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.
All of these have their specific stressors, all of these professions have loads of articles about how people are leaving these professions due to how hard they are.
All of these jobs tend to lead to them consuming your free time if you don't set boundaries, all have deadlines that lead to stress.
You cannot take a sick day by telling your team, “I have mental issues and need a day off.”
This hurt me to read on behalf of the OP.
I'm now 20 years into my career and never once have I come across this attitude. People take sick days all the time for mental health. I feel terribly for this person that they felt like they couldn't but this is far and away the exception rather than the rule.
Has any company come out against mental health in the past 20 years?
Doctor, lawyer, and athlete are "jock" professions, while software engineering is very much a "nerd" profession. These words represent status and general level of attractiveness and therefore access to attention and sex.
Doctors, lawyers, teachers, and professional athletes all experience social reward and/or social contexts to their work. Software engineering is interfacing with an unthinking, unfeeling machine for many hours a day.
Furthermore, the whole point of the vast majority of software engineering is to sell loot boxes to kids to increase shareholder wealth for a pittance of the wealth created (or something not too different from that for at least 60% of companies). How many mainstream software companies are contributing to building a society that you yourself would like to live in?
To put it bluntly, many bad parents abandoned their kids to the internet where they found solace. Software engineering is a natural extension of spending too much time using the internet and becoming curious how it works.
Poor mental health is a function of unmet needs... not feeling attractive, not feeling like you are contributing to the world or society at large, not getting laid, not feeling loved, not feeling worthy of love. All of these represent unmet needs, and I think software engineers struggle with these things more than a significant number of other professions because they are frequently intrinsic to why people become software engineers in the first place, machines don't care how socially inept you are, patients, clients, and judges do.
It's weird, I've harped on a few of these points in conversations with others (usually when talking about "sexy careers", and why people don't hold coders in the same regard as doctors) but your words made me realize why I'm trying to become a developer. The dealing with the machine rather than people is something I'm willing to run with more than anything, right now. Not wholly a function of unmet needs, but addressing a specific change I'd like to make.
The dealing with the machine rather than people is something I'm willing to run with more than anything, right now.
Software engineering is an incredibly people-focused career. You will need to be able to work with other devs, stakeholders, support, users.. everyone really. Going into a tech career thinking that it's somewhere you can avoid people is never going to work out well.
This has not been my experience at all. I do see this in the management layers, even with team leads, but the typical IC engineer does NOT spend any significant time talking with stakeholders, support, or users. They do have to work with other devs, but even that is frequently over chat, and not as much in-person, though it depends on the particular people and the company culture.
Yes, you really can go into a tech career and avoid talking to people much, much more than other careers. Just stay out of management if you don't like talking to people.
Are these the engineers who exert no control over their environments and just sit back and bitterly complain while taking no steps to resolve the issues? Those engineers who complain about "stupid management decisions" yet have made no real effort to influence the people and processes which led to those decisions? Sure. You can be a developer and avoid talking to humans as much as possible. You're just not going to be as effective or impactful as someone who does navigate those people problems. The technology is the easy part. How effectively companies navigate human problems makes a huge difference in how effectively they can implement technology solutions and engineers who can help solve those problems are invaluable.
The least effective ICs I ever ran into were those who brooded in front of their PC without communicating adequately with others. As a result, they didn't understand the requirements, built stuff that didn't meet the team's needs, and generally wasted a ton of time on stuff that needed to be redone.
This is true, but I only learnt about it after many years into this career, and to be honest I don't enjoy it very much. I still enjoy working with machines more than people.
I don't exactly think that. It's more like I would like to transpose more of my energy into fighting with a machine, and less into people, because my job is 90/10 dealing with execs and their bespoke, unmanageable concerns right now vs making something happen with technology. Could be a grass is greener thing. Maybe to current devs this comment looks crazy, I really wouldn't know yet.
I enjoy working with people, actually. My current role is rapidly changing that.
Right but you can tell all those people “this idea is literally impossible, the machine cannot do it” and at least some of them will listen to you.
Whereas in, say, government, people can just believe any stupid idea they want for an indefinite period of time.
As you can tell, I’m great with people. :)
This is just your perspective and, IMO, it's pretty warped. Software engineering is not a low-status position, even compared to doctors and lawyers. You aren't lacking in status or not having sex because you're a software engineer getting paid $200k/year instead of a doctor paid $200k/year.
Lawyers have to defend clients they know are guilty to help rapists and murderers walk free, and file IP lawsuits for patents they know are bullshit so that their client can siphon off a settlement from a large company, just because it's cheaper than a court battle. Lawyers have been widely (and unfairly!) regarded as one of the most despised professions since Shakespeare.[0] Professional atheletes have long been subject of the media debate over being paid "too much" compared to the value they bring to society. Even if they were broadly perceived as providing negative value to society, which I don't believe, software developers would not be unique.
This is becoming less and less true. Many junior devs who were born post-2000 that I talk to never had a computer growing up other than their phone, and their first real experience with PCs came in high school and university.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_kill_all_the_lawyers
I find that it definitely points to a time period when someone entered maybe not workforce, but the "IT world" let's say.
There was a time when programming in many places had definitely "unsexy" vibe among general population, with a lot of, well, painful "jokes", and all of that definitely set a "theme".
fast forward a decade or so to 2010 and suddenly IT is no longer that place where only losers go.
As it turns out, the massive money generated by software produces quite a lot of status.
But the IT world is meaningfully different from software engineering. IT infrastructure (as distinct from creating software) pays less, generally, and is also regarded as much lower-status. IT is like auto mechanics to software engineering's automobile design. It's the blue collar equivalent, especially at the low level. At the high level, as far as I understand, it morphs with "cloud-engineering" or just general management and becomes higher-status.
Unfortunately, I think this comes from how the entrance into IT is gated by working on low-level ("have you tried turning it off and on again?") problems, and putting slightly awkward, new-to-the-workforce nerds in a position where they need to help a lot of people with their computer problems. Many of whom are (understandably!) frustrated that their computer systems aren't working and/or don't totally understand why they won't work. So IT gets to see people at their worst and most frustrated, and people get to see IT at its most awkward and least experienced. So hostility forms on both sides. And first impressions sometimes last very long.
The massive amounts of money is, largely, a post-2010 thing too.
Before that, some hugely successful people in software outside of "nerd" circles were discussed often in terms disconnected with tech and more as just other (if wildly successful, like Bill Gates) business people.
Pay is not status. Software currently pays quite well, but in most companies today a developer is at the very bottom of the status curve. 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 say "used to" because in the 90s developers were a high status role. You got to make all decisions and execute on them with great independence. Pay was much lower but respect was much higher.)
The other stress factor is that developers get decreasing respect every year they age. This is in contrast with basically every other professional role where experience is highly valued. Nobody wants the rookie heart surgeon, everyone wants the 60 year old who has done it thousands of times. But nobody wants a 60 year old software engineer.
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.
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.
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).
This is your own perspective, and again, it's extremely warped. If you think developers are at the very bottom of the status curve, go sign up to be your company's janitor, receptionist, HR/"talent acquisition", junior accountant, or any "operations"/"administration" role. Someone's gotta order and restock all the free beer and snacks in your office, you know.
And other than the janitor, those positions are all still likely 9-5 salaried positions that pay decently. Go be a retail worker, hotel staff, or waiter/waitress and enjoy being shit on by both your manager and your customers all day. Then come back and talk about how being a software dev is low status.
Software developers usually have managers of various sorts of supervisors. This is classical division of worker / manager in the Taylorist sense, as in the managers are mostly not developers themselves.
This is what makes software developers a low status profession, i.e. many developers are glorified assembly line workers with little agency over their work (they do not make decisions).
Doctors and lawyers might have some form of management layer, but this is mostly a support function.
any person earnestly applying a nerd and jock mentality to adult life should find a nice patch of grass to touch and talk to more people
The words are shortcuts for larger more complex ideas about primary motivations and goals. Reward structures learned as children and maturing young adults are definitely going to influence, subconsciously or consciously, adult behavior and understandings about how the world works.
Here is Paul Graham using the word "nerd" and talking about the greater more complex idea: https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
I don't think goals and motivations are a monolith just for people who like computers, or STEM, or who socialize less in high school because 'they didn't want to play the popularity game'. this worldview is reductive, and wholly unaware how growing up is different for everybody. Just be aware before you judge people.
Did you read more than the first sentence of this comment before replying? I'm up in the air on it but it deserves more discussion and less mental laziness than you're showing here.
Well said. I mean, I'd like to see a graph of "wizard" rate per profession, maybe even per country for curiosity matters. I'd bet my arm that programmers have it pretty bad on that front.
As someone who crossed over from medicine, I can attest that software engineers have it very very good. Appreciate what you have.
I accept everyone's personal experiences with bad management, unreasonable timelines, and uninspiring projects, but those things are everywhere. Now add in patients and their families having the worst days of their lives in your presence day after day, high-pressure decision making, not getting even the chance to sit or go to the bathroom for nearly a whole shift. To top it off, if you have an "off day", that can earn you a lengthy investigation +/- a court case.
While it may sound insensitive, software engineering is nowhere near as complex or stressful as many (but not all) medical roles. It is both mentally and physically less taxing.
> While it may sound insensitive, software engineering is nowhere near as complex or stressful as many (but not all) medical roles. It is both mentally and physically less taxing
As much as I respect your personal experience, I think you make a mistake in assuming that it is universal. Further, you are also making the mistake of invalidating other people's individual experiences based on your perception of what the average worker does.
In other words, it is trivially easy to find software engineers who are burnt out to a much nicer crisp than the average doctor, and your dismissal of their suffering won't change a thing for them.
This isn't a contest to see which profession is most toxic to its workers. Our aim should be to find ways to prevent and mitigate these situations.
I hear what you're saying, but I don't feel I said it was universal in the sense that you're describing it. On the whole I would rate the average software engineer as having a less stressful life than the average doctor. I acknowledge that there are outliers and individual experiences that go against the average.
That said, I would argue that you underestimate the number of people in medicine who are burnt out. Many of my colleagues stay because it is a sunk cost financially/time-wise/reputatationally. You can pull up the numerous studies on burnout rates that have been done.
I'd anything it affirms my statement that you don't realize how much worse it could be. Like I said, there's a difference between taking down prod for 6 hours and getting sued for accusations that you killed a living being. This isn't intended to be a competition but it does become a bit absurd to watch people in the software world act like burnout from a micromanaging PM, unrealistic stakeholders, etc is the pinnacle of human suffering.
So… in conclusion, it could be worse. That’s some valuable insight. Obviously somebody out there always has it worse. How can doctors even complain when there exist 3rd world subsistence farmers?
>>> I can attest that software engineers have it very very good
> On the whole I would rate the average software engineer as having a less stressful life than the average doctor
Those are very different statements, and I don't even disagree with the second.
Consider the possibility that the software engineers complaining the most about burnout are likely not experiencing the average amount of stress, so your casual dismissal of their suffering is really rather misplaced. Just as an example, a coworker of mine committed suicide, leaving behind his wife and two kids under ten. He didn't have it very very good.
Which studies? I've checked a few Google results and none of them showed health-care even near the top, which is suspiciously surprising to me.
It's called "disagreeing". It doesn't "invalidate" anything.
They weren't disagreeing, they were minimizing other people's suffering and one-upping them. It's not a friendly thing to do and doesn't lead to an open curious conversation.
And at the end of the day this is exactly the attitude that prevents people from asking for a day off. It's wrong in medicine and it's wrong here.
The attitude we should have is: yes, Mr. Successful Boss Man, you are a better human than me: you are more disciplined, don't have a problem with anxiety while dealing with a lot more stress, make more money and even look better. But these facts do absolutely nothing to change that I am crumbling and need a break. If you are so good at dealing with stress - write the software (or stitch up that patient) yourself, surely it would be easy for you, the superhuman?
But we won't do that. Instead we'll pretend we are 10x engineers or genius doctors until we either mess ourselves up, or make a big enough mistake. The realization needed to wake up is: the people pushing us to work harder need us. They actually couldn't have their successful business empire or their big fancy hospital without our work.
You should always be advocating for better hours and more of the rewards from your work. I support that.
What makes me take it less seriously is framing it as a crisis in mental health. As much as people don't like comparisons the marketplace for our labor is inherently comparative, and people will optimize for the most money with the least hours/stress. I get that I'm providing anecdata but like I've said in previous comments, the stuff that software engineers I know complain about is from a much more privileged position than other occupations. Burnout is real, but if your version of burnout is someone else's idea of a mildly challenging day (which is my experience) it doesn't have the impact you want it to have. You may not realize it but there are roles in medicine where the work itself is inherently stressful regardless of how many concessions your employer provides.
If your goal is to argue that software engineers deserve higher compensation and better hours and more autonomy given the value they provide, it would garner more sympathy from someone like me. Proclaiming your suffering is at a boiling point feels like a lack of awareness.
Excluding this one sentence in the article
I don't see where anyone was comparing software engineering/engineers to another profession. I certainly don't see where it was proclaimed a crisis.
I don't think it's productive to tell people others have it worse when they are promoting a discussion around mental health. I also don't think being well paid and having what appear to be great working conditions preclude you from having mental health issues.
I remember taltking to some of my friends about who has it better. When I ask "would you like to work like me?" typical answer is "Sitting 8h staring at a screen? I couldn't do that!". When I was summer-working at home construction 8-19, I was tired after a day of work, but pretty happy. Now when I'm sitting so long programming, I have headache and feel tired constantly. There is something about moving all day which makes us a little happier than sitting or lying.
This can be said so many times over regarding so many unproductive comparisons. Two wrongs, I've heard all my life, don't make a right. Nevertheless, people insist on dismissing wrongs that aren't, as it were, up to snuff.
Well, we as a society can both walk and chew bubblegum. If the OP isn't in here begging us for scarce resources, then he's wrong to interrupt our exchange of lived experiences.
I think stressors in the medical industry should be talked about. That seems important. And when they are, I won't be in the comments whining about software on-call.
There’s a certain type of person that always has to comment whenever anyone says they have it hard by pointing out how actually those problems are nothing compared to X. It’s like a weird obsession with having to win the suffering competition.
It's a counterbalancing perspective that leads to healthy moderation.
If you live in a bubble of 16 year olds gifted new brand new cars and you complain openly how yours got dented, it's only fair that everyone else outside of that bubble rightfully calls you out and tells you to appreciate what you have.
You are the worst kind of person when it comes to mental health. Pretty insufferable “as a doctor, it’s harder!”
You’re wrong about the mentally taxing bit because you’re comparing Apples and Oranges. Most doctors are not spending solid 4hr blocks in flow focusing on a highly complex problem (surgeons being the obvious exception) but instead dealing with a sort of multi-tasking complexity which is a completely different type of mental taxation.
I mean, most doctors are spending their entire shifts trying not to inadvertently kill or disable anyone. Yeah that's a completely different type of mental taxation - one far worse IMO than any highly complex problem I've ever encountered in software engineering (and quite frankly, the problems aren't that complex most of the time. If anything, personally the SE stuff that's actually hard is fun and the rest is rather mind-numbing).
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.
What are your goals with this comment? What, do you estimate, has been your outcome?
If you want to bring medical profession stressors to light, go right ahead. This is an article about a real phenomenon. Not every complaint must be universal or superordinate.
You don't sound "insensitive," you sound juvenile. If your profession is harmful to practitioners, perhaps attempt to cultivate solidarity instead of actively working to demolish it?
As someone who's familiar with artisanal cobalt mining in the DRC, I can attest that medical practitioners have it good, but I won't because that would be unconstructive in a conversation about the latter's working conditions. Grow up.
Their goals are to self insert themselves and how oh so hard they have it.
Remember anything you experience, there will always be some wanker trying to one up you or dismiss you
I'm in an environment (military) were we actively work to prevent this. I have lots of kids (18-20yo) with mental health issues that are not helped by being allowed to take time off so casually. Our mental health experts want to keep people working because having them sit at home drinking/gaming does nothing. I have seen kids actually react well to increased "stress" on the job. Think basic training stuff. They are worked hard, go home tired and then actually sleep. Sending them home not tired leads to drinking and late-night gaming sessions after which they do not sleep and come to work the next day like zombies. Our people know how to spot this and adapt their schedules specifically to break the cycle. It wouldn't work for everyone, but we do need to accept that we are each not necessarily our own best therapists. If given more time off, many of us will simply amplify negative behaviors. The better answer is not I "need a day off" but rather "I'm booked to see the counselor at 08:00 tomorrow".
Are we talking US military here? I think I recognize the pattern you're talking about when you say:
You aren't actively doing anything. You're saturating their day so that they're distracted from whatever underlying problems they face. They're too tired to deal with them so they sleep and repeat. I'd be curious to see your solution play out in the ten years post separation, but the VA may be ahead of you. For context (if you're not American) TAPS is what you take as you separate: https://benefits.va.gov/TRANSITION/docs/pstap-assessment.pdf (Section 4.C should have some relevant quotes).
I remember at some point a Navy Corpsman explaining to me that the goal of Navy medicine isn't to make you better, it's to keep you in fighting shape. Fighting shape doesn't need to be the best or most optimal shape, just enough to do the job the military needs you to do.
With young people it isn't a matter of running them tired and bypassing the problem. Most aren't actually mentally ill, rather for the first time in their lives they don't have someone telling them how to live their lives on a daily basis. So they are given structure until they can work that stuff out for themselves. Extra work is often part of that structure. For instance, I know of one 19yo who was basically bored to death at work and hitting the bar every night (not in the US). So his boss put him on the unit "safety committee", which is extra work. He then had to interview people and write a monthly report to be read by the CO, which is very scary for the average 19yo kid at his first unit. That little bit of responsibility, extra work, turned him around real fast. He came to my office to have me edit his first report. He was nervous, but prideful nervous rather than scared. He didn't have bags under his eyes anymore.
I get what you're saying now. People do need billets to bridge them to some more higher official responsibility if you want them to grow. That said, I don't think this is a great panacea for mental health days. Generally I use mental health days if I'm overly stressed, burned out, upset, etc...
Would you let a troop take a sick day if they were any of those things?
Actually no. We have a procedure. Such people would be reminded of the various mental health services we have. If they don't touch base themselves, someone will touch base with them. That might be a padre or more likely a call from a mental health nurse. Those people would then authorize them staying home, or not, based on medical judgement. We don't allow people to switch off, especially when they might have access to weapons. If you call in for a mental health day, and then don't answer the call from the padre/nurse/boss, you can expect people at your door within an hour. I know of one door physically broken down after a kid called in for a mental health day, then fell asleep (very likely still drunk) and failed to answer the door.
Quite frankly, this is why I'm glad to no longer be part of such an organization. This is as close as you can toe the line of actually causing harm while still making it look beneficial.
Yeah, I agree. Somehow what they described is actually a bar or two worse than what I experienced at an infantry support unit. I'd like to be able to say that the DOD is capable of change, but the VA has been telling them about the long tail effects of "procedures" and decisions like this for decades at this point and not a thing has changed.
People use all kinds of colloquial models for mental health that may or may not have a relationship with reality. It is not obvious to me that there is such a thing as "underlying problems" that you mask by doing something else. Maybe, maybe not-- mental health is complicated and you have to prove this stuff. An alternative model is that people get depressed when they do nothing at home, and get better when they're surrounded by other people and have tasks to complete. I don't know what's actually right, but I'm always very skeptical when people approach these things with certitude.
I was speaking from some lived experience, so I'll be a bit more clear about what I meant by "underlying problems":
There were little activities to do on my base other than drink. I was paid very little, little enough not to afford a car. The cities I was stationed in were sounded by all kinds of loan sharks as a result. There were very few activities funded by the military that weren't somehow childlike or oriented for people with families. I was forced to live in a very old barracks that at times, frankly, barely functioned. While living in the barracks you can be summoned for duty at any time, unlike people who live off-base (married people). My life was as a Marine, so I'd be curious to hear an Airman's perspective. The services also tend to attract people who are actively attempting to leave home, so read from that what you will. None of these things are really unknown to the military or military leaders.
You go home from the military during basic training? Curious what country that is...
Having served I agree that a military environment where your day is full and you're basically told what to do all the time, and you're maybe working extremely hard, can override some "bad thoughts". That said, it's not unheard of for soldiers to commit suicide, harm themselves or others, and generally suffer from stress related to the military environment.
I agree that simply taking a day off is not a fix and if you are worried about getting stuff done at work it might even make things worse. That said, being in a workplace where it's considered ok to take a day off if you need to, maybe go hiking or something, is probably something that alleviates stress from the employees.
Basic training is a nothing thing in the military. It does not represent what military life is like. It is just a temporary proving ground for new employees. That said, many units still do unit PT in the afternoons specifically so that people head home reasonably tired. Remember too that in the military, especially for young single people, "home" is wherever you rack out.
It varies from person to person, but speaking for myself, getting back to work is incredibly good for me after I've experienced something terrible. The structure, the feeling of "normal," is better therapy than many give it credit for. Now granted, a big part of that is because I thoroughly enjoy my work and my manager looks out for my well-being, as do I for my subordinates. I know plenty of people, friends and family, who loathe their return to work precisely because that's not the case for them.
As to the GP's question:
Certainly not, but there are innumerable companies, software and otherwise, that while paying useless lipservice to the concept of taking care of employees, absolutely do not follow through. I have one friend who's simply unable to attend therapy because his insurance is shit and he's in too much debt to take on another. His employer has all kinds of things to say about how much they take care of their own, but he gets shit from his manager for taking "mental health days" so he doesn't, he just says he has the flu. Mind you he's no burger flipper, he's a seasoned sysadmin.
And, lest we forget that outside our IT professions, it's even worse. My wife is a cook and has bounced from one awful workplace to another many times, her treatment running the gamut from benign neglect to outright hostility at the notion of needing mental healthcare.
I agree with you but I think the key point here is "go home tired and then actually sleep" which is not often the case. After a stressful day as a software engineer or other white collar job, your body is not tired. Mentally you might be tired but that just leads to doomscrolling and social media and other dopamine hits. The key point here is that one should ideally be physically tired so that after they go home they want to sleep. This is why, for example, after a stressful day I make my body tired with a long run.
I've seen what you describe but then also can speak for myself that on my time off I'm awfully active. Building things physical and/or software, spending time outside, reading, etc. If I retired tomorrow I'd probably work just as much, if not more, because I'd work on my interests and not what I was assigned. This is common for the majority of adults I know.
I'd say I'm far from fully burnt out (we've all had our moments) but I think there is some career saturation point where people feel ownership over their free time and treat it with respect instead of "drinking/gaming".
Is wasting days off a symptom of youth? Is it because military employees lack autonomy? Is it just natural after years of selling your time to an employer?
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When you take a sick day, you're not supposed to say what's your issue.
The last 3 companies I’ve worked at over the last few years have all had “mental health days” in one form or another as a separate offering to sicks days. It’s very common, at least in the UK.
Sounds enlightened.
A lot of the comments here seem to use the term mental health days without irony quotes. A mental health day is not a psychological crisis. It is a plea for a timeout from the workaday grind.
I didn’t put the quotes to indicate any irony, just that they’re explicitly different to your sick days and allotted differently.
I was interviewing at a company recently and they called out that they offer 1 mental health day per month, in addition to other benefits.
That’s right, because the minute you say you’re taking it for mental health, you get managed out. I’ve personally seen it happen at one of the major food delivery startup, at one of the big social media companies and at Amazon.
The steps are the same. First they pile on more work on you, then gaslight you in believing your workload is the same as a junior employee and/or is subpar, then take you on a journey of “helping” you improve, document every small thing as a major flaw and then get you in that meeting with the HR.
This is very different than my experience at another FAANG. One of my reports was able to take a multi-week mental health leave and return without any negative impact on performance rating or career. Of course, mileage probably varies from manager to manager and org to org.
That's been closer to my experience as well. Hiring folks is hard. Hiring good folks is very hard. If you're working with someone who has demonstrated good work before, but are currently not performing due to life circumstances it's often still much more cost effective to try to work with that person to get them back on track than just firing them and moving on. Most places I've worked at would make several attempts to help an employee get back to a better place before moving to release them because they acknowledge it's faster and cheaper than replacing someone.
Most places I've been at will suffer with known weak developers for a long time because a weak developer with domain knowledge is still more productive than many new developers without it and there's always the risk the new hire will turn out to be a dud as well.
I go back and forth on this; on the one hand, yes, I don't owe my team an explanation about why I'm taking STO. On the other, me making it clear that I'm taking a mental health day may encourage another engineer (possibly a more junior one) to do the same if need be: emphasizing that mental health is a facet of overall health.
If anything Engineers would get the least pushback to taking a mental health day of those careers.
Our skillset becomes so uniquely tied to the company we work at that replacing a veteran engineer would take more than a year minimum. The differences between operations at two hospitals is probably minuscule compared to two tech companies.
It also feels like managers have received training in "burnout" so the few times I have uttered those words usually leads to some temporary white glove treatment.
Companies/managers have gotten alot smarter about this. The strategy is to hire enough and be managed to a degree such that the operation of any single system is never left leave to any single engineer.
So if your company is smart, yes you are replaceable.
There's strategy and there's reality though. They got other people to "operate" the thing, but "operate as well" is sometimes a pipe dream, which erodes the meaning of "replaceable".
I mean keep in mind, stupid companies also exist (I'd argue they're the norm actually - you can have a company with nothing but smart people, but it's a Chinese room - the company itself can be an idiot). That's the problem with stupidity in general: it doesn't know it's stupid.
It's a corollary of "the market can remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent".
Replaceable doesn't mean without friction or decrease of quality.
Many people don't know that they can tell their manager they will be out for health/medical reasons and do not have to provide any additional information (i.e. flu, back issues, mental wellness, etc...) . It would benefit a lot of people if they were taught basic laws related to employment while they are in school.
Different in every country.
We had an employee that used this technique. Too often. When the company needed to lay off people to cut costs, their name got on the layoff list before anybody else's.
Businesses are not charities. They need to make money. And if an employee is not pulling their weight, sooner or later they will be let go. Using the law to extend your stay can only go so far.
I am.
I worked alongside lawyers for almost a decade, providing them with non-engineering professional services. I also have a couple decades of experience in software engineering and startups.
The pressure in software engineering is something entirely different, and far worse, than what I experienced in the legal environment.
By and large lawyers are lawyers, not managers. Yes, there's a hierarchy of junior associate to senior-most partner but it's lawyers all the way up and down the chain. You don't have lawyers working under managers. And there's something about this that makes the pressures different. Pressures are there, hours are long, spouses are unhappy because the lawyers are always at work or distracted at home... but I never had anxiety attacks or mental health issues working in the legal environment whereas in the software and startup environments I did.
In legal, everyone knows the drill and you do the drill. And your superiors have done the drill.
In software, you often don't know drill. You just grind, often to satisfy someone who hasn't done the grind themselves. A company I once worked for – a successful public company – has constant openings for senior software engineers for this very reason.
I think the reason it it wears away at your value structure. You have to "sell" your mind (thus polluting your non-work day thinking) to a system that feels "wrong"
For lawyers, it's a clear meritocracy based on how much you can bleed. For doctors, a kind of "virtue" in the work that cancels out some of the stress/BS. For software, it can be like temporarily joining the popular circus that's in town (similar to a lot of meme crypto companies)
Indeed. Taking time off for mental health reasons is no less legitimate than taking time off for physical health reasons.
I've never actually told any bosses that I'm taking a "mental health day" or anything, though. I just take a sick day, because that's what it is.
I agree and maybe I even take it further. I don't see any need to give a reason or justification. OOO or on vacation is all I say. I'm not a child or asking for permission.
I can't remember any of my 10+ SWE jobs where anyone even asked what sickness my sick day was for.
Certainly not for a single day!
At my first job you had to justify every sick day. Looking back, I can't believe that was legal. This was the UK twenty years ago.
I'd say this is a cultural thing. For example, I have never heard of anyone taking a mental health day off. You just take vacation time and hope you come back normal.
Technically, you can take a sick day and the employer doesn't need a reason but if you work in an office environment, especially a small one, everyone knows everything. People know when you're sick and wonder if you're okay. They care and they ask.
We used to call these “duvet days”. Sometimes you just don’t want to get out of bed. If you’re not feeling well (mentally or physically) take the day off and get better.
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.
I don't think it really matters what jobs are "harder". Nothing in the article is making the claim this is unique (or for that matter universal). The author's experience was in engineering management, and that's what they're writing about.
It's relevant to our industry insofar as it's reflective of an experience in the industry. I'm personally a bit cautious around claims of what is harder or easier because they tend to be pointless comparisons mostly used to dismiss valid criticism with whataboutism.
I have definitely worked at organizations with a tech-bro startup culture where working non-stop (and drinking heavily) were idolized and anyone talking about mental health would have likely gotten a "man up"-esque speech (regardless of their gender, though shockingly these companies are mostly men). I have also worked at places where mental health was nominally respected but, like anything else, substantially more leeway was given to people perceived as high performers. I'm glad you haven't had to encounter anything like that, but I wouldn't even call it uncommon, nonetheless exceptional.
Honestly, I didn't realize until I was 2 or 3 years into my job that I was 'allowed' to take a sick day if I was going to spend it all miserable or even crying (I had a coworker who was a bully).
Nobody ever actually came out and so, but I realize now that it was pretty common.
Where do you work?
Sorry but this is really naive. They won't come out and say it explicitly, because they can't, but many companies will just find a way to quietly replace you or hold you back in the organization if you are public about any mental issues.