The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown • Hacker News Board

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#231

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 9:21 PM UTC

cgh wrote: post #168

everdrive wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's important not to sweat it, because a company does not care about your sleep or mental health. It will push you as far as it can. One time a few years ago, a coworker called me to tell me the stress we were under was causing her hair to fall out. I mentioned I'd lost significant weight and wasn't sleeping well, especially since another coworker had quit and now I was shouldering his responsibilities (programmin…

This is such an insane mentality for a rank-and-file employee who does not have significant upside tied to the business. If you're the sole shareholder of the company and there's some technical problem causing it to stop making money, then I can see it having a stressful effect on you and your health. If you're a worker bee who got 0.00000001% of the company's equity (if you're lucky), why oh why would you let the company's problems cause you to miss sleep and have a literal heart attack?

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#232

Post by Alupis » Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 9:41 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #227

Alupis wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Lots of things can be unacceptable, but not unacceptable enough to warrant being treated as a life-or-death emergency, where klaxons ring out and people get paged at 2AM. So your e-commerce website is down for a few hours. Fine. What's the worst thing that happens? You miss out on a small number of purchases, maybe a few customers are gone for good, and the shareholders reap a little less profit this quarter. Nobody…

> What's the worst thing that happens? You miss out on a small number of purchases, maybe a few customers are gone for good, and the shareholders reap a little less profit this quarter.

You build a culture of nobody caring about the singular thing that brings revenue into your organization. You're fine with shareholders taking a hit, because it's not your bank account - but what happens when a company has to let people go because they don't have enough customers and orders to support everyone? Oh, now they're supervillain out-of-touch CEO's I presume?

> Unless you're a hospital keeping people on life support, I don't want to hear about zero downtime.

Then look for other work? If you are being paid to keep a website online 24/7, and it goes down "for a few hours" and your attitude is "nobody died", then you're simply not cut out for that job - find another or be terminated.

There's not a single person on pager duty (or whatever) that doesn't know what they are getting paid for. Complaining about a job you volunteered (at-will employment!) for is insane.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#233

Post by mensetmanusman » Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 9:42 PM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #145

photonthug wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point. I honestly can't remember the last time that I've had a smooth experience with any kind of business or commercial thing, even when I'm the one paying for services. Bank declines transactions randomly when balance is sufficient, on vendors that have been used before. Orders of equipment over $10k are days late, no explanation provided, no number to speak to a human, just ineffective support robots. Planni…

> Orders of equipment over $10k are days late, no explanation provided, no number to speak to a human, just ineffective support robots. I would be furious. If I spend $10k I want to be speaking with a human if something goes wrong. I feel like in the US we have given up on decent customer experiences.

This is what labor shortage feels like.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#234

Post by coryrc » Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 9:43 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #220

coryrc wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm about to order some electric bike motors. Probably from ebikes.ca. If their website goes down I'll just wait until it comes back up. If it was groceries, I'd go to the store. Unless in-person-purchasing is an option, I'm just going to wait for my preferred vendor. My account's already set up and clearly they have what I want.

> I'm just going to wait for my preferred vendor By the numbers, most customers are shopping on any particular given ecommerce website for the first time. It's expensive and difficult to gain new customers - and even more difficult to gain repeat customers. What would you have done if you had not purchased from ebikes.ca before and just happened to stumble across them after a google search? What would you have done i…

I haven't purchased from them yet.

> What would you have done if after clicking the ad/link, the page didn't load?

archive.org first just to check if it's down temporarily. But if you're a vendor just reselling Alibaba, then there's not a lot of reason to shop from you. But with real value add, you can get customers. That's exclusive products, support/warranty, niche product, etc beyond just "fulfillment".

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#235

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 9:56 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #232

ryandrake wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of things can be unacceptable, but not unacceptable enough to warrant being treated as a life-or-death emergency, where klaxons ring out and people get paged at 2AM. So your e-commerce website is down for a few hours. Fine. What's the worst thing that happens? You miss out on a small number of purchases, maybe a few customers are gone for good, and the shareholders reap a little less profit this quarter. Nobody…

> What's the worst thing that happens? You miss out on a small number of purchases, maybe a few customers are gone for good, and the shareholders reap a little less profit this quarter. You build a culture of nobody caring about the singular thing that brings revenue into your organization. You're fine with shareholders taking a hit, because it's not your bank account - but what happens when a company has to let peop…

Way ahead of ya, I don't have such a job and obviously wouldn't accept one since I have such a fundamental objection to that kind of "omg four alarm fire" outlook on work. SREs with pager duty have a more compatible mindset for that and frankly are just built different!

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#236

Post by Alupis » Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 9:59 PM UTC

coryrc wrote: post #234

Alupis wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm just going to wait for my preferred vendor By the numbers, most customers are shopping on any particular given ecommerce website for the first time. It's expensive and difficult to gain new customers - and even more difficult to gain repeat customers. What would you have done if you had not purchased from ebikes.ca before and just happened to stumble across them after a google search? What would you have done i…

I haven't purchased from them yet. > What would you have done if after clicking the ad/link, the page didn't load? archive.org first just to check if it's down temporarily. But if you're a vendor just reselling Alibaba, then there's not a lot of reason to shop from you. But with real value add, you can get customers. That's exclusive products, support/warranty, niche product, etc beyond just "fulfillment".

> if you're a vendor just reselling Alibaba

There's an entire ocean between Alibaba flippers and strongly branded products sold first-party by mega-corps.

Consider the physical space and walk into a Target or Walmart - how many products on the shelf are Alibaba flips, and how many are sold by the manufacturer? Target has house brands, but Dawn Dish Soap is not one of them. You can get Dawn Dish Soap from most stores - if one day Target was randomly closed are you going to sit out front and wait for them to open, or are you going to another store?

Back in the digital space - let's pick golf... how many websites do you think sell Callaway golf clubs? How many of those websites are the actual manufacturer/brand? One? A google search for "buy golf clubs online" yields probably close to 50 websites just on the first page alone... of which 80% appear to be small businesses.

You start clicking through the search results looking for deals - and some of the pages don't load.

You're telling me you're going to go to archive.org and lookup the history of these random websites, then wait for them to come back online just to see if you want to buy something?

I don't buy this argument at all...

> That's exclusive products, support/warranty, niche product, etc beyond just "fulfillment"

People really don't consider or understand supply chain logistics, distribution and it's relation with retail... people really like to casually wave their hands and assert resellers/distributors have no space in the world, yet they buy products from resellers/distributors every single day without a moment's thought (Target & Walmart!). The "value add" is making desirable products accessible to regular people.

Regular people aren't going to pony up a $75,000 Purchase Order, fill a shipping container, and wait 6-8 months transit just so they can have a new cell phone case or new bookshelf. That's where distribution networks come in handy. We buy the $75,000 container so that you can buy just one item.

I guess we can't really blame people for not understanding this - people rarely understand how their beef and carrots got to the grocery store either.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#237

Post by samus » Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 10:01 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #128

caseyy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard "catch a falling knife" for this.

That's a very common term in stock trading as well! Prices are crashing, and you try to make use of that opportunity to buy stock and make a profit when the stock rebounds. Then the price crashes further, the rebound is not gonna happen in the near future, and your fingers are a bloody mess on the ground...

Another panic reaction is selling off everything at the first sign of trouble. And some people hold on to doomed stocks for way longer than what makes sense (look up "Intel guy" on /r/wallstreetbets)

Day trading requires due diligence and nerves like steel, else you are just making somebody else a little bit richer.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#238

Post by samus » Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 10:16 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #100

mynameisvlad wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/signs-nervous-breakdown Not all breakdowns come in the form of panic and anxiety attacks. Those are certainly a way that breakdowns can manifest, but it’s not the only way. Stress manifests in wildly different ways for different people and even stressors. You weren’t in his head, experiencing what he was experiencing, so it’s pretty much impossible to “diagnose” from the outside. I…

That's a good point. I didn't mean to gatekeep, which is what I ended up doing. Thank you. If he was functionally paralyzed for hours, then that absolutely qualifies. I was reading through it and thinking "If you can debug stuff, you're probably not having a mental breakdown" and wanted to highlight that some people do break down (which is why it's called a breakdown) and that it's ok.

If they were staying up for hours debugging, then they were also probably too tired to see the forest for the trees anymore. Simple exhaustion is sufficient to cause people to go on autopilot and follow trails that lead nowhere, or to just stare at nothing for minutes. Unless it's about life or death (or financial ruin), it's smarter to call it a day in such a situation. Or to at least do a powernap.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#239

Post by sillyfluke » Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 10:17 PM UTC

91bananas wrote: post #222

mcguire wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you assuming airline employees aren't scrambling when a flight is delayed? Or that road crews don't get called in the middle of the night? A minor power outage gets a crew called no matter what time it is; a major outage will bring in crews from different states, much less power companies.

But none of them are working in panic-mode as them doing this work is just an expected thing. As OP has pointed out, downtime in other industries is expected and agreed upon as OK. For some reason because it's on a computer that does not apply to our industry, we are to go in to panic-mode to fix, and write about how it will never happen again, stock prices fall, people lose their jobs.

In the case of flights, isn't it rare that it is a single employee or just a couple of employees that are tasked or held responsible for the flight taking off on time?

Funny story though, veering a little OT, but recently I had to haul ass from one end of the airport to the other due to arriving on a delayed flight with a connecting flight with a different airline. As I was about to enter the airplane, after getting my boarding pass scanned, completely drenched in sweat, the flight attendant saw me and said the captain wanted to see me and ushered me into the cockpit. I found myself in the cockpit, where the captain proceeded to talk to me in the local foreign language while I was thinking, "Wtf, isn't it illegal for me to be in here after 9-11?" I then started repeating, in the local language, that I didn't understand them. But that didn't have the desired effect intially and they kept talking. I repeated myself both in their language and English until the captain finally said, in English, "Are you a passenger?" When I said yes, he told me I could sit down.

When I sat down, the only rational explanation that I could come up with was that despite being in civilian clothes I was mistaken for a pilot. Not just any pilot, but one of the pilots that was supposed to be in the cockpit. I could only conjecture that he was a no-show and that they had to bring in a substitute to replace him which caused the plane to be delayed and allowed me to make the flight.

Any commercials pilots are free to correct my -- which normally should be a very silly -- theory. If it could possibly be true though, being the no-show pilot in that situation might be a little stressful.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#240

Post by jmprspret » Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 10:20 PM UTC

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?

Xanax is a benzodiazepine. You get "high" when taking just barely more than instructed. It's addictive. It's abused frequently. I've abused it before. It feels nice.

I would be surprised if you asked your GP "I have mental breakdowns now and then, I'd like some Xanax", and they just handed it out to you. Then again, I don't live in the US, so maybe the doctors there do just dish it out.