Ask HN: Which types of tech jobs are best for people that can't handle stress?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17847668

by yasp • 8 years ago

189 157 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

byoung2• 8 years ago

It depends on the company and culture. At my last company the environment was so toxic at the end they could make beer tasting a stressful job. So assuming the company has good culture, this list seems reasonable:

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-low-stress-jobs-for-...

yasp• 8 years ago

Saw the same listicle. Unfortunately most of those roles would be way too dull IMO. Wish it were possible to make being a developer low stress.

Goosey• 8 years ago

It is. Work for a company with good culture. Yelp has been great to me. Disclaimer: I work for Yelp and find it to be low stress.

astura2• 8 years ago

It's very possible!

Source: I'm developer, I have very little to no stress.

arh682• 8 years ago

Public sector? Less stress, more politics. A lot of people are RIP, but I doubt that's really what you want.

kristianp• 8 years ago

What's RIP in this context? Not dead, I assume?

hellogoodbyeeee• 8 years ago

I think he means they are as good as dead. They are so useless, they might as well be dead.

arh682• 8 years ago

Retired In Place

“Well I’ve got 3 more years, then I can retire”

“I don’t care about that release date, I’ll be retired by then!”

“The reasons I like this place are, well, job security...”

“We know your coworker does nothing all day, but he’s about to retire next December, so why try to fire him?”

astura2• 8 years ago

Depends on what you find stressful.

dasmoth• 8 years ago

For me, constant politics is way more stressful than occasional “X is on fire, fix it now!”

There’s a lot of variance in preferred working environments...

rboyd• 8 years ago

For dev? Maybe some categories of standalone desktop and mobile apps? Something with less frequent releases and without a server infrastructure to monitor.

A lot probably depends on the team you have to work with.

Maybe education? Producing content? Books, tutorial videos?

jaegerpicker• 8 years ago

I personally find Mobile or desktop apps A LOT less stressful, deadlines are usually much more reasonable. On iOS at least if the app works on your test device it's VERY likely to work on the device in the wild. Given the nature of the App Store "hot fixes" are a lot less of a thing. Also given the release cycle it's often common to have a lot better of a QA process in place. In general you only need to be an expert in one or two languages (swift/kotlin or Objective-C/Java if you cover both OS's). I'm a full time mobile developer and I love it.

hobls• 8 years ago

Client side development in general. Libraries, SDKs, etc, are also generally lower stress. They don’t tend to just break in the middle of the night or whatever.

swatcoder• 8 years ago

Different things are stressful for different people. In a broad sense, some people like the rush of high pressure environments and don't find them stressful. The same people might freak out if nobody's barking at them with demands and deadlines. Other people, obviously, are happy if they have more space and stability.

Make this more personal: what kind of things stress you out? Do you already work in tech? What stresses you in your current work?

derekp7• 8 years ago

I agree, and I would personally define workplace stress as one of the following:

1) Are you expected to perform intractable tasks? Given requirements / tasks by people who obviously don't understand technology or constraints (i.e., "I don't want to hear your excuses, just get it done).

2) Does it feel like a "frat club" that you aren't a member of? Such as people only listening to reason from others that are part of their in-group, but exclude you for some reason (i.e., you weren't there when critical parts of the company were being built, and they don't see you bringing anything valuable to the table).

3) Does every day feel like someone is looking for an excuse to fire you? This can happen at places with stack ranking, where managers hire in sacrificial lambs to throw to the slaughterhouse or when RIFs are required.

4) This goes along with point (1). Is your department not given enough tools / resources to do the job right, so you are always in firefighting mode (doing anti-work, which annihilates actual productive work).

sgroppino• 8 years ago

Probably the lowest paid ones.

odyssey7• 8 years ago

I've wondered about this question, and I'm not sure it correlates that way.

One company I worked for was known for being one of the lower cost vendors in its industry, and I experienced a pervasive back-stabbing culture, which I attributed to there being many employees who were especially fearful of losing the only job in the industry that they had been able to get. So I think in a lot of cases, the lower paying companies might have employees who are more desparate, and management who is used to having more-than-typical negotiating leverage, which they do exercise.

collyw4• 8 years ago

Why would people stay in a high stress low paying job?

TamDenholm• 8 years ago

I'm a contractor, so i work in a lot of different companies and get to experience a lot of different ways of working. I am by far the most relaxed and productive in the companies that are closest to ROWE (Results Only Work Environment).

If i know what i need to do, how to achieve it and and left the hell alone to do it where and how i want, i generally perform excellently. The daily "standup" google hangout as a check in on how progress is going works well.

When i'm expected to be in the office every day, given funny looks if i pack up my shit at 5pm, asked where i was if i didnt eat lunch at my desk, then quite frankly, i generally leave the contract early.

So yeah, its all about the place you work rather than the specific job you have. Being a contractor gives me the opportunity to move around and get a wide range of experience, which i enjoy. It also has the added benefits of being better paid and when you finish the contract, work related stress goes away. Might be worth trying?

jobserunder2• 8 years ago

When i'm expected to be in the office every day, given funny looks if i pack up my shit at 5pm, asked where i was if i didnt eat lunch at my desk, then quite frankly, i generally leave the contract early.

This. I'm the same way.

Now I only take 100% remote contracts and now I'm 2-3x more productive than my former office-going self.

Fun tip:

When someone asks "Where are you?" Then the correct answer is:

"Who wants to know?"

There are 2 exceptions:

1. It's your Mother asking. She has a right to know because she gave you life.

2. Your employer, when you are on the click. Because they are paying for your time.

Since I always bill by the hour and time everything to the minute as I go...I can answer them "Where am I" and send them a URL to the thing that I worked on.

If they are asking when I'm explicitly not billing... then either:

A) I ghost them immediately and terminate the contract

B) Ghost them the day after and send them back files after wiping everything clean.

This is the value in having multiple streams of income (rental properties, small contracts and passive income)

pxndx• 8 years ago

Yeah, there's nothing like already being rich. This is terrible advice, not everyone has rental properties or passive income.

gumby• 8 years ago

When i'm expected to be in the office every day, given funny looks if i pack up my shit at 5pm, asked where i was if i didnt eat lunch at my desk, then quite frankly, i generally leave the contract early.

This is doubly right on.

I am the opposite of the original questioner: I like the high stress environment where I feel like we're all pulling hard on some intense goal+. BUT I like it when we're a team thus I don't care if someone is leaving or coming when they are; I just care that if I toss a ball their way they'll know what to do with it and if someone tosses a ball my way I will know what to do with it. That we're all working to get the job done -- which is no excuse for bullshit monitoring each other.

The other doubly right on: again, I'm not a contractor but I've hired plenty and they don't pretend to be committed to our large goal, only what they signed up for. And that's totally fair. A contractor (generally has to) has to hustle for business but has an easier time firing a customer they don't like.

+ original question was a good one and I was interested in the replies even though I don't seek out the same thing.

DanielBMarkham• 8 years ago

Same here. I'm also a contractor and have seen scores of different work environments. Maybe hundreds. I also specialize in making tech teams happier and more productive, so how people feel about their work is something I've been tracking and learning about for a while.

"Stress" is a weird word. I've seen people with jobs I thought were skate that were totally stressed-out. I've also seen people with jobs I'd never take who thrive.

Maybe discomfort is a better word. From what I've seen, all jobs involve some amount of discomfort. The critical factor is whether or not you feel in control over it.

I was on a short gig with a client a few years back where I was hired by the QA department. They were having problems with quality, but it really was about trust, attitude, stress (discomfort), and interpersonal relationships.

I was only there for a few weeks, but I never had a week with that client where they didn't complain about something. I wore jeans, which broke the dress code. Jeans were common all over the company, but for some reason this particular group cared about a dress code. I left an hour early because there was nothing to do and I didn't want to waste their time. They wanted me there until 5 every day.

It was seven or eight things like that over a few weeks. They were probably one of my top five worst clients ever. It was sad because when I worked with the dev teams there was this feeling of helplessness. It wasn't that things sucked. Things suck all the time. It was that they didn't feel like they had control over it. Instead it was just random sucky stuff showing up and everybody having to react. All the time.

It destroyed trust and made things miserable. People ended up in little cliques, controlling information flow and making sure somebody else got blamed for things. I pointed out that there were some severe environment issues that we needed to fix right away. Then I was corrected and told that they only wanted 1 or 2 tech topics from me, not advice on making a better work environment.

I was happy to leave.

That unpredictable, out-of-control, low-trust-environment is what destroys lives. (and team productivity). All of those adjectives are relative, however, and I've never seen a case where things couldn't get better. If people want things to get better.

wallflower4• 8 years ago

When i'm expected to be in the office every day, given funny looks if i pack up my shit at 5pm, asked where i was if i didnt eat lunch at my desk, then quite frankly, i generally leave the contract early.

Let me add if they require you to punch in and punch out on their awful ADP time tracking portal for lunch time...

gordaco6• 8 years ago

If what you want is a low stress environment, you're like me. Some pieces of advice:

1) This goes without saying, but avoid startups. The more established the company, the better. Big corps are much more likely to respect a 9-to-5 workday and much less likely to call you at 2 am.

2) Try to work in a BTB product, not a BTC. BTB means way fewer customers, and fewer customers means fewer eyes looking for bugs, which in turn means a lower probability of finding an unexpected bug that needs to be solved yesterday. This sounds a bit cynical, but really isn't because of my next point:

3) There is an even better way to avoid bugs in production: have a very good and thorough testing system. When interviewing, ask about the testing process and how likely are they to detect bugs before a client runs the code. If you are looking for a job as a tester, instead ask the following: how automated are the tests and the build system? The more, the better.

4) This might sound bad, but it's my best piece of advice about jobs: look for a workplace that has lots of women (yes, they exist. For certain charitable definition of "lots", at least). Especially older women. Bonus points if you see pregnant women. Double bonus points if people are allowed to work less hours in order to take care of their kids, and you know a few people taking advantage of this situation (IDK how frequent is this in the US. Here in Spain it's common and regulated by law). Triple bonus points if there are many women in managerial positions. I realize that all of this sounds sexist, but whether we like it or not, the weight of childcare and housekeeping still falls mostly on the shoulders of women. So, if you find a company with lots of women, it usually means that the company offers very good work-life balance. As a bonus, you avoid one common source of stress: the competitiveness that pervades certain brogrammer companies.

There are also some points to consider that apply to every job: learn to forget about work the moment you exit the office (have something to do on evenings. Something for yourself, something not related to your job); try to make commute pleasurable (walk to your job, use public transport so you can read, etc); avoid romantic relationships with colleagues, especially people you work closely with; etc.

EDIT: typo.

cleandreams• 8 years ago

If you want the startup life, find a startup where the founders (white men probably) have small children and professional wives.

lloyd-christmas• 8 years ago

Except if the significant other is part of the business. Family businesses tend to not care much for (or are oblivious to) employees' outside lives, since their work/life is already one and the same.

pjg• 8 years ago

This is a "stereotype" and may be the case some of the time, but definitely not the rule. I'm doing a product startup in fintech. Extremely high stress levels i.e. we've had 4 near death experiences in the first 3 years of our startup (one had to do with money running out, others more to do with specific business we're in). We've not just survived but improved! However there is no traditional work-life balance. I typically work 6 days/week and some/many others in the company do too. I have kids and working spouse but trade my time 50:50 with my spouse in terms of spending time with kids. Bottom line: Your mileage may vary, but just because a founder is married with kids is no guarantee of a 9 to 5 daily routine

l_t2• 8 years ago

Choose a startup where:

- People regularly take vacation time.

- They're happy to hear that you care about work/life balance and will not work more than 40 hours a week except in emergencies.

- You're not strongly invested in whether the company experiences long-term success.

- They have a moderately refined change control process (e.g. Scrum, but anything works as long as it collects all the work in one place to be prioritized and scheduled).

- You don't have to go on-call. (For many, this can be quite stressful.)

mlboss• 8 years ago

Very helpful advice. Another positive thing about big companies is that you are allowed to work on long term/researchy projects.

l_t2• 8 years ago

Good point about the testing system. Test coverage plus a good CI/CD system goes a long way to reduce "deployment anxiety", in my experience. Untrustworthy tools or broken processes can be a major source of stress.

But, I wouldn't completely discount startups as an option. There are startups that respect their employees time and offer a great environment for low-stress workers, at least at the 10+ employee level. (I don't have much experience with startups smaller than that). If you value self-determination, a startup can be a great option.

ioddly• 8 years ago

have something to do on evenings. Something for yourself, something not related to your job

I'm curious what everyone does for this. I've attempted to find a few things but nothing has strongly clicked with me. Most of my interests right now are on the computer, which makes it hard to disengage, and I definitely need to do more to get a handle on it.

dpc59• 8 years ago

sports and art

gordaco6• 8 years ago

Personally, I study physics and maths. And read, and listen to weird ethnic music on youtube. And play videogames. I mean, there are so many things in life. You already spend 8+ hours a day at work, there's no point in spending even more when you get home.

thx113897932• 8 years ago

fabrication, welding, juggling, playing music, working on and riding motorcycles, doing acid in the woods.

it takes some doing but it's well worth the effort to move your leisure time away from device-focused activities. the sense of life balance gained is palpable.

tayo42• 8 years ago

what have you tried and failed with?

though i like cooking, surfing and Brazilian jujitsu. recently started skating again. thinking about getting into yoga.

going to a class like martial arts or something similar where there's a teacher, you can improve, socialize and go regularly might help.

chrisper• 8 years ago

Gaming for one. Watch TV. Spend time with my dog. Go shopping. Promise myself that I will keep the apartment clean...

robinwassen• 8 years ago

I started most of my non-computer hobbies at 25.

One piece of advice is to find something that you think might be fun or cool. Then stick to it for a while even if it's not that fun to start with.

For example most sports are quite miserable when you start out, but when you start to do progress and get a bit hang of it, it becomes fun.

tluyben2• 8 years ago

There are many things; family, friends (go somewhere to meet up, less chance ending up sitting behind a computer if your friends are like mine anyway), read books, sports, electronics (soldering things and testing takes forever and it's fun), cooking, ...

Even computer stuff can force you to disengage; like gaming (especially on a console; it doesn't do mail or anything else productive :). But also, I like, as a hobby to work on small programming languages, type systems, proofs etc. Those things will never make it to production and will never make money, which is the point. I find them a lot of fun and during those it is very hard to get me to do anything work related as they all suck me in and keep me there until I sleep.

noufalibrahim• 8 years ago

Reading, calligraphy, martial arts mainly. These days, spending a lot of time with our young son (less than a year old).

konschubert• 8 years ago

Reddit and YouTube and whatever are great if you just want to forget about your job but if course they are also black holes for time.

ereyes01• 8 years ago

Become a photographer. Learning about the gear and the mechanics of taking pictures will appeal to your geeky side. Going on photo walks helps you connect with nature and be outside, if your climate allows it.

mikeymz• 8 years ago

I had same problem for years. I am in my late 30s now and I got a dog. She is a source of constant rage but going for a long walk every day has been great to get me away from my machine

toomanybeersies• 8 years ago

I leave my work laptop at work, and have my personal laptop at home.

That way I can't do work stuff at home, even if I wanted to. The only thing I have access to at home is my work email, so that I can email in sick if need be.

domepro• 8 years ago

I was always a gamer and therefore a lot of my time at home is spent at my computer.

I have a neat trick that I started doing during my university time (ymmv as not everyone will be able to use it). I started with using exclusively linux for any programming and/or homework assignments. When I'm at my personal desktop - it's always windows, at work I'll use linux or OS X, depending on what my options are.

It works pretty well for me, as it's a context switch for my brain - native terminal = work, windows = fun.

As an additional bonus, a dog which I can't reasonably leave home for extended periods of time (bringing her to work would never be an option, even if my workplace is dog-friendly) and have to walk so that gets rid of anyone (including myself) trying to squeeze OT out of me, and gets me out of the house for regular walks.

saiya-jin• 8 years ago

Tons of good advices here, it really depends who you are inside, and how much you actually know this inner drive. Meaning even you might not know till it 'clicks' as you write.

Expose yourself to different things, be relentless - if you don't like some hobby/activity/sport after few weeks once you get a bit of a hold of it, move on. These days, there are way more things to do in life than one can possibly manage, even if not working at all.

I found out in my late 20s that adventures are THE drive for me. They have various forms - backpacking in remote parts of the world, doing sports like hiking, climbing, skiing, alpinism, ski touring, paragliding, diving etc. Add rigorous physical training to make this all happen and enjoy in safest possible manner.

It was not a sudden revelation, rather gradual process - after spending 16 days on Annapurna circuit in Nepal, something changed in me. Being at the right spot at the right time, meeting the right people along the route. It took a while for me to realize this, and I am continuously changing priorities - paragliding being newest hobby, the goal having pilot license and be self-sufficient. Its a long process, but one I want to undertake seriously. I mean, it's freaking flying! In cheapest manner possible, and for some even coolest. I can't manage to do more, there is simply no more free time.

I know I will not look back when dying and cherish those moments spent in front of the screen, in contrary. I will for sure remember every single peak climbed (the harder the effort the fonder the memories), every country experienced, the strong emotions when I proposed to my fiancee on top of Mont Blanc, the tears of joy on top of Matterhorn or Kilimanjaro etc.

crocal• 8 years ago

I thought I was original then I read "Cathedral and the Bazaar". Anyway: martial arts and playing music are two common activities for hackers in needs of disengaging. These activities offer a complete range of possibilities, so whatever your shape / prefeferece is, you will always find something that will eventually "click" with you.

hellweaver666• 8 years ago

For me, I've recently taken up running. I have a full time job and a wife and three kids so time to myself where I can chill is rare. Running gives me an excuse to literally run away from it all and I can vary the length of my run depending on how much I need to destress. Bonus is that I also sleep better as a result of the extra exercise and I'm losing some of that middle age weight I've gained from sitting at my ass at a desk all the time.

mindentropy2• 8 years ago

I used to come home and work on things that I really like and is very intricate. I like to work on core libraries or very low level stuff. I am an embedded dev by profession. In my entire 13 years of my career I always went home to program on something I really like. This helped me destress a lot and also helped me professionally.

I really struggle with the office environment. I really love the open source development culture of mailing lists, IRCs etc. Handling different people face to face and their mannerisms always irks me a lot. Also being an introvert in a horribly extroverted workplace really puts a stress on me.

When I go home I really love to read and implement something at my own pace. These days I have picked up cooking which is a lot similar to programming and I really love it.

appgini• 8 years ago

I found that having a long walk in a park or some place with lots of greenery, while also listening to some podcasts, is amazing for relaxation, as well as of course being healthy.

Choosing interesting and funny podcasts prevents me from getting bored of taking the same walking/jogging route daily. Some of the nice podcasts I enjoy and learn a lot from: freakonomics radio, tell me something I don't know, TED radio hour.

soulchild774• 8 years ago

Try to work in a BTB product, not a BTC. BTB means way fewer customers, and fewer customers means fewer eyes looking for bugs

This! I worked for two huge (~60 and ~600 million page impressions per month) online communities for a total of 15 years. The level of stress induced by the users whenever something broke, was changed (even only slightly) or they just had a bad day was horrible and led to all kinds of fuzzy health problems (mainly panic attacks and hypertension). I was very attached to the product and always strived to make the users happy, and that played a big part in the problem.

Making slight changes to the interface oftentimes resulted in users insulting us like we had renovated their living room without permission. Can you imagine what it was like when a bug in Apache's mod_cache suddenly cached session cookies?

I always loved the job, but that made it so hard to draw a line and not letting it get to me.

Afterwards I switched employers and started working on a B2B platform in the banking sector. Of course, the enterprise has a different set of problems (in my case, no clue what the requirements really are), but your corporate users are just used to a different kind of standard (hint: way lower than your average Bootstrap frontend). They pay very good money, let you work on interesting things, technology-wise, and users are mostly easy to satisfy.

karimf• 8 years ago

Can you elaborate more about the stories about working on online communities?

I've been inclined to work on BTC rather than BTB because I imagined it will have more impact than the other (e.g. facebook vs salesforce)?

gordaco6• 8 years ago

I agree so much with your latest paragraph. I'm currently working on a software that helps telcos decide the placement and configuration of mobile network cells and antennas, and it's like you said: it's actually a very interesting and deep problem, the pay is good, and since the users are engineers, it doesn't matter that the UI is just average looking as long as it does what the application manual says. The application is huge but reasonably maintainable.

I worked for about two years and a half in web development, and in one case the application was widely, widely used. Everything was on fire and users complained constantly. Saying that I don't miss it would be a big understatement.

mszcz• 8 years ago

I do understand this point of view, now let me offer my grass-is-always-greener anecdote.

I worked for 10 years in the software departament of a large IT distributor. We had a B2B web portal to sell IT equipment. The clients were all business, ranging from small (~$1000/mo) to large ($10M/mo). Now, the clients were still complaining but not as much as I figure they do in a B2C environment. However, what made it worse, in my opinion, is that when they complained we had to listen. This is not a single _user_ out of 500k, it's a single _paying customer_ out of 5000. This resulted in us having to implement a lot of one-off features that were specific to a single or a couple of clients on a platform used by all of them. That in turn resulted in the codebase becoming a monstrosity and me being frustrated and tired by feeling like I had 5000+1 bosses. I stayed so long only because the software departament and the people in it were so awesome.

segmondy4• 8 years ago

I don't agree with this. This type of stress and worry is usually due to poor engineering. Our goals should be to reduce this type of stress, how? By writing solid tests, preventing regressing tests, solid logging, monitoring, automating away all the little rubbish, building solid reliable systems. Seriously, how do airline engineers or the folks who write the software for your car braking system sleep? By building solid systems with fail-safe.

princekolt• 8 years ago

I guess this still applies to your point number 1, but I'll say it anyway: Avoid small B2B companies that have one or two big customers among a bunch of smaller ones. These big customers know they have leverage over the company and will make it do whatever they want, and then change their mind completely 3 months later, at the expense of your sanity.

You could ask during interviews "how many customers do you have? are they big?" and usually the company tries to brag that they have that one big brand name, but in my experience this is a red flag. Be careful.

segmondy4• 8 years ago

Remember folks, little risk, little rewards. If you pick this type of role, don't seethe when you see your peers earning 3-10x more. Don't claim you are underpaid.

triplee2• 8 years ago

On the flip side -- remember your total compensation package. If you work a 60+ hour week, that higher salary broken down to an hourly and compared to the 8 and skate 40 hour a week job suddenly isn't so high. Also compare PTO and other benefits, especially considering "unlimited PTO" often offered by many fast paced places is usually a lie. There's often other benefits in big places that aren't directly salary, but pay off in other ways (discounts, better health care, etc.) And there's the added non-financial benefits of lower stress.

There are pretty big cons to the bigger corporate world, B2B, etc., but money isn't as big of a difference as it first appears.

msh• 8 years ago

Not necessarily. Some bigco's, esp in finance, can provide very good worklife balance together with good pay. Maybe not top of the market google pay but nowhere near the levels you mention.

triplee2• 8 years ago

Literally everything you just said, and I can't say I could really have said it better. Also -- a fair amount of federal/state govt. and some contracting roles for govt. fit the bill here too. Certain very large nonprofits as well.

avcdsuia2• 8 years ago

Try some nooptropics before you go for stress-free jobs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics/wiki/faq#wiki_what_suppl...

vasco• 8 years ago

Quintessential HN.

mlevental2• 8 years ago

man if this isn't one of the dumbest hn responses I've ever seen I don't know what is - "instead of trying to have a healthy work-life balance or accommodate personal emotional necessities take these unregulated unproven mind altering substances and keep working yourself to death". like is that you Elon trying to get Tesla employees to crank out more cars? and people actually wonder what the value of teaching kids about toxic labor-exploitative ideology is. sheesh

avcdsuia2• 8 years ago

We aren't born in perfection. I'm assuming we all live healthy lives already, but that's not gonna cure everything.

I understand my opinion isn't popular, or easy to accept. However, some people (including me) have mild or severe anxiety, are ruled by fear in their entire lives. Having drugs doesn't mean they can eliminate what is encoded in their gene, but it can make dealing with their emotion more approachable, that's enough.

ps: I do L-Theanine, which can be found commonly in teas.

_fhql2• 8 years ago

If I'm hearing you correctly - a way to express the same thing you just said using the principles of nonviolent communication [1] could sound something like:

"having a healthy work life balance, healthy emotional management skills, and using safe and well-tested medicines are things that I strongly value. When I read your comment suggesting that people use nootropics, I felt scared / angry / <insert whatever your emotional response was here, related to your needs not being met>, because in it, I heard an invitation to not deal with a stressful job in a healthy way by ignoring the fundamental causes of stress and bypassing them by numbing oneself through the use of untested and unregulated products.

Would you be up for explaining more of your thought process as to why you think using nootropics is a good idea? And, how does this address what I'm hearing the in parent commenter's request to address the core causes of stress at work in a healthy, balanced way? Thanks for the conversation."

What do you think?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication

captain_perl• 8 years ago

First comment on HN that literally made my jaw drop. Kudos! :)

closeparen• 8 years ago

At my employer, you have a pretty low-stress life if you're content to be a contributor on other people's projects and not angling for your own. Of course, your career will never advance that way.

toomuchtodo• 8 years ago

The trick is to get a high dollar job that doesn’t require your career to advance. Let someone else shovel dreck for no additional comp.

bobosha• 8 years ago

Government jobs

rasengan• 8 years ago

It might be worth breaking down the types of stressors that you may have issue with and identifying the ones that are non-starters.

Then you might be able to narrow down a professional career that is in-line with the way you wish to live life.

pm902• 8 years ago

This is great advice and needs more visibility. Things that cause stress for someone may not be the same things that cause stress for another.

e.g. for me personally, working a stable, boring job was more stressful since I felt like my talents, my opportunity to have an impact was being severely affected.

scarface742• 8 years ago

It depends on what stresses you. I hate red tape and indecisiveness. When I want to get something done, I hate having to go through bureaucracy and meetings and approvals.

For me, small companies or small teams where I am on team that has complete autonomy over the “how” is the least stressful. Of course you want some sensible standards.

I was more stressed out as the “Dev lead” with supposed authority where every decision had to go through red tape, a ticketing system and approvals than I was at a small company where I was “just” a developer who would let my team know my architectural thinking - just to make sure I wasn’t missing something - and then have free reign from development, devops, netops, etc. - I had admin access to their AWS infrastructure.

I also don’t do well in large companies. I can do it, but having to deal with large organizations stresses me.

I’m also a little nuerotic about not being competitive in the market and being “stuck” at a job.

hvidgaard2• 8 years ago

As a company grows, and especially as the portfolio of code expands, it becomes a necessity to have an "it architect" have the overview of it all, approving changes to the interworkings of it all. They also needs to approve tech changes, not because they don't want you to work with cool new stuff, but because they have to guarantee the dependencies pulled in are reasonable.

A big software system is comparable to an aircraft in complexity, and it's not unreasonable to expect it to be handled like this.

scarface742• 8 years ago

It doesn’t help when the person serving as your IT Architect doesn’t know AWS, your outsourced AWS support company only knows the netops part of AWS so they built the AWS environment just like you would build an environment on prem, manually (instead of using Cloud Formation), having separate subnets for EC2 instances for Dev vs. prod instead of having entirely separate accounts (ie VPCs), and didn’t know how to use any of the other features of AWS. They decided while I was there to move completely over to AWS from an on prem environment and brought in “consultants” to help us.

To be honest, I was the architect responsible for software development for the company but didn’t know AWS from a hole in the wall at the time - but neither did the consultants. I wanted to contract someone on my team that had done development and devops on AWS and was certified. I already had approval to hire developers and my budget would have allowed it. But that was a turf battle.

Seeing the writing on the wall, I spent the next six months studying up on AWS even though I couldn’t use any of the services. It took so long to get anything approved and my neck was on the line to deliver the system by a certain date, I just asked for a bunch of large AWS EC2 environments and started using the same tools that I would have used in an on prem environment - Mongo (instead of DynamoDB or ElasticSearch), Consul/Vault for configuration (instead of Parameter Store), Fabio (for “load balancing” with internal services), Nomad for job execution and scheduling (instead of CloudWatch/lambda/Elastic Container Service) etc.

They ended up having a run rate on AWS that was much more expensive than if I had used AWS services. But, I followed all of the procedures, had complete control over my environments and servers without touching the AWS console, kept the netops team employed because they had to manage the monstrosity - Consul, Vault, Mongo, and Nomad were clustered. I got my pat on the back for delivering on time and on budget - since the AWS architecture budget fell on the netops team not mine - and got my bonus.

Then knowing what POS I was forced to create, I put my AWS certifications, my “successful” project, and my title of “lead software architect” that I negotiated for on my resume and got the hell out of dodge to a smaller company that paid me more where I was able to do everything correctly.

Fast forward a little bit, now I’m getting real -all I have to do is sign on the dotted line - lucrative offers for consultant roles for a “cloud architect” position because I’m one of the few people in my market that know AWS from a netops, devops, and development point of view. But I don’t want the stress or travel right now.

That’s the way the game has to be played to get ahead. Whether I like it or not....

inostia• 8 years ago

Try looking into higher education, particularly major state or well-regarded private universities. Avoid for-profit degree mills. It's a great environment to work in, often times much less stress than in a for-profit environment, with a lot of room for advancement into leadership. If you enjoy working in and around academia that's a plus, often with benefits to take classes and even get a degree while working.

The work can be a bit on the "boring" side, but it also provides great work-life balance and stability. If you live in California, look at some opportunities in the University of California system.

Downsides are generally lower pay, and as I mentioned it can be a bit boring.

walshemj• 8 years ago

Might help if you tell us in which country and what sector you are working in.

twblalock• 8 years ago

I think it's more about processes than anything else.

I've worked at a company with poor processes around code quality, testing, and deployment. Every release day, we know we would have a very late night because of all of the customer-facing bugs our inadequate QA processes didn't catch. We also had regular outages for the same reason, often in the middle of the night. We didn't have good monitoring systems so problems often came to our attention only after customers had been affected for hours. And we didn't have useful post-mortems so the same problems happened again and again.

Now I work at a much larger company, where the stakes for production problems are much higher. But I am not stressed out, because we do such a good job with testing and monitoring that (fingers crossed) I've only had one bad night troubleshooting production problems during the entire previous year. And when something goes wrong, we take steps to make sure it can't happen again.

The second corporate culture is the one you should look for it you want a low-stress job. You're more likely to find it at companies that have been around for a while, but there are younger companies like that too.

analog31• 8 years ago

Location may matter. I suspect working in the Midwest is lower stakes than on the coasts, possibly with a better environment (e.g., easy access to the great outdoors), and less fearsome commutes.

stevebmark• 8 years ago

Generally IT / infrastructure / administrative are the most checked out, coasting, least engaged, least applied folks, with the exception being poorly designed environments where you're always dealing with outages. And of course there's high risk if you get it wrong.

Generally work that has a direct customer and user requirements, like application design (closer to the front end of an application) is more stressful, with API/backend layer less stressful. There's less pressure to deliver features and it's easier to apply straight SE principles without having to care as much about the end product. Generally the further you get away from end user customer deliverables, the less stress there is.

devonkim• 8 years ago

I have to highly, highly disagree given the context that in most SaaS software companies operations are going to be on-call, and horrific on-call nights can't happen if you're not on-call. Even in the best of companies (minus organizations that have the massive resources of a follow-the-sun on-call rotation) being on-call means tons of interruptions during one of the most important times you need to not be interrupted - sleeping.

What you may be observing is that the operations folks that make it to a later stage in their career that have not burned out permanently have adopted / maintained a mentality of simply not caring about work as much as possible.

cryptozeus2• 8 years ago

I have worked in midwest, east cost, south Florida and west cost. Believe me, location makes a huge difference. I.e new york was extremely stressful with lots of micro management and back stabbing. Midwest was really slow for my liking...for me I found the balance as a software dev in west cost. Working in mid level company with full fredom for schedule.

wincy• 8 years ago

I made the mistake of working for a Silicon Valley company that moved their offices to the Midwest to save money. They had also fired their entire dev team three years before and outsourced them because “they wrote tests”.

cryptozeus2• 8 years ago

Hummm something similar is happening to my company, no more hiring in valley. All new hires in midwest Offices. Will have to watch out. Tx

alphanumeric0• 8 years ago

Find a job where the people defining the software direction have experience doing so. Find a lead who has a firm grasp of how software evolves and can hand you software specifications that make sense and don't have bugs built in to them (I speak from experience).

rhapsodic• 8 years ago

I suggest first, don't work for a tech company. Work in the IT department of a large (e.g. Fortune 500) established company like an insurance company, or perhaps a bank. In that environment, many tech jobs can be low-stress, even development. However, your best bet would be something like a DBA position where your job is to babysit a few production databases, managing backups, server migrations, etc.

telltruth• 8 years ago

Program Management. I have watched several colleagues switching from dev to PM over time precisely because of stress, both in terms of keeping up with tech as well as release pressure. The downside is that PM jobs are shrinking and climbing career ladder is harder. The upside is that your neck is not on the line (well, most of the time) but you get to share credits for success pretty much all the same and in some cases even be the defecto face of the project in high profile events.

evervevdww221• 8 years ago

quality assurance positions

sumedh• 8 years ago

Those positions are more stressful compared to devs when you find bugs in production.

DoreenMichele• 8 years ago

You might find it helpful to do some testing of some sort to try to identify your pain points, even if it is free on the internet personality tests, like Briggs-Meyers. For example: Introverts will be stressed by having to deal with people too much. Extroverts will be fine with that, but will lose their marbles from social isolation.

Then do some informational interviews to find out actual working conditions for various jobs or at various target companies.

Consider the possibility that you may have a hidden disability. They can create areas where a person lacks flexibility and adaptability. If you have some kind of disability, you may mostly need control over things related to that.

Knowing exactly what your pain points are can help you figure out what works and what doesn't. You may not need a low stress environment per se. You may just need low stress surrounding X thing.

taway_1212• 8 years ago

Maybe tech writer (author of documentation, tech blog posts on company website etc.)?

pasta• 8 years ago

You first should define stress:

Being responsible (of thinking you are responsible) without having full control to change a difficult situation.

martin_ky• 8 years ago

In addition to what has been said in this thread about office culture, politics, internal processes, etc. I believe a big factor in reducing work-related stress in any job, is actually being competent at your job.

What I mean is, work in a domain you know something about, with tools and technologies you know well. Be comfortable with your skills and know they are on par with the task you've been given (and also know when they are not). Don't put more on your plate than you can take.

Of course, being too comfortable can result in stagnation. Sometimes, we need to push ourselves or be pushed in order to learn and grow. Let your superiors know when a task is outside your comfort zone. A good mentor will try to push you, but also let you fail gracefully.

collyw4• 8 years ago

Academia tends to be fairly low stress.

CyberFonic• 8 years ago

Only a non-academic would say that. From my experiences in STEM academia (not history, or some such).

Today, universities are run by professional managers. It is all about money. So you are writing papers, applying for grants, teaching a hundred or so students, working on 5-6 committees, involved in 2-3 conferences per year, etc. It is rare for an academic to work less than 70 hours a week and for far less money than in industry.

collyw4• 8 years ago

I worked in academia for a number of years. Not as a researcher but as a technician.

voltooid• 8 years ago

Definitely not. https://qz.com/547641/theres-an-awful-cost-to-getting-a-phd-... (Most of the article is anecdotal but it does make references to studies & statistics of self-reported stress levels among academics.)

collyw4• 8 years ago

Ok, that's a PhD, I am not going to argue against that but there are plenty of non-research jobs in academia.

b0rsuk3• 8 years ago

After being burnt out by previous 2 jobs I found an offer which advertised "good work-personal life balance" among other things. It turned out to be a subcontractor for a grown-up startup. There were 4 people at the moment, including the boss (who conducted the interview himself! 20 years of programming experience). For the first time I felt sympathy and respect for my employer, and I got an impression he liked me too. An interesting thing he told me during the interview: we would not be paid for overtime, because our client doesn't pay for them.

I was right. I got the job, and I was nearly 4 years unemployed at the time. This is my favourite job so far by far. The code is dirty, but it's something you just need to get used to (and my "Working with Legacy Code" is on its way). Collegues are smart (but we have 1 hardcore manipulator - to become immune to him, don't tell him anything personal and never try to please him). Deadlines are not a problem because with no unit tests (we do plan to write them) our client is afraid to breathe. Dirty code is not scary if you know how to approach it.

I also worked in a corporation which had mostly women. Women love mind games and politics. Those I worked with definitely did. Presence of women is not necessarily an indicator of a stress-free workplace.

fareesh• 8 years ago

I also worked in a corporation which had mostly women. Women love mind games and politics. Those I worked with definitely did. Presence of women is not necessarily an indicator of a stress-free workplace.

It is imprecise to attribute intent to the politics and mind games that you may have experienced personally in an anecdotal case, using that kind of generalization.

Also it may have had nothing to do with the fact that they were women, just a bad culture in that company specifically. There are plenty of companies with men who suffer the same problems.

Overall it's an unfair generalization.

venantius• 8 years ago

This might work for you, but I'd say in general this sounds like a fairly unhealthy workplace. Poor engineering practices (when exactly do the tests get written if not day by day?) and negative co-workers? You have to distrust someone pretty strongly to call them a "hardcard manipulator"

b0rsuk3• 8 years ago

Yes, I distrust him strongly because he consistently works to undermine me. He doesn't upset me anymore because he's predictable and I understand what he's trying to do - make me lash out and discredit me. I could take it to my boss, but then it would be my word vs his word, and I'm not 100% sure my boss is who he appears to be. Maybe he just pretends to be a nice person. I wont take such risk so early in my new job, not after almost 3 years of unemployment. I don' think I have to do anything - I'll leave him in the dust because he's lazy.

Yet overall, this workplace is the healthiest I worked in. You have to paint the overall picture. My boss cares about good software practices and treats people well. He appears honest. His expectations are realistic. Work time is very flexible.

b0rsuk3• 8 years ago

The bad practices are mostly on the part of our client company. They understand they painted themselves into a corner, they are afraid to touch it anymore and are glad someone took it over from them. They loosened our deadlines because we're working with a giant hairball. I still think they have a problem with practices, but they're getting there.

jolux3• 8 years ago

I guess open misogyny is ok on HN now? What the fuck is this?

dang3• 8 years ago

The fact that somebody posted something does not make it "ok" on HN. Moderation takes time to kick in. So does flagging.

dang3• 8 years ago

Women love mind games and politics.

That counts as trolling and you'll get banned if you do it here, so please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

EZ-E• 8 years ago

The best is to work for a low traffic backend/back-office/api used internally.. Less risks of downtime, lower damage if it does go down too. No stress with scaling, online migrations, optimisation... I used to work (internship) for a tiny internal backend which only was used maybe once or twice a day. It could have been down for hours and no one would care or notice. If a bug slipped into "live" environment, the worse that could happen is a co-worker phoning me saying "oh yeah I tried to use that and it didn't work, can you help me?"

On the flip side you might learn less than working on an high traffic application because high-volume creates a whole new lot of potential issues and things to watch out for. I think I would choose a chill job like this again when I'm older

Nokinside• 8 years ago

Most job are OK if you can talk honesty to your boss and he tries to find a way to make it work.

My first job was in a small 15 people startup that was later sold to larger company. The founder was in his 40's and while he had some technical skills, his people management skills were really extraordinary. I learned from him what it really means if you really believe that the people are the most important resource: you manage every person individually and change things around them to fit them in, not the other way around.

We basically changed the tasks and organization to fit the people who worked in the company every time new people came or left. We even changed the the main product to fit the skill set and opportunities that came along with the people who worked in the company.

Basically everyone you hire has something that makes them perform less than what their potential is. You can't really change people–they are what they are–but you can change their environment and work they do.

star-techate• 8 years ago

1. avoid metrics. Ask during the interview how they gauge your work performance, how people get bonuses, etc. As a rule you'd much rather be judged by a person, your direct manager, than by an Excel sheet. Yes, hostile managers can be a source of stress, but they'll be that in any case. Metrics are simply an additional potential source of stress.

2. avoid having to deal with backups. Think of all the warnings about test coverage. Or about advocacy for compile-time checks, and for more thorough checks, for information in the editor as you're coding. Backup systems are all about finding out that shit's broke after it's too late and when you most urgently need it. They are an incarnation of stress. And if you do it well, nobody will ever even know. It's not "heads - bonus, tails - no bonus", but "heads - you can come into work tomorrow for the same pay, tails - you can't".

guilhas• 8 years ago

Development of tools or web apps for internal company use.

stbn• 8 years ago

Just a few days ago, I asked a similar question which may be interesting to some:

Ask HN: Being Highly Sensitive (HSP), can I find fulfilling work in tech? [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826317

st1ck2• 8 years ago

Part-time and/or remote if that works for you. Pretty good if you work remotely for junior/middle level job, while having senior skill set. Obviously you earn much less than you could, but you're playing on easy level.

Also, specialize in some narrow field. Instead of being Python dev, you can be writing plugins/scripts for Blender. Maybe machine learning. That's not narrow, but much less people can do basic ML in Python than webdev in Python.

Maybe screw the programming, just do animations in Blender. Just make sure you don't specialize in something proprietary and headed into dead-end (like Windows Phone).

radix07• 8 years ago

Part-time programming? Never seen such a position, where do they exists?

st1ck2• 8 years ago

Probably not common in the US, but you can always try to negotiate with your existing employer. Networking should help here too.

If you live in a place with low cost of living, freelancing must be the most straightforward way to land a part-time job eventually. Some (obviously small) companies just don't have enough work (and money) to hire full time. Some of them go to Upwork or Toptal. I'd like to know what are other ways for them to find talent (except job postings of course).

segmondy4• 8 years ago

From my experience, tons of folks manufacture stress where there shouldn't be none. It's no surprise to see that in the same environment, some folks thrive while other's suffer. Why? Obviously the environment is a fixed constant, so we must reach the conclusion that the difference lies in individuals.

When do we find ourselves stressed? Usually when faced with uncertainty. If you know exactly what to do, how to do it, the stress goes down. How do you know exactly what to do? By having crystal clear communication and have clear expectations. How do you know exactly what to do? By having trained for it before hand. Meaning, studying, practicing and having lots of experience.

If you know what to do and how and are still feeling stressed what could be the cause? Perhaps other unrealistic expectations, such as a tight deadline. Well, if you believe something is going to take 3 months and your boss believes it's going to take 1 month, then there's a break down in communications if you can't reach a consensus. You must learn to communicate and be diplomatic. What you find out is that those who have great communication skills/social thrive and are less stressed.

Let's say that you are great at communication and the deadline still persists, why stress? If you are highly skilled, have a great network, and sufficient savings, you can go get another job right? Well if you are not highly skilled and lucked into a safe boring job, have no network or poor savings, then you can't eliminate the stress.

A lot of stress and strain comes from within not outside, it's all about your mental toughness and approach to things. If you believe that these stress are external then you will have a tough time dealing with them, if you believe that you have control and most of it is internal, then you can change your mental approach and state towards them.

Ask HN: Which types of tech jobs are best for people that can't handle stress?

Related Stories