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I don't know how it is in the Valley, but if someone told me "I'm suffering from extreme anxiety and if I try to force through it I'm worried the quality of my

I don't know how it is in the Valley, but if someone told me "I'm suffering from extreme anxiety and if I try to force through it I'm worried the quality of my work would suffer, can I take today off?" I doubt I would say no. Depression sucks, anxiety sucks, having both can be personally and professionally catastrophic.

taurath 11y ago
Most of the time its not extreme enough to take a full day off. It just means you run at 50%, or 30% capacity. But you can't really speak up about not having that capacity, and if you take the day off it comes out of your vacation. At the end of the week though, the work is done because you buckle down. This is why open offices and daily standups and constant micromanagement are terrifying to me - everyone is VERY happy with my work output and I'm considered an A player, but if you watched me on an hour by hour basis you'd have a much different opinion of me.
- trafficjam30125 11y ago
  Open-plan is actually sold to employers for its discriminatory "benefit". Mostly it's about age, not disability. People like you and me aren't even on their map. We may be a highly productive (in the long term, though short-term volatility is embarrassing) ~4% of the population but "they" don't care either way about us. They do want to keep "the olds" out, though. Once people have kids, they struggle with open-plan offices. That's because the biologically rooted need to protect someone makes it impossible for you to keep the "you can trust anyone" attitude of college kids and programmers in halfway-house environments. Open-plan forces you to trust randoms with visibility into how you are working, and that's something that's intolerable for anyone who's ever had a disability, anyone with a less-than-privileged upbringing, and anyone who's ever had a child (among other sets of people).
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- whitegrape 11y ago
  The last bit is funny since it's basically the same thing for people with impostor syndrome (which seems pretty common in the industry) but those people may or may not subjectively feel like they're trying their best regardless. A trick I think helps in either case is to compare with others -- are you obviously at the bottom of the pack by your own standards (which are probably too high)? If no, stop stressing. (For some reason this doesn't develop into an ego thing for me, or a devaluation of other coworkers whose work I think is less stellar than my own even though I'm not putting in 100%... But if that happened that would be a whole new problem.) At one job seeing a 95th percentile commit count per month that was less than 12 (with an average of about 4-5) made me worry a lot less about not committing anything for over a week. The job before that I was used to committing something every day or sometimes every other day.
  - sarciszewski 11y ago
    At my previous job at a startup on a team of 3 developers, I accounted for 75% of the commits over a 6 month period. Many of these were big multi-week projects (one- and two-way integration with EMRs, or scraping the ones that didn't have an API). I was the first one they "indefinitely furloughed" when their investor tightened the belt.
    - cableshaft 11y ago
      Were you paid more than the other developers? When a previous company had a major layoff because of our only client tightening his belt, who got let go? Primarily the people who were paid more than the others, including veteran developers who were simultaneously developing and acting as project managers leading the teams. Only a handful of developers remained.
      - sarciszewski 11y ago
        Nope, one guy made more than the both of us, but he was the team lead.
- sarciszewski 11y ago
  > everyone is VERY happy with my work output and I'm considered an A player, but if you watched me on an hour by hour basis you'd have a much different opinion of me Same here, actually. I've had days where I knocked out "estimated 4 hour" tickets in 20 minutes. I also have days where I can't focus for the first and last 4 hours worth a damn.
  - Khaine 11y ago
    I'm similar Modern work is more like a sprint than a marathon. If your not in the flow nothing gets done. But when you have flow, you just smash work. Its quite frustrating that flow is so elusive.
mbrock 11y ago
For a lot of people with anxiety, I bet that message would be really hard to write if they didn't know explicitly up front that it would be accepted and understood.
- sarciszewski 11y ago
  For sure. :(

taurath 11y ago

Most of the time its not extreme enough to take a full day off. It just means you run at 50%, or 30% capacity. But you can't really speak up about not having that capacity, and if you take the day off it comes out of your vacation. At the end of the week though, the work is done because you buckle down. This is why open offices and daily standups and constant micromanagement are terrifying to me - everyone is VERY happy with my work output and I'm considered an A player, but if you watched me on an hour by hour basis you'd have a much different opinion of me.

trafficjam30125 11y ago
Open-plan is actually sold to employers for its discriminatory "benefit". Mostly it's about age, not disability. People like you and me aren't even on their map. We may be a highly productive (in the long term, though short-term volatility is embarrassing) ~4% of the population but "they" don't care either way about us. They do want to keep "the olds" out, though. Once people have kids, they struggle with open-plan offices. That's because the biologically rooted need to protect someone makes it impossible for you to keep the "you can trust anyone" attitude of college kids and programmers in halfway-house environments. Open-plan forces you to trust randoms with visibility into how you are working, and that's something that's intolerable for anyone who's ever had a disability, anyone with a less-than-privileged upbringing, and anyone who's ever had a child (among other sets of people).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
whitegrape 11y ago
The last bit is funny since it's basically the same thing for people with impostor syndrome (which seems pretty common in the industry) but those people may or may not subjectively feel like they're trying their best regardless. A trick I think helps in either case is to compare with others -- are you obviously at the bottom of the pack by your own standards (which are probably too high)? If no, stop stressing. (For some reason this doesn't develop into an ego thing for me, or a devaluation of other coworkers whose work I think is less stellar than my own even though I'm not putting in 100%... But if that happened that would be a whole new problem.) At one job seeing a 95th percentile commit count per month that was less than 12 (with an average of about 4-5) made me worry a lot less about not committing anything for over a week. The job before that I was used to committing something every day or sometimes every other day.
- sarciszewski 11y ago
  At my previous job at a startup on a team of 3 developers, I accounted for 75% of the commits over a 6 month period. Many of these were big multi-week projects (one- and two-way integration with EMRs, or scraping the ones that didn't have an API). I was the first one they "indefinitely furloughed" when their investor tightened the belt.
  - cableshaft 11y ago
    Were you paid more than the other developers? When a previous company had a major layoff because of our only client tightening his belt, who got let go? Primarily the people who were paid more than the others, including veteran developers who were simultaneously developing and acting as project managers leading the teams. Only a handful of developers remained.
    - sarciszewski 11y ago
      Nope, one guy made more than the both of us, but he was the team lead.
sarciszewski 11y ago
> everyone is VERY happy with my work output and I'm considered an A player, but if you watched me on an hour by hour basis you'd have a much different opinion of me Same here, actually. I've had days where I knocked out "estimated 4 hour" tickets in 20 minutes. I also have days where I can't focus for the first and last 4 hours worth a damn.
- Khaine 11y ago
  I'm similar Modern work is more like a sprint than a marathon. If your not in the flow nothing gets done. But when you have flow, you just smash work. Its quite frustrating that flow is so elusive.

mbrock 11y ago

For a lot of people with anxiety, I bet that message would be really hard to write if they didn't know explicitly up front that it would be accepted and understood.

sarciszewski 11y ago
For sure. :(