1-2 hours extra. Earned a lot of my respect on that day :)

Good manager, rare manager. Worth their weight in gold.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#190

Post by lovethevoid »

Alupis wrote: post #160
vlunkr wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really depends on what type of service we're talking about. Yeah, if you're doing really high volume sales on products that can be purchased elsewhere for close to the same price and shipping options, then uptime is critical. That's not the situation most of us are in.

> That's not the situation most of us are in. From an ecommerce website's perspective - it is exactly the situation most of us are in. Unless you are the manufacturer for your own goods, then you are competing on often-thin margins within a crowded industry with lots of competition where everyone more-or-less offers the same price. In an age where more and more people don't even consider shopping anywhere but Amazon,…

>Unless you are the manufacturer for your own goods, then you are competing on often-thin margins within a crowded industry with lots of competition where everyone more-or-less offers the same price.

That's not true. You don't have to manufacture your own goods to not compete with others at a commodity level. It's quite literally why branding is so important.

But I do find it funny you wound up doing exactly what the above commenter stated, and are acting like this is a world ending event for a small-medium sized ecommerce site to be down for a while.

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