Stress and its consequences for software development

http://www.the-programmers-stone.com/about

by notmyname • 17 years ago

83 21 17 years ago

ggchappell• 17 years ago

I've just scanned the article, and it does indeed look very worth reading.

I'm particularly interested in this (from the introduction):

> But I also discovered that I was playing with fire. Whenever I got a team ready to be really useful, there would be a bizarre negative reaction from all sorts of other people who were employed within the same organizations, but were not part of the teams I was working with. Sometimes this effect was so strong it could become a workplace hazard, and it always grew until the teams themselves were no longer able to function.

I know exactly what he is talking about. I have seen it happen in very different contexts (including contexts not at all related to software development): when you get a group of people that is starting to accomplish things, people within the organization act in strange ways to shut it down.

It looks like this particular issue is addressed on the 7th page: "The Dreaded Jungian Backlash". (It also looks like you need to read the preceding pages to understand it all.)

I look forward to finding out what the article has to say.

TJensen• 17 years ago

I managed a team that gelled once (not because of any skill of mine; it was an amazing team). It was surprising how much antipathy there was from other people in the company. Even though everybody on my team was happy and they were being amazingly productive, I somehow got labeled as the bad manager.

gruseom2• 17 years ago

Ever hear of Wilhelm Reich's concept of the "emotional plague"? Many human beings react with antipathy when others express a greater aliveness than they themselves feel capable of. Reich's idea was that this was because their feelings were being stirred to a greater degree than they were able to tolerate, provoking a clampdown reaction. I've noticed something like this many times in companies: when a small oasis of creativity spontaneously forms, the larger organization often acts to destroy it.

Jerry Weinberg told a great story once about a company he consulted at where every software project failed, except for a handful of successes. He looked into the successes and found that they had all been the work of one team. The team had intentionally covered their tracks (I forget how) and actually pleaded with him not to report on their success. He didn't heed this request, though, and told an executive about them, presumably with the intention of encouraging more such teams to develop. The executive responded by disbanding the team! Shocked, Weinberg asked why. "Because I didn't understand what they were doing." Weinberg said, sarcastically, "Would you rather they succeeded in a way you don't understand or failed in a way you do?" The executive replied, quite unironically, "I would rather they fail in a way that I understand."

arohner• 17 years ago

Very interesting. I just noticed this comment, and I think the guy stumbled into something about why FP is popular in a certain population:

"The language requirement is because Native American languages are verb based. Hopi has no nouns at all. I argue that nouns are good for sorting objects into categories and associating responses with the categories. Verbs are better for describing processes and relationships. People using verb based languages are very likely to be a population that assumes juxtapositional thinking is available to them."

Update: The short version of the article is that your brain has two modes of thinking. The one programmers use he calls "Juxtapositional", and cannot be accessed when the chemicals associated with stress are present. He then draws the relationship in the above quote, where Native American cultures were less stressed, and used verb based languages.

Notice that many of the "weird" programming languages are verb based / functional? lisp, haskell, forth, etc. Maybe some of the power of these languages is related to the fact that only people who aren't stressed like using them?

neilk2• 17 years ago

Hopi has no nouns at all

That one sentence makes me doubt the entire essay. No language can get along without nouns. The Wikipedia page on the Hopi language has examples of nouns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_language

Can you imagine any normal person being able to live their life without representing physical objects? That isn't just a functional language; that would be like a programming language without variables or data structures.

There's a trope in North American culture of supposing that Native Americans were or are somehow holier than other kinds of people, or even had access to some special states of consciousness. Their cultures are nearly destroyed so it's hard to check that. But I think it's silly and probably kind of patronizing.

There is some work which does suggest that a Neolithic tribe can have very different concepts of time and number, but this is still a point of controversy. I don't believe we're going to find the key to enlightenment here, just a different way of thinking, which is way more important than a fantasy for nirvana via linguistics, IMO.

Although, I will forgive this author because it's not central to his argument, and he has a point about how Native American lifestyle was the antithesis of modernity.

derefr• 17 years ago

> that would be like a programming language without variables or data structures.

I would say it's more like a language where every "noun" is really a "verb" in disguise—e.g. combinatoric logic. You can let K and KI mean true and false when speaking about combinatoric logic, but when using it, they're still verbs (combinators), not values.

messel• 17 years ago

I guess Frank Herbert was right, "Fear is the mind killer."

Profound perspective. I programmed for 13 years and was increasingly burnt out by shorter time lines and more controlled projects. I thought I had completely lost my coding mojo and took a leave of absence Nov. 2008. I may yet relive my hayday of coding wizardry!

pbz• 17 years ago

Did you get better?

msie• 17 years ago

Finding this essay made me glad I read Hacker News today! I don't think I would have found it any other way.

triplefox• 17 years ago

I've followed the "Programmer's Stone" concepts off-and-on, almost forgot about them entirely. This is definitely the best iteration of them yet.

gruseom2• 17 years ago

I had trouble following this. Anybody care to take a shot at explaining what it says, or what's good about it?

jibiki• 17 years ago

Basically, he contrasts two types of thinking. The narrow sort of thinking, where you're totally focused in on one thing, and the "juxtapositional" sort of thinking, where you can hold multiple ideas in mind at the same time.

The first type of thinking is associated with high stress environments, and the second type of thinking is associated with productive programming, scientific exploration, learning, etc. He goes on to explain the many ramifications of this, which are fascinating, IMO.

ZeroGravitas• 17 years ago

A great deal of this is similar to the findings on management and creativity and/or stress and creativity.

Stress kills creativity because it creates a chemical reaction that forces your mind to focus intently and over-rely on previous experience. This might help if you need to run away from a bear, but might hinder if you're trying to solve a tricky problem that requires exploring and potentially letting go of assumptions.

Similarly it's very tricky to "manage" creativity or any task where you can't specify and measure either the process or the outcome (preferably both). You may sadly realise this covers most white collar work but it only really gets talked about in relation to obviously 'creative' things like advertising and R&D.

The basic of management there is "don't", though there are some things that help such as "clan controls" where you hire people with a particular value set (e.g. scientists or open source programmers) and encourage them to be evaluated, outside of work, by their peers.

It might be worth pondering a comparison between an leading advertising agency work areas and Google's famous playgrounds.

This guy proposes that the bits of the company that can be managed traditionally (sales, clerical workers) thrive on (or are even addicted to) continual stress and this causes a hidden rift between them and the programmers (etc.) who absolutely require at least some time in the stressless mindset in order to do their job.

dmoney3• 17 years ago

It seems he's let the Reciprocality.org domain expire, and only put some of it on the new domain. There was some interesting stuff there, including the original Programmer's Stone book. I wonder if I still have the .zip of it.

dmoney3• 17 years ago

Granted, some of his theories made him sound like a crackpot, not that that means they were false.

dmoney3• 17 years ago

Aha, it appears to be mirrored here: http://www.buildfreedom.com/content/reciprocality/

pj• 17 years ago

I also discovered that I was playing with fire. Whenever I got a team ready to be really useful, there would be a bizarre negative reaction from all sorts of other people who were employed within the same organizations, but were not part of the teams I was working with.

Have you ever been working in one of those organizations and your coworkers goad you into not working so hard? They say things like, "You're making us look bad." or "Take the day off early."

Little things like that. Some have more humor in them than others, but everyone wants to work as little as possible for as much money as possible. If a super team comes in and makes work look fun and easy and they actually accomplish a lot, it raises the bar for every other team and even individual in the organization. Like little self-organized unions who pressure other union members through psychological stress and booby traps.

This is the same problem afflicting our culture at every level, from kindgergarten to the board room to the white house. It has created the mess we are in right now.

willwagner• 17 years ago

Interesting article. I don't doubt that stress can limit creativity, but from my own experience, some stress seems to make me more productive. At times, a little deadline pressure is a good motivating force, and I find it easier for me to get into and stay in "the zone" where I'm completely focused and able to work at a fast pace. Continual stress would likely make things worse, but a few weeks of deadline pressure can really make me work harder and better.

To be honest, I skimmed through parts of the article so I hope I'm not repeating or misrepresenting what the article says, but it seems like the best process for me is to have some stress free time at the beginning of a project to let things percolate, and then later on, have a looming deadline to help me focus and grind things out.

Andys2• 17 years ago

I agree - deadline stress works best at the end of a project where you already know what to do and how to do it, and you just need a kick up the rear to get things moving rapidly.

neilk2• 17 years ago

The article is mostly informed speculation, but its sweep is so large, the conclusion almost becomes trivial. If we accept that the entire culture is literally sick, there are deeper implications than just programming productivity.

Andys2• 17 years ago

That thought scared me - are most people in office jobs stressed out all the time? Does fear really drive our society?

Stress and its consequences for software development

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