Dealing With Stress At Work

This topic comes from a listener request made on Twitter. Mina states: “my name is Mina I’m a mid-level backend developer. I really love your podcast ,now it’s my main podcast. Could you give us tips on how to deal with work stress ? And how to be more productive HQ developer? Thanks , keep up the good work” Thank you Mina, we don’t know much about HQ development, but can definitely talk to work place stress and how to deal with it. Dictionary.com defines stress as “a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances.” Workplace stress happens when your work environment or tasks become so demanding that you experience mental or emotional turmoil due to the circumstances. Some times you are able to control or influence the demands that are causing stress in the workplace. However, most of the time you do not have control over them which causes even more stress as you aren’t able to see an end. This is just an overview of how work can affect a developer’s stress level. Each category highlights a few of the more common aspects of work related stress. There are many more stressors that developers face on a daily basis, but the five mentioned here are the most common that are seen across development shops. Be on the look out for them, especially as you attempt to deal with demands at your job to make sure you aren’t sabotaging your own mental health in an attempt to make things better. Take a hard look at your employer and ask if they are doing things that mitigate or exacerbate the stress levels of you and your fellow developers. If they exacerbate then look for ways you can effect change. It’s unlikely that a single employer will be all one or the other, more than likely they will be a mix of good and bad ways of dealing with stress. Use this information to help guide your employer to better choices in how to help developers under load to better deal with stress. Episode Breakdown Common Causes of Stress for Developers Technology and services updating too quickly. One of the most exciting aspects of working in technology is how rapidly it changes. When this occurs too quickly it can induce stress as developers have to learn new functionality, sometimes just to get their applications to work. Technological changes and updates can typically be mitigated by staying on an older version, however if you stay too long the cost to update becomes very high. Stress comes when the changes and updates are so frequent that you can’t keep up and run the risk of deprecated technology if you stay too long on an older version. Even more stressful that technology stack changes are when services you are consuming update too frequently with breaking changes. If possible find a different provider who performs a similar service but doesn’t update with breaking changes as frequently. Lack of or changing acceptance criteria. You can’t successfully build something if you don’t know what you are building. However, it’s easy to get pressured into starting a project or task without knowing all of the details. When you don’t have complete and specific acceptance criteria then you may be building something amazing that doesn’t fit the need of the customer. Your acceptance criteria should be SMAR, not sure the T (time-bound) makes sense. Another cause of stress related to acceptance criteria is when they are in a state of flux while you are developing. Once developers have committed to a task the acceptance criteria should be lock, if something needs to be changed then there should be a new task created for that change. Inflexible or constantly changing deadlines. Deadlines are the bane of existence for many software development shops.