Low Stress Jobs

I mean, I kinda get how this survey got these results. Almost every company has one guy lifting 80% of the weight and the rest carrying 20%.

They think software engineering is “typin stuff”

* num_too_old_seniors * 3

Google can kindly fuck off

Come on, SW dev is low stress compared to surgeons, front line soldiers, or even parcel deliverers.

@Fast-Nop I bet devs cumulatively have higher levels of stress due to more hours of medium-to-lower levels of stress during the days before the features they haven't started yet is due

I'm so stressed I can't even punctuate that right now 🫠

@MammaNeedHummus Surgeons routinely operate in 12h shifts and even more, especially in ER. It's atrocious, and their work items don't have an undo feature.

True but they are trained for it

@MammaNeedHummus Yeah, and you know how? By just throwing them under the bus when they become assistance docs. That's the "training" for such atrocious work hours.

@Fast-Nop

surgeons: I hope I don't kill someone.

software dev for weapons industry: <rubbing hands together maniacally>

Surgeons are way above devs in the stress department (I mean maybe somewhat higher than devs who write life or death software like pacemakers) bc move the knife one centimeter off and the patient is dead or crippled. And you have to live with that, or the anxiety that it may happen at some point….
Way more stressful than a button not firing when clicked

I mean, not a Frontline soldier, but I've been a bodyguard (which also doesn't have respawn), and I found it less stressing than being a dev.

I think it is because being a bodyguard I already perfectly knew what "clients" wanted to do, and what I was supposed to do in response.

I don't think it deserves to be at the forefront of the "stress free" list, but I don't think it exactly deserves to be on the forefront of the "stressful" list either.

If I had to rank it, with 1 being the least and 10 being the most, it's maybe a 4.5-7 depending on your job.

We have this new guy at work who took three weeks to add a checkbox (!!!) to three pages and the accompanying column in the DB. Saw him napping around lunch in his chair a few times. He probably has the lower end of stress.

I just got off working OT and I still don't think I experience a 7 because honestly my head isn't on the chopping block if I make mistakes. I do tons of work but very little of it is business-operations-critical.

@AlgoRythm I would be stressed if it took me 3 weeks to add checkboxes and a db column if the codebase is easy to add to. But he probably doesn’t care lol

if stress then no_stress() else continue

Simple, right? RIGHT? ;(

I never understood those studies that show software dev as a super low stress career. Certainly, a surgeon experiences more stress, but I feel that IT/Dev stress is it’s own special animal. I think it’s the long term frustration that really elevates our stress to very high levels. Answering to fools, working long and odd hours at the expense of our families and often for no good reason, dedicating years of effort to build something that’s gone the second the business sponsor leaves the company, etc. It’s the absurdity of it all that gets me and the annoyance to my family concerning the hours.

@Fast-Nop Actual work I have done: a whistleblowing tool for organized crime. We had security clearance and NDAs. If someone found out what we did we may be killed to stop development. Or tortured by organized crime to leak secrets.

Watershed predictions for a municipal zoning system. If I messed up whole future development areas of a city could be swept away by water.

A tool for performing routine checks of nuclear facilities. If someone didn’t do the checks because the software didn’t work correctly there could be a meltdown.

One job where a few hundred people could lose their jobs if I messed up.

Now I work on finance. Nobody dies if the system messes up.

It does?

@irene Except the stress because of the anti-crime tool, none of that is necessarily stressful. It's with quite some responsibility, but that's why there should be proper QA processes in place. There's a reason why regulated domains are regulated.

@Nanos

You simply can not do the job if you think like that.

Of course we could be killed any second. Then again, tell that to school shootout kids...

Fortunately, in civilized countries people can not strut around packing a fucking assault rifle, so that makes it very easy for us to detect the actual threats and neutralize them.

I feel like this list is just manager cope. We all know that dev is a scale of chosen stress

Another item to add to this discussion: it’s worth noting that a lot of IT/Dev work is one of the few work items that is easily and immediately measurable by organizations. As opposed to say, a new marketing plan. For example, if you “brick” a core router for a large organization, your job (and in the USA your family’s health benefits) will be on the line. If you take down a major e-commerce’s system with a mistake, again, your family’s entire livelihood could be on the line - not just money, but their healthcare too. I still agree it’s not warfare or surgery, but it’s still a lot of pressure which leads to stress.

@Nanos

I don't consider any country where one can freely carry AK-47 around "civilized".

@Fast-Nop The stress shouldn’t exist? Like in the real world? There is a difference between “should” and “does”.

@irene Software with high impact is regulated, with processes etc to be followed, because relying on a single dev not to fuck up is a disaster waiting to happen. If you don't have such processes, then the software isn't high impact.

I guess it depends on the environment the dev is controlled, maintained and administered.

If you’re in a super strict place where the sprint timelines is the be all and end all and you have only x hours to finish before it gets to QA of course it’s going to be stressful.

I was in a waterfall type environment with almost no devops. Issues were emailed and collated in excel sheets and the QA was essentially the client/project lead. All in a company where software dev was the lowest concern and pharmaceutical research was highest. THAT WAS STRESSFUL.

Now I’m in an true software house. Multiple teams. QA teams that aren’t the enemy and collaborate. First time in an Agile environment with a full integrated azure devops. I’m the happiest I have been in years.

Yea and no. If you know the domain and codebase in your sleep, it’s stress free. You know what to do. Otherwise, you’ll be having gray hairs daily.

In a phrase 🐎💩