I Knew a Programmer Who Went Completely Insane

The latest company I was employed at there had me working ridiculous hours but this is completely anecdotal, I'm glad I have my life back.

I'd add:

Fourth - say no to overtime, even if it's paid. Unless you're really in desperate need for money, think for a copule of minutes and you'll realize that your time (which you can use to do a ton of interesting things, and in fact is ultimately the matter life is made of) is usually more valuable than your money.

> The 8 hour workday was fought for and won for a reason. To expect more, an employer would be unprofessional. To accept more, except when compensated or in extreme circumstances, makes the engineer unprofessional. One comes to soon realize this. (See The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin.)) Most companies, especially startups, don't. It's sad to think that the culture values high stress, long work hours with the inevitable diminishing return, and literally anything, no matter how unhealthy, to get workers to be slaves. At the same time, a lot of these companies have mediocre health and dental benefits with high cost to the employee.

> Yeah, companies don't give a shit about you. And why should they? Corporations exist to make money. That's all. Your health, while in the long-term helps this goal, in the short-term it doesn't. The shorter the lifespan of the company, the less they care. This is easily observed.

> The question is, why do you give a shit about your company?

I mean, yeah, we can spout platitudes all we want here. I agree that if you aspire to be a good employer, you should treat your employees well. But that's not the problem here: The example employee in the OP was a top performer who helped solve tough problems, and nobody seemed to suspect that anything was wrong until he snapped.

The problem is that workplaces are not designed to be able to identify an employee having problems with stress, let alone to actively manage it. I have never encountered a workplace that can do so effectively - some employers are better than others about things like work/life balance, etc. But the level of stress in your life is variable, and the level of stress being generated by your work is variable, even in the best of circumstances. It is difficult, if not impossible, for an employer to even understand how much stress you might be under outside of work.

For example, a lead artist at a previous employer got let go for getting into too many arguments at work. It was only at that point that we learned that he was having a really tough time because he was a single parent and his son was suffering from a severe, life-threatening condition. It's nice to think that if his supervisors had known they could have done something about it - maybe they would have - but from the outside it merely made him look like a bad employee. Maybe he wanted to keep his personal life private, maybe he thought he had it under control, or maybe they decided they had to set an example regardless of his reasons - but the point stands: Ultimately, it is up to you, not your employer, to manage your stress.

Either way. You're completely missing the point. First off "insane" is a completely non-precise term, and I strongly believe a clarification of psychological framework be made before the discussion actually begins. Let's stop wasting time on this. Let's stop throwing around "type" systems in CS but not in Psych, which are both supposed to be sciences.

I sent this to some developer (acting as a recruiter) for a prominent SF company during a bar run (he was looking for front-end devs not with 10+ startups under their belt but with someone they're looking to mold):

The Web is a hypermedia application. So we're building pretty much http://schema.org/ vocabularies implemented over models (Django, Rails, etc.) with hypermedia specs (front-end begging for more data in more stupid ways than anyone cares to document).

Look. You want kids who'll acclimate better than the Chinese or Russians to text editors like LightTable and who enjoy the pleasures of vim-seek.

And you want an actual Web, or at least people who have dreams which logically entail that such a thing is possible (dreams of mundane facts).

So what am I getting at? What are you dreams restricted by? Is it this or that job? What are you building? What am I building? And what why does it seem that we should be building these things, by our evolution? Demanding high-pay? Insane? What are you talking about? "High-pay"? "Insane"?

What does any of this have to do with the Internet Declaration of Independence? Why are you inheriting this psychological framework? Why haven't you consumed post-structuralism? Why is your Internet "American"?

Again: "Insane"?

That's in your headline. In your headline. Headline. That's significant weight.