I read this whole, long article, and I don't understand how you're freaking out at every. single. step. although you do say the visa thing is the root stress.
But you seem to be freaking out even at not getting on-boarded immediately or that you don't have detailed explanation of what you will be working on the first day, or that you're not immediately invited to all the meetings. I work at Autodesk. This is completely normal, it takes a couple of weeks to start on a team and not everything is clear, especially if a key person just left. This isn't a job at Burger King where everything is clear. Also, nobody is going to structure their vacations around you. Some head count is getting allocated, and then filled, often with huge delays, and that person arrives at a certain date, and while people know it's coming, it's not necessarily a good time for anyone, it is forced on us. It's troublesome to onboard the intern or new employee and it gets past around like a hot potatoes sometimes. And no, often there isn't any documentation. I've onboarded probably over 50 people over 20 years.
It sounds like you arrived after the project was just sent in a tailspin and people are having meetings just to figure out WTF is the state is the state of project, and you shouldn't have expected to be invited to all those meetings, as you have nothing to contribute as junior and the people probably weren't sure of anything. It's normal. Also, that iBuddy yapping about the previous guy getting fired? We can't know the context, have you thought that person was hugely stressed about it too and sharing that earnestly? I mean, they're on the sinking project as well? And at least she's talking to you and putting you in the context of the team. Insensitive, perhaps, but again the world isn't going to rearrange around you.
At one point in the story, you're clearly falling into a depression, and seeing everything dark. A manager repeatedly cancelling and re-scheduling a meeting isn't a plot to harass you: it happens a lot to busy people, we don't know what kind of crisis he's dealing with. During this whole thing, you just assume that everyone is just taking off, missing work, and focused on you. These people might actually be going through crisis on their own and having to put out fires left-and-right.
This last bit, where you get a meeting in a locked abandoned building you think nobody should have access to, and you ask the senior director to leave because he wasn't invited: You realize that's paranoid thinking and crazy behavior, right? When you need to have a HR-type meeting with an employee, you have it in a private place -- for the employee's benefit! It's for you that it's in a private place, away from other people's prying eyes. Then, of course, the whole point of the meeting is to have the senior director talk to you, that's what the meeting is, he didn't show up unplanned. He's not on the invite so that you're not too stressed on the way. The idea that they're keeping it secret and deleting the meeting from the calendar to hide it is just paranoid delusions perhaps caused by depression. It's the way it's done. These meetings are happening because you're in deep shit, it's very rare. The director is offering you to leave on our own so that you can leave with your head up and on your own terms, and not have the record of having been fired. It's a kind of curtesy. This might sound horrible -- but firing someone is a last resort.
Now, don't get me wrong. I've hired people from india, china, singapore, and other places. I have no doubt that you have suffered inappropriate comments and racist behavior. But we don't know the full story! I've had to fire people as well, who seem to do a lot of work, but a lot of useless work that needed to be redone, or get stuck into rat holes for week without asking questions. These people all thought they were doing as best, and got multiple warnings and "PIPs" (Performance Improvement Projects, as you know) as they could and no doubt had a lot of fingers to point after they were let go. It's always other people's fault.
That's a good question. It's not exactly stress what I'm feeling. More of an embarrassment, since I usually take pride in my work.
It's hard to advocate for good engineering practices in my team when I don't get org support. We have a junior joined our team, and I think it's best for them to start their career elsewhere. I don't bad-mouth the company and I feel dishonest when I need to play along and justify the way our organization works.
Maybe it will convert to stress with time, and I hope I will be able to recognize it early to leave immediately.
That sounds right. When things weren't going well at the startups I worked at I felt crazy stressed out.
I also felt some stress when busy, but that was less because there was a lot to do and more because I had someone who was expecting it to be done in an unreasonable amount of time.
It's hard to understand until you've worked at a place where you and all your co-workers are context-switching between 5 projects all due yesterday and everybody is pissed off. I didn't mind the "hello" at my older jobs where I actually wasn't stressed out.
It is extremely stressful some of the times even. But it's the reality we live in. People don't change. Companies change extremely rarely. If you are smart enough to reverse-engineer software systems -- a necessary skill during onboarding -- then you are smart enough to see nobody will change things to a more positive environment, and hence you should leave.
I hate it with all my heart but if I have to, I'll do it 50 times more. I am never allowing myself be held hostage.
I've had the chance to see the toll that a stressful environment (big tech company) can have on physical and mental health - I've experienced it personally and noticed it in others that I work with.
The part about a big tech company being a stressful environment isn't the thing that surprised me, but rather people's responses to how they react to either being on the receiving side of the stress, and management's failure to respond to this or even try to talk about it.
The thing that bugs me the most about the entire situation is that most of the stress that seems to exist, mostly exists because of people who have no idea what they're doing, make decisions they have no business making. Then you have engineers that either come from cultures that are high in agreeableness, or they've never been very assertive themselves and just accept these decisions, thinking it's a situation of "if I don't do this I'm going to get fired".
Most of the people I work with don't even consider the option of just taking an extended period of time off to prevent being burned out because they're basically tied to their employment due to work visas (you guessed it, Indian and Chinese workers) and a lot of them are trying to support family back home. So even leaving their job and taking extended time off isn't a viable option.
Don't even get me started on how I've seen people's physical and mental health completely deteriorate. I know lots of people in my organization that are extremely depressed and wouldn't even be the least bit surprised if I heard they ate a bullet tomorrow.
This whole industry has just motivated me to work to achieve financial independence/early retirement as soon as I can just so I never have to think about working with incompetent people in my life again, or at least, have the financial freedom to cut those relationships once they do arise. It sucks because I know I'll be working on tech related projects for the rest of my life, but I have to ignore the desire to work on things that will actually make a difference so that I can build up that nest egg to have the financial freedom and peace of mind to actually pursue it.
I have exactly same experience. The company and people were not too stressful, but the project and the situation was. It was my first job after graduating, and I was doing most SW alone in a project that, in hindsight, could never quite work due to some technological restraints.
I tried hard to make it work and was stressed often. Not worth... I blame myself mostly for being obsessed about the project, but I wish I would not have been working alone, especially as a newcomer to the field.
Take a vacation! The company will be okay without you for a while.
Disclaimer: I’m about to say stuff that are just my impressions, without a lot of “I think” or “I believe.” Take those as implied.
Generally the stress of management is in coordinating various personalities and balancing competing priorities, while being on the hook for delivering results without having any direct impact on whether a project gets done to a high degree of quality. They rely on others’ expertise, some of whine may not be that reliable, and it’s stressful!
Directors and VPs have that stress plus they are more directly accountable to financial results. However, they have to be cheerful and optimistic and never show weakness or worry to an almost psychopathic degree. This may look like a good work/life balance externally but internally “work brain” and the weight of stress are relentless. The bad ones sublimate stress and occasionally explode and yell at their subordinates.
To engineers none of this looks like “work” because none of it produces concrete results. (I haven’t mentioned the endless word docs to read and write, and the spreadsheets, oh god the endless spreadsheets.) But it does accumulate a lot of stress and anxiety.
On the vacation side of things, seriously, take a vacation! It will be okay!
I cannot speak to my current employer as my handle is not anonymized. I will say that in prior employments the level of stress was directly correlated to the incompetence of the staff and developers. Incompetent people tend to create two problems:
1. Job insecurity. Politics ramp up as employee mobility goes down.
2. The technology is trash. The internal tech is often riddled with excessive abstractions, confused organization, lack of purpose, and other unnecessary qualities that generally slows people down. Its a real bummer when 10 minute task takes 2 weeks to complete in the office.
I can only speak to large software companies and unfortunately the demand for employees will often exceed the available supply of confident AND experienced developers available in the market.
This is a tough one to answer. Yes, there are harder done people, and I suppose that is enough to end the conversation.
The only part I'd mention here is that you focus on micromanagement and autonomy, which alone, to me, isn't really the source of stress. I've had boring but predictable butt-in-seat jobs with clear instructions. You do your work at a reasonable pace, you will make your deadline.
The source of the stress is being pressured to make firm deadline commitments under conditions of complexity and uncertainty, and the organizational aftermath when you don't make them (ranging from confrontational meetings, to angry emails to your boss, to threats to your employment, to threats to your professional reputation). I really have seen them all.
Can't speak to how much of this goes on in other jobs, I'm sure it does -- then again, I don't constantly hear about a "critical shortage" of workers in most of these other jobs either, which implies to me that people with options may be rationally choosing to avoid software development in favor of other fields.
Your first point is dead on, although I'm lazy and just go to XOCO in terminal 1 most of the time ...
I think, perhaps, you interpreted him differently than I did on your other points:
2. I don't think he's talking about paternalism, I think he's talking about dealing with very intense, private insecurity about the state of a company. There is something not quite unlike doom facing company nearly every day, and it's incredibly hard to filter actual uncertainties that companies should account for. It's important to be both transparent and conservative with negativity, but not for paternalistic reasons.
3. There's not a special type of person that handles stress better, exactly, there's a special type of stress that comes with trying to start/run a company. And it's not really worth it if you're thinking in pure outcome based terms. As an example, I picked my family up (we have 4 kids) and moved them cross country in August because it seemed like the best decision for my company. It was an excruciating choice in a way that a normal, career based moves haven't been. I suspect anyone could have handled that flavor of stress since I'm not uniquely stress resilient.
x. I think intense word choice can occasionally reflect the intensity of what you're talking about in a way that forced mildness undermines. So why not?
I think a lot of the stress comes from the responsibility for making something work while the definition of that something can radically change based on the whims, lack of foresight, or poor planning by one's coworkers.
Starting and running a company is very scary, so it's not surprising that many people who are not cut out for the emotional work involved end up like this.
> The company was running out of runway, we just hadnt been told yet.
At least your CEO didn't dump all the bad news and resulting anxiety directly on the team. Good job, it's exactly what he's paid for.
Actually it's surprisingly not stressful--one interesting thing I've learned is that, at least for myself, job stress and burnout comes from something not going that well (e.g. my old startup), not from being super busy.
And to the parent comment--I'm fine, thanks for the concern :)
This is my first job out of school, and I have been in it for almost 2 years now. This is a job I dreamed to get, yet I still feel stressed and miserable.
This stress mostly come from interaction with my line manager. I don't seem to get a chance to say anything during our meetings, and often when I get a chance to say something, it is as if he doesn't hear it. This even happens when he asks about my progress, but doesn't seem to give me a chance to answer. Written communications are mostly ignored.
This led to a lot of seemingly impossible tasks on me, and I'm blamed for being too slow. Sometimes I can pull in the hours and finish early. In those cases he often forgets why we are doing those in the first place. And because I don't get a chance to explain, I'm blamed for doing useless tasks.
Our team has a higher turnover rate compare to others, but some stellar people still stay. He is well liked by upper management, and I think they are also somewhat aware of his management style.
Besides these, I have to admit I learned a lot from him. When I calm down after the meetings, I can often realize that he has a point behind what he says, and the point is often helpful. I do feel I'm becoming a better engineer, and progressed a lot comparing to when I just started.
And since I started with a background irrelevant to tech, I also appreciate him bringing me into the field. Even if I am just starting, I'm already earning a salary that I could only dream were I in the field I studied at school.
So at this point I am not really sure what I should do. To my surprise my annual reviews are fine despite all these. I love the engineering work per se, and the company is doing pretty well too. I have some amazing colleagues, but I'm not sure about my manager.
Is this just because I am very junior, or have poor communication skills? Or should I quit? Would it be safe to talk to any of {skip manager, senior colleagues, HR} without making things worse?
Lots of questions, and I would really appreciate any advice. Many thanks!
I quite like my current job, but this really resonated:
> By volume, I’m referring to the total number of obligations that you’re committed to complete—from answering a minor question to finishing a major project. As this volume increases past a certain threshold, the weight of these efforts can become unbearably stressful.
I have this happening to me RIGHT NOW. I am on 4 different projects, PLUS I am expected to on-board a new engineer onto our team.
The thing is: I also have a ton of meetings I am forced to attend.
I'm sinking! I'm going to have to work late for at least a week! It is stressful for no reason!
Software development does not have to be a stressful experience. I'm sorry that you believe it does as that implies that your experience has largely been stressful.
In my mind, that perspective is a huge red flag for me when I'm on the job hunt. If you are trying to stress me out in an interview rather than make me comfortable then I have to thank you for letting me know before I started working there that you would be exhausting both physically and emotionally.
If your startup really needs you and your colleagues know that, everyone will understand if you are under too much stress and I think their reactions (while possible sad (which you might interpret as disappointment)) will be understanding.
You've been lucky, then, to work in a low stress environment and have yet to encounter a stressful one.
The nature of the work is less of a factor in the stress than you co-workers. Stress is created by people, and their personalities and management styles. When hiring, people tend to hire others like them, so you end up with a distinct company "culture", since people who match it stay, and those who don't, move on. So, if you start with a culture of stress in a company, it's going to continue in that direction, and if you end up there and don't fit with their culture, you will be stressed out, even if your colleagues might not.
I've been working in tech for going on 30 years now, and I've seen plenty of super-stressful workplaces.
I once presented with softwaredoug before a room of 400 people on a project that we didn't quite get finished! Yes... massive amounts of stress as we approached the deadline and realized that we were not going to hit it. Nevertheless, b/c of the stress we pushed harder than we normally would have, we learned a lot more than we otherwise would have, and _despite_ not finishing, the talk was one of the better received of my career. (We turned it into a lessons learned talk. We had plenty of great questions.)
How did we deal with the stress? I think we just sat with it. It was always there. Over time you recognize it for what it is, an illusion. That doesn't make it feel much better, but it gives you a bit more control and equanimity. And being able to push through hard situations despite the illusory feelings of dread opens the doors for doing some really interesting things.
But you seem to be freaking out even at not getting on-boarded immediately or that you don't have detailed explanation of what you will be working on the first day, or that you're not immediately invited to all the meetings. I work at Autodesk. This is completely normal, it takes a couple of weeks to start on a team and not everything is clear, especially if a key person just left. This isn't a job at Burger King where everything is clear. Also, nobody is going to structure their vacations around you. Some head count is getting allocated, and then filled, often with huge delays, and that person arrives at a certain date, and while people know it's coming, it's not necessarily a good time for anyone, it is forced on us. It's troublesome to onboard the intern or new employee and it gets past around like a hot potatoes sometimes. And no, often there isn't any documentation. I've onboarded probably over 50 people over 20 years.
It sounds like you arrived after the project was just sent in a tailspin and people are having meetings just to figure out WTF is the state is the state of project, and you shouldn't have expected to be invited to all those meetings, as you have nothing to contribute as junior and the people probably weren't sure of anything. It's normal. Also, that iBuddy yapping about the previous guy getting fired? We can't know the context, have you thought that person was hugely stressed about it too and sharing that earnestly? I mean, they're on the sinking project as well? And at least she's talking to you and putting you in the context of the team. Insensitive, perhaps, but again the world isn't going to rearrange around you.
At one point in the story, you're clearly falling into a depression, and seeing everything dark. A manager repeatedly cancelling and re-scheduling a meeting isn't a plot to harass you: it happens a lot to busy people, we don't know what kind of crisis he's dealing with. During this whole thing, you just assume that everyone is just taking off, missing work, and focused on you. These people might actually be going through crisis on their own and having to put out fires left-and-right.
This last bit, where you get a meeting in a locked abandoned building you think nobody should have access to, and you ask the senior director to leave because he wasn't invited: You realize that's paranoid thinking and crazy behavior, right? When you need to have a HR-type meeting with an employee, you have it in a private place -- for the employee's benefit! It's for you that it's in a private place, away from other people's prying eyes. Then, of course, the whole point of the meeting is to have the senior director talk to you, that's what the meeting is, he didn't show up unplanned. He's not on the invite so that you're not too stressed on the way. The idea that they're keeping it secret and deleting the meeting from the calendar to hide it is just paranoid delusions perhaps caused by depression. It's the way it's done. These meetings are happening because you're in deep shit, it's very rare. The director is offering you to leave on our own so that you can leave with your head up and on your own terms, and not have the record of having been fired. It's a kind of curtesy. This might sound horrible -- but firing someone is a last resort.
Now, don't get me wrong. I've hired people from india, china, singapore, and other places. I have no doubt that you have suffered inappropriate comments and racist behavior. But we don't know the full story! I've had to fire people as well, who seem to do a lot of work, but a lot of useless work that needed to be redone, or get stuck into rat holes for week without asking questions. These people all thought they were doing as best, and got multiple warnings and "PIPs" (Performance Improvement Projects, as you know) as they could and no doubt had a lot of fingers to point after they were let go. It's always other people's fault.
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