Ways to improve mental health for software developers

https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/11/5-ways-to-improve-mental-health-for-software-developers/

by heymax054 • 5 years ago

77 64 5 years ago

akersten• 5 years ago

Yeah yeah EAP and watercooler conversations. Here's some things that would actually make my life and mental health as developer at a large game company better:

- Eliminate crunch time due to management's bad planning

- If crunch time is "unavoidable," apologize and pay me for it. 1.5x for every hour over 40 would go a long way towards making me not resent the blundering middle managers that got us into the "we have to release yesterday" situation

- Know what's important; when everything is "top priority," nothing is, and your developers have no idea what they should work on next

- Weekly team meetings are for positive reinforcement, not "things are looking fine but we gotta keep pushing." That kind of "motivation" is extremely heavy on the mind

- Remind us that sick days are for both physical and mental health and encourage us to use them if we need them

hasmolo• 5 years ago

bruh, this is the whole “boomer” management style. constantly implying your staff could do more, while cooly restricting praise and autonomy to just poison your org.

these sort of “leaders” best quality is that their management style dies with their generation, if we try hard as a group to kill it.

fartcannon• 5 years ago

Boomers? I'm getting tired of reading this. Youre being manipulated by partisan politics.

skinkestek• 5 years ago

Not a "boomer" myself, but I strongly dislike the hate that gets sent towards them.

We should be very thankful for a lot of the stuff they did for us.

Also, I'd rather work with the average "boomer" than most people who deride "boomers".

wonderwonder4• 5 years ago

Amazing to me the arbitrary groups people feel they are allowed to discriminate against. Lets just insult a few dozen million people because of when they were born and actively pine for their demise because social media tells me they are what's wrong with everything. Hate is not a good look on you friend.

goodpoint2• 5 years ago

whole “boomer” management style

Can we please not point the finger at whole categories of people simply based on their age?

hyperman1• 5 years ago

The last few months I see a lot of these age base remark. Boomer. Gen Z. Millenial. Each with their own long list of bad qualities, so other age groups have a reason to look down on them.

I don't actually believe this is natural anymore. This must be orchestrated. Somewhere, some group is cynically pushing this narrative. Are they luring eyeballs by pushing divisive articles? Are they distracting from bigger problems? I don't know, but this feels fabricated.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

I'd be curious if not most of workers issues all across the economy boils down to basically this.

People in charge should be in charge, communicate well and strong, if they fail they compensate for it a bit, and acknowledge people's effort when things are harder.

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

- If crunch time is "unavoidable," apologize and pay me for it. 1.5x for every hour over 40 would go a long way towards making me not resent the blundering middle managers that got us into the "we have to release yesterday" situation

This doesn’t really work in practice.

You’d think that forcing the company to pay more to hit a deadline would be a disincentive, but instead it makes crunch time forgivable because the company is paying extra for it. “What are you complaining about? You’re getting time and a half to work those extra 20 hours!”

It also does nothing to address the core problem of overwork leading to burnout. If anything, it lures people deeper into burnout because for many people it’s hard to turn down extra money.

Finally, I haven’t seen good results from offering crunch time pay incentives for many reasons, but the most unexpected is that the incentives are very lopsided across the team. An experienced developer who has young kids at home may not be able to stay late, but an inexperienced junior straight of college with nearly zero external obligations may be able to put in 80 hours of poking around the codebase while racking up huge paychecks for contributing very little. Worst case, the seniors end up with even more work because they have to go back and rework a project that was done by juniors working crunch time while their usual senior/mentor peers were unavailable. The incentives of extra hourly crunch time payouts get weird very quickly.

ravenstine3• 5 years ago

How about this?

Treat software engineers like they actually know something.

If an engineer thinks something is a bad idea, actually listen to them instead of pretending to listen. It amazes me how many companies see software engineers as extremely low tier, but I think a lot of that stems from most engineers lacking direct involvement with decision makers and other personnel.

This is why I am pessimistic about the concept of having project managers act as an interface between engineering and the rest of the company. On one hand, it relieves engineers of a certain amount of responsibility but the tradeoff is that now one or two individuals have an incentive to do things to please both parties at once. The result is that no one really knows what that engineer guy Al actually does around here.

Perhaps a lot of problems around engineering morale would go away if we eliminated the middle men and only engineers themselves to interface with the rest of the company and advocate what they think makes sense rather than what makes sense to a project manager who will only do what results in the least amount of hassle for them. It would be up to the engineers themselves to make sure they aren't culturally segregated and made low tier.

If you're an engineer and your company gives the sales people their own desks while you have to share a desk, consider how much that company actually values you.

wreath2• 5 years ago

The alternative is to have engineering managers be the interface between engineers and business, product managers partner up with the engineering managers and team leads do the project management part along with EM. Product tells the team what business problems are worth solving and then gets out of the way completely. EM and Team lead are who decide on timeline and deadlines after consulting with the rest.

Tarucho• 5 years ago

We are treated like low tier because in most software companies we are low tier. In command and control structures value is given by position not by contribution. We might be expensive but still low tier. The rockstar programmer, etc. are just silly lies they told us.

novok3• 5 years ago

Just get out of the game development industry and move to another software development type. It's much better on the other side.

It was obviously bad in 2004 with public exposes, and it is still the same today: https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

Game development will improve its working conditions when nobody wants to work for a game company, until then they will be underpaid and overworked compared other software development types. There is a crazy hot hiring market elsewhere in the industry, do your part by walking away.

kubb• 5 years ago

Stand up from your desk and take a walk in nature, not kidding.

krisrm• 5 years ago

Strong agree on this. Whenever I find my shoulders getting tight with stress, a walk outside might not fix everything, but it sure makes a difference.

asdfuiopasdf• 5 years ago

If your shoulders get tight from typing, consider using two keyboards or a (more expensive) split style.

dukeofdoom• 5 years ago

Best advice! I would add kayaking to that. You get to see nature from another perspective, and use your arms for a complete workout. Sunsets on a lake are amazing.

amelius• 5 years ago

How about massages, yoga and meditation sessions?

atmartins• 5 years ago

Many of the things listed in the article burn me out, though. Any additional expectations about team building or water cooler talk only extend the amount of time I'm ignoring my family and shackled to the screen. My employer or coworkers are not who I look to for improvements with mental health as I feel it is a very personal topic. I wish there was more respecting boundaries. A tech manager is not equipped to deal with the mental struggles people may have and so this just comes across as a cheap way to increase productivity (or to prevent a decrease).

Some of the passive suggestions are better, such as making time off or other resources available. Trying to force anything or intervene even with games or other interruptions is wrong imo. Even an invite "that the whole team is doing" feels like pressure. At a minimum it's an interruption and another context switch. I'd personally rather take that hour to walk and get some fresh air, so I'm not focusing on my screen for an unrelated thing.

I know everyone's different but this is how I feel when I hear or read about this kind of thing. It reminds me of something I heard a long time ago "you may have the right message but be the wrong person to deliver it". Let work be work and let people recharge with family and friends if they prefer.

irrational• 5 years ago

Yes. Nothing stresses me out more than talking to other people. Going on an hour long walk by myself (hopefully in a nature setting) is what I need. But when I work in an office there is a stigma against just getting up and walking away for awhile. Butts in seats. This is one of the reasons I love working from home. My mental health has improved infinity fold since starting to work from home.

yodsanklai• 5 years ago

Nothing stresses me out more than talking to other people

I'm in the same boat. That, and also the bright artificial lights in our huge open space. There's almost no natural light in the whole building which I find extremely disturbing. Luckily we can work from home almost full time now. Hope we won't go back to normal.

ecf• 5 years ago

Let work be work and let people recharge with family and friends if they prefer.

Instead of that, you’ll get HR peddling their Modern Health subscription that they’re paying unknown amounts for.

UnpossibleJim• 5 years ago

Oh God, we had to go through a "personality test" seminar at work, with absolutely no basis in science that was this exact thing. Break up into your ECBR groups (I forget the exact abbreviated systems), and discuss how you're similar. It felt like seeing a psychic, starting with vague generalities and narrowing it down to specifics in a group. This was our "entertainment budget" for the group for the quarter, to give you an idea of the cost, when most of us were not only on a deadline to ship, but would rather have spent those two hours with our families or at the pub.

jlund-molfese• 5 years ago

I once had a coworker I didn't know very well say something like "I noticed you seemed a little off during the last meeting, is everything alright?". I'm sure they meant well, but the comment was jarring and invasive. It felt like on top of everything else going on at the time, I needed to exhaust more effort worrying about how I appear on camera.

peakaboo• 5 years ago

The guy was just trying to help out. Friendly people do that...

I understand where you are coming from though. I was depressed in my 20s and my inner dialogue was all about how bad I must appear to other people. It prevented me from relaxing in the company of others completely, and made me interpret their comments in a negative way.

You get out of that by gaining self confidence. You have to have the mindset to not let other people's opinions bother you too much. So for example, what if that guy you mentioned think you look not happy on camera? Maybe you don't but you have no obligation to look like anything. You can put a picture of a rabbit instead of yourself. You can say your camera is broken.

It all comes back to having the confidence to do these things because that is freedom. If you don't have the confidence to go your own way because you want to, you are a complete slave to the behavior of others. They decide how you feel. Just stop it. Walk your own path in life. Start practicing tomorrow by turning off your camera.

Good luck.

russelldjimmy2• 5 years ago

That’s how some people connect, my friend.

A good-faith way to look at it would be to see it is this way - sometimes, things bother us and we don’t feel like telling other people about them because we don’t want to bother them. When this person asked you if everything was alright, I believe they meant to say “hey if there’s anything bothering you, I’m open to talk about it okay? No judgement”

Our analytical minds play tricks on us very often. It can take any situation and make a bad faith interpretation of it.

novok3• 5 years ago

We are spending a lot of our lives at work, we might as well make it enjoyable process. "Shackled to the screen" shows you really loathe it and I'd suggest figuring out how to make it actually enjoyable vs. approaching it with a self-toxic attitude that probably makes you not enjoyable to work with too.

Employers can choose to make you an amazon warehouse worker who is given zero slack inside a windowless room with no AC and no ability to socialize with your fellow workers, or to give you slack so you can have water cooler discussions and hang out time to get to know people better vs. faceless voices in a zoom call. Doing these things are not an either-or proposition.

goodpoint2• 5 years ago

Any additional expectations about team building or water cooler talk only extend the amount of time I'm ignoring my family and shackled to the screen

No, these are not supposed to be additional work hours on top of the normal work.

My employer or coworkers are not who I look to for improvements with mental health as I feel it is a very personal topic

...and yet we spend 40+ hours a week in contact with this people. Not to mention the emotional attachment to the meaning and outputs of the work itself.

Mental health is not something that we can offload to our spare time. Just like workplace safety.

I wish there was more respecting boundaries

Respecting boundaries is not incompatible with talking about mental health - actually it's the opposite.

laserlight• 5 years ago

Totally agreed. Team building benefits the company. Why should employees spend from their personal time. Same for mental health.

BlargMcLarg• 5 years ago

Respecting boundaries is not incompatible with talking about mental health - actually it's the opposite.

What if my boundary is not wanting to talk about it?

Mental health is not something that we can offload to our spare time.

Why not just give the employee more time to fix their own things if they so desire, rather than pushing employers to fix it. Clearly some prefer the former, some prefer the latter.

Considering the article talks about "autonomy" multiple times, it is a little baffling that "keep 40+ hours but spend some hours on your employee's health" is the sole solution pushed.

pdimitar2• 5 years ago

Critical mistake in this article: assuming that more activities at work will reduce or even stop work-induced burnout.

No. Send me a compensation for working hard to launch your project and order me to rest for a week. I'll figure out what to do to unwind, don't you bother yourself with this -- it's on me and I'll handle it.

zz865• 5 years ago

True that many people are different. Lots of working parents can only spare 40 hrs/week which suits them best. Lots of singles or parents with SAH partners who want to do the full on jobs and make money.

pdimitar2• 5 years ago

Everyone eventually figures it out that more work does not equal more enjoyment. Absolutely everyone, no exceptions. I've seen hyperactive super-ambitious and rich people who lived and breathed work for 99% of their lives and who would probably suffer a nervous breakdown if they had to take a long weekend by the sea with their partner. And I saw them again when they were 70 years old. They were crying and saying how much they regret not spending more time with their kids and grand-kids. Quite a sad sight but also very educational...

The difference [among people] that you speak of is very closely correlated to age and life/work experience. I've known people who realized that work is duping them to have almost no personal life and to cheer for other people's success... at 24 years old (quite impressive IMO). I myself finally started catching up with that fact, as dumb and slow as I am, at 36. And yeah, others learn it at 70.

It's OK to be ambitious and build a lucrative career (or an empire). The key factor here is knowing when to stop and/or how much % of your waking time you should be dedicating to work. Life is not all about work, never was, never will be. There's a good reason humans were hunter-gatherers for likely tens, if not hundreds, of millennia.

BIackSwan2• 5 years ago

I have been writing a book about how software developers should approach taking care of their mental health - self.debug. You can download it for free here - https://leanpub.com/selfdebug

Its rough and incomplete. Would be great to get some feedback on this.

AlexCoventry2• 5 years ago

If you were able to add an excerpt from the book, it might help with sales.

mgkimsal2• 5 years ago

it's free to download. just set the price to $0.

I've not finished it yet, but I can say I was a bit... wary because it hadn't been touched in ... 18 months I think? No shade on the author there - putting your work out there is great.

I'm only about 15% through it so far, but it's not bad.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 5 years ago

Google famously uses an approach of giving 20% of a worker’s time to be used for anything they found interesting.

I have been told that Google is no longer doing this. Is my information incorrect?

BurningFrog3• 5 years ago

When i was there in 2006-2009, it only existed in theory.

Sure, you could do a 20% project, but you would still be judged only on what you accomplished in you regular role.

sokoloff2• 5 years ago

Are you saying that anything positive that came from a 20% time project would not be added to the judgment of what you accomplished? That seems terribly short-sighted (and unwise on Google’s part).

WJW• 5 years ago

Even when they did, it was often more a case of 120% time, ie you were expected to do your normal work (which would easily fill a "normal" 40 hour workweek) and then the "20%" part would be in addition to that.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 5 years ago

I remember a TED talk that Dan Pink gave (I think this might be it[0]), in which he mentioned a company that did "20% time."

Atlassian; not Google.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y

blcknight• 5 years ago

Oh god, EAP are the worst most useless benefits. Good luck trying to use them. The free therapy sessions offered were unbookable. Only a handful of providers, who had no availability. When I found one after months of trying, they ghosted me for our virtual visit.

I was suffering horrible from anxiety and panic attacks and that honestly made things worse. I felt relieved to be able to talk about it and then got the rug pulled right out from under me.

BigRedDog1669• 5 years ago

Totally agree, the health care plan my very large company offered had months long wait times for therapists. The company would send email "We care about mental health" with a list of resources and EAP stuff. When I emailed them about the unavailability of therapy through their insurance they had no response. I tried using the internal EAP and it had so many limits and hurdles that it added more stress.

BadCookie• 5 years ago

I had a similar experience. After my dad died, I thought it might help to talk to someone. My EAP benefit turned out to be useless. There’s a shortage of mental health professionals that didn’t exist before—or at least was made much worse by—the pandemic.

novok3• 5 years ago

EAPs that are like this are like this because they want to control costs via rate limiting. Therapists have a hard time joining them too because they will only hire a set amount.

The shortage is more in mental health professionals who take insurance. If your willing to pay full fee and then submit a super bill to your provider to get part of the cost back, you'll find therapists fairly quickly.

rbanffy• 5 years ago

Workday started what they called "Thank You Fridays". One Friday off, every two weeks. Some teams would take them all at once, while others would split so that the function wasn't left uncovered.

Not sure if it's still happening.

wonderwonder4• 5 years ago

This sounds like a great incentive. I feel like a 4 day work week is really the best motivation.

cyberpunk• 5 years ago

I mean what a non article. It essentially boils down to “more autonomy, education and work life balance”.

Yes. We know.

I can’t speak for anyone else but what improved my mental health was recognising my distraction techniques for what they were, and addressing the root cause of those (e.g drinking in evenings to numb how utterly pointless this existence sometimes can feel; and solving it by learning to do stuff with my hands — in this case carpentry)

I doubt you’ll gleam much wisdom from such an article. Maybe do some meditation, cut down on the booze and find something unrelated to work that makes you happy and just accept that work occasionally sucks for everyone..

Anyway, ymmv

alexchantavy• 5 years ago

I really like this quote

Some of the foundational building blocks of our software world were built by people who knew one another only by mailing list or IRC channel. Software was built, but, perhaps even more importantly, strong connections were made.

With this in mind it seems silly many software companies are stubbornly insisting work-from-office.

Ways to improve mental health for software developers

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