How to learn to stop being constantly stressed under pressure as software eng?

Hi,

You should add "Ask HN:" to your title, like so:

  Ask HN: How to learn to stop being constantly stressed under pressure as software eng?

That way, it's clear that you are asking something, and it will also appear on the "ask" tab.

It sounds like you're under abusive management. If it's within your power, you should probably start looking for a new job. If you want, you should use some of those vacation days you have saved up to go on the job hunt.

It sounds like your management is pushing you to give more than it's reasonable for you to give. You need to really understand that it's more than is reasonable. (You yourself described it as "unreasonable deadline".)

And, based on that, you need to become comfortable saying "no" without feeling guilty.

I mean, in a crunch, sure. For a couple of weeks, sure. For six months? That's a management failure. It's not your fault, and you can't fix it. You may be able, by heroic effort, to temporarily prevent catastrophe, at great cost to yourself. But it's actually OK to not do so. It is not reasonable for you to pay the price for management's failures.

Others have said said it: learn to say no. However, tooling helps. Some will not like this suggestion: look into scrum or kanban agile. A single backlog of tasks and units of work. With scrum, you tell the business "we can do the following stories/tasks in the next two weeks." It is on you and your team to only commit (ie, say no) to work you can reasonably finish in that period. This gives the opportunity to the business to give priority to things they feel are important. If you find that you are over committing, commit to less the following iteration. Understand that, as you said, it is unreasonable to pull heroic hours. Stick to 36 to 44 hours a week. If work is not completed, you alter the following iteration to do less.

Finally, a quote that I internalized as a kid: if you can do something about a situation, do so and don't worry. If you cannot do something, then don't and don't worry. Applied to this context, I would take that to mean you can put limits in place and you shouldn't worry if that makes the business upset.

This is your life. Time lost with friends and family can never be gotten back. Finding reasonable balance with work is paramount.

It is not just that easy. It requires work and discipline. I'm still working on taking the same advice and not working crazy long hours. Fortunately, my manager helps me here and says, "dude. It's late. Go home. Family time."

I think this is one of the pitfalls of working remotely. It's hard to gauge how your work is being received and similarly how managements requests are being received.

Have you talked to management about this concern? I think the solution is more about communicating expectations and consequences rather than something that you should be fixing just on your side. At this rate, you will burn out, it sounds like it's already starting. No one wants that to happen. They probably need to hire more backend devs which is another discussion. You should also be careful to distinguish what you interpret from requests from their intentions. It's possible management has no idea that you're being overworked unless you somehow let them know and they're just keep giving you work because you perform so well. I wouldn't however call them blameless.

Dale Carnegie has a pretty good book about managing stress. It's called "How to stop worrying and start living". Wikipedia has a summary of it here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Stop_Worrying_and_Sta...

Main thing that is got from it was thinking about the worst possible outcome of whatever is stressing you out and realizing that it's probably not as big of a deal as you're making it out to be. The project deadlines set by your management are made up and missing them won't be the end of the world, so you should treat them that way. A website going down for an hour will also not matter a day after it happens.

Do your best at work and learn to say no. If you're good at your job they will respect your work, and if they don't there will be a lot of other companies ready to hire you.

A good therapist can help you manage stress levels and give you tools to manage your particular situation.

Some tools are breathing techniques, learn how to communicate with management, learn how to push back and learn why you aren't doing it now.

I'd urge you to consider it before something worse can happen (e.g. panic attacks). Like you said, most of the times, the stress is self-inflicted. Remember, health should be your number one priority.

I am guessing back end work and dealing with performance issues is causing stress? If this is the case fixing the back end team will help.

It also sounds like you are worrying too much about what management thinks. They will let you know quick enough if you are a problem and let you go if the business is suffering...irregardless of you being the special one :-)

This is the goal of Agile development

I do not think it is a learned skill as much as it is a management system

Change the management system to be less stressful for you

How to convince capitalists to take less money?

Good luck.

The lowest impact solution will be to start and end your days earlier (7-3 is a common bounds) next is to lobby for a 9/80 schedule and don't do overtime.

9/80 can change your life, barely felt burnout when was on a 9/80

Problem is that you don't have completely clear directives regarding what's expected of you, and you therefore infer those expectations by some kind of subjective (and perhaps subconcious) reasoning.