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Anxiety in product development

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Re: Anxiety in product development

#51

Post by karatestomp »

wsantas wrote: post #39
jmhnilbog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think instances of anxiety are inherently irrational or unhealthy? I know of the effect of sustained stress on people, but I was trying to bring to light potential positive effects of anxiety bringing clarity or insight into ways to relive that same anxiety. It seemed like your post was something born out of such a thing. I've encountered so many younger people in tech, making $200K+ in places that support lif…

I have a theory that the massive amount of data at our finger tips an inability to control social media lack of self care (or read awareness) has cause an inability to focus and a hyper active brain. This habitual scroll, scroll, feed, feed, dopamine, dopamine cause the brain to be over active and thoughts hard to control. People get heightened without even being aware. Never-mind if you dont carefully curate your fe…

Relatedly, I found my "night owl" tendencies, which were "natural" and just about impossible to fight, went away completely when I limited myself to a few dim candles for light after sundown, and no glowing screens of any kind—no TV, no computer, no phone, period. You can still do a ton in low light—board and card games, reading, playing music, listening to music (small exception to the no-screens thing may be a practical necessity to get an album or playlist started or whatever if you don't want to go for physical media, but no fiddling with the playlist), writing. A very low candle power electric light (think nightlight, most of which are still brighter than what I was using and I could see just fine for most anything) would probably do. Obviously you might need a bit more if you're older and your eyes are getting worse, but you really do adjust to lower light levels than one might think. Dozens to hundreds of times lower than typical nighttime lighting, for sure.

I only did it for a couple weeks but soon found whole-room artificial lighting at night obnoxiously and needlessly bright. A candle for the room and ~2 candles per person (or equivalent from small electric lights—it's actually hard to find them this dim, though) provide entirely enough illumination to do just about whatever you want, and, crucially, let you get tired.

I strongly suspect a huge proportion of people who are "naturally" very active at night or just "can't" have a normal sleep schedule are in fact suffering from the availability and use of particular technologies.

Re: Anxiety in product development

#52

Post by vorpalhex »

I've had a few engineers who struggled with the issues mentioned at the beginning of the article. They were skilled engineers who typically knew the right thing to do, but felt they needed permission or approval to do the things.

And the solution I took was to gently encourage them, but also let them be just a little bit uncomfortable. They need a safe environment they can fail in with no repercussion, but also need to practice overcoming the unknown and being willing to take on some risk.

Re: Anxiety in product development

#53

Post by tonyarkles »

codr7 wrote: post #34

I've spent around 34 years writing code so far. My last project was an online order system for a lunch restaurant. To get an idea what kind of problems they're dealing with, I started by working two weeks in the restaurant. To my surprise I found that I actually enjoy delivering food more than writing code. As long as the customers get the food they ordered delivered in time, everyone is happy. And once I'm done, I'm…

> And once I'm done, I'm done.

My wife does live production (AV) for big shows and concerts. It's a stressful job; for a lot of it, you're on tight timelines and have one chance to get it right. Any mistake you make is pretty clearly obvious to all of the people in the room. You plan the shit out of it ahead of time: one missing item on a truck can be a (pardon the pun) show stopper.

But like you said, at the end of the night, when the trucks are all packed up, you get to go home and never worry about that particular job ever again. If something went wrong, there might be a post-mortem the next day with lessons learned for next time, but it's over.

Some days I am thankful that I don't have her job. Some days I am jealous that she gets to walk away from it all at the end of the night.

Re: Anxiety in product development

#54

Post by HPsquared »

pogorniy wrote: post #11
openfuture wrote: post #5

Funny, to see this pop up finally. I've been talking (with my friends) about how all development is 'fear driven development' for quite a while now. Of course I don't mean just software development, but the way it manifests in software is instructive. The different fear responses range from formal methods to FOMO but in general we latch onto something as a source of comfort. Conway's law expanded to how you communica…

> development is 'fear driven development' for quite a while now. Do you have examples of fear-driven and non-fear development approaches? And what flavors of "non-fear" development are possible?

I think he's saying there is no such thing as "non-fear-driven development".

Re: Anxiety in product development

#55

Post by mjayhn »

gazelle21 wrote: post #45
codr7 wrote: post #34

I've spent around 34 years writing code so far. My last project was an online order system for a lunch restaurant. To get an idea what kind of problems they're dealing with, I started by working two weeks in the restaurant. To my surprise I found that I actually enjoy delivering food more than writing code. As long as the customers get the food they ordered delivered in time, everyone is happy. And once I'm done, I'm…

Im on the opposite side. I worked at a restaurant for 12 years and it was the worst time of my life. I would constantly get called into work at 3 am due to random people not showing up. Inventory, dealing with 20+ people who don't care about the job. Terrible customers, and horrible people really left my bitter. To top it all off I was stresseed out of my mind and broke. Im a dev now and its deff stressful but doesn'…

Yeah this feels very American Beauty, rose-tinted glasses. Kevin Spacey goes to work in a drive thru stress-free because he doesn't care about the job or need the money and is sick of responsibilities. Same thing here. Except we needed that job and had to be responsible because we didn't want to make $5.25/hr or have terrible shifts.

You're only there for 2 weeks, you know you're only there for 2 weeks and everyone knows you're not going to get the terrible end of the stick unless they're specifically going out of their way.

I delivered a lot of different food in high school and it honestly was one of the worst jobs of my career, I'd much rather work in retail or clean pools. All of my income went into gas and repairing my car. If I got a tip it was a few bucks and back then we had the 30 minute delivery thing that caused so many drivers to get into wrecks I'm pretty sure it was eventually banned or made illegal (or they all just dropped it).

Re: Anxiety in product development

#56

Post by ImprobableTruth »

openfuture wrote: post #5

Funny, to see this pop up finally. I've been talking (with my friends) about how all development is 'fear driven development' for quite a while now. Of course I don't mean just software development, but the way it manifests in software is instructive. The different fear responses range from formal methods to FOMO but in general we latch onto something as a source of comfort. Conway's law expanded to how you communica…

Classifying formal methods as a 'fear response' strikes me as asinine in the same way that calling safety belts a fear response would be. If it's software where failure can cause a lot of damage, why wouldn't fear be a natural response?

Frankly, I'd be outright horrified if say the people responsible for autonomous driving weren't anxious about mistakes, since I'd either have to assume that they just didn't care or - perhaps even worse - do not realize the potential consequences of their actions.

Re: Anxiety in product development

#57

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

danielbarla wrote: post #40
neutronicus wrote: post #18

I think the serenity prayer, sans unnecessary theological content, is relevant here. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the ones I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. For a lot of software products, there is no winning in the long run. You've got good product-market fit and customer loyalty, but your code base is a huge mess and the hard technical problems are so…

I also appreciate this quote, because it sets up a mature way of looking at things, categorising, and dealing with them. However, I'm less of a fan of the opening words; it's not so much that this should be magically granted on to us with a wishing wand, it's something we need to consciously work on, from within. Somehow that slogging, gritty aspect is less represented.

That is not what praying is about. A healthy prayer is a form of meditation, like "meditate on how you want your future to look like". It is a reconnection with the higher self. It is already an attempt to access something from within. It is a technique to understand thing about oneself, to build up internal structure and organize inner spiritual work.

But if you base your conception of prayer on a sketch from Monty Python or maybe a mentally ill person on the street who uses some christian terms for progressing their own insanity, then in that conception maybe prayer is a way to "magically grant with a wishing wand". But this is not what healthy use of the term is about. I assume the original poster who used this word is not insane and looks at the implicit meaning of the quote, which if looked at in that light, makes a lot of sense.

Re: Anxiety in product development

#58

Post by chefandy »

codr7 wrote: post #34

I've spent around 34 years writing code so far. My last project was an online order system for a lunch restaurant. To get an idea what kind of problems they're dealing with, I started by working two weeks in the restaurant. To my surprise I found that I actually enjoy delivering food more than writing code. As long as the customers get the food they ordered delivered in time, everyone is happy. And once I'm done, I'm…

As someone who has both coded and worked in restaurants for over a decade each, I assume that once the novelty wears off, you'll a) probably get start getting frustrated with restaurant life, overall and b) the lower income has its own long-term stressors that will grate on you.

I could be wrong though. If you end up just genuinely being a restaurant person, maybe occasionally doing some coding to supplement your income, that's fantastic. There are many things I loved about the restaurant industry.

Re: Anxiety in product development

#59

Post by wpietri »

codr7 wrote: post #34

I've spent around 34 years writing code so far. My last project was an online order system for a lunch restaurant. To get an idea what kind of problems they're dealing with, I started by working two weeks in the restaurant. To my surprise I found that I actually enjoy delivering food more than writing code. As long as the customers get the food they ordered delivered in time, everyone is happy. And once I'm done, I'm…

I get this entirely. And for me, this is driven by broken feedback loops in software.

Some years back, I started a company with an excellent product manager, one very focused on actual user impact. One of the first things we did is build a tiny, cheap usability lab; every Tuesday we'd have 4 users in to try things out. We rigged it so engineers could watch the sessions remotely, and for the sessions we didn't watch, he'd share key bits. It was really satisfying to see stuff getting used, what worked, what didn't.

Later, as we grew, we still kept the user tests, but added on a slick system for experiments. All of us were involved in thinking about what to test next, how we could make things better. My cofounder was definitely the best at that, but we all made contributions. We all were engaged. We all paid attention to what we were doing for users.

And it helped that despite being a startup, we were big on automated testing and pair programming. When my mom got sick, I took two weeks off and everybody was fine without me. They carried on releasing a few times a day, trusting in each other and in the safety net we had built for ourselves.

It seems to me that the average development process, which is generally about building whatever people with organizational power want, is emotionally corrosive. It wears us down, because it isn't satisfying on a human level. Which, IMHO, makes it way less efficient.

Re: Anxiety in product development

#60

Post by Minor49er »

neutronicus wrote: post #18

I think the serenity prayer, sans unnecessary theological content, is relevant here. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the ones I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. For a lot of software products, there is no winning in the long run. You've got good product-market fit and customer loyalty, but your code base is a huge mess and the hard technical problems are so…

If the theological content is unnecessary, then who are you expecting to grant you the things requested in the prayer?
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