Mental health in software engineering

Reminds me of my Director of Engineering gig where I was asked how quickly we could deliver a new feature that the CTO had thought of. After giving three different estimates on the spot and being told each was “unrealistic” and told to “try again” in a meeting with senior leadership present, I finally said “Just tell me what date you want to hear so we can pretend I said that.”

I was chastised for being unprofessional and embarrassing the department. Didn’t care then; no regrets now.

> Most doctors are not spending solid 4hr blocks in flow focusing on a highly complex problem

I'm sorry but this is exactly what I meant by my original post. You don't realize that 4hr blocks in flow is an enviable luxury.

Granted my time was in a high acuity setting but let me cast it in more relatable terms.

Software 1 is brought to you with a complaint of the billing system dropping occasional transactions over the last 4 months. Now it is dropping 1 in 100 transactions. They use the Stripe API. It's your job in the next 15 minutes to debug and determine if there will be a complete service outage occurring within the next couple hours. If there will be an outage, you are expected to push a temporary fix to prod immediately and refer for continued review. If not, you must determine which parts of the billing system require referral for revision. Mind you that every decision you make can be reviewed years after the fact and can be litigated as they please.

Your assistsnt comes over with softwares 2 through 5 that were just submitted for your review. Software 2 has issues with a simple deadlock that could have been handled by someone other than you, but now it's your problem to deal with. Software 5 has been inexplicably ported from Delphi to Angular, and they've seen 2 others before you about why some of their native functionality broke, but now it's a big problem and they need you to look at it. There were some patches made by other devs but the stakeholders don't have access to them right now.

As you are looking into software 4,the assistant tells you "Dr zenzero, devops is on line 1 for you". They tell you that software 1 has more problems than described and it looks like it needs to be refactored in multiple areas. Software 3 keeps complaining to your assistant that you're ignoring them.

So no, "Most doctors are not spending solid 4hr blocks in flow focusing on a highly complex problem" because they don't get that luxury.

I get to do that now and it's bliss.

>Developers are no longer allowed any say in what to build or how to build it, they are micromanaged by product managers and program managers and team managers and required to give daily status reports ("agile").

I don't see how this is a bad thing, for a large and complicated product. For a small company where a team of 5 people can do the whole thing, sure, you don't need all this management, though I think some parts of the Agile methodology can be useful just for keeping people in sync. I worked in a small-ish team a while ago using an Agile methodology and it was fine: the program manager basically told us the feedback from the customer, and then it was up to us to decide what features to make to keep the customer happy and how to do it and how to schedule it. The Agile methodology just forced us to have regular meetings, and made it easy for the outside stakeholders to keep tabs on us and attend our meetings when necessary. Having daily habits in your life isn't a bad thing for many people, and that's basically what Agile was, in my experience: a way of having habits.

>Pay was much lower but respect was much higher.

No, it really wasn't. Maybe within the profession, but not to society at-large. Developers back then had little respect, until they started making lots of money in the dot-com boom, then people starting respecting the profession a bit more. Software development has never gotten the respect that doctors and lawyers get.

>Nobody wants the rookie heart surgeon, everyone wants the 60 year old who has done it thousands of times.

This might have some truth, but it's a bad view: generally, older surgeons prefer to use older surgical techniques that they learned decades ago, since they weren't trained on the newest techniques. The newer techniques generally are much less invasive and have faster recovery times. It's better to go with younger surgeons who have more modern training, but still some experience (i.e., not fresh out).

America is basically a cut-throat place where unchecked capitalism runs amok and you can make a fortune if you're smart and/or lucky in business. Getting everyone healthcare isn't going to improve things for people who like things the way they are. It would be a boon for many small businesses, yes (imagine if independent restaurants didn't have to worry about employee health insurance because they had government insurance), but tech giant companies don't care about that because they can afford to basically be their own insurance company, which helps them prevent competition from small upstarts.

So yes, I agree the general lack of regulation is part of why America has "high innovation", but it comes at a great cost to society, and yields a highly stratified society with a lot of losers, and this causes society to be rather dangerous, with a lot of crime, homelessness, drug abuse, etc.

> I'm not terribly convinced that software engineering is harder on someone mental health than being a doctor, lawyer, sales, engineer, professional athlete, teacher, or any other white collar profession is.

Who claimed it was?

Why does that even matter?

Whether you stepped in shit or are knee deep in shit, you're still in shit. Instead of having competitions about who is covered in more shit, why don't we help clean each other off? Stop comparing, we're not in a situation we need to triage. You are allowed to be sympathetic or empathetic to others, even if on average they have it better off than you. We're all humans. We benefit by coming together.