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What gives you the most anxiety?

Ben Halpern on September 06, 2020

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Willem Odendaal

This is probably more than you're looking for, but I'm thinking carefully about my career (and why I tend to burn out so often). I wrote this list just this morning, so I guess it's relevant...

  • Having to focus on many things at once.
  • Production support issues.
  • Team members I'm responsible for that under-perform.
  • Deadlines.
  • Business drama/chaos.
  • Problematic architectures (especially if I came up with them)
  • A lot of people depending on me!
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David Koczka

Having to focus on many things at once.

I'm also struggling with that one, most of the times I'm responsible for 3-4 projects at the same time, although not of them active at all times, but it's still unsettling.

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Ben Sinclair

I think the many-things-at-once problem is something I've never dealt with very well.
Weirdly, perhaps, it's easier now I'm working remotely because I do some of the work at the weekend and take, shall we say, "extended" breaks during the week when people are pushing for results. The company's ok with this, and it means I work more at my own pace.

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Mark Andrew-Ronald Kimitch, MASc šŸ’»šŸ’

Having to focus on many things at once is less of an issue with focus, and more of an issue with the brain's ability to jump back and forth between tasks. A normal brain can technically only focus on one thing at a time. People who are perceived as being able to focus on multiple things simultaneously are really just efficient at switching their focus between multiple tasks very quickly.

Perhaps thinking of it like this might help someone find ways to improve this ability within themselves?

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Ciscoquan

Over thinking on ideas

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Imodjin • Edited

The biggest cause of my anxiety is society. I get very nervous every time I have to go outside or go to the store. The sounds of the outside world make me feel almost panic attacks, which makes me have to wear headphones every night. In addition to anxiety, I am also haunted by irritability. In order to keep calm, it was necessary to study what is kratom. Kratom is the only thing that helps me cope with my antisociality. I feel more relaxed and able to go out to the store. So the main cause of anxiety is people, that's why i tried kratommystic.com

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Yash_Jaiswal

Fear of missing out

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pomfrit123 profile image
***

missing what?

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Yash_Jaiswal

Fear of missing out. Like when everyone is doing and you are the only one who isn't or when you feel like you are the odd one out.

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pomfrit123 profile image
***

I know that I have it too. Do you mean missing out on using some new language/framework or something more in general?

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Yash_Jaiswal

well Yeah mostly it is related to new framework/languages or tools and tech.

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pomfrit123 profile image
***

there'll always be something new, Im trying to learn how things work, like the flux pattern or the web mvc or how to make a preprocessor or a compiler.. I dont know where Im going with this comment :) but if you know the general stuff it would be easy to learn any framework/language if you need it for some specific task

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Amjad Abujamous

@Yash_Jaiswal @***

I saw that YouTube video the other day by Joshua Fluke during which he said (I might be paraphrasing) "Tools are just tools, we only care about the end goal/product".

So a long as you're doing quality work, there are zero reasons to care about your tools. Just be sure they are market relevant.

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Pandita

My main anxiety:

meme-dog

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btlm • Edited

It's also a problem in Poland. There are many small local company owners (very often oldmen) who think making web apps is easy and fast. And they won't pay much because they don't find my work hard.

"You only sit and type on a keyboard and you want 20 ā‚¬ per hour?!" :D horrible.

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Srikanth • Edited

When I get a call from the alerting system about an incident, and before I can listen to the message I get another call and another call. Some of these alerting systems are horribly designed. The one I have experience with calls you for each instance of the alert and has no smart way of detecting that I am already listening to one of their calls so they call you again and again before I can acknowledge their message.

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Fernando Zablah

I don't know what kind of infrastructure/framework you are working on. But for my Node.js projects I use sentry.io , it is amazing, gives you detail where something crashed, which user and commit related info. It has a variety of supported languages/frameworks. Most importantly you can setup the amount of alerts you receive for each instance of an error.

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Srikanth • Edited

stackdriver logging -> xmatters alerts
I used sentry before, but don't you need some integration for alerting via Text or Call?

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Fernando Zablah

I don't know for call, but I receive my alerts via Slack and email.

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Max Ong Zong Bao

Selling to customers while figuring out to push the right hot button that they will buy from you or dealing with partners that is looking to push work that is not yours into your hand instead of them doing it themselves.

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Scott Hutchinson

This is very interesting , I think I can sell anything to anyone (I have been selling my mediocare self to people for a very long time) . I get anxious whenever anyone is displeased with something I am doing .

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Max Ong Zong Bao

Haha it might be your a born salesman.

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klyse

Right now to satisfy the steak holderā€™s by adding the right amount of new features / keep up with migrations to a new framework and to make the app more stable for the future.

Turns out the task is more difficult than I expected...

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webbureaucrat

I get anxiety whenever my whole test suite passes. Does anyone else have this issue? I really can't put my finger on why this happens.

My only guess is that it abruptly takes me out of finishing a very small, manageable task (passing a single unit test) to suddenly reckoning with breaking down the next larger task, but I'm not sure that's right.

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Matthieu Cneude • Edited
  1. Not well estimated deadlines (which are 97% of the total of deadlines).
  2. Functionalities which are possibly useless for the end user.
  3. Working on a product which doesn't provide anything new / better than the concurrence, just trying to catch on what already exists.
  4. Seeing bad decisions taken, being pretty explicit about them with good arguments, not being listened to 'cause I'm only a worker "producing" software, dealing with the bad consequences.
  5. Micro-management and mistrust.
  6. A company which sells a company culture totally different of the reality.
  7. Being "Agile" meaning using a bunch of tools.
  8. A startup doing everything like Google 'cause you know, it's Google.
  9. Using micro-services as a magical spell, ending with distributed chaos.
  10. Working in a waterfall environment which does Scrum.
  11. Working in an ego driven environment where other services (or users) are stupid because developers are the best.
  12. Not understanding that soft skills are more important than pure technical knowledge when you're working in a team.
  13. Trying to fit somebody in a team to see if the candidate think like everybody else, and therefore killing diversity and collective intelligence.
  14. Interviews with: random questions (a developer should know everything? Really?) which have nothing to do with the daily work, looking at the knowledge of somebody at time T even if this knowledge is obsolete in two months and, at the same time, not verifying if the person is able to adapt.
  15. Having interviews where nobody bothered looking at the candidate's Github code, blog, or portfolio.

...

Many more.

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Manik Malhotra

I feel really anxious when I code or even study programming before sleep.
My mind stays unstable over night nd it feels so tired when i wakeup in morning. Some what depressed sometimes.
But thats the time I get to learn and code new things, after my office hours.
Sometimes it goes for few days without proper sleep.

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Andrew Avery • Edited

Look, whatever gives you anxiety there are ways to deal with it, and Iā€™m not joking. Those things like anxiety, depression, sociopathy, it all can be cured. And Iā€™m not even talking about going to one of those doctors that will rob you and give you no solutions instead. Only some kind of pills that will make you only sleep. Day and night. The thing that I used is kratom. That thing is a must have. It has so many benefits, yet it is completely natural. It is a tree actually, a tree that can relieve your mental pain and make you feel comfortable. At least it helped me and some of my friends. If you are interested, you can check here kratomgallery.com/. You wonā€™t be disappointed!

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Riya Adhikari

Unexpected pings from team members who I know always come to me with problems without doing their due-diligence. I know this sounds funny but this was becoming an issue. It got to the point where switching context from their discussion back to my work was causing me anxiety. Thankfully i have manager who understands all this and he made it a point that unless somebody needs very urgent help from another team member, they're only supposed to ping us during a certain time slot of the dev's choosing.

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SJellen

For me its the idea that maybe I'm only a hobbyist.
I read posts about people applying for hundreds of jobs and when i search for jobs there are only a handful that look interesting. I'd much rather build something than spend more than 30 minutes looking over the same jobs that are posted over and over.
I have no doubt that I'll succeed but that's what makes anxiety so draining. It's your mind working against you.

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Maulik

As a developer, below mentioned reasons give me anxiety.

  • not having family time
  • getting the same kinda work and no self-development
  • no motivation and recognition
  • not allowed to take enough breaks
  • no transparency of what is happening on the project or team I am working with
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Quentin Caillaud • Edited

Future. Shortness of life. Death.

(Yaay ! Party !)

Alt text of image

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Jean-Michel šŸ•µšŸ»ā€ā™‚ļø Fayard

Social media - I have a bad addiction to Twitter

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Kanav Khurana

The idea of losing precious time on work that I'm NOT 100% passionate about.

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Stephan Nijman

Lots of things, but development wise it would be anything to do with servers or hosting. If i would never have to deal with those again i would be a much happier dev! šŸ˜Š

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David Israel

Marketing. After running the marathon of creating a good product, you start a second marathon of marketing / sales without a breather.

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Phippsy

Overhearing the sales guy saying "Yeah - that will be available by the end of the week" to a prospect, when you know you're still at least a month out.

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Adrian Emil Grigore

What anxiety?

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Ben Read

Whiteboard interviews

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Matt Ellen-Tsivintzeli

Asking for help, especially if that involves a phone call.

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Swarup Kumar Mahapatra

Business Analyst/Client coming up with change in requirements while QA team is about to signoff for release

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The Sword Breaker

Being Right About Something And Not Getting Appericated

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FoodBite

Glad you come up with this discussion

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Andrew Baisden

The whole job search process and wondering how many interview stages and how long you will have to wait for some job offers.

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Anzhari Purnomo

Walking on a meeting where I know Iā€™m gonna get chewed on. šŸ’€

But most of the time Iā€™m only overthinking the whole end of the world scenario in my head.

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Mike

when a dumbass salesman who doesn't know adobe makes dreamweaver and calls it "Microsoft Dreamweaver" runs a smear campaign live on Zoom

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Mark Andrew-Ronald Kimitch, MASc šŸ’»šŸ’

Technical interviews... šŸ˜±

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sanidz

anxiety