Work forces you to see your own motivations and character and you have to manage yourself like you might manage a very valuable employee that you cannot afford to lose.
This means you need to see your strengths and understand how you are motivated and try to come up with ways of making the best use of those characteristics. There's no point feeling sad that you aren't X or Y. If you're Z then how can you make best use of Z?
I suggest that it's important to stop thinking that other people are idiots because this lack of tolerance or understanding of other people seems to extend to yourself. You have to understand and accept yourself as having flaws. Then you may see that other people are the same - their apparent idiocy always has reasons behind it and you should take some time to understand them even if you still don't agree with them.
I notice that depression is something I feel the ghost of when my image of myself is damaged by some real world situation. The only real solution to this is to stop thinking about yourself so much and think about other people more. Help people do what they want rather than what you want for a bit.
Also as someone else noted, bad family situations, relationships etc, create a lot of weight. Try to avoid people who make you sad and find ways to hang out with people who interest you enough that you forget about yourself for a while.
> I do not feel like I have the mental space to keep track of everything I need to do, and I do not even feel like I am aware of what I'm doing anymore.
Have you tried keeping a document logging what your thoughts/steps while doing a task were? I find this helps me stay on track and not too disorganised. You don't need to write it in a clean way, just enough bullet points to reconstruct the steps you've taken, progress and things left to decide/learn about.
The things you write can be as simple as "I downloaded the code from 'X', 'Y' is the shell command I used to build the project, now how do I reproduce bug 'Z'? Is there an existing script I can run or do I need to ask someone for a command, blah blah"...
I find this is very useful when working on unfamiliar tasks or when I'm finding it hard to get traction on a task (due to procrastination or anything else). Just writing something has a way of making yourself get any clarity you can, and if you lose traction again, the notes you wrote are something solid to go back to.
I'm doing alright as far as my career goes, not great, but okay. Which is disappointing because me and everyone around thought I'd do great, because I/they thought I was a great software developer, since I'm smart and I know my tech and my programming.
Unfortunately working as a software developer is a different story entirely, I found many times that my chase for good simple code takes time, and sometimes I overthink things and I don't test properly, and I'm also slow, and don't communicate the problem with my team because I don't work consistent hours, because my brain cannot do consistency.
Turns out I have ADHD. Possibly autism too. So I understand your feelings of I just need to be better, because it works for other right? Even tho you know that fundamentally you are right, but it works for others so why not you? I don't have a solution. But sometimes you can't just "be better" and "more consistent", I also wish I could, but maybe it's not possible.
Maybe the only way is to find where we are good and do more of that. If you have struggle finishing things hope on calls with people that are good at finishing things. Talk with them. Be proactive and be open. I also don't do this as often as I should, because I'm also ashamed.
I don't know exactly what the point was to this, but so you know others also fail, even tho they deemed smart and skilled by others.
If you recognize yourself in that post, then what you recognize is called negative self talk. The only advice I have for you is to learn to recognize how this pattern makes things worse and to learn (or be taught) how to stop that pattern. The blog post is a textbook self-flagellation and I have no doubt author returns to it to feel worse about themselves in some twisted attempt to motivate positive change.
Hah. I feel very much seen by both of these comments, much more than I’m confident to admit.
Something I have been struggling with all my life is deciding whether I am flawed in some way, or the other party/the environment is - because my immediate reaction is always to feel responsible and inadequate, and it takes a lot of energy of confidently feeling superior or right about something. Like, is it a pattern, or am I reflecting to avoid being ignorant?
It's both. All humans and all environments are flawed. You can change yourself and control your reactions to your environment if you want to. You can probably also either improve your environment to some extent, or move to a better environment (not always possible for everyone but HN users usually have that option).
There's no need to feel superior: that's not particularly helpful and will tend to give you a distorted perception of reality. Most likely you're just average.
Division of labour is THE big advantage of working with other people. So yes, focus on the bits you are good at and hand the other stuff to people who are good at that part. It's usually worth it.
My 2c, stop looking for excuses, stop assigning your self worth to the quality of your work.
Mistakes happen, bugs are impossible to avoid. You may need to add rigid processes to your work to avoid the most egregious examples, but you just have to live with the fact that you will write bugs.
If you find you write more bugs than your peers and they have more impact than your peers, that's fine maybe you are not cut out to be a "systems engineer" maybe move to something more forgiving like frontend or something, you will probably be happier.
There is a reason that I am not working on avionics or respirator firmware. I don't have the discipline to follow the processes required to minimize the chance of accidentally killing people and I don't want the legal liability.
You don't have to be working on "important" stuff, John Carmack one of the best and most celebrated developer of our time spent most of his career working on games.
Be mercenary, do not take pride in your work, do your work for money. You will be happier, take pride in who you are and what you do outside of work.
> stop assigning your self worth to the quality of your work
my personal riff on that is 'stop assigning self worth to the quality that others assign to your work'. being able to internally generate self-worth through the act of producing high quality work is a super power.
I have a young daughter and when I think about the most critical skills I want her to develop throughout her adolescence, communication is one of the most important ones that will prove to be valuable throughout her life. In whichever career she chooses, with friendships, personal mental health, partner relationships, etc.
She is smart, she is talented and incredibly curious and those things I really do not worry about. What will set her apart from the majority of her peers throughout life will be her ability to effectively communicate and interact with others in a way that is meaningful. It’s benefits go far beyond what most of us appreciate
This could be due to ADD, I am still getting tested. Granted, that's a diagnosis, not a root cause.
No, it’s a diagnosis of the root cause - in fact, it is plausibly the root cause of everything else described in the post. Inability to complete work, procrastination/distraction by focusing on nearby tasks, the pervasive sense that you struggle with things that other people do not, even the depression (untreated ADD causing repeated failures, repeated failures causing depression). To understand why it really could be the root cause, you can read up on “executive dysfunction”, which is what ADD really is.
The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute.
(In some places, bupropion can be prescribed as an antidepressant. It has effects that also help with executive dysfunction, so you may find it to be more effective than serotonin-based antidepressants.)
> The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute.
No, not quite - there's a variety of different ADHD medications and I'd argue there's more popular ones like Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine). Non-stimulants like Strattera or Intuniv absolutely can and are prescribed on their own, which are really useful for people that respond poorly to stimulants.
Perhaps you meant to say there's two main classes of stimulants (amphetamines, methylphenidates) that are worth investigating and shouldn't be skipped over?
realized this one about myself earlier this year, it really helped to boil it down to something besides “I am just inherently bad at things.” that attitude worked as a dumb single kid, but it was harming my adult life and relationships.
therapy helped me get there. I have been on bupropion for about a year, and recently started on methylphenidate. it might not be the right one for me, or maybe too small of a dosage. I’m taking it slow and being deliberate with the drugs.
working with a personal trainer to get in shape and lose weight, as well as quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook for a while has also done wonders for me here. it’s cliche, but you really can’t replace fitness with anything else, and that took me 35 years to internalize.
> quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook for a while
I am also fantasizing about this and am only holding off from doing it because of the social stigma (what idiot would quit a well paid full-time job). My biggest issue with the software industry is the feverish shiny-new-thing syndrome that AI is causing (and my current company is all in on this, with "Hyper-Velocity Engineering" panels). Maybe I don't want to move at light speed and would rather stop and smell the roses.
pretty much every day I feel that tickling of “what the hell did I just do?”
but I don’t care. I put 15 years into my tech career. I am good at building software, and I will not let this ridiculous “resume gap” problem stop me from taking a break for my mental health. any tech employer that wouldn’t want me because of it is a place I wouldn’t want to work anyway.
also, to be honest, I’m writing more code now than I ever did in the last year of my tech job… working on a full CMS and custom website combo for my friends bar, such that I can copy that template over for future projects (want to help local businesses escape the bullshit machine). also building a cool web development desktop app. and more! I’m having a great time
yeah! it's pretty cool when I start doing something that used to be difficult and now it's just... not. weird how long your old form sticks with you in your head like that.
yeah, at a local pizza/taproom place. they share tips with cooks, works out to ~$35/hr. I'm not expecting it to replace a tech salary, but it helps offset the savings burn (which was specifically set aside for this). engaging with real people in real life about real things is also an indreeeedibly nice change of pace (even the stressful/tense moments of shit hitting the fan).
ADHD is unlikely to be the root cause as there is unlikely to be any single root cause. Treating ADHD will reduce or eliminate a component of this, but will not address the issues entirely.
Atomoxetine's effect size is surprisingly similar to methylphenidate, though in my experience it treats different aspects of ADHD than stimulants. Some doctors (mine) are open to combining it with a long-acting stimulant, which actually can be a really nice setup, especially if you're sensitive to stimulants.
Hope you get it worked out OP. I will say, if it's ADHD, it's 100% worth trying to get the best treatment you can.
I can sympathize with what you're going through OP. I have similar struggles myself (primarily with severe anxiety) and wouldn't wish most of what I have had to go through on my worst enemy.
I do have one comment though:
You mention stability in your goals, and how you want to find stability. What is stability to you? I've struggled for years with trying to find stability but it often just leads me back to thinking that there really is no such thing. You just never know what is going to happen in life. Finding a job and having stable employment are hard, and will likely only get harder as we age. Relationships have ups and downs, and their downs can be incredibly challenging to navigate. Most of us (at least in Europe) don't have the luxury of building wealth to escape the 9-5 grind. We simply need to work (and stay employable) until we have the ability to retire. I don't know how things work in your country, but here in Sweden I can't even start to collect my state pension until I turn 69. I need to find a way to remain employable until I am 69, or amass enough wealth to not need to worry about paying my bills if I don't have stable employment.
I could go on and on but honestly I think stability is a myth. Life is inherently unstable. But we human beings are also incredibly resiliant.
Take care of yourself. I wish you all the best OP.
This sounds a lot like the shame and frustration people with ADD feel when untreated.
I know several people who suffer with ADD, who are extremely intelligent and talented, and felt the exact same emotions before they were diagnosed. Those emotions were _much_ alleviated once treated, mostly through pharmacological means. Anecdotal but seems a strong pattern to me.
Hey, good luck! I've had some depressive episodes where I couldn't do work or even good off for a good week or so, but I'm privileged to have not been chronically depressed and need medication (I have others issues and working on those have prevented episodes). Going to therapy was the best decision of my life, and this year I've progressed enough that I put in almost 100 hours over 7 days for one critical project (which isn't something you should be able to brag about lol, but I'm proud of myself; a year ago I would've had a breakdown on about day 2). It's a journey though, and you'll have good weeks and bad, so just keep in mind that even if this week seems bad, next year's gonna be great!
> Going to therapy was the best decision of my life
Such an under-appreciated tool, going to therapy, granted you find the right person to do it with.
For people who've tried it just a few times but never really had "the epiphany", don't stop trying to find the right individual to have this space and conversations with, as it quite literally can change your life. It might take going through 5-6 people before you encounter "Ah, I actually feel like I could tell this person anything, I'm relatively sure they'll have good insights and understands what I want", but it so worth it once things click.
For software you don’t need to do engineering. You just need to provide value to your employer. No need to make a product perfect, but there is a need to make the product more valuable to your employer. Likely it will not be more valuable if the code is more shiny.
I thought I was depressed but then I got divorced and realized my depression was situational from being in an awful relationship. Consider causes like this as well, it is hard to see when you're inside it.
Also be careful with reaching conclusions too quickly. I ended up breaking a 10+ year long relationship after thinking that was the problem, I ended up even more miserable than before. Begged her to take me back after some years, and luckily we're happily together ever since and still married :) (with lots of changes from the first iteration, obviously)
I would love to read an update about your experience with antidepressants, as it's a path I'm thinking about more and more with the (losing) battle I've been fighting against my own long term depression.
I really resonated with your eventual realization that while others have their own battles, they are very rarely similar to this. I guess I knew it was unusual, but I took way too long to realize just how weird it was to feel soul-crushingly miserable for no identifiable reason, even when things are going well, even when I'm around friends I like and they're having fun.
I'm not OP but just wanted to add my own experience with anti-depressants as someone who has battled mild depression and extreme anxiety for years. Ultimately in my case it turned out that I needed to try several different antidepressants that my doctor prescribed until I found one that worked to aid in decreasing my depression and anxiety symptoms with pretty much no side effects. I tried several which did not work for me or had a lot of side effects. Some antidepressants that helped my friends and family in their struggles did not help me. So definitely ask your doctor if they'd be willing to work with you to try and find a medication that works well for you with minimal side effects if they recommend that you take such medications.
I agree mental health is important and have struggled with similar issues... but it is hard to read prose in fixed-width typefaces. Please consider a more readable serif variable-width typeface.
I've wanted to write something similar regarding anxiety on a blog of my own for close to a decade now, but I was always afraid to put my feelings to paper, in case they become real. If they stay in my head, I can dismiss them. OP, I hope you feel some relief having posted this; if it helped you, perhaps it could encourage other to let down their walls.
I used to co-supervise a PhD student who suffered from severe anxiety, she was good but her anxiety stood in her way almost all of the time. You could see that she used up 3/4 of her brain just on being anxious, there wasn't much power left to do the actual work to any standard. It's a horrible disease. (and yeah, she was on medication and diagnosed).
I have worked in environments where as the day wore on, my performance plummeted.
After a lot of investigation, I suspect that air quality, lighting, ergonomics can have adverse effects. Only recently I read an article that said that in a room with several persons and poor ventilation the CO2 levels reach levels which are known to impair brain and other neurological functions.
That is, I suspect that your depression is the symptom of a bad environment and not the root cause of your problems.
This is irresponsible on your part. OP has been diagnosed by professionals and is being treated and clearly sees the difference. While high CO2 levels make a measurable difference in some tasks and its effects can be felt in crowded spaces, it seems like you're taking your pet peeve and dismissing the struggle that the OP is going through. Please try to have more sympathy.
I understand it can be difficult or even frightening to think about problems that don't have a trivially described cause, effect and solution like your proposal, but it would be a good idea to ask questions, even as simply as asking if that OP has noticed an effect, before trivializing their struggles this way
As mentioned by a sibling comment: this is an insensitive take.
It takes a lot of courage to write down one’s struggles for all the world to see. Your analysis denies the OP their self-reflection, and instead reduces it to a thing you happened to find in your own life.
> > That is, I suspect that your depression is the symptom of a bad environment and not the root cause of your problems.
Yeah that's BS.
When you were a kid in class in winter you had 20 kids + the teacher in the same room submerged by co2 , plus you were in a literal prison taken from the comfort of your bed in the dead of the night, had to ask permission to use the restroom and you could be denied , once you managed to get to the restroom you'd be submerged by even more co2 because of all the cigarette smoking going on from the older guys. And I am not even considering bullying as a factor that for the least lucky or strong could be added to the above list.
Still no depression in sight .
The problem comes from within, life was never meant to be taken this seriously, all the improvements and technological prowness that we tout vs. Subsaharan Africa come with the cost of literal self torture.
We have evolved in a scenario in which if you had reason to believe to have >90% chance of being alive 1 week from now (something like 168 hours into the future) then you could literally go out of your hut celebrating with your dick swinging left and right .
We have now reached a point where people would be unhappy with 168 years because 'oh no what happens next OMG I am so scared!'
Mental health and thinking are 2 parallel lines, they can never be reconciled, thinking is much more toxic than CO2, lead, sniffing glue, meth, heroin, fentanyl and all the other so called harmful substances which as toxic as they might be they don't make you want to off yourself.
Paradoxically if we stopped thinking and ran New York City into the ground back to an African hut village it would be the best party in the history of humanity and so much happiness could be extracted from that, much much more than building it up further, even though it would not be visible from the outside
I've been there (without the LLMs and antidepressants since therapy is healthier). The 1 year is quite optimistic from my perspective. Good luck though. Prioritize yourself.
The different usages of I or i though ... please fix the LLM type checking it.
One of the major themes I pick up in this piece is an unfortunate, very common, misallocation of mental effort regarding the past-present-future mindset. As in, the described course is simply regarding treatment of symptoms. There is little to no awareness at this point in the journey that the sources of the mental issues may be much deeper than simply imposter syndrome or poor culture fit.
I am not a Psychologist. I am a Writer. Psychology is the invention of a Writer, facts. To write convincing characters or portraits of events, it takes a long and often painful study of the human psyche. When I finally fell into circumstances where I was able to apply this to myself, the process, after years, has resulted in a fundamental change in my own mind. For the better, though it is occasionally foreign or akin to feeling “adrift” in life - such is clarity.
Point being? Looking outside for help is problematic, and “friends and family” were in my situation the actual causes and “negative feedback loops” which had decades long consequences. Only by turning my back on them was I able to identify the nearly subconscious roots of my guilt and shame issues having no valid reason to exist. To the contrary, I found how my life had been quite a reflection of well formed morals, ethics, and principles of a high minded, pragmatic, and good quality of character person.
That’s why AA and friends and family suck as resources. They are unreliable. One does not repair the mind by continuing to engage with others also of a broken nature. Healing happens in solitude. Being unable or unwilling to take this path is the first thing to address in pursuit of real, lasting positive change.
Or, ya know, just take handfuls of pills and keep rowing your boat in the river of denial. Seems to be the way Mormonism keeps its catastrophically delusional dogma in play. Read the experiences of ex-Fundamentalist cast outs or voluntary abandonment.
One must turn their back on the broken culture that broke them to find the truth and spiritual health within. Good luck to all.
My mother is a therapist, and I'd like to share a few things I've learned from her over the years.
One piece of advice is to start with the biological side. Getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, and taking care of your physical health can have a surprisingly positive effect on your mental state.
At the same time, don't hesitate to seek help from a therapist. They can help guide the way you think about your experiences and how you interpret them. It's a gradual process, but it really can make a difference.
You're right, but framed generally like this, it's easy to skip this advice.
OP/reader, more specifically, examine that post. It is an avalanche of negative self-talk. It's a person telling themeselves and the world that they cannot do something. You can take a perfectly healthy person, turn on this cycle, and watch it destroy their lives.
Depression has many causes, but its roots that make it stick are cycles like these. Antidepressants are a parachute, but you have to rebuild the engine and an important part of that is to learn to reframe events and identify and challenge your negative assumptions.
I'm at this point fully convinced that 90%+ of people with depression have either a metabolic disfunction, gut issues, heavy metal poisoning or some other occult infection or a problem.
So it's not really mental, it's literally a disease of the physical body. The brains are then affected as a side effect.
You can look up low carb, carnivore, heavy metal elimination groups etc... and you will find thousands of real testimonials.
The problem is that many if not most of these are hard if not impossible to diagnose since the modern medical science is lacking completely at this plus the combination of arrogant doctors not taking these people seriously and gaslighting them makes it 10 times worse, so experimentation is needed and then a commitment for a year or two.
Most of y’all need to buck up. If day to day engineering tasks are so challenging for you maybe the anxiety and depression you’re feeling is your system telling you that you are in misalignment.
Why are you an engineer if you are struggling to complete the basic tasks? Are you meant to be doing what you are doing?
It's true a steel inner strength is required in day to day engineering. It's hard, and it lacks positive reinformcement almost always. When you hear something it is bad.
But let's define "buck up" and see the other side of the elephant. That blog post is a textbook example of negative self talk. You can have a world that looks down on you and spit back at it and do your best work, but if you look down on yourself you _will not_ bootstrap your way out, because you learn to believe you cannot.
That is depression, and depression is reinforced if not caused by that self-talk. Addressing the self-talk and stopping the flagellation will allow that steel inner strength to build up. Medication is a parachute but the wings and engine need to be rebuilt using self confidence, and that's a long road of:
* reframing failures as lessons
* honesty with self about your own role in your depression
* careful build-up of support
* learning to find the important and good in each memory, vs the deprecating and painful
I think the point was that there are people who don't need all this extra work, it just comes naturally. And they are more suited to engineering than people who need to spend a lot of energy on emotional and mental regulation as well.
There is no cure for depression. Like there is no cure for diabetes. There is a big difference between having the disease, and feeling sadness brought on by circumstances. There is no such thing as simply "removing the depression".
No, the point is that not everyone is cut out to be an engineer. If you find yourself being depressed as an engineer, one possibility is that it's really not the job for you. Not everyone is capable of being an engineer, and being prone to emotional disregulation is probably a good indicator. Not to say you can't muddle through, but the original post was saying that you should at least ask yourself if you'd be happier elsewhere.
Yeah, you articulated it better than me. Especially in the case where the OP is indicating that a lot of their stress comes from inability to perform or get better in an engineering context. If after a few years you aren't feeling more confident in your skills or aren't more comfortable with your tech stack it's time to re-evaluate. OP mentions they prioritize stability and I think a lot of people get into engineering for the wrong reasons.
In my opinion the prerequisites are a natural aptitude and a genuine curiosity.
You're all correct. I'm just not convinced that the person wouldn't have those if they were relieved of the burdens holding them down.
It can be simultaneously true that they are struggling and unlikely to succeed now, and that their natural aptitude is not being realized due to non-work factors.
Hell, one time my friend died suddenly, and I failed out of every project I was on and developed a ton of health problems. Since then, I've gone back to my natural state, but it was hard. Anyone looking at me during that time would have seen a distracted fuckup. I probably would have been given an ADHD diagnosis and drugged heavily, were it not for the acute signal from the proximity of a good friends sudden murder.
I think there are methods and patterns to be learned. Engineering is mostly a succession of problems, with a somewhat illusory prize at the end. But a lot of people currently in software development are not trained well to withstand the journey. And for some, it’s just that they have been doing it since high school or something.
One of the thing that is important is to segment the work and have checkpoints and mini bosses. You don’t climb a mountain in one go. That’s one of the reason I dislike LLM in coding is because coding is my down time after a deep thinking session.
Another thing is to have an end goal in mind, and plan the journey according to those. You do this by having enough information about the business domain. I’ve seen people rush blindly into solving problem and get a burnout in the process. This also help with pacing yourself to a sustainable rate of effort.
Too much therapy speak here. You can't think your way out of depression. Only by taking action can you change things. Fix your body first. Then learn to socialize. Then get good at something (ideally something you can make money from). Think in terms of systems not goals. As a man your only way out is action (I can't speak on the female side of things).
Right, it's very easy to dismiss the general therapy talk. I'm not a fan myself.
Exercise, cultivating positive fear responses, self-challenge are all important.
What you're pinning as "therapy talk" is just that last one - you need to think critically about how you approach life problems, not just accept the most negative interpretation of events and your inner monologue.
I think any stoic would agree with that statement.
Thanks! I'm cured! I'm glad you told me to man up, I'd never thought to do that myself.
I know that this is a glib response, but really that's the only way to respond to these comments. They're farcical and we have long known them to be unreasonable. Mocking them is the only way to get some people to learn it seems.
I wish it was this easy. But mental health is as complex and multifaceted as our brain is. There can be more than one reason why a once happy engineer is now struggling to complete basic tasks, and they are often hard to find and explain or to relate to simple explanations like these (which is why more and more people are turning to therapy for answers).
You raise good questions, but thousands more could be asked: Are you taking care of your foundations? Sleeping enough? Eating nutritious food? Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you haven't even acknowledged to yourself? Is your work environment healthy? What things aren't healthy that you've normalised? Are you seeing enough friendly people in your day to day life? And so on.
My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these, so "bucking up" can be seen as either great advice or irresponsible and insensitive, and it doesn't necessarely apply to "most of y'all". So maybe you need to buck up, but also don't be frustrated if you don't. Maybe the solution is elsewhere.
I think mental health is way over blown in terms of complexity.
>My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these
I'd argue these are all binary questions and pretty easy to answer:
>Eating nutritious food? : Yes/No
>Sleeping enough?: Yes/No
>Are you taking care of your foundations? Yes/No based on above plus Yes/No to "Sufficient Exercise?"
>Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you haven't even acknowledged to yourself?: Yes/No (Stop playing videogames, reduce phone use, limit drugs and alcohol)
>Is your work environment healthy?: Yes/No (If 'No' how can you leave it)
> Are you seeing enough friendly people in your day to day life? : Yes/No
An easy happiness formula is:
1. Eat right: Maintain a healthy diet to keep your physical energy stable.
2. Exercise: Keep active every day to release mood-boosting chemicals.
3. Get enough sleep: Prioritize rest to reset your mental state.
4. Imagine an incredible future: Daydream about grand possibilities, even if you don't fully believe them at first.
5. Work toward a flexible schedule: Having control over your time is one of the highest drivers of happiness.
6. Do things you can steadily improve at: Progress and mastery trigger the chemicals in your body that make you happy.
7. Help others: Once you’ve helped yourself first, giving back provides profound psychological benefits.
8. Reduce daily decisions to routine: Remove mental clutter and decision fatigue by establishing steady habits
You are not much different from any other animal at some level. With enough conditioning you will believe that you have no agency over your own life, and you’ll just sit there and take the shocks hoping it ends soon. Or worse, you’ll lose perspective and imagine the only solution to your current (likely temporary) circumstance is to (definitely very permanently) end your own life.
I worked on projects with EEs and MEs for years. Were they not doing "engineering" because they built custom PCBs and the devices they go inside, rather than drawing the wiring plans or HVAC plans for a construction project? Most of them didn't even have a PE.
I’ve studied Electronic Engineering (and interacted with the Civil Engineering classes). And the main difference is that physical laws are inflexible and failure cases may result in deaths, maiming, and material damages. Software constraints are more forgiving in most cases. But that does not means a total lack of discipline has no negative impact. Au contraire, an engineering mindset greatly improves the chances of successfully delivering a project.
I think non-engineering mindsets in any sort of engineering/engineering adjacent role is the cause of a lot of friction.
>Very, very, very little of real-world software dev is anything close to "engineering".
I mean same principles apply in general.
> If there’s one thing I would like to add is that engineering is a much of a mindset than knowledge.
Amen.
> I won’t say “follow your passion” (which is often a terrible advice). But if you can’t take some joy in what you’re doing (either the act or the goal), your body will rebel in various ways.
The official definition of engineering is: "Engineering is the application of mathematics and scientific principles to design, build, and optimize structures, machines, systems, and processes." Software development falls into this definition. If there isn't something in this definition you like then you're in the wrong job. I find joy in optimizing processes. No matter what scale, a well designed and optimized system brings me joy.
You need to communicate better. One of the most important steps is to know your audience. This means you need to understand where they are coming from. Without this understanding, your words are unlikely to be correct and useful. To communicate clearly is to think clearly.
If you can’t follow these basics, why are you even writing comments? Are you meant to be using the internet?
If there’s one thing I would like to add is that engineering is a much of a mindset than knowledge. I have friends in software development and they do not enjoy the practice at all. Everything is just chores to them.
I won’t say “follow your passion” (which is often a terrible advice). But if you can’t take some joy in what you’re doing (either the act or the goal), your body will rebel in various ways.
Work forces you to see your own motivations and character and you have to manage yourself like you might manage a very valuable employee that you cannot afford to lose.
This means you need to see your strengths and understand how you are motivated and try to come up with ways of making the best use of those characteristics. There's no point feeling sad that you aren't X or Y. If you're Z then how can you make best use of Z?
I suggest that it's important to stop thinking that other people are idiots because this lack of tolerance or understanding of other people seems to extend to yourself. You have to understand and accept yourself as having flaws. Then you may see that other people are the same - their apparent idiocy always has reasons behind it and you should take some time to understand them even if you still don't agree with them.
I notice that depression is something I feel the ghost of when my image of myself is damaged by some real world situation. The only real solution to this is to stop thinking about yourself so much and think about other people more. Help people do what they want rather than what you want for a bit.
Also as someone else noted, bad family situations, relationships etc, create a lot of weight. Try to avoid people who make you sad and find ways to hang out with people who interest you enough that you forget about yourself for a while.
“Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping” - Jordan Peterson
I wish he hadn't said that ! :-)
Nice basic advice but ironic coming from him
Broken clocks and all.
> I do not feel like I have the mental space to keep track of everything I need to do, and I do not even feel like I am aware of what I'm doing anymore.
Have you tried keeping a document logging what your thoughts/steps while doing a task were? I find this helps me stay on track and not too disorganised. You don't need to write it in a clean way, just enough bullet points to reconstruct the steps you've taken, progress and things left to decide/learn about.
The things you write can be as simple as "I downloaded the code from 'X', 'Y' is the shell command I used to build the project, now how do I reproduce bug 'Z'? Is there an existing script I can run or do I need to ask someone for a command, blah blah"...
I find this is very useful when working on unfamiliar tasks or when I'm finding it hard to get traction on a task (due to procrastination or anything else). Just writing something has a way of making yourself get any clarity you can, and if you lose traction again, the notes you wrote are something solid to go back to.
I know this pattern from myself.
I'm doing alright as far as my career goes, not great, but okay. Which is disappointing because me and everyone around thought I'd do great, because I/they thought I was a great software developer, since I'm smart and I know my tech and my programming.
Unfortunately working as a software developer is a different story entirely, I found many times that my chase for good simple code takes time, and sometimes I overthink things and I don't test properly, and I'm also slow, and don't communicate the problem with my team because I don't work consistent hours, because my brain cannot do consistency.
Turns out I have ADHD. Possibly autism too. So I understand your feelings of I just need to be better, because it works for other right? Even tho you know that fundamentally you are right, but it works for others so why not you? I don't have a solution. But sometimes you can't just "be better" and "more consistent", I also wish I could, but maybe it's not possible.
Maybe the only way is to find where we are good and do more of that. If you have struggle finishing things hope on calls with people that are good at finishing things. Talk with them. Be proactive and be open. I also don't do this as often as I should, because I'm also ashamed.
I don't know exactly what the point was to this, but so you know others also fail, even tho they deemed smart and skilled by others.
If you recognize yourself in that post, then what you recognize is called negative self talk. The only advice I have for you is to learn to recognize how this pattern makes things worse and to learn (or be taught) how to stop that pattern. The blog post is a textbook self-flagellation and I have no doubt author returns to it to feel worse about themselves in some twisted attempt to motivate positive change.
Hah. I feel very much seen by both of these comments, much more than I’m confident to admit.
Something I have been struggling with all my life is deciding whether I am flawed in some way, or the other party/the environment is - because my immediate reaction is always to feel responsible and inadequate, and it takes a lot of energy of confidently feeling superior or right about something. Like, is it a pattern, or am I reflecting to avoid being ignorant?
It's both. All humans and all environments are flawed. You can change yourself and control your reactions to your environment if you want to. You can probably also either improve your environment to some extent, or move to a better environment (not always possible for everyone but HN users usually have that option).
There's no need to feel superior: that's not particularly helpful and will tend to give you a distorted perception of reality. Most likely you're just average.
Okay, this is a genuine question because I was trying to avoid negative self talk.
Why did you read the message and think of negative self talk? I'm just trying to learn more about your point of view.
I was just pointing out things where I struggle.
Division of labour is THE big advantage of working with other people. So yes, focus on the bits you are good at and hand the other stuff to people who are good at that part. It's usually worth it.
My 2c, stop looking for excuses, stop assigning your self worth to the quality of your work.
Mistakes happen, bugs are impossible to avoid. You may need to add rigid processes to your work to avoid the most egregious examples, but you just have to live with the fact that you will write bugs.
If you find you write more bugs than your peers and they have more impact than your peers, that's fine maybe you are not cut out to be a "systems engineer" maybe move to something more forgiving like frontend or something, you will probably be happier.
There is a reason that I am not working on avionics or respirator firmware. I don't have the discipline to follow the processes required to minimize the chance of accidentally killing people and I don't want the legal liability.
You don't have to be working on "important" stuff, John Carmack one of the best and most celebrated developer of our time spent most of his career working on games.
Be mercenary, do not take pride in your work, do your work for money. You will be happier, take pride in who you are and what you do outside of work.
> stop assigning your self worth to the quality of your work
my personal riff on that is 'stop assigning self worth to the quality that others assign to your work'. being able to internally generate self-worth through the act of producing high quality work is a super power.
I have a young daughter and when I think about the most critical skills I want her to develop throughout her adolescence, communication is one of the most important ones that will prove to be valuable throughout her life. In whichever career she chooses, with friendships, personal mental health, partner relationships, etc.
She is smart, she is talented and incredibly curious and those things I really do not worry about. What will set her apart from the majority of her peers throughout life will be her ability to effectively communicate and interact with others in a way that is meaningful. It’s benefits go far beyond what most of us appreciate
The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute.
(In some places, bupropion can be prescribed as an antidepressant. It has effects that also help with executive dysfunction, so you may find it to be more effective than serotonin-based antidepressants.)
> The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute.
No, not quite - there's a variety of different ADHD medications and I'd argue there's more popular ones like Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine). Non-stimulants like Strattera or Intuniv absolutely can and are prescribed on their own, which are really useful for people that respond poorly to stimulants.
Perhaps you meant to say there's two main classes of stimulants (amphetamines, methylphenidates) that are worth investigating and shouldn't be skipped over?
> untreated ADD causing repeated failures, repeated failures causing depression
realized this one about myself earlier this year, it really helped to boil it down to something besides “I am just inherently bad at things.” that attitude worked as a dumb single kid, but it was harming my adult life and relationships.
therapy helped me get there. I have been on bupropion for about a year, and recently started on methylphenidate. it might not be the right one for me, or maybe too small of a dosage. I’m taking it slow and being deliberate with the drugs.
working with a personal trainer to get in shape and lose weight, as well as quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook for a while has also done wonders for me here. it’s cliche, but you really can’t replace fitness with anything else, and that took me 35 years to internalize.
> quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook for a while
I am also fantasizing about this and am only holding off from doing it because of the social stigma (what idiot would quit a well paid full-time job). My biggest issue with the software industry is the feverish shiny-new-thing syndrome that AI is causing (and my current company is all in on this, with "Hyper-Velocity Engineering" panels). Maybe I don't want to move at light speed and would rather stop and smell the roses.
pretty much every day I feel that tickling of “what the hell did I just do?”
but I don’t care. I put 15 years into my tech career. I am good at building software, and I will not let this ridiculous “resume gap” problem stop me from taking a break for my mental health. any tech employer that wouldn’t want me because of it is a place I wouldn’t want to work anyway.
also, to be honest, I’m writing more code now than I ever did in the last year of my tech job… working on a full CMS and custom website combo for my friends bar, such that I can copy that template over for future projects (want to help local businesses escape the bullshit machine). also building a cool web development desktop app. and more! I’m having a great time
Fitness also contributes to most common physical tasks becoming trivial, you can literally jump out of bed in the morning if it strikes your fancy.
yeah! it's pretty cool when I start doing something that used to be difficult and now it's just... not. weird how long your old form sticks with you in your head like that.
>quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook
Are you doing entry level line cook work or something?
yeah, at a local pizza/taproom place. they share tips with cooks, works out to ~$35/hr. I'm not expecting it to replace a tech salary, but it helps offset the savings burn (which was specifically set aside for this). engaging with real people in real life about real things is also an indreeeedibly nice change of pace (even the stressful/tense moments of shit hitting the fan).
I'll re-enter tech later... maybe.
Oh interesting,that doesn't seem to bad.
ADHD is unlikely to be the root cause as there is unlikely to be any single root cause. Treating ADHD will reduce or eliminate a component of this, but will not address the issues entirely.
Atomoxetine's effect size is surprisingly similar to methylphenidate, though in my experience it treats different aspects of ADHD than stimulants. Some doctors (mine) are open to combining it with a long-acting stimulant, which actually can be a really nice setup, especially if you're sensitive to stimulants.
Hope you get it worked out OP. I will say, if it's ADHD, it's 100% worth trying to get the best treatment you can.
It's scary how your first paragraph describes by recent (but not long term) experiences. Looks like I have some checks to do as well.
On your goals:
1. It's okay to make mistakes. Pain + reflection = progress.
2. Try to shift your perspective so your sense of worth isn't tied to your work.
3. Anytime you say "I should", "I need to", usually this is sign you are blindly following some sort of cognitive script [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubMghRYqk8o&t=1844s
The “should” trap is a big one. I found The Work by Byron Katie to be a very effective self-guided method for addressing those thoughts.
I can sympathize with what you're going through OP. I have similar struggles myself (primarily with severe anxiety) and wouldn't wish most of what I have had to go through on my worst enemy.
I do have one comment though:
You mention stability in your goals, and how you want to find stability. What is stability to you? I've struggled for years with trying to find stability but it often just leads me back to thinking that there really is no such thing. You just never know what is going to happen in life. Finding a job and having stable employment are hard, and will likely only get harder as we age. Relationships have ups and downs, and their downs can be incredibly challenging to navigate. Most of us (at least in Europe) don't have the luxury of building wealth to escape the 9-5 grind. We simply need to work (and stay employable) until we have the ability to retire. I don't know how things work in your country, but here in Sweden I can't even start to collect my state pension until I turn 69. I need to find a way to remain employable until I am 69, or amass enough wealth to not need to worry about paying my bills if I don't have stable employment.
I could go on and on but honestly I think stability is a myth. Life is inherently unstable. But we human beings are also incredibly resiliant.
Take care of yourself. I wish you all the best OP.
I started doing a lot better at work when I stopped smoking weed and started getting a quick workout in before work each day.
My story has a lot of similarities to yours…
I got diagnosed with ADHD 2 years ago, at age 35.
It was one of the most important things I’ve ever done.
I strongly encourage you to keep looking into this.
Please be gentle to yourself. You’ve been fighting your whole life with one hand tied behind your back, and no one even knew.
This sounds a lot like the shame and frustration people with ADD feel when untreated.
I know several people who suffer with ADD, who are extremely intelligent and talented, and felt the exact same emotions before they were diagnosed. Those emotions were _much_ alleviated once treated, mostly through pharmacological means. Anecdotal but seems a strong pattern to me.
Hey, good luck! I've had some depressive episodes where I couldn't do work or even good off for a good week or so, but I'm privileged to have not been chronically depressed and need medication (I have others issues and working on those have prevented episodes). Going to therapy was the best decision of my life, and this year I've progressed enough that I put in almost 100 hours over 7 days for one critical project (which isn't something you should be able to brag about lol, but I'm proud of myself; a year ago I would've had a breakdown on about day 2). It's a journey though, and you'll have good weeks and bad, so just keep in mind that even if this week seems bad, next year's gonna be great!
> Going to therapy was the best decision of my life
Such an under-appreciated tool, going to therapy, granted you find the right person to do it with.
For people who've tried it just a few times but never really had "the epiphany", don't stop trying to find the right individual to have this space and conversations with, as it quite literally can change your life. It might take going through 5-6 people before you encounter "Ah, I actually feel like I could tell this person anything, I'm relatively sure they'll have good insights and understands what I want", but it so worth it once things click.
For software you don’t need to do engineering. You just need to provide value to your employer. No need to make a product perfect, but there is a need to make the product more valuable to your employer. Likely it will not be more valuable if the code is more shiny.
I thought I was depressed but then I got divorced and realized my depression was situational from being in an awful relationship. Consider causes like this as well, it is hard to see when you're inside it.
Also be careful with reaching conclusions too quickly. I ended up breaking a 10+ year long relationship after thinking that was the problem, I ended up even more miserable than before. Begged her to take me back after some years, and luckily we're happily together ever since and still married :) (with lots of changes from the first iteration, obviously)
I would love to read an update about your experience with antidepressants, as it's a path I'm thinking about more and more with the (losing) battle I've been fighting against my own long term depression.
I really resonated with your eventual realization that while others have their own battles, they are very rarely similar to this. I guess I knew it was unusual, but I took way too long to realize just how weird it was to feel soul-crushingly miserable for no identifiable reason, even when things are going well, even when I'm around friends I like and they're having fun.
Wishing you the best OP.
I'm not OP but just wanted to add my own experience with anti-depressants as someone who has battled mild depression and extreme anxiety for years. Ultimately in my case it turned out that I needed to try several different antidepressants that my doctor prescribed until I found one that worked to aid in decreasing my depression and anxiety symptoms with pretty much no side effects. I tried several which did not work for me or had a lot of side effects. Some antidepressants that helped my friends and family in their struggles did not help me. So definitely ask your doctor if they'd be willing to work with you to try and find a medication that works well for you with minimal side effects if they recommend that you take such medications.
Wish you all the best. Mental illness sucks.
Stop thinking about it and go talk to someone. You are likely just delaying your healing and happiness.
Good luck!
I agree mental health is important and have struggled with similar issues... but it is hard to read prose in fixed-width typefaces. Please consider a more readable serif variable-width typeface.
Many of us are used to monospace all day long in terminal
I've wanted to write something similar regarding anxiety on a blog of my own for close to a decade now, but I was always afraid to put my feelings to paper, in case they become real. If they stay in my head, I can dismiss them. OP, I hope you feel some relief having posted this; if it helped you, perhaps it could encourage other to let down their walls.
Thank you so much for sharing.
I used to co-supervise a PhD student who suffered from severe anxiety, she was good but her anxiety stood in her way almost all of the time. You could see that she used up 3/4 of her brain just on being anxious, there wasn't much power left to do the actual work to any standard. It's a horrible disease. (and yeah, she was on medication and diagnosed).
I have worked in environments where as the day wore on, my performance plummeted.
After a lot of investigation, I suspect that air quality, lighting, ergonomics can have adverse effects. Only recently I read an article that said that in a room with several persons and poor ventilation the CO2 levels reach levels which are known to impair brain and other neurological functions.
That is, I suspect that your depression is the symptom of a bad environment and not the root cause of your problems.
This is irresponsible on your part. OP has been diagnosed by professionals and is being treated and clearly sees the difference. While high CO2 levels make a measurable difference in some tasks and its effects can be felt in crowded spaces, it seems like you're taking your pet peeve and dismissing the struggle that the OP is going through. Please try to have more sympathy.
I understand it can be difficult or even frightening to think about problems that don't have a trivially described cause, effect and solution like your proposal, but it would be a good idea to ask questions, even as simply as asking if that OP has noticed an effect, before trivializing their struggles this way
As mentioned by a sibling comment: this is an insensitive take.
It takes a lot of courage to write down one’s struggles for all the world to see. Your analysis denies the OP their self-reflection, and instead reduces it to a thing you happened to find in your own life.
> > That is, I suspect that your depression is the symptom of a bad environment and not the root cause of your problems.
Yeah that's BS.
When you were a kid in class in winter you had 20 kids + the teacher in the same room submerged by co2 , plus you were in a literal prison taken from the comfort of your bed in the dead of the night, had to ask permission to use the restroom and you could be denied , once you managed to get to the restroom you'd be submerged by even more co2 because of all the cigarette smoking going on from the older guys. And I am not even considering bullying as a factor that for the least lucky or strong could be added to the above list.
Still no depression in sight .
The problem comes from within, life was never meant to be taken this seriously, all the improvements and technological prowness that we tout vs. Subsaharan Africa come with the cost of literal self torture.
We have evolved in a scenario in which if you had reason to believe to have >90% chance of being alive 1 week from now (something like 168 hours into the future) then you could literally go out of your hut celebrating with your dick swinging left and right .
We have now reached a point where people would be unhappy with 168 years because 'oh no what happens next OMG I am so scared!'
Mental health and thinking are 2 parallel lines, they can never be reconciled, thinking is much more toxic than CO2, lead, sniffing glue, meth, heroin, fentanyl and all the other so called harmful substances which as toxic as they might be they don't make you want to off yourself.
Paradoxically if we stopped thinking and ran New York City into the ground back to an African hut village it would be the best party in the history of humanity and so much happiness could be extracted from that, much much more than building it up further, even though it would not be visible from the outside
I've been there (without the LLMs and antidepressants since therapy is healthier). The 1 year is quite optimistic from my perspective. Good luck though. Prioritize yourself.
The different usages of I or i though ... please fix the LLM type checking it.
An admirable start down a self-discovery path.
One of the major themes I pick up in this piece is an unfortunate, very common, misallocation of mental effort regarding the past-present-future mindset. As in, the described course is simply regarding treatment of symptoms. There is little to no awareness at this point in the journey that the sources of the mental issues may be much deeper than simply imposter syndrome or poor culture fit.
I am not a Psychologist. I am a Writer. Psychology is the invention of a Writer, facts. To write convincing characters or portraits of events, it takes a long and often painful study of the human psyche. When I finally fell into circumstances where I was able to apply this to myself, the process, after years, has resulted in a fundamental change in my own mind. For the better, though it is occasionally foreign or akin to feeling “adrift” in life - such is clarity.
Point being? Looking outside for help is problematic, and “friends and family” were in my situation the actual causes and “negative feedback loops” which had decades long consequences. Only by turning my back on them was I able to identify the nearly subconscious roots of my guilt and shame issues having no valid reason to exist. To the contrary, I found how my life had been quite a reflection of well formed morals, ethics, and principles of a high minded, pragmatic, and good quality of character person.
That’s why AA and friends and family suck as resources. They are unreliable. One does not repair the mind by continuing to engage with others also of a broken nature. Healing happens in solitude. Being unable or unwilling to take this path is the first thing to address in pursuit of real, lasting positive change.
Or, ya know, just take handfuls of pills and keep rowing your boat in the river of denial. Seems to be the way Mormonism keeps its catastrophically delusional dogma in play. Read the experiences of ex-Fundamentalist cast outs or voluntary abandonment.
One must turn their back on the broken culture that broke them to find the truth and spiritual health within. Good luck to all.
My mother is a therapist, and I'd like to share a few things I've learned from her over the years.
One piece of advice is to start with the biological side. Getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, and taking care of your physical health can have a surprisingly positive effect on your mental state.
At the same time, don't hesitate to seek help from a therapist. They can help guide the way you think about your experiences and how you interpret them. It's a gradual process, but it really can make a difference.
I believe you can get through this. :)
You're right, but framed generally like this, it's easy to skip this advice.
OP/reader, more specifically, examine that post. It is an avalanche of negative self-talk. It's a person telling themeselves and the world that they cannot do something. You can take a perfectly healthy person, turn on this cycle, and watch it destroy their lives.
Depression has many causes, but its roots that make it stick are cycles like these. Antidepressants are a parachute, but you have to rebuild the engine and an important part of that is to learn to reframe events and identify and challenge your negative assumptions.
> At the same time, don't hesitate to seek help from a therapist
I'd like to add that for certain kinds of people, the process of doing this on your own is near torture.
I'm at this point fully convinced that 90%+ of people with depression have either a metabolic disfunction, gut issues, heavy metal poisoning or some other occult infection or a problem.
So it's not really mental, it's literally a disease of the physical body. The brains are then affected as a side effect.
You can look up low carb, carnivore, heavy metal elimination groups etc... and you will find thousands of real testimonials.
The problem is that many if not most of these are hard if not impossible to diagnose since the modern medical science is lacking completely at this plus the combination of arrogant doctors not taking these people seriously and gaslighting them makes it 10 times worse, so experimentation is needed and then a commitment for a year or two.
Many improve in 4 to 6 months. Some take longer.
Most of y’all need to buck up. If day to day engineering tasks are so challenging for you maybe the anxiety and depression you’re feeling is your system telling you that you are in misalignment.
Why are you an engineer if you are struggling to complete the basic tasks? Are you meant to be doing what you are doing?
This is one side of the elephant.
It's true a steel inner strength is required in day to day engineering. It's hard, and it lacks positive reinformcement almost always. When you hear something it is bad.
But let's define "buck up" and see the other side of the elephant. That blog post is a textbook example of negative self talk. You can have a world that looks down on you and spit back at it and do your best work, but if you look down on yourself you _will not_ bootstrap your way out, because you learn to believe you cannot.
That is depression, and depression is reinforced if not caused by that self-talk. Addressing the self-talk and stopping the flagellation will allow that steel inner strength to build up. Medication is a parachute but the wings and engine need to be rebuilt using self confidence, and that's a long road of:
* reframing failures as lessons
* honesty with self about your own role in your depression
* careful build-up of support
* learning to find the important and good in each memory, vs the deprecating and painful
I think the point was that there are people who don't need all this extra work, it just comes naturally. And they are more suited to engineering than people who need to spend a lot of energy on emotional and mental regulation as well.
Yes - you are identifying a non-depressed engineer. A depressed engineer can become one of those by removing the depression.
There is no cure for depression. Like there is no cure for diabetes. There is a big difference between having the disease, and feeling sadness brought on by circumstances. There is no such thing as simply "removing the depression".
No, the point is that not everyone is cut out to be an engineer. If you find yourself being depressed as an engineer, one possibility is that it's really not the job for you. Not everyone is capable of being an engineer, and being prone to emotional disregulation is probably a good indicator. Not to say you can't muddle through, but the original post was saying that you should at least ask yourself if you'd be happier elsewhere.
Yeah, you articulated it better than me. Especially in the case where the OP is indicating that a lot of their stress comes from inability to perform or get better in an engineering context. If after a few years you aren't feeling more confident in your skills or aren't more comfortable with your tech stack it's time to re-evaluate. OP mentions they prioritize stability and I think a lot of people get into engineering for the wrong reasons.
In my opinion the prerequisites are a natural aptitude and a genuine curiosity.
You're all correct. I'm just not convinced that the person wouldn't have those if they were relieved of the burdens holding them down.
It can be simultaneously true that they are struggling and unlikely to succeed now, and that their natural aptitude is not being realized due to non-work factors.
Hell, one time my friend died suddenly, and I failed out of every project I was on and developed a ton of health problems. Since then, I've gone back to my natural state, but it was hard. Anyone looking at me during that time would have seen a distracted fuckup. I probably would have been given an ADHD diagnosis and drugged heavily, were it not for the acute signal from the proximity of a good friends sudden murder.
This is ableism.
I think there are methods and patterns to be learned. Engineering is mostly a succession of problems, with a somewhat illusory prize at the end. But a lot of people currently in software development are not trained well to withstand the journey. And for some, it’s just that they have been doing it since high school or something.
One of the thing that is important is to segment the work and have checkpoints and mini bosses. You don’t climb a mountain in one go. That’s one of the reason I dislike LLM in coding is because coding is my down time after a deep thinking session.
Another thing is to have an end goal in mind, and plan the journey according to those. You do this by having enough information about the business domain. I’ve seen people rush blindly into solving problem and get a burnout in the process. This also help with pacing yourself to a sustainable rate of effort.
Too much therapy speak here. You can't think your way out of depression. Only by taking action can you change things. Fix your body first. Then learn to socialize. Then get good at something (ideally something you can make money from). Think in terms of systems not goals. As a man your only way out is action (I can't speak on the female side of things).
Right, it's very easy to dismiss the general therapy talk. I'm not a fan myself.
Exercise, cultivating positive fear responses, self-challenge are all important.
What you're pinning as "therapy talk" is just that last one - you need to think critically about how you approach life problems, not just accept the most negative interpretation of events and your inner monologue.
I think any stoic would agree with that statement.
Thanks! I'm cured! I'm glad you told me to man up, I'd never thought to do that myself.
I know that this is a glib response, but really that's the only way to respond to these comments. They're farcical and we have long known them to be unreasonable. Mocking them is the only way to get some people to learn it seems.
https://www.youtube.com/@ElishaLong
I wish it was this easy. But mental health is as complex and multifaceted as our brain is. There can be more than one reason why a once happy engineer is now struggling to complete basic tasks, and they are often hard to find and explain or to relate to simple explanations like these (which is why more and more people are turning to therapy for answers).
You raise good questions, but thousands more could be asked: Are you taking care of your foundations? Sleeping enough? Eating nutritious food? Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you haven't even acknowledged to yourself? Is your work environment healthy? What things aren't healthy that you've normalised? Are you seeing enough friendly people in your day to day life? And so on.
My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these, so "bucking up" can be seen as either great advice or irresponsible and insensitive, and it doesn't necessarely apply to "most of y'all". So maybe you need to buck up, but also don't be frustrated if you don't. Maybe the solution is elsewhere.
I think mental health is way over blown in terms of complexity.
>My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these
I'd argue these are all binary questions and pretty easy to answer:
>Eating nutritious food? : Yes/No
>Sleeping enough?: Yes/No
>Are you taking care of your foundations? Yes/No based on above plus Yes/No to "Sufficient Exercise?"
>Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you haven't even acknowledged to yourself?: Yes/No (Stop playing videogames, reduce phone use, limit drugs and alcohol)
>Is your work environment healthy?: Yes/No (If 'No' how can you leave it)
> Are you seeing enough friendly people in your day to day life? : Yes/No
An easy happiness formula is:
1. Eat right: Maintain a healthy diet to keep your physical energy stable.
2. Exercise: Keep active every day to release mood-boosting chemicals.
3. Get enough sleep: Prioritize rest to reset your mental state.
4. Imagine an incredible future: Daydream about grand possibilities, even if you don't fully believe them at first.
5. Work toward a flexible schedule: Having control over your time is one of the highest drivers of happiness.
6. Do things you can steadily improve at: Progress and mastery trigger the chemicals in your body that make you happy.
7. Help others: Once you’ve helped yourself first, giving back provides profound psychological benefits.
8. Reduce daily decisions to routine: Remove mental clutter and decision fatigue by establishing steady habits
> An easy happiness formula is:
> [list of eight things that may be extremely difficult for people with depression]
.
Robert Sapolsky has a fantastic discussion of depression as a form of learned helplessness. We see it in abused animals: https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc?is=YnnSt1292XjiGbEE
You are not much different from any other animal at some level. With enough conditioning you will believe that you have no agency over your own life, and you’ll just sit there and take the shocks hoping it ends soon. Or worse, you’ll lose perspective and imagine the only solution to your current (likely temporary) circumstance is to (definitely very permanently) end your own life.
Very, very, very little of real-world software dev is anything close to "engineering".
You said it friend.
Take any long-running successful project, and you’ll find that they practice an engineering-like discipline to make it sustainable.
And the difference will be as stark as steak is from stew. To be clear, “engineering-like” is not “engineering”.
I worked on projects with EEs and MEs for years. Were they not doing "engineering" because they built custom PCBs and the devices they go inside, rather than drawing the wiring plans or HVAC plans for a construction project? Most of them didn't even have a PE.
I’ve studied Electronic Engineering (and interacted with the Civil Engineering classes). And the main difference is that physical laws are inflexible and failure cases may result in deaths, maiming, and material damages. Software constraints are more forgiving in most cases. But that does not means a total lack of discipline has no negative impact. Au contraire, an engineering mindset greatly improves the chances of successfully delivering a project.
I think non-engineering mindsets in any sort of engineering/engineering adjacent role is the cause of a lot of friction.
>Very, very, very little of real-world software dev is anything close to "engineering".
I mean same principles apply in general.
> If there’s one thing I would like to add is that engineering is a much of a mindset than knowledge.
Amen.
> I won’t say “follow your passion” (which is often a terrible advice). But if you can’t take some joy in what you’re doing (either the act or the goal), your body will rebel in various ways.
The official definition of engineering is: "Engineering is the application of mathematics and scientific principles to design, build, and optimize structures, machines, systems, and processes." Software development falls into this definition. If there isn't something in this definition you like then you're in the wrong job. I find joy in optimizing processes. No matter what scale, a well designed and optimized system brings me joy.
You need to communicate better. One of the most important steps is to know your audience. This means you need to understand where they are coming from. Without this understanding, your words are unlikely to be correct and useful. To communicate clearly is to think clearly.
If you can’t follow these basics, why are you even writing comments? Are you meant to be using the internet?
If there’s one thing I would like to add is that engineering is a much of a mindset than knowledge. I have friends in software development and they do not enjoy the practice at all. Everything is just chores to them.
I won’t say “follow your passion” (which is often a terrible advice). But if you can’t take some joy in what you’re doing (either the act or the goal), your body will rebel in various ways.
Rare and needed reminder in the big '26