33 ms·

Ask HN: Which types of tech jobs are best for people that can't handle stress?

189 points by yasp 8y ago

byoung2 8y ago
It depends on the company and culture. At my last company the environment was so toxic at the end they could make beer tasting a stressful job. So assuming the company has good culture, this list seems reasonable: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-low-stress-jobs-for-it-pros/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-low-stress-jobs-for-...
- yasp 8y ago
  Saw the same listicle. Unfortunately most of those roles would be way too dull IMO. Wish it were possible to make being a developer low stress.
  - Goosey 8y ago
    It is. Work for a company with good culture. Yelp has been great to me. Disclaimer: I work for Yelp and find it to be low stress.
    - meowface 8y ago
      Interesting, since the public perception of Yelp seems to be that they're an extremely unethical organized crime-style racket intentionally destroying small and medium sized businesses if they don't receive protection money after demanding it. Maybe that's no longer the case or maybe it's solely isolated to Yelp's sales and marketing departments, but either way it doesn't seem to mesh well with having a good culture.
      - okintheory 8y ago
        I'm surprised this is down-voted. Isn't this in fact the public perception? Last time I remember Yelp getting significant mainstream media attention, it was in relation to allegations of racket-like tactics [1]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/03/is-yelp-an-extortion-racket/346166/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/03/is-yelp...
        maccard 8y ago
        I don't work for yelp or any company related to yelp. Two reasons it could be downvoted. 1) The external facing business image may be totally different to their internal workplace culture (this can go both ways). 2) for all the accusations I've seen of yelp, I've never seen anything more than a he said she said. None of the cases have ever gone to court in any country that I've seen. Anecdote incoming: I worked in a mom and pop shop. We constantly had issues with people threatening bad/false reviews on different websites (Facebook/Google usually). There was also some amount of 1 star reviews that came in from Google accounts with no visible profile info and no description. These things happen obline, and I'm sure yelp is no exception. Do they sell more visible placement to businesses? Yes as do Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor,booking.com, uber eats etc. Is there any proof of them artificially posting reviews to tank small businesses and then removing them when the businessess pay for sponsored listings? Not that I've seen at least.
  - astura 8y ago
    It's very possible! Source: I'm developer, I have very little to no stress.
arh68 8y ago
Public sector? Less stress, more politics. A lot of people are RIP, but I doubt that's really what you want.
- kristianp 8y ago
  What's RIP in this context? Not dead, I assume?
  - hellogoodbyeeee 8y ago
    I think he means they are as good as dead. They are so useless, they might as well be dead.
    - bitshepherd 8y ago
      Retired In Place is likely what was intended here.
  - arh68 8y ago
    Retired In Place “Well I’ve got 3 more years, then I can retire” “I don’t care about that release date, I’ll be retired by then!” “The reasons I like this place are, well, job security...” “We know your coworker does nothing all day, but he’s about to retire next December, so why try to fire him?”
- astura 8y ago
  Depends on what you find stressful.
- dasmoth 8y ago
  For me, constant politics is way more stressful than occasional “X is on fire, fix it now!” There’s a lot of variance in preferred working environments...
rboyd 8y ago
For dev? Maybe some categories of standalone desktop and mobile apps? Something with less frequent releases and without a server infrastructure to monitor. A lot probably depends on the team you have to work with. Maybe education? Producing content? Books, tutorial videos?
- jaegerpicker 8y ago
  I personally find Mobile or desktop apps A LOT less stressful, deadlines are usually much more reasonable. On iOS at least if the app works on your test device it's VERY likely to work on the device in the wild. Given the nature of the App Store "hot fixes" are a lot less of a thing. Also given the release cycle it's often common to have a lot better of a QA process in place. In general you only need to be an expert in one or two languages (swift/kotlin or Objective-C/Java if you cover both OS's). I'm a full time mobile developer and I love it.
- hobls 8y ago
  Client side development in general. Libraries, SDKs, etc, are also generally lower stress. They don’t tend to just break in the middle of the night or whatever.
swatcoder 8y ago
Different things are stressful for different people. In a broad sense, some people like the rush of high pressure environments and don't find them stressful. The same people might freak out if nobody's barking at them with demands and deadlines. Other people, obviously, are happy if they have more space and stability. Make this more personal: what kind of things stress you out? Do you already work in tech? What stresses you in your current work?
- derekp7 8y ago
  I agree, and I would personally define workplace stress as one of the following: 1) Are you expected to perform intractable tasks? Given requirements / tasks by people who obviously don't understand technology or constraints (i.e., "I don't want to hear your excuses, just get it done). 2) Does it feel like a "frat club" that you aren't a member of? Such as people only listening to reason from others that are part of their in-group, but exclude you for some reason (i.e., you weren't there when critical parts of the company were being built, and they don't see you bringing anything valuable to the table). 3) Does every day feel like someone is looking for an excuse to fire you? This can happen at places with stack ranking, where managers hire in sacrificial lambs to throw to the slaughterhouse or when RIFs are required. 4) This goes along with point (1). Is your department not given enough tools / resources to do the job right, so you are always in firefighting mode (doing anti-work, which annihilates actual productive work).
sgroppino 8y ago
Probably the lowest paid ones.
- odyssey7 8y ago
  I've wondered about this question, and I'm not sure it correlates that way. One company I worked for was known for being one of the lower cost vendors in its industry, and I experienced a pervasive back-stabbing culture, which I attributed to there being many employees who were especially fearful of losing the only job in the industry that they had been able to get. So I think in a lot of cases, the lower paying companies might have employees who are more desparate, and management who is used to having more-than-typical negotiating leverage, which they do exercise.
  - collyw 8y ago
    Why would people stay in a high stress low paying job?
    - duggan 8y ago
      A variety of reasons; high switching costs, perhaps due to skills, education, or having limited financial freedom. The current job may confer benefits not available with alternative lower stress options (hours, proximity to family, etc). Perhaps it is an entry level job that is seen as a route to higher paid work.
TamDenholm 8y ago
I'm a contractor, so i work in a lot of different companies and get to experience a lot of different ways of working. I am by far the most relaxed and productive in the companies that are closest to ROWE (Results Only Work Environment). If i know what i need to do, how to achieve it and and left the hell alone to do it where and how i want, i generally perform excellently. The daily "standup" google hangout as a check in on how progress is going works well. When i'm expected to be in the office every day, given funny looks if i pack up my shit at 5pm, asked where i was if i didnt eat lunch at my desk, then quite frankly, i generally leave the contract early. So yeah, its all about the place you work rather than the specific job you have. Being a contractor gives me the opportunity to move around and get a wide range of experience, which i enjoy. It also has the added benefits of being better paid and when you finish the contract, work related stress goes away. Might be worth trying?
- jobserunder 8y ago
  >When i'm expected to be in the office every day, given funny looks if i pack up my shit at 5pm, asked where i was if i didnt eat lunch at my desk, then quite frankly, i generally leave the contract early. This. I'm the same way. Now I only take 100% remote contracts and now I'm 2-3x more productive than my former office-going self. Fun tip: When someone asks "Where are you?" Then the correct answer is: "Who wants to know?" There are 2 exceptions: 1. It's your Mother asking. She has a right to know because she gave you life. 2. Your employer, when you are on the click. Because they are paying for your time. Since I always bill by the hour and time everything to the minute as I go...I can answer them "Where am I" and send them a URL to the thing that I worked on. If they are asking when I'm explicitly not billing... then either: A) I ghost them immediately and terminate the contract B) Ghost them the day after and send them back files after wiping everything clean. This is the value in having multiple streams of income (rental properties, small contracts and passive income)
  - pxndx 8y ago
    Yeah, there's nothing like already being rich. This is terrible advice, not everyone has rental properties or passive income.
gordaco 8y ago
If what you want is a low stress environment, you're like me. Some pieces of advice: 1) This goes without saying, but avoid startups. The more established the company, the better. Big corps are much more likely to respect a 9-to-5 workday and much less likely to call you at 2 am. 2) Try to work in a BTB product, not a BTC. BTB means way fewer customers, and fewer customers means fewer eyes looking for bugs, which in turn means a lower probability of finding an unexpected bug that needs to be solved yesterday. This sounds a bit cynical, but really isn't because of my next point: 3) There is an even better way to avoid bugs in production: have a very good and thorough testing system. When interviewing, ask about the testing process and how likely are they to detect bugs before a client runs the code. If you are looking for a job as a tester, instead ask the following: how automated are the tests and the build system? The more, the better. 4) This might sound bad, but it's my best piece of advice about jobs: look for a workplace that has lots of women (yes, they exist. For certain charitable definition of "lots", at least). Especially older women. Bonus points if you see pregnant women. Double bonus points if people are allowed to work less hours in order to take care of their kids, and you know a few people taking advantage of this situation (IDK how frequent is this in the US. Here in Spain it's common and regulated by law). Triple bonus points if there are many women in managerial positions. I realize that all of this sounds sexist, but whether we like it or not, the weight of childcare and housekeeping still falls mostly on the shoulders of women. So, if you find a company with lots of women, it usually means that the company offers very good work-life balance. As a bonus, you avoid one common source of stress: the competitiveness that pervades certain brogrammer companies. There are also some points to consider that apply to every job: learn to forget about work the moment you exit the office (have something to do on evenings. Something for yourself, something not related to your job); try to make commute pleasurable (walk to your job, use public transport so you can read, etc); avoid romantic relationships with colleagues, especially people you work closely with; etc. EDIT: typo.
- cleandreams 8y ago
  If you want the startup life, find a startup where the founders (white men probably) have small children and professional wives.
  - 8y ago
avcdsuia 8y ago
Try some nooptropics before you go for stress-free jobs. https://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics/wiki/faq#wiki_what_supplements_are_possibly_good_for_mitigating_anxiety.3F https://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics/wiki/faq#wiki_what_suppl...
- vasco 8y ago
  Quintessential HN.
- mlevental 8y ago
  man if this isn't one of the dumbest hn responses I've ever seen I don't know what is - "instead of trying to have a healthy work-life balance or accommodate personal emotional necessities take these unregulated unproven mind altering substances and keep working yourself to death". like is that you Elon trying to get Tesla employees to crank out more cars? and people actually wonder what the value of teaching kids about toxic labor-exploitative ideology is. sheesh
  - avcdsuia 8y ago
    We aren't born in perfection. I'm assuming we all live healthy lives already, but that's not gonna cure everything. I understand my opinion isn't popular, or easy to accept. However, some people (including me) have mild or severe anxiety, are ruled by fear in their entire lives. Having drugs doesn't mean they can eliminate what is encoded in their gene, but it can make dealing with their emotion more approachable, that's enough. ps: I do L-Theanine, which can be found commonly in teas.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - toyota786 8y ago
      Surely if you're assuming that the person reading this has anxiety or something similar leading to their desire for a more laid-back job, the proper advice should be to go to their doc and see about getting diagnosed and prescribed. I'd say self medication is probably a last resort and even then one that should be done with caution.
closeparen 8y ago
At my employer, you have a pretty low-stress life if you're content to be a contributor on other people's projects and not angling for your own. Of course, your career will never advance that way.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  The trick is to get a high dollar job that doesn’t require your career to advance. Let someone else shovel dreck for no additional comp.
bobosha 8y ago
Government jobs
rasengan 8y ago
It might be worth breaking down the types of stressors that you may have issue with and identifying the ones that are non-starters. Then you might be able to narrow down a professional career that is in-line with the way you wish to live life.
- pm90 8y ago
  This is great advice and needs more visibility. Things that cause stress for someone may not be the same things that cause stress for another. e.g. for me personally, working a stable, boring job was more stressful since I felt like my talents, my opportunity to have an impact was being severely affected.
scarface74 8y ago
It depends on what stresses you. I hate red tape and indecisiveness. When I want to get something done, I hate having to go through bureaucracy and meetings and approvals. For me, small companies or small teams where I am on team that has complete autonomy over the “how” is the least stressful. Of course you want some sensible standards. I was more stressed out as the “Dev lead” with supposed authority where every decision had to go through red tape, a ticketing system and approvals than I was at a small company where I was “just” a developer who would let my team know my architectural thinking - just to make sure I wasn’t missing something - and then have free reign from development, devops, netops, etc. - I had admin access to their AWS infrastructure. I also don’t do well in large companies. I can do it, but having to deal with large organizations stresses me. I’m also a little nuerotic about not being competitive in the market and being “stuck” at a job.
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  As a company grows, and especially as the portfolio of code expands, it becomes a necessity to have an "it architect" have the overview of it all, approving changes to the interworkings of it all. They also needs to approve tech changes, not because they don't want you to work with cool new stuff, but because they have to guarantee the dependencies pulled in are reasonable. A big software system is comparable to an aircraft in complexity, and it's not unreasonable to expect it to be handled like this.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    It doesn’t help when the person serving as your IT Architect doesn’t know AWS, your outsourced AWS support company only knows the netops part of AWS so they built the AWS environment just like you would build an environment on prem, manually (instead of using Cloud Formation), having separate subnets for EC2 instances for Dev vs. prod instead of having entirely separate accounts (ie VPCs), and didn’t know how to use any of the other features of AWS. They decided while I was there to move completely over to AWS from an on prem environment and brought in “consultants” to help us. To be honest, I was the architect responsible for software development for the company but didn’t know AWS from a hole in the wall at the time - but neither did the consultants. I wanted to contract someone on my team that had done development and devops on AWS and was certified. I already had approval to hire developers and my budget would have allowed it. But that was a turf battle. Seeing the writing on the wall, I spent the next six months studying up on AWS even though I couldn’t use any of the services. It took so long to get anything approved and my neck was on the line to deliver the system by a certain date, I just asked for a bunch of large AWS EC2 environments and started using the same tools that I would have used in an on prem environment - Mongo (instead of DynamoDB or ElasticSearch), Consul/Vault for configuration (instead of Parameter Store), Fabio (for “load balancing” with internal services), Nomad for job execution and scheduling (instead of CloudWatch/lambda/Elastic Container Service) etc. They ended up having a run rate on AWS that was much more expensive than if I had used AWS services. But, I followed all of the procedures, had complete control over my environments and servers without touching the AWS console, kept the netops team employed because they had to manage the monstrosity - Consul, Vault, Mongo, and Nomad were clustered. I got my pat on the back for delivering on time and on budget - since the AWS architecture budget fell on the netops team not mine - and got my bonus. Then knowing what POS I was forced to create, I put my AWS certifications, my “successful” project, and my title of “lead software architect” that I negotiated for on my resume and got the hell out of dodge to a smaller company that paid me more where I was able to do everything correctly. Fast forward a little bit, now I’m getting real -all I have to do is sign on the dotted line - lucrative offers for consultant roles for a “cloud architect” position because I’m one of the few people in my market that know AWS from a netops, devops, and development point of view. But I don’t want the stress or travel right now. That’s the way the game has to be played to get ahead. Whether I like it or not....
inostia 8y ago
Try looking into higher education, particularly major state or well-regarded private universities. Avoid for-profit degree mills. It's a great environment to work in, often times much less stress than in a for-profit environment, with a lot of room for advancement into leadership. If you enjoy working in and around academia that's a plus, often with benefits to take classes and even get a degree while working. The work can be a bit on the "boring" side, but it also provides great work-life balance and stability. If you live in California, look at some opportunities in the University of California system. Downsides are generally lower pay, and as I mentioned it can be a bit boring.
walshemj 8y ago
Might help if you tell us in which country and what sector you are working in.
twblalock 8y ago
I think it's more about processes than anything else. I've worked at a company with poor processes around code quality, testing, and deployment. Every release day, we know we would have a very late night because of all of the customer-facing bugs our inadequate QA processes didn't catch. We also had regular outages for the same reason, often in the middle of the night. We didn't have good monitoring systems so problems often came to our attention only after customers had been affected for hours. And we didn't have useful post-mortems so the same problems happened again and again. Now I work at a much larger company, where the stakes for production problems are much higher. But I am not stressed out, because we do such a good job with testing and monitoring that (fingers crossed) I've only had one bad night troubleshooting production problems during the entire previous year. And when something goes wrong, we take steps to make sure it can't happen again. The second corporate culture is the one you should look for it you want a low-stress job. You're more likely to find it at companies that have been around for a while, but there are younger companies like that too.
analog31 8y ago
Location may matter. I suspect working in the Midwest is lower stakes than on the coasts, possibly with a better environment (e.g., easy access to the great outdoors), and less fearsome commutes.
stevebmark 8y ago
Generally IT / infrastructure / administrative are the most checked out, coasting, least engaged, least applied folks, with the exception being poorly designed environments where you're always dealing with outages. And of course there's high risk if you get it wrong. Generally work that has a direct customer and user requirements, like application design (closer to the front end of an application) is more stressful, with API/backend layer less stressful. There's less pressure to deliver features and it's easier to apply straight SE principles without having to care as much about the end product. Generally the further you get away from end user customer deliverables, the less stress there is.
- devonkim 8y ago
  I have to highly, highly disagree given the context that in most SaaS software companies operations are going to be on-call, and horrific on-call nights can't happen if you're not on-call. Even in the best of companies (minus organizations that have the massive resources of a follow-the-sun on-call rotation) being on-call means tons of interruptions during one of the most important times you need to not be interrupted - sleeping. What you may be observing is that the operations folks that make it to a later stage in their career that have not burned out permanently have adopted / maintained a mentality of simply not caring about work as much as possible.
cryptozeus 8y ago
I have worked in midwest, east cost, south Florida and west cost. Believe me, location makes a huge difference. I.e new york was extremely stressful with lots of micro management and back stabbing. Midwest was really slow for my liking...for me I found the balance as a software dev in west cost. Working in mid level company with full fredom for schedule.
- wincy 8y ago
  I made the mistake of working for a Silicon Valley company that moved their offices to the Midwest to save money. They had also fired their entire dev team three years before and outsourced them because “they wrote tests”.
  - cryptozeus 8y ago
    Hummm something similar is happening to my company, no more hiring in valley. All new hires in midwest Offices. Will have to watch out. Tx
alphanumeric0 8y ago
Find a job where the people defining the software direction have experience doing so. Find a lead who has a firm grasp of how software evolves and can hand you software specifications that make sense and don't have bugs built in to them (I speak from experience).
rhapsodic 8y ago
I suggest first, don't work for a tech company. Work in the IT department of a large (e.g. Fortune 500) established company like an insurance company, or perhaps a bank. In that environment, many tech jobs can be low-stress, even development. However, your best bet would be something like a DBA position where your job is to babysit a few production databases, managing backups, server migrations, etc.
telltruth 8y ago
Program Management. I have watched several colleagues switching from dev to PM over time precisely because of stress, both in terms of keeping up with tech as well as release pressure. The downside is that PM jobs are shrinking and climbing career ladder is harder. The upside is that your neck is not on the line (well, most of the time) but you get to share credits for success pretty much all the same and in some cases even be the defecto face of the project in high profile events.
evervevdww221 8y ago
quality assurance positions
- sumedh 8y ago
  Those positions are more stressful compared to devs when you find bugs in production.
chatnati 8y ago
All tech jobs produce stress. People in IT were found to produce more stress chemicals in their blood than a surgeon (study done 10+ years ago during the dotcom boom). Recommend avoiding IT if you cannot handle stress - or go and learn how to handle stress - preferably by joining the military and getting your brain rewired to function successfully under stressful situations.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
You might find it helpful to do some testing of some sort to try to identify your pain points, even if it is free on the internet personality tests, like Briggs-Meyers. For example: Introverts will be stressed by having to deal with people too much. Extroverts will be fine with that, but will lose their marbles from social isolation. Then do some informational interviews to find out actual working conditions for various jobs or at various target companies. Consider the possibility that you may have a hidden disability. They can create areas where a person lacks flexibility and adaptability. If you have some kind of disability, you may mostly need control over things related to that. Knowing exactly what your pain points are can help you figure out what works and what doesn't. You may not need a low stress environment per se. You may just need low stress surrounding X thing.
taway_1212 8y ago
Maybe tech writer (author of documentation, tech blog posts on company website etc.)?
pasta 8y ago
You first should define stress: Being responsible (of thinking you are responsible) without having full control to change a difficult situation.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
martin_ky 8y ago
In addition to what has been said in this thread about office culture, politics, internal processes, etc. I believe a big factor in reducing work-related stress in any job, is actually being competent at your job. What I mean is, work in a domain you know something about, with tools and technologies you know well. Be comfortable with your skills and know they are on par with the task you've been given (and also know when they are not). Don't put more on your plate than you can take. Of course, being too comfortable can result in stagnation. Sometimes, we need to push ourselves or be pushed in order to learn and grow. Let your superiors know when a task is outside your comfort zone. A good mentor will try to push you, but also let you fail gracefully.
collyw 8y ago
Academia tends to be fairly low stress.
- CyberFonic 8y ago
  Only a non-academic would say that. From my experiences in STEM academia (not history, or some such). Today, universities are run by professional managers. It is all about money. So you are writing papers, applying for grants, teaching a hundred or so students, working on 5-6 committees, involved in 2-3 conferences per year, etc. It is rare for an academic to work less than 70 hours a week and for far less money than in industry.
  - collyw 8y ago
    I worked in academia for a number of years. Not as a researcher but as a technician.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- voltooid 8y ago
  Definitely not. https://qz.com/547641/theres-an-awful-cost-to-getting-a-phd-that-no-one-talks-about/ https://qz.com/547641/theres-an-awful-cost-to-getting-a-phd-... (Most of the article is anecdotal but it does make references to studies & statistics of self-reported stress levels among academics.)
  - collyw 8y ago
    Ok, that's a PhD, I am not going to argue against that but there are plenty of non-research jobs in academia.
b0rsuk 8y ago
After being burnt out by previous 2 jobs I found an offer which advertised "good work-personal life balance" among other things. It turned out to be a subcontractor for a grown-up startup. There were 4 people at the moment, including the boss (who conducted the interview himself! 20 years of programming experience). For the first time I felt sympathy and respect for my employer, and I got an impression he liked me too. An interesting thing he told me during the interview: we would not be paid for overtime, because our client doesn't pay for them. I was right. I got the job, and I was nearly 4 years unemployed at the time. This is my favourite job so far by far. The code is dirty, but it's something you just need to get used to (and my "Working with Legacy Code" is on its way). Collegues are smart (but we have 1 hardcore manipulator - to become immune to him, don't tell him anything personal and never try to please him). Deadlines are not a problem because with no unit tests (we do plan to write them) our client is afraid to breathe. Dirty code is not scary if you know how to approach it. I also worked in a corporation which had mostly women. Women love mind games and politics. Those I worked with definitely did. Presence of women is not necessarily an indicator of a stress-free workplace.
- fareesh 8y ago
  > I also worked in a corporation which had mostly women. Women love mind games and politics. Those I worked with definitely did. Presence of women is not necessarily an indicator of a stress-free workplace. It is imprecise to attribute intent to the politics and mind games that you may have experienced personally in an anecdotal case, using that kind of generalization. Also it may have had nothing to do with the fact that they were women, just a bad culture in that company specifically. There are plenty of companies with men who suffer the same problems. Overall it's an unfair generalization.
  - sireat 8y ago
    Anecdotally my wife concurs with the OP. According to her experience(and talking with other women) as soon as the office gets 4-5 women, you get the Marie Antoinette type of tiny intrigues about issues that most heterosexual men would completely gloss over. Theoretically a man could spin such intrigues as well. It doesn't necessarily mean that such an office is a bad place to work as it may or may not affect overall productivity. Personally, I've never noticed such things but then again as a programmer most working environments are 90%+ men.
EZ-E 8y ago
The best is to work for a low traffic backend/back-office/api used internally.. Less risks of downtime, lower damage if it does go down too. No stress with scaling, online migrations, optimisation... I used to work (internship) for a tiny internal backend which only was used maybe once or twice a day. It could have been down for hours and no one would care or notice. If a bug slipped into "live" environment, the worse that could happen is a co-worker phoning me saying "oh yeah I tried to use that and it didn't work, can you help me?" On the flip side you might learn less than working on an high traffic application because high-volume creates a whole new lot of potential issues and things to watch out for. I think I would choose a chill job like this again when I'm older
st1ck 8y ago
Part-time and/or remote if that works for you. Pretty good if you work remotely for junior/middle level job, while having senior skill set. Obviously you earn much less than you could, but you're playing on easy level. Also, specialize in some narrow field. Instead of being Python dev, you can be writing plugins/scripts for Blender. Maybe machine learning. That's not narrow, but much less people can do basic ML in Python than webdev in Python. Maybe screw the programming, just do animations in Blender. Just make sure you don't specialize in something proprietary and headed into dead-end (like Windows Phone).
- radix07 8y ago
  Part-time programming? Never seen such a position, where do they exists?
  - st1ck 8y ago
    Probably not common in the US, but you can always try to negotiate with your existing employer. Networking should help here too. If you live in a place with low cost of living, freelancing must be the most straightforward way to land a part-time job eventually. Some (obviously small) companies just don't have enough work (and money) to hire full time. Some of them go to Upwork or Toptal. I'd like to know what are other ways for them to find talent (except job postings of course).
Nokinside 8y ago
Most job are OK if you can talk honesty to your boss and he tries to find a way to make it work. My first job was in a small 15 people startup that was later sold to larger company. The founder was in his 40's and while he had some technical skills, his people management skills were really extraordinary. I learned from him what it really means if you really believe that the people are the most important resource: you manage every person individually and change things around them to fit them in, not the other way around. We basically changed the tasks and organization to fit the people who worked in the company every time new people came or left. We even changed the the main product to fit the skill set and opportunities that came along with the people who worked in the company. Basically everyone you hire has something that makes them perform less than what their potential is. You can't really change people–they are what they are–but you can change their environment and work they do.
star-techate 8y ago
1. avoid metrics. Ask during the interview how they gauge your work performance, how people get bonuses, etc. As a rule you'd much rather be judged by a person, your direct manager, than by an Excel sheet. Yes, hostile managers can be a source of stress, but they'll be that in any case. Metrics are simply an additional potential source of stress. 2. avoid having to deal with backups. Think of all the warnings about test coverage. Or about advocacy for compile-time checks, and for more thorough checks, for information in the editor as you're coding. Backup systems are all about finding out that shit's broke after it's too late and when you most urgently need it. They are an incarnation of stress. And if you do it well, nobody will ever even know. It's not "heads - bonus, tails - no bonus", but "heads - you can come into work tomorrow for the same pay, tails - you can't".
guilhas 8y ago
Development of tools or web apps for internal company use.
stbn 8y ago
Just a few days ago, I asked a similar question which may be interesting to some: Ask HN: Being Highly Sensitive (HSP), can I find fulfilling work in tech? [0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826317
segmondy 8y ago
From my experience, tons of folks manufacture stress where there shouldn't be none. It's no surprise to see that in the same environment, some folks thrive while other's suffer. Why? Obviously the environment is a fixed constant, so we must reach the conclusion that the difference lies in individuals. When do we find ourselves stressed? Usually when faced with uncertainty. If you know exactly what to do, how to do it, the stress goes down. How do you know exactly what to do? By having crystal clear communication and have clear expectations. How do you know exactly what to do? By having trained for it before hand. Meaning, studying, practicing and having lots of experience. If you know what to do and how and are still feeling stressed what could be the cause? Perhaps other unrealistic expectations, such as a tight deadline. Well, if you believe something is going to take 3 months and your boss believes it's going to take 1 month, then there's a break down in communications if you can't reach a consensus. You must learn to communicate and be diplomatic. What you find out is that those who have great communication skills/social thrive and are less stressed. Let's say that you are great at communication and the deadline still persists, why stress? If you are highly skilled, have a great network, and sufficient savings, you can go get another job right? Well if you are not highly skilled and lucked into a safe boring job, have no network or poor savings, then you can't eliminate the stress. A lot of stress and strain comes from within not outside, it's all about your mental toughness and approach to things. If you believe that these stress are external then you will have a tough time dealing with them, if you believe that you have control and most of it is internal, then you can change your mental approach and state towards them.

189 points by yasp 8y ago

It depends on the company and culture. At my last company the environment was so toxic at the end they could make beer tasting a stressful job. So assuming the company has good culture, this list seems reasonable: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-low-stress-jobs-for-it-pros/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-low-stress-jobs-for-...

yasp 8y ago
Saw the same listicle. Unfortunately most of those roles would be way too dull IMO. Wish it were possible to make being a developer low stress.
- Goosey 8y ago
  It is. Work for a company with good culture. Yelp has been great to me. Disclaimer: I work for Yelp and find it to be low stress.
  - meowface 8y ago
    Interesting, since the public perception of Yelp seems to be that they're an extremely unethical organized crime-style racket intentionally destroying small and medium sized businesses if they don't receive protection money after demanding it. Maybe that's no longer the case or maybe it's solely isolated to Yelp's sales and marketing departments, but either way it doesn't seem to mesh well with having a good culture.
    - okintheory 8y ago
      I'm surprised this is down-voted. Isn't this in fact the public perception? Last time I remember Yelp getting significant mainstream media attention, it was in relation to allegations of racket-like tactics [1]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/03/is-yelp-an-extortion-racket/346166/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/03/is-yelp...
      - maccard 8y ago
        I don't work for yelp or any company related to yelp. Two reasons it could be downvoted. 1) The external facing business image may be totally different to their internal workplace culture (this can go both ways). 2) for all the accusations I've seen of yelp, I've never seen anything more than a he said she said. None of the cases have ever gone to court in any country that I've seen. Anecdote incoming: I worked in a mom and pop shop. We constantly had issues with people threatening bad/false reviews on different websites (Facebook/Google usually). There was also some amount of 1 star reviews that came in from Google accounts with no visible profile info and no description. These things happen obline, and I'm sure yelp is no exception. Do they sell more visible placement to businesses? Yes as do Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor,booking.com, uber eats etc. Is there any proof of them artificially posting reviews to tank small businesses and then removing them when the businessess pay for sponsored listings? Not that I've seen at least.
- astura 8y ago
  It's very possible! Source: I'm developer, I have very little to no stress.

arh68 8y ago

Public sector? Less stress, more politics. A lot of people are RIP, but I doubt that's really what you want.

kristianp 8y ago
What's RIP in this context? Not dead, I assume?
- hellogoodbyeeee 8y ago
  I think he means they are as good as dead. They are so useless, they might as well be dead.
  - bitshepherd 8y ago
    Retired In Place is likely what was intended here.
- arh68 8y ago
  Retired In Place “Well I’ve got 3 more years, then I can retire” “I don’t care about that release date, I’ll be retired by then!” “The reasons I like this place are, well, job security...” “We know your coworker does nothing all day, but he’s about to retire next December, so why try to fire him?”
astura 8y ago
Depends on what you find stressful.
dasmoth 8y ago
For me, constant politics is way more stressful than occasional “X is on fire, fix it now!” There’s a lot of variance in preferred working environments...

rboyd 8y ago

For dev? Maybe some categories of standalone desktop and mobile apps? Something with less frequent releases and without a server infrastructure to monitor. A lot probably depends on the team you have to work with. Maybe education? Producing content? Books, tutorial videos?

jaegerpicker 8y ago
I personally find Mobile or desktop apps A LOT less stressful, deadlines are usually much more reasonable. On iOS at least if the app works on your test device it's VERY likely to work on the device in the wild. Given the nature of the App Store "hot fixes" are a lot less of a thing. Also given the release cycle it's often common to have a lot better of a QA process in place. In general you only need to be an expert in one or two languages (swift/kotlin or Objective-C/Java if you cover both OS's). I'm a full time mobile developer and I love it.
hobls 8y ago
Client side development in general. Libraries, SDKs, etc, are also generally lower stress. They don’t tend to just break in the middle of the night or whatever.

swatcoder 8y ago

Different things are stressful for different people. In a broad sense, some people like the rush of high pressure environments and don't find them stressful. The same people might freak out if nobody's barking at them with demands and deadlines. Other people, obviously, are happy if they have more space and stability. Make this more personal: what kind of things stress you out? Do you already work in tech? What stresses you in your current work?

derekp7 8y ago
I agree, and I would personally define workplace stress as one of the following: 1) Are you expected to perform intractable tasks? Given requirements / tasks by people who obviously don't understand technology or constraints (i.e., "I don't want to hear your excuses, just get it done). 2) Does it feel like a "frat club" that you aren't a member of? Such as people only listening to reason from others that are part of their in-group, but exclude you for some reason (i.e., you weren't there when critical parts of the company were being built, and they don't see you bringing anything valuable to the table). 3) Does every day feel like someone is looking for an excuse to fire you? This can happen at places with stack ranking, where managers hire in sacrificial lambs to throw to the slaughterhouse or when RIFs are required. 4) This goes along with point (1). Is your department not given enough tools / resources to do the job right, so you are always in firefighting mode (doing anti-work, which annihilates actual productive work).

sgroppino 8y ago

Probably the lowest paid ones.

odyssey7 8y ago
I've wondered about this question, and I'm not sure it correlates that way. One company I worked for was known for being one of the lower cost vendors in its industry, and I experienced a pervasive back-stabbing culture, which I attributed to there being many employees who were especially fearful of losing the only job in the industry that they had been able to get. So I think in a lot of cases, the lower paying companies might have employees who are more desparate, and management who is used to having more-than-typical negotiating leverage, which they do exercise.
- collyw 8y ago
  Why would people stay in a high stress low paying job?
  - duggan 8y ago
    A variety of reasons; high switching costs, perhaps due to skills, education, or having limited financial freedom. The current job may confer benefits not available with alternative lower stress options (hours, proximity to family, etc). Perhaps it is an entry level job that is seen as a route to higher paid work.

TamDenholm 8y ago

I'm a contractor, so i work in a lot of different companies and get to experience a lot of different ways of working. I am by far the most relaxed and productive in the companies that are closest to ROWE (Results Only Work Environment). If i know what i need to do, how to achieve it and and left the hell alone to do it where and how i want, i generally perform excellently. The daily "standup" google hangout as a check in on how progress is going works well. When i'm expected to be in the office every day, given funny looks if i pack up my shit at 5pm, asked where i was if i didnt eat lunch at my desk, then quite frankly, i generally leave the contract early. So yeah, its all about the place you work rather than the specific job you have. Being a contractor gives me the opportunity to move around and get a wide range of experience, which i enjoy. It also has the added benefits of being better paid and when you finish the contract, work related stress goes away. Might be worth trying?

jobserunder 8y ago
>When i'm expected to be in the office every day, given funny looks if i pack up my shit at 5pm, asked where i was if i didnt eat lunch at my desk, then quite frankly, i generally leave the contract early. This. I'm the same way. Now I only take 100% remote contracts and now I'm 2-3x more productive than my former office-going self. Fun tip: When someone asks "Where are you?" Then the correct answer is: "Who wants to know?" There are 2 exceptions: 1. It's your Mother asking. She has a right to know because she gave you life. 2. Your employer, when you are on the click. Because they are paying for your time. Since I always bill by the hour and time everything to the minute as I go...I can answer them "Where am I" and send them a URL to the thing that I worked on. If they are asking when I'm explicitly not billing... then either: A) I ghost them immediately and terminate the contract B) Ghost them the day after and send them back files after wiping everything clean. This is the value in having multiple streams of income (rental properties, small contracts and passive income)
- pxndx 8y ago
  Yeah, there's nothing like already being rich. This is terrible advice, not everyone has rental properties or passive income.

gordaco 8y ago

If what you want is a low stress environment, you're like me. Some pieces of advice: 1) This goes without saying, but avoid startups. The more established the company, the better. Big corps are much more likely to respect a 9-to-5 workday and much less likely to call you at 2 am. 2) Try to work in a BTB product, not a BTC. BTB means way fewer customers, and fewer customers means fewer eyes looking for bugs, which in turn means a lower probability of finding an unexpected bug that needs to be solved yesterday. This sounds a bit cynical, but really isn't because of my next point: 3) There is an even better way to avoid bugs in production: have a very good and thorough testing system. When interviewing, ask about the testing process and how likely are they to detect bugs before a client runs the code. If you are looking for a job as a tester, instead ask the following: how automated are the tests and the build system? The more, the better. 4) This might sound bad, but it's my best piece of advice about jobs: look for a workplace that has lots of women (yes, they exist. For certain charitable definition of "lots", at least). Especially older women. Bonus points if you see pregnant women. Double bonus points if people are allowed to work less hours in order to take care of their kids, and you know a few people taking advantage of this situation (IDK how frequent is this in the US. Here in Spain it's common and regulated by law). Triple bonus points if there are many women in managerial positions. I realize that all of this sounds sexist, but whether we like it or not, the weight of childcare and housekeeping still falls mostly on the shoulders of women. So, if you find a company with lots of women, it usually means that the company offers very good work-life balance. As a bonus, you avoid one common source of stress: the competitiveness that pervades certain brogrammer companies. There are also some points to consider that apply to every job: learn to forget about work the moment you exit the office (have something to do on evenings. Something for yourself, something not related to your job); try to make commute pleasurable (walk to your job, use public transport so you can read, etc); avoid romantic relationships with colleagues, especially people you work closely with; etc. EDIT: typo.

cleandreams 8y ago
If you want the startup life, find a startup where the founders (white men probably) have small children and professional wives.
- 8y ago

avcdsuia 8y ago

Try some nooptropics before you go for stress-free jobs. https://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics/wiki/faq#wiki_what_supplements_are_possibly_good_for_mitigating_anxiety.3F https://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics/wiki/faq#wiki_what_suppl...

vasco 8y ago
Quintessential HN.
mlevental 8y ago
man if this isn't one of the dumbest hn responses I've ever seen I don't know what is - "instead of trying to have a healthy work-life balance or accommodate personal emotional necessities take these unregulated unproven mind altering substances and keep working yourself to death". like is that you Elon trying to get Tesla employees to crank out more cars? and people actually wonder what the value of teaching kids about toxic labor-exploitative ideology is. sheesh
- avcdsuia 8y ago
  We aren't born in perfection. I'm assuming we all live healthy lives already, but that's not gonna cure everything. I understand my opinion isn't popular, or easy to accept. However, some people (including me) have mild or severe anxiety, are ruled by fear in their entire lives. Having drugs doesn't mean they can eliminate what is encoded in their gene, but it can make dealing with their emotion more approachable, that's enough. ps: I do L-Theanine, which can be found commonly in teas.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - toyota786 8y ago
    Surely if you're assuming that the person reading this has anxiety or something similar leading to their desire for a more laid-back job, the proper advice should be to go to their doc and see about getting diagnosed and prescribed. I'd say self medication is probably a last resort and even then one that should be done with caution.

closeparen 8y ago

At my employer, you have a pretty low-stress life if you're content to be a contributor on other people's projects and not angling for your own. Of course, your career will never advance that way.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
The trick is to get a high dollar job that doesn’t require your career to advance. Let someone else shovel dreck for no additional comp.

bobosha 8y ago

Government jobs

rasengan 8y ago

It might be worth breaking down the types of stressors that you may have issue with and identifying the ones that are non-starters. Then you might be able to narrow down a professional career that is in-line with the way you wish to live life.

pm90 8y ago
This is great advice and needs more visibility. Things that cause stress for someone may not be the same things that cause stress for another. e.g. for me personally, working a stable, boring job was more stressful since I felt like my talents, my opportunity to have an impact was being severely affected.

scarface74 8y ago

It depends on what stresses you. I hate red tape and indecisiveness. When I want to get something done, I hate having to go through bureaucracy and meetings and approvals. For me, small companies or small teams where I am on team that has complete autonomy over the “how” is the least stressful. Of course you want some sensible standards. I was more stressed out as the “Dev lead” with supposed authority where every decision had to go through red tape, a ticketing system and approvals than I was at a small company where I was “just” a developer who would let my team know my architectural thinking - just to make sure I wasn’t missing something - and then have free reign from development, devops, netops, etc. - I had admin access to their AWS infrastructure. I also don’t do well in large companies. I can do it, but having to deal with large organizations stresses me. I’m also a little nuerotic about not being competitive in the market and being “stuck” at a job.

hvidgaard 8y ago
As a company grows, and especially as the portfolio of code expands, it becomes a necessity to have an "it architect" have the overview of it all, approving changes to the interworkings of it all. They also needs to approve tech changes, not because they don't want you to work with cool new stuff, but because they have to guarantee the dependencies pulled in are reasonable. A big software system is comparable to an aircraft in complexity, and it's not unreasonable to expect it to be handled like this.
- scarface74 8y ago
  It doesn’t help when the person serving as your IT Architect doesn’t know AWS, your outsourced AWS support company only knows the netops part of AWS so they built the AWS environment just like you would build an environment on prem, manually (instead of using Cloud Formation), having separate subnets for EC2 instances for Dev vs. prod instead of having entirely separate accounts (ie VPCs), and didn’t know how to use any of the other features of AWS. They decided while I was there to move completely over to AWS from an on prem environment and brought in “consultants” to help us. To be honest, I was the architect responsible for software development for the company but didn’t know AWS from a hole in the wall at the time - but neither did the consultants. I wanted to contract someone on my team that had done development and devops on AWS and was certified. I already had approval to hire developers and my budget would have allowed it. But that was a turf battle. Seeing the writing on the wall, I spent the next six months studying up on AWS even though I couldn’t use any of the services. It took so long to get anything approved and my neck was on the line to deliver the system by a certain date, I just asked for a bunch of large AWS EC2 environments and started using the same tools that I would have used in an on prem environment - Mongo (instead of DynamoDB or ElasticSearch), Consul/Vault for configuration (instead of Parameter Store), Fabio (for “load balancing” with internal services), Nomad for job execution and scheduling (instead of CloudWatch/lambda/Elastic Container Service) etc. They ended up having a run rate on AWS that was much more expensive than if I had used AWS services. But, I followed all of the procedures, had complete control over my environments and servers without touching the AWS console, kept the netops team employed because they had to manage the monstrosity - Consul, Vault, Mongo, and Nomad were clustered. I got my pat on the back for delivering on time and on budget - since the AWS architecture budget fell on the netops team not mine - and got my bonus. Then knowing what POS I was forced to create, I put my AWS certifications, my “successful” project, and my title of “lead software architect” that I negotiated for on my resume and got the hell out of dodge to a smaller company that paid me more where I was able to do everything correctly. Fast forward a little bit, now I’m getting real -all I have to do is sign on the dotted line - lucrative offers for consultant roles for a “cloud architect” position because I’m one of the few people in my market that know AWS from a netops, devops, and development point of view. But I don’t want the stress or travel right now. That’s the way the game has to be played to get ahead. Whether I like it or not....

inostia 8y ago

Try looking into higher education, particularly major state or well-regarded private universities. Avoid for-profit degree mills. It's a great environment to work in, often times much less stress than in a for-profit environment, with a lot of room for advancement into leadership. If you enjoy working in and around academia that's a plus, often with benefits to take classes and even get a degree while working. The work can be a bit on the "boring" side, but it also provides great work-life balance and stability. If you live in California, look at some opportunities in the University of California system. Downsides are generally lower pay, and as I mentioned it can be a bit boring.

walshemj 8y ago

Might help if you tell us in which country and what sector you are working in.

twblalock 8y ago

I think it's more about processes than anything else. I've worked at a company with poor processes around code quality, testing, and deployment. Every release day, we know we would have a very late night because of all of the customer-facing bugs our inadequate QA processes didn't catch. We also had regular outages for the same reason, often in the middle of the night. We didn't have good monitoring systems so problems often came to our attention only after customers had been affected for hours. And we didn't have useful post-mortems so the same problems happened again and again. Now I work at a much larger company, where the stakes for production problems are much higher. But I am not stressed out, because we do such a good job with testing and monitoring that (fingers crossed) I've only had one bad night troubleshooting production problems during the entire previous year. And when something goes wrong, we take steps to make sure it can't happen again. The second corporate culture is the one you should look for it you want a low-stress job. You're more likely to find it at companies that have been around for a while, but there are younger companies like that too.

analog31 8y ago

Location may matter. I suspect working in the Midwest is lower stakes than on the coasts, possibly with a better environment (e.g., easy access to the great outdoors), and less fearsome commutes.

stevebmark 8y ago

Generally IT / infrastructure / administrative are the most checked out, coasting, least engaged, least applied folks, with the exception being poorly designed environments where you're always dealing with outages. And of course there's high risk if you get it wrong. Generally work that has a direct customer and user requirements, like application design (closer to the front end of an application) is more stressful, with API/backend layer less stressful. There's less pressure to deliver features and it's easier to apply straight SE principles without having to care as much about the end product. Generally the further you get away from end user customer deliverables, the less stress there is.

devonkim 8y ago
I have to highly, highly disagree given the context that in most SaaS software companies operations are going to be on-call, and horrific on-call nights can't happen if you're not on-call. Even in the best of companies (minus organizations that have the massive resources of a follow-the-sun on-call rotation) being on-call means tons of interruptions during one of the most important times you need to not be interrupted - sleeping. What you may be observing is that the operations folks that make it to a later stage in their career that have not burned out permanently have adopted / maintained a mentality of simply not caring about work as much as possible.

cryptozeus 8y ago

I have worked in midwest, east cost, south Florida and west cost. Believe me, location makes a huge difference. I.e new york was extremely stressful with lots of micro management and back stabbing. Midwest was really slow for my liking...for me I found the balance as a software dev in west cost. Working in mid level company with full fredom for schedule.

wincy 8y ago
I made the mistake of working for a Silicon Valley company that moved their offices to the Midwest to save money. They had also fired their entire dev team three years before and outsourced them because “they wrote tests”.
- cryptozeus 8y ago
  Hummm something similar is happening to my company, no more hiring in valley. All new hires in midwest Offices. Will have to watch out. Tx

alphanumeric0 8y ago

Find a job where the people defining the software direction have experience doing so. Find a lead who has a firm grasp of how software evolves and can hand you software specifications that make sense and don't have bugs built in to them (I speak from experience).

rhapsodic 8y ago

I suggest first, don't work for a tech company. Work in the IT department of a large (e.g. Fortune 500) established company like an insurance company, or perhaps a bank. In that environment, many tech jobs can be low-stress, even development. However, your best bet would be something like a DBA position where your job is to babysit a few production databases, managing backups, server migrations, etc.

telltruth 8y ago

Program Management. I have watched several colleagues switching from dev to PM over time precisely because of stress, both in terms of keeping up with tech as well as release pressure. The downside is that PM jobs are shrinking and climbing career ladder is harder. The upside is that your neck is not on the line (well, most of the time) but you get to share credits for success pretty much all the same and in some cases even be the defecto face of the project in high profile events.

evervevdww221 8y ago

quality assurance positions

sumedh 8y ago
Those positions are more stressful compared to devs when you find bugs in production.

chatnati 8y ago

All tech jobs produce stress. People in IT were found to produce more stress chemicals in their blood than a surgeon (study done 10+ years ago during the dotcom boom). Recommend avoiding IT if you cannot handle stress - or go and learn how to handle stress - preferably by joining the military and getting your brain rewired to function successfully under stressful situations.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

You might find it helpful to do some testing of some sort to try to identify your pain points, even if it is free on the internet personality tests, like Briggs-Meyers. For example: Introverts will be stressed by having to deal with people too much. Extroverts will be fine with that, but will lose their marbles from social isolation. Then do some informational interviews to find out actual working conditions for various jobs or at various target companies. Consider the possibility that you may have a hidden disability. They can create areas where a person lacks flexibility and adaptability. If you have some kind of disability, you may mostly need control over things related to that. Knowing exactly what your pain points are can help you figure out what works and what doesn't. You may not need a low stress environment per se. You may just need low stress surrounding X thing.

taway_1212 8y ago

Maybe tech writer (author of documentation, tech blog posts on company website etc.)?

pasta 8y ago

You first should define stress: Being responsible (of thinking you are responsible) without having full control to change a difficult situation.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

martin_ky 8y ago

In addition to what has been said in this thread about office culture, politics, internal processes, etc. I believe a big factor in reducing work-related stress in any job, is actually being competent at your job. What I mean is, work in a domain you know something about, with tools and technologies you know well. Be comfortable with your skills and know they are on par with the task you've been given (and also know when they are not). Don't put more on your plate than you can take. Of course, being too comfortable can result in stagnation. Sometimes, we need to push ourselves or be pushed in order to learn and grow. Let your superiors know when a task is outside your comfort zone. A good mentor will try to push you, but also let you fail gracefully.

collyw 8y ago

Academia tends to be fairly low stress.

CyberFonic 8y ago
Only a non-academic would say that. From my experiences in STEM academia (not history, or some such). Today, universities are run by professional managers. It is all about money. So you are writing papers, applying for grants, teaching a hundred or so students, working on 5-6 committees, involved in 2-3 conferences per year, etc. It is rare for an academic to work less than 70 hours a week and for far less money than in industry.
- collyw 8y ago
  I worked in academia for a number of years. Not as a researcher but as a technician.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
voltooid 8y ago
Definitely not. https://qz.com/547641/theres-an-awful-cost-to-getting-a-phd-that-no-one-talks-about/ https://qz.com/547641/theres-an-awful-cost-to-getting-a-phd-... (Most of the article is anecdotal but it does make references to studies & statistics of self-reported stress levels among academics.)
- collyw 8y ago
  Ok, that's a PhD, I am not going to argue against that but there are plenty of non-research jobs in academia.

b0rsuk 8y ago

After being burnt out by previous 2 jobs I found an offer which advertised "good work-personal life balance" among other things. It turned out to be a subcontractor for a grown-up startup. There were 4 people at the moment, including the boss (who conducted the interview himself! 20 years of programming experience). For the first time I felt sympathy and respect for my employer, and I got an impression he liked me too. An interesting thing he told me during the interview: we would not be paid for overtime, because our client doesn't pay for them. I was right. I got the job, and I was nearly 4 years unemployed at the time. This is my favourite job so far by far. The code is dirty, but it's something you just need to get used to (and my "Working with Legacy Code" is on its way). Collegues are smart (but we have 1 hardcore manipulator - to become immune to him, don't tell him anything personal and never try to please him). Deadlines are not a problem because with no unit tests (we do plan to write them) our client is afraid to breathe. Dirty code is not scary if you know how to approach it. I also worked in a corporation which had mostly women. Women love mind games and politics. Those I worked with definitely did. Presence of women is not necessarily an indicator of a stress-free workplace.

fareesh 8y ago
> I also worked in a corporation which had mostly women. Women love mind games and politics. Those I worked with definitely did. Presence of women is not necessarily an indicator of a stress-free workplace. It is imprecise to attribute intent to the politics and mind games that you may have experienced personally in an anecdotal case, using that kind of generalization. Also it may have had nothing to do with the fact that they were women, just a bad culture in that company specifically. There are plenty of companies with men who suffer the same problems. Overall it's an unfair generalization.
- sireat 8y ago
  Anecdotally my wife concurs with the OP. According to her experience(and talking with other women) as soon as the office gets 4-5 women, you get the Marie Antoinette type of tiny intrigues about issues that most heterosexual men would completely gloss over. Theoretically a man could spin such intrigues as well. It doesn't necessarily mean that such an office is a bad place to work as it may or may not affect overall productivity. Personally, I've never noticed such things but then again as a programmer most working environments are 90%+ men.

EZ-E 8y ago

The best is to work for a low traffic backend/back-office/api used internally.. Less risks of downtime, lower damage if it does go down too. No stress with scaling, online migrations, optimisation... I used to work (internship) for a tiny internal backend which only was used maybe once or twice a day. It could have been down for hours and no one would care or notice. If a bug slipped into "live" environment, the worse that could happen is a co-worker phoning me saying "oh yeah I tried to use that and it didn't work, can you help me?" On the flip side you might learn less than working on an high traffic application because high-volume creates a whole new lot of potential issues and things to watch out for. I think I would choose a chill job like this again when I'm older

st1ck 8y ago

Part-time and/or remote if that works for you. Pretty good if you work remotely for junior/middle level job, while having senior skill set. Obviously you earn much less than you could, but you're playing on easy level. Also, specialize in some narrow field. Instead of being Python dev, you can be writing plugins/scripts for Blender. Maybe machine learning. That's not narrow, but much less people can do basic ML in Python than webdev in Python. Maybe screw the programming, just do animations in Blender. Just make sure you don't specialize in something proprietary and headed into dead-end (like Windows Phone).

radix07 8y ago
Part-time programming? Never seen such a position, where do they exists?
- st1ck 8y ago
  Probably not common in the US, but you can always try to negotiate with your existing employer. Networking should help here too. If you live in a place with low cost of living, freelancing must be the most straightforward way to land a part-time job eventually. Some (obviously small) companies just don't have enough work (and money) to hire full time. Some of them go to Upwork or Toptal. I'd like to know what are other ways for them to find talent (except job postings of course).

Nokinside 8y ago

Most job are OK if you can talk honesty to your boss and he tries to find a way to make it work. My first job was in a small 15 people startup that was later sold to larger company. The founder was in his 40's and while he had some technical skills, his people management skills were really extraordinary. I learned from him what it really means if you really believe that the people are the most important resource: you manage every person individually and change things around them to fit them in, not the other way around. We basically changed the tasks and organization to fit the people who worked in the company every time new people came or left. We even changed the the main product to fit the skill set and opportunities that came along with the people who worked in the company. Basically everyone you hire has something that makes them perform less than what their potential is. You can't really change people–they are what they are–but you can change their environment and work they do.

star-techate 8y ago

1. avoid metrics. Ask during the interview how they gauge your work performance, how people get bonuses, etc. As a rule you'd much rather be judged by a person, your direct manager, than by an Excel sheet. Yes, hostile managers can be a source of stress, but they'll be that in any case. Metrics are simply an additional potential source of stress. 2. avoid having to deal with backups. Think of all the warnings about test coverage. Or about advocacy for compile-time checks, and for more thorough checks, for information in the editor as you're coding. Backup systems are all about finding out that shit's broke after it's too late and when you most urgently need it. They are an incarnation of stress. And if you do it well, nobody will ever even know. It's not "heads - bonus, tails - no bonus", but "heads - you can come into work tomorrow for the same pay, tails - you can't".

guilhas 8y ago

Development of tools or web apps for internal company use.

stbn 8y ago

Just a few days ago, I asked a similar question which may be interesting to some: Ask HN: Being Highly Sensitive (HSP), can I find fulfilling work in tech? [0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826317

segmondy 8y ago

From my experience, tons of folks manufacture stress where there shouldn't be none. It's no surprise to see that in the same environment, some folks thrive while other's suffer. Why? Obviously the environment is a fixed constant, so we must reach the conclusion that the difference lies in individuals. When do we find ourselves stressed? Usually when faced with uncertainty. If you know exactly what to do, how to do it, the stress goes down. How do you know exactly what to do? By having crystal clear communication and have clear expectations. How do you know exactly what to do? By having trained for it before hand. Meaning, studying, practicing and having lots of experience. If you know what to do and how and are still feeling stressed what could be the cause? Perhaps other unrealistic expectations, such as a tight deadline. Well, if you believe something is going to take 3 months and your boss believes it's going to take 1 month, then there's a break down in communications if you can't reach a consensus. You must learn to communicate and be diplomatic. What you find out is that those who have great communication skills/social thrive and are less stressed. Let's say that you are great at communication and the deadline still persists, why stress? If you are highly skilled, have a great network, and sufficient savings, you can go get another job right? Well if you are not highly skilled and lucked into a safe boring job, have no network or poor savings, then you can't eliminate the stress. A lot of stress and strain comes from within not outside, it's all about your mental toughness and approach to things. If you believe that these stress are external then you will have a tough time dealing with them, if you believe that you have control and most of it is internal, then you can change your mental approach and state towards them.