4 ms·
I had the opposite experience. Frustrations whilst coding could be severe but were mostly things within my control. Sure, we had major failures and outages wh
by njovin 2y ago
I had the opposite experience. Frustrations whilst coding could be severe but were mostly things within my control. Sure, we had major failures and outages which spiked stress, but these were rare and we learned and grew from them.
As a manager, I was constantly dealing with things way outside my control with much more severe consequences: other people's emotions, people quitting, budget cuts, layoffs, political posturing. At one point I was told to layoff an entire team of very talented, very productive Ukrainian engineers because Russia had decided to invade their country and my company didn't want to deal with the _possibility_ that they'd become unproductive.
I know it's entirely dependent on the type of work and the organization, but from a stress-reduction standpoint I'll take staff engineer over people manager every time.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoSame. The two big stresses as an IC are "I have a difficult problem and I might need to ask for help or admit I can't do it, but there's no deadline closer than the end of the day" and "Production is on fire, which means I get to feel like a hero for a few hours and then do a writeup begging for time to fix our stupid problems." Stressful, but not too scary since there were no other humans involved. When I briefly tried to manage my own team the problem was, "The whole team is staring at me during this boring-ass meeting and it turns out the company's problems are not something I can solve as quick as I thought I could" Letting down customers is stressful, too. When we had big customers quit I took it kinda personally. A lot of hubris involved I guess