A trick I use is to shift my mental framing of things away from this binary "should" and "should not". There's a mental oversimplification some of us do where we place expectations on the world, our product, ourselves, etc, and anything outside of those is unacceptable, intolerable, broken. This oversimplification is not sustainable in a messy, flawed world (or product (or self)).
Instead I reframe things as "how they are" and "how they could be different" (possibly better, but not in a way where their current state creates cognitive dissonance). Things can be made better, and better, ad infinitum. But it's not a sprint (!) to some idealized destination; it's a migration, in a direction.
Anyway, this helps me, hopefully it's helpful to someone else.
I wish people in tech (in the US anyway) would stop making this particular claim
> But software engineers are more likely to have mental health problems than those who perform mechanical labor, and I think our problem-oriented world-view has something to do with that.
I've heard this said before, and as someone with lifelong mental illness, and having spent a solid decade and a half of my life in low-wage "mechanical labor" roles prior to becoming a well-paid software engineer, I've always found this assertion to be very, very bizarre, and extremely out of touch. It's so clearly wrong given just a little bit of thought or research.
I don't want to minimize anyone's mental health situation. Techies suffer from mental illness too, it's true. But the reality is that, at least for most people suffering from mental illness, having your agency restricted exacerbates symptoms. And nothing restricts your agency like being low income. And to be sure, most (certainly not all) people in "mechanical labor" professions are low income.
When you're low income, you're forced to work jobs where you have to tolerate abuse from customers and managers, your work is largely not valued because you're completely fungible so you are treated like shit, and in some cases you have to endure operational abuse/humiliation like having to ask permission to use the bathroom. You have to endure long commutes, unpredictable schedules that change from week to week, and unstable/dangerous living conditions. And that's hardly the half of it.
That's not even to mention that being low income in the United States means it's somewhere between extremely challenging and impossible to 1. afford therapy/mental healthcare, 2. get time off from your job to go to therapy/psychiatric sessions.
Anyway, I'm glad that a source was finally cited this time. The source cited in turn cites this source
Namely, an Indian paper which compares software developers with railway laborers and hospitality workers in India. I think it's pretty obvious that the findings here can't be safely generalized to the US -- there are serious economic differences and not to mention cultural differences at play here.
Anyway, I think it's an attractive fantasy among American engineers that low-waged workers are happy and uncomplicated and untormented by the same demons that torture the more sophisticated souls that sling code for a living. But it's absolute bullshit, and doing a small amount of research on this (not to mention talking to low income folks in your life about mental health) will show you that it's dead wrong.
> Anyway, I think it's an attractive fantasy among American engineers that low-waged workers are happy and uncomplicated and untormented by the same demons that torture the more sophisticated souls that sling code for a living.
Overall, i agree with you. However, having worked both IT and non-IT jobs, and residing in a very low income neighborhood in western Europe, i have the feeling (nothing objective/scientific) that non-IT folks have a class consciousness that they're being screwed and they should worry as little as possible about work-related problems as long as they have a roof over their heads. Workers are usually conscious that the boss/manager is an exploitative asshole and that customers can be abusive entitled brats (however if the situation in the USA is 1/10th as bad as US TV shows suggest, then i can say for sure the situation here in Europe is really different and outside of luxury shops, workers eg. cashiers/waiters are expected to be treated with respect and the customer is not royalty).
While in the IT world, there's a devotion to the entire capitalist apparatus and a denial of exploitative/abusive relationships, which appears to lead to greater mental anxiety and cognitive dissonance. I've seen plenty of people suffer from work-related injuries and handicaps, but in other fields than IT, i've never seen people willingly and consciously overwork themselves to that point.
That's a very subjective, limited view of the topic, and i don't mean in any way that IT jobs aren't more comfortable than manual labor. But not every IT job is comfortable and the startup/company culture makes it very hard to say no to your boss, ensuring a culture of self-exploitation leading to burnout. In other fields, we have strong unions and habits to make the boss' life miserable by stealing supplies or sabotaging work... i don't hear of so many equivalents in the IT industries.
I picked this up a while ago. I first started with one of those mood tracker apps on a lark, because for a while I'd been thinking that my general mood was heavily seasonal and I wanted some data to back that up. Eventually I got tired of seeing streams of frowns on the tracker, so I switched to text, and because I wanted it to be completely private it's an org file that I sync with git to a private server.
Apart from taking the time to think about the good as much as the bad, one understated benefit has been that it's helped build a general sense of self. Thoughts are so... ephemeral, we hardly remember the things we thought or felt a day or a week ago unless it's persistent. Noting down what I felt during the day sort of hardened it in my brain, and then reading it a couple weeks later when I remembered it in context established a sense of continuity in my mind. It's been wonderful for my personal development
One tip, or rather, opinion, from my side: I've generally found that prompts, like the ones in TFA, felt too restrictive. They're good to start with, because I suspect a lot of us (myself included) generally don't think about how we feel most days. But being more freeform has unlocked a broader set of emotions that I now write about.
On the specific issue of "done items been removed from a list".
With Jira I have a confluence page that only shows done tickets from the projects I'm working on - that way when I feel overwhelmed I can go look at the massive amount of work the team I run has gotten done, it's a psychological trick of looking at it from the other side "That problem/issue/story/bug is just one of many amongst many".
Re: the former half of the blog... I know this is "obvious," but reading it just now has made all sorts of lights go on in my mind.
It's as if software projects start perfect, getting infested with bugs and problems as soon as a programmer starts programming it. Many/most of these "issues" are simply the multitude of complexities that we hadn't thought of yet.
Start with "jira-like system that emphasizes achievement and positivity." That broad idea is perfect, bug free. As soon as we put flesh on those bones it accumulates issues.. failures and failings.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 30.6 ms ] threadInstead I reframe things as "how they are" and "how they could be different" (possibly better, but not in a way where their current state creates cognitive dissonance). Things can be made better, and better, ad infinitum. But it's not a sprint (!) to some idealized destination; it's a migration, in a direction.
Anyway, this helps me, hopefully it's helpful to someone else.
Majority of online culture's default is conversation-stopping 'moral shoulds' + binary stances.
> But software engineers are more likely to have mental health problems than those who perform mechanical labor, and I think our problem-oriented world-view has something to do with that.
I've heard this said before, and as someone with lifelong mental illness, and having spent a solid decade and a half of my life in low-wage "mechanical labor" roles prior to becoming a well-paid software engineer, I've always found this assertion to be very, very bizarre, and extremely out of touch. It's so clearly wrong given just a little bit of thought or research.
I don't want to minimize anyone's mental health situation. Techies suffer from mental illness too, it's true. But the reality is that, at least for most people suffering from mental illness, having your agency restricted exacerbates symptoms. And nothing restricts your agency like being low income. And to be sure, most (certainly not all) people in "mechanical labor" professions are low income.
When you're low income, you're forced to work jobs where you have to tolerate abuse from customers and managers, your work is largely not valued because you're completely fungible so you are treated like shit, and in some cases you have to endure operational abuse/humiliation like having to ask permission to use the bathroom. You have to endure long commutes, unpredictable schedules that change from week to week, and unstable/dangerous living conditions. And that's hardly the half of it.
That's not even to mention that being low income in the United States means it's somewhere between extremely challenging and impossible to 1. afford therapy/mental healthcare, 2. get time off from your job to go to therapy/psychiatric sessions.
Anyway, I'm glad that a source was finally cited this time. The source cited in turn cites this source
http://www.ijhssi.org/papers/v3(2)/Version-2/G0322052056.pdf
Namely, an Indian paper which compares software developers with railway laborers and hospitality workers in India. I think it's pretty obvious that the findings here can't be safely generalized to the US -- there are serious economic differences and not to mention cultural differences at play here.
Anyway, I think it's an attractive fantasy among American engineers that low-waged workers are happy and uncomplicated and untormented by the same demons that torture the more sophisticated souls that sling code for a living. But it's absolute bullshit, and doing a small amount of research on this (not to mention talking to low income folks in your life about mental health) will show you that it's dead wrong.
Overall, i agree with you. However, having worked both IT and non-IT jobs, and residing in a very low income neighborhood in western Europe, i have the feeling (nothing objective/scientific) that non-IT folks have a class consciousness that they're being screwed and they should worry as little as possible about work-related problems as long as they have a roof over their heads. Workers are usually conscious that the boss/manager is an exploitative asshole and that customers can be abusive entitled brats (however if the situation in the USA is 1/10th as bad as US TV shows suggest, then i can say for sure the situation here in Europe is really different and outside of luxury shops, workers eg. cashiers/waiters are expected to be treated with respect and the customer is not royalty).
While in the IT world, there's a devotion to the entire capitalist apparatus and a denial of exploitative/abusive relationships, which appears to lead to greater mental anxiety and cognitive dissonance. I've seen plenty of people suffer from work-related injuries and handicaps, but in other fields than IT, i've never seen people willingly and consciously overwork themselves to that point.
That's a very subjective, limited view of the topic, and i don't mean in any way that IT jobs aren't more comfortable than manual labor. But not every IT job is comfortable and the startup/company culture makes it very hard to say no to your boss, ensuring a culture of self-exploitation leading to burnout. In other fields, we have strong unions and habits to make the boss' life miserable by stealing supplies or sabotaging work... i don't hear of so many equivalents in the IT industries.
Apart from taking the time to think about the good as much as the bad, one understated benefit has been that it's helped build a general sense of self. Thoughts are so... ephemeral, we hardly remember the things we thought or felt a day or a week ago unless it's persistent. Noting down what I felt during the day sort of hardened it in my brain, and then reading it a couple weeks later when I remembered it in context established a sense of continuity in my mind. It's been wonderful for my personal development
One tip, or rather, opinion, from my side: I've generally found that prompts, like the ones in TFA, felt too restrictive. They're good to start with, because I suspect a lot of us (myself included) generally don't think about how we feel most days. But being more freeform has unlocked a broader set of emotions that I now write about.
With Jira I have a confluence page that only shows done tickets from the projects I'm working on - that way when I feel overwhelmed I can go look at the massive amount of work the team I run has gotten done, it's a psychological trick of looking at it from the other side "That problem/issue/story/bug is just one of many amongst many".
Re: the former half of the blog... I know this is "obvious," but reading it just now has made all sorts of lights go on in my mind.
It's as if software projects start perfect, getting infested with bugs and problems as soon as a programmer starts programming it. Many/most of these "issues" are simply the multitude of complexities that we hadn't thought of yet.
Start with "jira-like system that emphasizes achievement and positivity." That broad idea is perfect, bug free. As soon as we put flesh on those bones it accumulates issues.. failures and failings.