> I'm not terribly convinced that software engineering is harder on someone mental health than being a ... lawyer ... is. I am. I worked alongside lawyers for

> I'm not terribly convinced that software engineering is harder on someone mental health than being a ... lawyer ... is. I am. I worked alongside lawyers for almost a decade, providing them with non-engineering professional services. I also have a couple decades of experience in software engineering and startups. The pressure in software engineering is something entirely different, and far worse, than what I experienced in the legal environment. By and large lawyers are lawyers, not managers. Yes, there's a hierarchy of junior associate to senior-most partner but it's lawyers all the way up and down the chain. You don't have lawyers working under managers. And there's something about this that makes the pressures different. Pressures are there, hours are long, spouses are unhappy because the lawyers are always at work or distracted at home... but I never had anxiety attacks or mental health issues working in the legal environment whereas in the software and startup environments I did. In legal, everyone knows the drill and you do the drill. And your superiors have done the drill. In software, you often don't know drill. You just grind, often to satisfy someone who hasn't done the grind themselves. A company I once worked for – a successful public company – has constant openings for senior software engineers for this very reason.