I recently left a stressful job after developing shingles and then celiac disease. My life is much worse now, I went into that job healthy and strong and now I'm sick all the time. Perhaps celaic disease was always in the genetic cards for me, or maybe the stress triggered it? The worst part is the job wasn't especially bad, it was a reasonable job, and I can expect my next job to have similar stress I think. What am I going to do?
I'm always amazed at the change in perspective after being in a job for a while. While unemployed, I feel competent, I make progress on hard problems nobody else in the world is working on, and I feel good. While employed, stupid crap stresses me constantly, I can't leave the stress at work, I bring it home, I obsess about social hierarchies that can vanish in an instant. Everytime I've left a job I'm amazed that after just a couple days I can barely remember what I was working on before and what stressed me, like my brain knows all of that no longer matters and let's it go in an instant.
How can I keep a healthy outside perspective while remaining employed? How do I avoid becoming mentally trapped in the workplace mindset? I've been giving this a lot of thought, but no answers so far.
Go to therapy. Seriously. Helping you work through your mind not doing what you want is literally their profession. I've found it incredibly helpful multiple times throughout my life, for lots of things vaguely similar to this.
I asked a psychiatrist friend of mine what they do when someone shows up depressed for reasons that are totally reasonable. She said they try to use drugs and therapy to generate some minor delusions that would help the person feel better in their environment.
Maybe OP is just having the reasonable response to corporate work and the rest of us are deluded.
But yeah, talking to therapists is like a cheat code OP. You'll feel better. But you might just be having a totally rational experience.
Edit: since this seems to be the wrong place to have this conversation (my mistake), I'd like to emphasize that my point is that you should seek therapy as it was suggested OP, but also to commiserate that offices are often horrible experiences.
I felt this way after leaving an absurdly toxic place[0]. Anything felt more productive. Even lifting weight felt like a torrent of meaning. But I'm not sure this freedom lasts on your own. It seems reactionary after being pressured into something that hurt you. After 1 month where I did 3h of sport daily and read books, my motivation crashed. Be prepared in case that happens. Find people with better view on life, better sense of workplace sanity. This (IMO) is better long term. Unless you manage to monetize your standalone problem solving skills (freelancing might be a good option for you too).
Take care.
[0] I had a string of bad luck regarding jobs, and I hated the whole work concept, but I got lucky and found a new place which is peaceful and interesting enough. Maybe you can find something like that.
Ya, therapy. But, short answer, stoicism / CBT, at least narrowly. Focus on what you can control. Check out the dichotomy of control. Do your best to be a positive influence. Give your work what is fair, but no more.
Work is for earning slavery units to live life. Everything outside of work is your actual life. Create hard edged barriers between work and not work. Develop and foster deep hobbies you enjoy. This takes effort. I would suggest they not be computer based hobbies.
Eating habits can change with stress. If I eat certain types of wheat, my back hurts. I had an endoscopy and colonoscopy that came back normal, but I had some inflammation spots in my stomach, likely due to consuming some bad wheat or something else. These changes can come about from the state of gut biomes.
Cleaning up my eating habits and consuming probiotics seems to have helped a lot. I can eat limited amounts of gluten now without my back hurting, or my stomach complaining about it. I still struggle with cravings of sugar and cream at times, especially when I'm fighting depressive events. Eating things the body craves is an easy out. It's limiting those actions with mind, when it is not so healthy, that challenge many of us.
Nowadays many plants, including barley and soybeans, are sprayed with round-up two weeks before harvest so they will dry in the field. Of course the round-up is not rinsed off, because that would defeat the purpose. It is unknown what effect consuming that much round-up has on people, but the effects we know about are not good.
Not sure what its called, but there is a test you can get your doctor to do that checks what foods you shouldn't eat. Sister-in-law took it and discovered soy was not good for her along with some other products she ate. Really helped with avoid food related problems.
What worked for me past years is having a vision for the money earned at work. My vision is time/energy/financial independence and I do that by buying income paying assets (e.g., rental properties), running a small business, and being contractor so I have a say in the number of hours I work.
What didn't work for me is buying a fancy car, expensive shoes, semi-luxury remodels of my home, etc. -- those were just net negatives like a drug that keeps life bearable just a little longer. Frankly I suspect _needing_ those things are often a symptom of not being content with your life.
It's been said "a why to live can bear almost any how". The problem in your case is that the stress can make your precarious health situation worse. But maybe the why > how mitigates stress ? It did in my case. Sorry and thanks for sharing. Anyone of us can go from good to poor health so it is worth contemplating your situation.
As someone whose work imbalances led him from a software development manager to years of prison, here's what years of alone time to think about things led me to (probably just the ravings of someone gone insane but it feels good to share):
1. Truly take the time to realize that your life is valuable and worth prioritizing. Somehow my only identity morphed into filling the 'superman' roll at work and successful executive at home. If I hadn't saved the company from X or performed some herculean feat I had no worth at work. If I didn't get the next promotion I had no worth at home. But guess what? I had huge worth as a husband and especially as a father, and I sacrificed that because I couldn't see it. You are valuable. You have worth. You are worthy of love. And hopefully, if you are in the right place, you are loved. Being superman/the wonder kid at work/the executive big dog so your wife can show off to the Joneses does not define you. And eventually you age out of the wonder kid role or just actually break in the superman role because, sorry, none of us are superman. And all that fancy stuff? In 10 years its all outdated and you either need to throw it away and replace it or you are too uncool to be one of the cool kids.
2. Find a mentor. Someone who has been through it, who knows what's BS and what isn't, and can help you with what's important. My healthiest work environments were when I had a mentor. One of the most valuable things a mentor always reminded me of when I was deep into an 80 hour week fighting fires. No one is going to die because of this, and no one is going to remember it in 5 years. That and a manager's job is to provide his team the tools they need to do their job, not make his employees tools to do his.
3. Find a community. Relating back to step one, it helps us to value ourselves when we see others valuing us. If you can't find any other, go to an addiction group. You are an addict, maybe in search of an addiction at this point because your character is still holding out, but if you continue this path and haven't already you WILL find your addiction sooner or later.
4. Do not let others tear you down. I had a horrible relationship with my ex-wife. Instead of working to fix it I put tons of energy into going to court in my head why I was right, she was wrong and horrible. Tons of energy into why she was right to think I was a total piece of shit and falsely think I was not worthy of love (see 1 above). Tons of energy into why I deserved a treat/reward for all the hard work I did that no one properly gave me recognition for and deserved, and secretly rewarding myself in the most destructive of ways. At the time I hated my wife. I'm not sure it could be fixed looking back, but I would give anything to go back and put the energy into that relationship that I put into stupid work projects and addiction. Instead the mother of my children, the woman who picked me forever, my best friend from high school on, with whom I shared every major life event, will never talk to me again. A lifetime of memories I don't get to share with her. Family vacation memories. The first time we ordered lemon light at Takara's and remember how good it used to be. Never again a 'dad will you make your amazing ribs this weekend?'.
5. If you have a family, make sure to have a worry tree in your front yard. After a crap work day, after a 1.5 hour commute (I'm oldschool from when people still went to work in the office, you spoiled kids these days!), before going into the house, I paused and left my worries at the worry tree to be picked up in the morning, and went into the house leaving work behind and myself ready to be present for my kids when I opened that door and they ran up screaming excitedly 'daddy's home' :'( When we moved I didn't setup a new worry tree routine and I that is one of my biggest regrets. So many lost evenings because I came home in a shit attitude.
6. Don't white knuckle through life. Ask for help. Ask for help at work. Ask for help at home. Ask for help from a mentor. Ask for help from friends. Definitely don't keep track of all the times you didn't get help/what you wanted in your head. If you didn't ask for it, it's on you. If you keep track of it in your head, you are just wasting energy/brain power. You can't judge people on not helping/appreciating you if you don't show them what you need. No one is going to fix this for you. No one is going to say 'wow, Bob's really deserves a break/help/affection' unless you are lucky enough to have amazing people around you. Ask for a break. Ask for help. Ask for affection. Find enough self worth somehow to know you are worthy of all of those things! If work doesn't respect that, leave. They are a zombie company and will suck you dry. I gave 15 years to a company in a field that I felt made a difference. Made them millions. Signed over patents. Impacted hundreds of thousand of people lives in a positive way. In the end I was worth 2 weeks notice. And nothing I ever did mattered when I was left so broken I utterly and completely failed my children and wife.
Sorry for my rant. I have a mens 'stop being a shitty person' group tonight where it is my night to talk about my story, so I have been thinking about this stuff today and just kind of threw up all over this reply. I apologize for the word vomit.
Social stress gave me a case of the shingles once in my twenties. It didn't make much sense to me at the time, but for some reason being stressed out about buying a bunch of Christmas gifts late in the season caused it to happen!
Shingles is very commonly brought on by stress. It's latent chickenpox virus, which is usually kept in check by the immune system, but stress depresses immune response.
I had a coworker who developed shingles as we were nearing the deadline on a project that had all sorts of problems in layers of the stack we didn't control, and my sister developed shingles after being laid off. The first thing I associate with that disease is stress.
For me it was moving to the rural South and buying a farm. Animals die if I don't feed or water them. It gives me a daily reset. That and I took a job that I feel ethically pushed to do for my 8-5. Just what worked for me. I hope you find your "place".
The elephant in the room is that the vast majority of people who are coping are supporting a family, usually with kids, or are at some age-appropriate stage on that track. The stupid crap and social hierarchies at work are trivialities, obstacles to be overcome and then forgotten. People raising families are often swimming in an ocean of oxytocin and existential fulfillment giving them huge mental and emotional boosts.
I'm pointing this out in case you're endlessly ruminating on what is wrong with you, why can't you just buckle down and deal, whatever, and you're coming home to an empty apartment and Netflix year after year. That's missing the big picture. I'm not saying you should start a family if you don't have one. Maybe you can't or won't, in which case, be gentle with yourself and make sure that you are taking the whole picture into account when you compare yourself with others.
It can help a lot to find ways to compartmentalize your work. It also helps to have ongoing appointments with therapists or other experts who can help you keep an eye on your symptoms to figure out whether anything is starting to go wrong - keeping a journal etc may help you keep things under control.
For me there were some really obvious signs early in my career that I didn't recognize until much later when they led to diagnosis (and mostly successful treatment) of chronic illness - it's easy to assume that things in your workplace are bad because they have to be.
Bringing the stress home is definitely a tough thing. I don't have any answers for you on that. It might help to try and find work you're good at but don't care about, oddly enough, but that poses its own challenges.
While not a cure-all, try Ashwaghanda. It lowers cortisol levels.
> How do I avoid becoming mentally trapped in the workplace mindset?
Think about starting your own business, or at least find a job where you have a greater degree of freedom, or perhaps where you feel you have more of an impact.
Consider taking up contracting. You pick the clients, set your own hours, manage your own deadlines and only take on as much as you want. Its helped me tremendously manage my mental health.
I certainly agree that it gives you a much broader sense of agency. especially when you get to the point you can fire clients for just not being good to work with (generally wanting the final results but not wanting to put in the organizational effort)
it can have the opposite effect on the down times. no one is looking after you to make sure to make rent, and alot of engineers don't have the kind of training or personality that lends to cold calling. at least I don't...I can't even imagine what that would look like for systems programmers - "oh hi, I'm just calling to see if you need any device drivers written". ".......uh..."
I also developed celiac disease recently - it is tough to deal with. Since diagnosis, meal planning, shopping and cooking have become tasks that require a lot of mental energy. Normal things like going out to a show or commuting to work are logistically difficult when you’re unable to eat at any restaurants. I am trying to get a WFH job to curb some of this difficulty. Good luck with everything.
Sadly chain restaurants are your friend now. PF Chang's has never poisoned me with their gluten free. Red Robin's are pretty good about their gluten free but ask them and make sure they know you are actually celiac, the waitress will normally tell you if the place is safe for celiac or just kind of 'gluten free'. Make sure they have a dedicated fryer for their frys, the whole swapping it out is not good enough for celiacs. No other chains have been consistently safe enough 'gluten free' to risk on a business trip for me. Big surprise is the Thai places around me don't have gluten in their soy sauce so they are safe if you order smart/tip well enough that they make sure not to cross contaminate, so you might check with them to see if they will let you look at their soy sauce label, but obviously don't try out places like that on work trips. 'The sickness' in a hotel with jet lag and having to be 'on' to meet clients sucks.
Be careful with things you think are safe. Tortilla chips can have too much cross contamination so experiment when it's safe to 'get the sickness' and find what works for you. When my daughter and I were first diagnosed we couldn't drink coke because the carmel color supposedly had gluten. Some craft rootbeers/dark sodas still have the 'bad' natural color not the 'good' artificial one. Another tricky one that got me a lot until I figured it out, red wine can use a wheat paste to seal the barrels. So cheap steel aged reds only. Red wine is the only thing that gets cheaper when you go gluten free :)
If it makes you feel any better my wife has celiac and it gets easier with time. Eventually you get pretty familiar with things and figure out where is good and where isn't. We mostly do GF in our family cause it's easier to just do GF than try and mix and match.
Also I hope you like Mexican food corn tortillas and chips are a life saver.
Good idea, but he stuff I work on it just for fun, and not as important as I made it sound. My point was that I'm competent and motivated, but stress from work encroaches on that and ruins it.
I wonder how we classify lot of things as "it's in the mind".
My life (eg. family) is already destroyed because of environment. Stress adds up to the damage.
Do not rule out: lyme and other diseases - it is hard to detect those and try bandaid treatments for symptoms. Mold issues in the home/work/car - again this is sickening.
When you have a weak immune systems, you get affected with some of the daemonic disease, and then EMF, stress etc. wreaks havoc on your body.
Yes, you can CONTROL stress and EMF exposures - and reduce the impact on your body.
> I explained to a Google leader how the WebAssembly project was struggling without support from his organization and how people were being driven away from the project. He agreed with my assessment and then told me nothing was going to change. In the end, the team changed things on their own.
Man I wish that didn't feel so relevant. Literally on an all-day "strategy" meeting right now and heard a variation of this about 5 minutes ago...
Oh yeah, that paragraph really nailed it. Every place I've worked that's started to go downhill, it always started with executives, who never acknowledged their role in the problem or did anything to fix it.
I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.
Innovation no longer happens at these places. I can't think of the last thing Google did that was all that impressive. The only google products I still use are search, gmail and google maps. That's it. The same as in 2005.
These companies no longer need to innovate to stay relevant. They focus instead on stifling competition, lobbying politicians, marketing, advertising, dark patterns, etc. The good people eventually get shut out and shut down and leave or stop trying to influence change. The bureaucracy wins and eventually the music stops.
> I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.
The problem is power is too concentrated. Companies no longer need to innovate. This isn't just in tech. Everyone wants their assets to grow at others expense society be damned.
Fundamentally, the C-level/senior executives are rarely connected with what's actually going at the ground level. And IME a lot of them simply don't care. They make decisions without understanding the impacts to the rest of the organization, and when objections or concerns are raised, they're filtered or attenuated at the middle management layer (due, usually, to a culture of fear) or dismissed at the top levels.
Put another way: When the decision makers don't feel the consequences of their decisions, those consequences will be ignored. It's a kind of corporate negative externality.
I think there's also an element of overestimating how much power "people in power" actually have. Unless you're at the point in the org chart where you can actually move money and people you're stuck trying to keep your little zen garden clean inside a massive constantly shifting system you have no control over.
Power in an organization should probably be measured by "resources they have unilateral control over" instead of "authority." Because if all you have is authority you're a glorified manager.
>I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.
Well the problem is you try and then you disappear either because you self-select out of that environment or you get managed out because that's an easier problem for the manager to solve because it doesn't involve admitting they're the problem.
I wonder if presenting concerns to them in the form of problem-consequences would compel them to action.
If an employee is just complaining to them they are likely to just be annoyed, but if they are told about future negative impact then they would need to take some form of action (presumably).
> it always started with executives, who never acknowledged their role in the problem or did anything to fix it
Wow I see a lot of executive hate on HN. Sure some is probably deserved, but I have seen a lot projects and companies (after being brought in as a consultant to fix) where the technologists had a pretty clear business vision given to them and were left to their own devices with good budgets, platform, and process freedom fail miserably due to team dysfunction and all too often—incompetence.
In my experience, this usually happens because an exec sees a presentation or comes up with an idea and is like "Let's do this, we'll throw some good people at it and they'll figure out how" and then it turns out that after the org is built, hundreds of people are working on it, and they've investigated all the constraints, it's not actually possible to build the idea. The ideas that actually work usually get developed in the opposite direction, an engineer says "We can build this, let's put an early version in front of some people and see if we should."
Innovation is path-dependent, and communication/adoption/organizational/economic constraints are just as real as technical ones. It's like how pretty much any skilled programmer could've built the first version of Facebook in a weekend, but to take off, it needed to start in the highest social-status campus (Harvard) of the most networked population (college students) of early adopters (young people). That limited the pool of entrepreneurs to basically just Mark Zuckerburg and the Winklevii, and Zuckerburg got there first under somewhat dubious circumstances.
Same with a lot of discussions in politics, climate change, renewable energy, and Hacker News. An uninformed layperson looks at the problem as a whole, says "We should do this, let's throw money at it and someone will figure out how", and then we end up with a financial bubble and not a whole lot of solutions.
Related reading: The pre-CIA OSS "Simple Sabotage Field Manual"
When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.
Oh, we do it better. We just replace step 2 and 3 with "Executive management says the same set of empty slogans they've been saying for years whenever these problems are raised, thus all but admitting that nothing is actually going to change."
Then we add a step 5 where middle management goes away and gossips about how everything is f*cked.
Yeah, that's not great, but I still highly prefer that truthful "nothing is going to change" over false promises. At least you have the information you need to make a real decision for yourself.
I zeroed-in in that quote as well. What good does it do to optimize your hiring process to select for candidate ability implement middle-out bubblesort at the whiteboard when ... this is the kind of toxicity they can expect to have crashing down on their heads when they actually get there?
The middle-out bubblesort stuff is so they don't have to decide where to put you. You're a cog with a certain amount of learning in you and can be put anywhere someone wants your butt in a seat. It's credentialism at its base, but it's also resource engineering to cut down on management overhead. Just like hint-based management in general, except in these cases the hint is the person's skills.
Recent Xoogler here. I've never met anyone who was actually happy at Google when you sat them down for an honest talk. Everyone was either coasting and depressed/disengaged, or overworked and stressed (I would say 80% were the former). People were frustrated about the bureaucracy, the promo process, the slow pace, the meaninglessness of the work an individual IC does, the stress for managers. Even on a super sexy project dealing with cutting edge AI that got tons of press coverage, everyone was frustrated. This company has a serious cultural issue.
I'm a Googler who has only worked in startups before, and my life has markedly improved in every single way since I started working at Google. There is nothing I miss from life before FAANGs, and I consider the vast majority of Faangineers be obscenely privileged. Most of them have progressed to the same point in life that I am at but are 10 years younger.
For sure, that's the upside of working there. Every aspect of my life outside of career satisfaction improved considerably - I relocated to the US, was able to buy a house, my work life balance got a lot better compared to working at startups, etc. But as a job in and of itself it was pretty lame (apart from a few periods that were fun). The thing is, I feel like that's true for most people there.
You didn't really give us any experiences in this comment. No mention at all of why anything is better, or how your experience has differed from OP or the comment you're replying to.
2gler here. I was actually really happy for about the first 80% of my first time at Google (Search, 2009-2012). Miserable for the last 20%. Mildly discontent for my first team back, reasonably happy after transferring.
Your team and the specific work you're doing matters a lot for your happiness at Google (and presumably any big company). Work with your manager to craft a job description that's better suited for you, or transfer if you can't. You have to actively manage your career - and your happiness - in any job.
The issue is, originally FAANG jobs were exciting.
Think about it this way, everyone who was early at Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook/etc has awesome stories of being on the first team in the world to ever try solving some really difficult problems. Exploring unknown new fields of computing, designing new UIs for never before imagined devices. You did super cool things.
It is comparatively recent that FAANG jobs have become sort of lame.
Remember how cool Google maps was when it first came out? Or how awesome Gmail was? Those were ground breaking projects!
Heck we take distributed databases for granted now days, but Facebook pioneered a lot of amazing technology, so did Google, Amazon, and Twitter.
Microsoft actually may have had the right model way back when, back when they had teams and job roles in charge of making new products, and another org just devoted to maintaining current versions of software. Of course that division was easy to make back when software came on CDs. Now days everything is cloud based and evergreen.
Maybe companies need to have a career path that is just "maintain stuff" and your promos are based on how well stuff keeps working and any cost savings/perf improvements you can squeeze out of the existing code w/o doing a massive rewrite.
I mean, I often make the same points as you (also ex-Google.)
But I have to say, as a counterpoint, I met many people inside Google who loved it there and were living their best career lives there, and getting treated really well to do it.
It wasn't me, but, there's a personality type that thrives in those environments. It's not all awful. You get to play with some really fancy big tools. Deploy your stuff across thousands of servers or ship a product to millions of people. Sit on the shoulders of other really smart engineers and use the pretty amazing stuff they build (like, seriously, stuff like F1 etc. is pretty amazing).
And if you can play the game there well, and you really want to succeed there, there's lots of room to climb.
Wasn't my game, but let's be honest, there's actually a lot there to go with.
> I've never met anyone who was actually happy at Google when you sat them down for an honest talk. Everyone was either coasting and depressed/disengaged, or overworked and stressed
I think this is true of most careers in the US. At the end of the day it's a job, help you provide for yourself and family. It would be amazing if you were in love with every minute of it, but it a means to the end. You hear many NFL players say the same thing, they dont care if they win or lose, it's just their job. They show up, play, get a pay check and go on with their life.
I'd settle for at least feeling like my time on earth is not wasted and my talents are appreciated. I completely felt that in jobs before Google and I'm feeling it right now in my post-Google job at another FAANG (but it could be because I'm at a more senior role and it's a honeymoon phase)
What I mean was that I saw no middle - people working okay hours and enjoying themselves. You had motivated people producing good work with decent load but hating it, like me. Or people not caring and coasting doing little work - also like me when I got depressed from the work. And people super stressed and burning out. But I saw no happy people.
I’m a Googler and I’m very happy with my job and the company in general. People I work on projects with also seem engaged and satisfied with their work.
This really hits home for me. I've been in a similar situation for more than a year. Extremely overworked, understaffed team constantly missing deadlines. Endless pointless meetings. Managers don't care. Even my short and long term memory has taken a toll, although its probably due to another chronic health issue. I want to quit and stay unemployed for a while, but that's frankly just scary. Good job.
It's funny how concepts that get repeated a million times in "how to be a boss" type threads are completely forgotten in "my job sucks" ones. Case in point: CULTURE COMES FROM THE TOP.
Your managers are the ones closest to you in setting the culture, and they're telling you to stop caring. Take the hint, just like they'd want you to take the (common at many many companies) hint that they aren't going to fire you, but it's time for you to move on to your next job.
I have a potentially crippling difficulty in understanding people and relationships. It's not entirely clear to me what I can do to help work through it or increase my skill levels with respect to it.
At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to accept what people say and do at the object level. Instead of at a meta level. That is to say, object level is what people actually say and do and meta level is like the subtext to borrow a literary term of what people say and do.
The boss saying, "let's all work hard and do what it takes." Is something that I want to take literally. What they mean is, "Just put in 8ish hours a day and don't take a two week vacation right before a release." However, I'm deeply uncomfortable with taking the meta version.
When the meta version is totally divorced from the object version is where things completely go off the rails for me. "Let's all work hard and do what it takes." => "Don't rock the boat because none of this was ever going to work in the first place."
Fortunately for me, I've only seen such bosses (or I suppose scenarios) from afar. As far as I know I've never worked directly for one.
I always want to do this but health insurance always keeps me from never going a day without being employed. Im fortunate to be able to have that kind of job stability but the anxiety of being out of a job and then needing any kind of medical care is real.
> health insurance always keeps me from never going a day without being employed.
There's no way to cap the actual health care costs, but the health insurance is about 30k/year for a family of 4 on COBRA.
That is a lot or not depending on how your job is affecting your health.
I'm right now spending a year off work and leaving my job has definitely improved my life more than paying me 30k would (of course, there are other expenses too - it's like a 120k/year burn rate in the bay area).
My father ended his life from issues related to work stress (it had to do with violent naxal robberies and being personally threatened, but still no sleep for 3-4 days messes you up), so I might have a very skewed point of view on this, but the lesson was to never take the "retire and do hobbies at 60" for granted & to draw-down the financials into time spent when you can keep up with your kids on shared things.
You do not have to sign up when you terminate your employment. You can sign up when you actually need medical care that you want to be covered. Though, at that time you have to pay back for the time since termination.
It makes it a little easier to walk away and "hope for the best" on the healthcare front.
>I want to quit and stay unemployed for a while, but that's frankly just scary
I don't know you, but if you have the savings to do it, I'd say go for it. I've done it and it was wonderful. The day I realized I could just quit my job without having another job lined up a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I couldn't manage to find the effort needed to go through a job search while still employed, and taking a six month sabbatical also was great for doing a lot of new things I didn't usually have the time for.
That's great for you. Not really feasible for the likes of me, who have a girlfriend and 3 animals to support. To say nothing of those with actual, human kids.
If you can manage it, my advice would be to just start quietly looking for new opportunities on the side. You may be able to make a pivot. Putting your health first also means trying to make the safest choices so you don't have more stress to deal with.
Put a month in between starting something new, too. Depending on the particulars of the healthcare involved that might not even require COBRA (many cover you through the end of the month rather than ending the day you leave; many also cover you day 1 of employment rather than starting X days after, so you can quit on the 1st of one month, start new job on the 1st of the next month, or similar), but even if not, one month of COBRA and missed expenses isn't that bad.
But, that way you can actually have a breather, get back into a healthy headspace, etc, before starting in. My best job transitions have had a break in between; my worst were quit job 1 on Friday, start job 2 on Monday.
Normally I have few meetings, but recently it's gone up a bit. I told people I'll be available so they can call me in if they have a specific question. Suddenly I got stuff done again.
> Managers don't care.
This is part of the reason why I looked for a smaller company, where passion is required to survive.
> We did not have a PM. We knew we needed one, we tried to get one, and at best we had a part-time PM for a brief time who volunteered and then moved on. This left complex social and organizational challenges in the hands of overworked engineers with little experience solving them.
That's really the problem, right there, and I think she pretty much says it.
I've worked with standards people before (not on the committees, themselves, thank Cthulhu). It's a really rocky environment.
Usually, everyone involved is full of self-interest, and they want to push their own agenda, because billions. Having a standard give you an edge, can be quite valuable. Look to some of the video codecs, and see why.
In that environment, it's often difficult to get everyone to agree on a "The Buck Stops Here" leader. Usually, a Chair is appointed when the committee is formed. Sounds like this one just sort of congealed.
I sincerely wish her health and happiness. In my case, being forced out of the rat race was one of the best things that could have happened to me.
I work at Google and generally love it but this is currently my #1 complaint about being on an infra team. We have no PM so it falls to me to figure out how best to apply the systems and tools we have in new domains... but I can't actually make these decisions unilaterally. It requires people on the other side of whatever engagement and those relationships are complex and often fickle and it takes a huge amount of my time to navigate them. We temporarily had a PM who got a bunch of initiatives started but then swapped teams and all of the momentum vanished.
> If you’re building a product that billions of people will be stuck with, however, this can lead to a little stress. The history of the web is littered with bad APIs, ill-considered specs, and tangled piles of security vulnerabilities. Something a programmer puts together in a week can consume decades of engineering time in the future. WebAssembly could not and would not release as a half-baked or ill-considered spec because as browser developers we all understood the costs everyone would pay for that.
I might be missing something here, but this feels a little like unnecessary pressure. As I understand it, billions of people wouldn't be using the API; a few compiler authors would. I thought that's one of the nice things about WASM: recompile to upgrade. Security is a good concern to have, of course!
I used to work at G. They put this pressure on you artificially, I think because they believe it gets you to buy in to your work due to its importance. Practically, it seems to encourage lethargy because you need to make sure that all billion of them are happy. Great engineering is done when you know what you can sacrifice some goals for other goals.
People today aren't a lot smarter than people were 20 years ago, and we kind of forget that fact when we try to do grandiose projects like "replace the entire stack and make sure that it works equally well to the old stack in all circumstances." The old stack was built well for its goals, and had the benefit of 20 years of tuning. The replacement needs to come when the goals change. There is plenty of opportunity still: peoples' goals change frequently.
If the goal was just to allow you to write webapps using toolchains for native apps, then you can put in an LLVM-like sidecar next to JS that has terrible performance but amazing security (I think this was closest to the goal of WASM). However, if the goal was to bring native performance to webapps means you can target your spec toward efficient JIT compilation on x86 and ARM (and RISC-V), without worrying a lot about portability to other architectures. I have heard a mix of the two looking at the WASM project from the outside: that they wanted native performance with 100% portability of both hardware platforms and development languages, and they thought they could achieve it.
A great TPM (technical program/product manager - the Google term for an engineering-focused product manager) can help define these exclusions, and it sounds like OP really tried hard to get one. I'm surprised that Google didn't give them one to start.
I had the same conclusion: This team needs to get a dedicated TPM to act as a stress umbrella for the team. I tell my engineering team, if anyone is stressing you out, "pinging you" for things, asking you to set up pointless meetings, "escalating" things with managers, or anything else that sucks away your productivity, please redirect them to me and I'll handle these annoyances. If software developers are distracted by stressful bullshit, then I'm not doing my job.
Chrome already had Google Native Client (NaCl), basically the LLVM sidebar you describe, so asm.js and wasm (and even Google's own Dart VM) had an uphill battle to being adopted by Chrome.
> As I understand it, billions of people wouldn't be using the API; a few compiler authors would.
Yes, but billions of people may suffer the consequences of the WASM design doing something stupid and then the few compiler authors having to semi-successfully deal with it. That may be stressing, assuming that you care about such things as your brain child being an improvement (not a regression) on what came before.
Very few developers, yes, but shipped to very many end users. As it turns out WASM was used as a springboard for a pretty nasty exploit chain to get persistent root on Chromebooks (responsibly disclosed and fixed, thankfully.)
> I’ve seen managers cry multiple times, and this is one of the places that happened.
What sorts of places are they working that they have seen this multiple times?! Maybe I’ve been very fortunate, but I’ve worked for a Fortune 500 company for 20 years and I cannot think of a single times things have become so stressful that anyone was close to tears. Usually things are very calm and when managers talk about work life balance they really mean it and walk the walk and don’t just talk the talk.
i wrote and then deleted a comment. I work in consulting and I'll just say that tears on conference calls are rare but do happen from time to time.
I've seen it at the bottom of the org chart all the way to almost the very top and even client side. It's not uncommon for race cars to be pushed until the engine blows and it's not uncommon for people to be pushed (or push themselves) beyond what they can bear. Everyone has their limits and there's no shame in reaching/crossing them. I've been there and it sucks, it really does.
I've seen it particularly when it's about things that are (or seem to be) important but the business has neglected supporting the team accordingly. When you're in this position and don't have a good place to quickly jump to it's easy to think "I'll just put in as much as they do and live on" but when something goes wrong and that team is the only one that can fix important (or "important") thing inevitably many just go through extremely stressful situations.
Chronic stress is no joke. It really does cause brain damage, which people usually describe as "burn-out" as if it is just a thing to get over. But it takes years to get back to a functional condition, and it will not be the condition you started in.
Never stay with a thing that is giving you chronic stress. Damage is permanent. Leave it, or find a way to not be insulated.
A really excellent book on chronic stress and its effects on physiology is "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers", by Robert Sapolsky, and endocrinologist. (It is beyond me how anybody can become an endocrinologist without suffering chronic stress!) I had to read the last chapter at 30 minutes per page, plus breaks, because he was tying up threads from the whole rest of the book.
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I'm always amazed at the change in perspective after being in a job for a while. While unemployed, I feel competent, I make progress on hard problems nobody else in the world is working on, and I feel good. While employed, stupid crap stresses me constantly, I can't leave the stress at work, I bring it home, I obsess about social hierarchies that can vanish in an instant. Everytime I've left a job I'm amazed that after just a couple days I can barely remember what I was working on before and what stressed me, like my brain knows all of that no longer matters and let's it go in an instant.
How can I keep a healthy outside perspective while remaining employed? How do I avoid becoming mentally trapped in the workplace mindset? I've been giving this a lot of thought, but no answers so far.
Maybe OP is just having the reasonable response to corporate work and the rest of us are deluded.
But yeah, talking to therapists is like a cheat code OP. You'll feel better. But you might just be having a totally rational experience.
Edit: since this seems to be the wrong place to have this conversation (my mistake), I'd like to emphasize that my point is that you should seek therapy as it was suggested OP, but also to commiserate that offices are often horrible experiences.
Take care.
[0] I had a string of bad luck regarding jobs, and I hated the whole work concept, but I got lucky and found a new place which is peaceful and interesting enough. Maybe you can find something like that.
Work is for earning slavery units to live life. Everything outside of work is your actual life. Create hard edged barriers between work and not work. Develop and foster deep hobbies you enjoy. This takes effort. I would suggest they not be computer based hobbies.
Cleaning up my eating habits and consuming probiotics seems to have helped a lot. I can eat limited amounts of gluten now without my back hurting, or my stomach complaining about it. I still struggle with cravings of sugar and cream at times, especially when I'm fighting depressive events. Eating things the body craves is an easy out. It's limiting those actions with mind, when it is not so healthy, that challenge many of us.
What didn't work for me is buying a fancy car, expensive shoes, semi-luxury remodels of my home, etc. -- those were just net negatives like a drug that keeps life bearable just a little longer. Frankly I suspect _needing_ those things are often a symptom of not being content with your life.
It's been said "a why to live can bear almost any how". The problem in your case is that the stress can make your precarious health situation worse. But maybe the why > how mitigates stress ? It did in my case. Sorry and thanks for sharing. Anyone of us can go from good to poor health so it is worth contemplating your situation.
1. Truly take the time to realize that your life is valuable and worth prioritizing. Somehow my only identity morphed into filling the 'superman' roll at work and successful executive at home. If I hadn't saved the company from X or performed some herculean feat I had no worth at work. If I didn't get the next promotion I had no worth at home. But guess what? I had huge worth as a husband and especially as a father, and I sacrificed that because I couldn't see it. You are valuable. You have worth. You are worthy of love. And hopefully, if you are in the right place, you are loved. Being superman/the wonder kid at work/the executive big dog so your wife can show off to the Joneses does not define you. And eventually you age out of the wonder kid role or just actually break in the superman role because, sorry, none of us are superman. And all that fancy stuff? In 10 years its all outdated and you either need to throw it away and replace it or you are too uncool to be one of the cool kids.
2. Find a mentor. Someone who has been through it, who knows what's BS and what isn't, and can help you with what's important. My healthiest work environments were when I had a mentor. One of the most valuable things a mentor always reminded me of when I was deep into an 80 hour week fighting fires. No one is going to die because of this, and no one is going to remember it in 5 years. That and a manager's job is to provide his team the tools they need to do their job, not make his employees tools to do his.
3. Find a community. Relating back to step one, it helps us to value ourselves when we see others valuing us. If you can't find any other, go to an addiction group. You are an addict, maybe in search of an addiction at this point because your character is still holding out, but if you continue this path and haven't already you WILL find your addiction sooner or later.
4. Do not let others tear you down. I had a horrible relationship with my ex-wife. Instead of working to fix it I put tons of energy into going to court in my head why I was right, she was wrong and horrible. Tons of energy into why she was right to think I was a total piece of shit and falsely think I was not worthy of love (see 1 above). Tons of energy into why I deserved a treat/reward for all the hard work I did that no one properly gave me recognition for and deserved, and secretly rewarding myself in the most destructive of ways. At the time I hated my wife. I'm not sure it could be fixed looking back, but I would give anything to go back and put the energy into that relationship that I put into stupid work projects and addiction. Instead the mother of my children, the woman who picked me forever, my best friend from high school on, with whom I shared every major life event, will never talk to me again. A lifetime of memories I don't get to share with her. Family vacation memories. The first time we ordered lemon light at Takara's and remember how good it used to be. Never again a 'dad will you make your amazing ribs this weekend?'.
5. If you have a family, make sure to have a worry tree in your front yard. After a crap work day, after a 1.5 hour commute (I'm oldschool from when people still went to work in the office, you spoiled kids these days!), before going into the house, I paused and left my worries at the worry tree to be picked up in the morning, and went into the house leaving work behind and myself ready to be present for my kids when I opened that door and they ran up screaming excitedly 'daddy's home' :'( When we moved I didn't setup a new worry tree routine and I that is one of my biggest regrets. So many lost evenings because I came home in a shit attitude.
6. Don't white knuckle through life. Ask for help. Ask for help at work. Ask for help at home. Ask for help from a mentor. Ask for help from friends. Definitely don't keep track of all the times you didn't get help/what you wanted in your head. If you didn't ask for it, it's on you. If you keep track of it in your head, you are just wasting energy/brain power. You can't judge people on not helping/appreciating you if you don't show them what you need. No one is going to fix this for you. No one is going to say 'wow, Bob's really deserves a break/help/affection' unless you are lucky enough to have amazing people around you. Ask for a break. Ask for help. Ask for affection. Find enough self worth somehow to know you are worthy of all of those things! If work doesn't respect that, leave. They are a zombie company and will suck you dry. I gave 15 years to a company in a field that I felt made a difference. Made them millions. Signed over patents. Impacted hundreds of thousand of people lives in a positive way. In the end I was worth 2 weeks notice. And nothing I ever did mattered when I was left so broken I utterly and completely failed my children and wife.
Sorry for my rant. I have a mens 'stop being a shitty person' group tonight where it is my night to talk about my story, so I have been thinking about this stuff today and just kind of threw up all over this reply. I apologize for the word vomit.
I had a coworker who developed shingles as we were nearing the deadline on a project that had all sorts of problems in layers of the stack we didn't control, and my sister developed shingles after being laid off. The first thing I associate with that disease is stress.
I'm pointing this out in case you're endlessly ruminating on what is wrong with you, why can't you just buckle down and deal, whatever, and you're coming home to an empty apartment and Netflix year after year. That's missing the big picture. I'm not saying you should start a family if you don't have one. Maybe you can't or won't, in which case, be gentle with yourself and make sure that you are taking the whole picture into account when you compare yourself with others.
For me there were some really obvious signs early in my career that I didn't recognize until much later when they led to diagnosis (and mostly successful treatment) of chronic illness - it's easy to assume that things in your workplace are bad because they have to be.
Bringing the stress home is definitely a tough thing. I don't have any answers for you on that. It might help to try and find work you're good at but don't care about, oddly enough, but that poses its own challenges.
> How do I avoid becoming mentally trapped in the workplace mindset?
Think about starting your own business, or at least find a job where you have a greater degree of freedom, or perhaps where you feel you have more of an impact.
it can have the opposite effect on the down times. no one is looking after you to make sure to make rent, and alot of engineers don't have the kind of training or personality that lends to cold calling. at least I don't...I can't even imagine what that would look like for systems programmers - "oh hi, I'm just calling to see if you need any device drivers written". ".......uh..."
Be careful with things you think are safe. Tortilla chips can have too much cross contamination so experiment when it's safe to 'get the sickness' and find what works for you. When my daughter and I were first diagnosed we couldn't drink coke because the carmel color supposedly had gluten. Some craft rootbeers/dark sodas still have the 'bad' natural color not the 'good' artificial one. Another tricky one that got me a lot until I figured it out, red wine can use a wheat paste to seal the barrels. So cheap steel aged reds only. Red wine is the only thing that gets cheaper when you go gluten free :)
Also I hope you like Mexican food corn tortillas and chips are a life saver.
If those problems are important, is there a way to work on them for pay? Like through a nonprofit, for example?
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My life (eg. family) is already destroyed because of environment. Stress adds up to the damage.
Do not rule out: lyme and other diseases - it is hard to detect those and try bandaid treatments for symptoms. Mold issues in the home/work/car - again this is sickening.
When you have a weak immune systems, you get affected with some of the daemonic disease, and then EMF, stress etc. wreaks havoc on your body.
Yes, you can CONTROL stress and EMF exposures - and reduce the impact on your body.
Man I wish that didn't feel so relevant. Literally on an all-day "strategy" meeting right now and heard a variation of this about 5 minutes ago...
I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.
These companies no longer need to innovate to stay relevant. They focus instead on stifling competition, lobbying politicians, marketing, advertising, dark patterns, etc. The good people eventually get shut out and shut down and leave or stop trying to influence change. The bureaucracy wins and eventually the music stops.
> I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.
The problem is power is too concentrated. Companies no longer need to innovate. This isn't just in tech. Everyone wants their assets to grow at others expense society be damned.
Fundamentally, the C-level/senior executives are rarely connected with what's actually going at the ground level. And IME a lot of them simply don't care. They make decisions without understanding the impacts to the rest of the organization, and when objections or concerns are raised, they're filtered or attenuated at the middle management layer (due, usually, to a culture of fear) or dismissed at the top levels.
Put another way: When the decision makers don't feel the consequences of their decisions, those consequences will be ignored. It's a kind of corporate negative externality.
Power in an organization should probably be measured by "resources they have unilateral control over" instead of "authority." Because if all you have is authority you're a glorified manager.
The managerial class can be rewarded for failure (learning experience) but is so rarely held responsible that it's newsworthy when it happens.
Well the problem is you try and then you disappear either because you self-select out of that environment or you get managed out because that's an easier problem for the manager to solve because it doesn't involve admitting they're the problem.
It's sad but true.
If an employee is just complaining to them they are likely to just be annoyed, but if they are told about future negative impact then they would need to take some form of action (presumably).
Wow I see a lot of executive hate on HN. Sure some is probably deserved, but I have seen a lot projects and companies (after being brought in as a consultant to fix) where the technologists had a pretty clear business vision given to them and were left to their own devices with good budgets, platform, and process freedom fail miserably due to team dysfunction and all too often—incompetence.
Step 1: Organization holds endless multi-hour meetings about intractable organizational issues.
Step 2: Stakeholders go to a bar to drink heavily and commissarate.
Step 3: Uninhibited stakeholders decide on a way to ignore the inscrutable organizational issues and Just Do It.
Step 4: Organization pats itself on the back for another successful round of all-day meetings.
Sort of a variation on the classic "beatings will continue until morale improves" strategy.
Innovation is path-dependent, and communication/adoption/organizational/economic constraints are just as real as technical ones. It's like how pretty much any skilled programmer could've built the first version of Facebook in a weekend, but to take off, it needed to start in the highest social-status campus (Harvard) of the most networked population (college students) of early adopters (young people). That limited the pool of entrepreneurs to basically just Mark Zuckerburg and the Winklevii, and Zuckerburg got there first under somewhat dubious circumstances.
Same with a lot of discussions in politics, climate change, renewable energy, and Hacker News. An uninformed layperson looks at the problem as a whole, says "We should do this, let's throw money at it and someone will figure out how", and then we end up with a financial bubble and not a whole lot of solutions.
When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.
https://www.openculture.com/2015/12/simple-sabotage-field-ma...
Then we add a step 5 where middle management goes away and gossips about how everything is f*cked.
Opinions are my own.
Your team and the specific work you're doing matters a lot for your happiness at Google (and presumably any big company). Work with your manager to craft a job description that's better suited for you, or transfer if you can't. You have to actively manage your career - and your happiness - in any job.
Truth.
Think about it this way, everyone who was early at Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook/etc has awesome stories of being on the first team in the world to ever try solving some really difficult problems. Exploring unknown new fields of computing, designing new UIs for never before imagined devices. You did super cool things.
It is comparatively recent that FAANG jobs have become sort of lame.
Remember how cool Google maps was when it first came out? Or how awesome Gmail was? Those were ground breaking projects!
Heck we take distributed databases for granted now days, but Facebook pioneered a lot of amazing technology, so did Google, Amazon, and Twitter.
Microsoft actually may have had the right model way back when, back when they had teams and job roles in charge of making new products, and another org just devoted to maintaining current versions of software. Of course that division was easy to make back when software came on CDs. Now days everything is cloud based and evergreen.
Maybe companies need to have a career path that is just "maintain stuff" and your promos are based on how well stuff keeps working and any cost savings/perf improvements you can squeeze out of the existing code w/o doing a massive rewrite.
But I have to say, as a counterpoint, I met many people inside Google who loved it there and were living their best career lives there, and getting treated really well to do it.
It wasn't me, but, there's a personality type that thrives in those environments. It's not all awful. You get to play with some really fancy big tools. Deploy your stuff across thousands of servers or ship a product to millions of people. Sit on the shoulders of other really smart engineers and use the pretty amazing stuff they build (like, seriously, stuff like F1 etc. is pretty amazing).
And if you can play the game there well, and you really want to succeed there, there's lots of room to climb.
Wasn't my game, but let's be honest, there's actually a lot there to go with.
I think this is true of most careers in the US. At the end of the day it's a job, help you provide for yourself and family. It would be amazing if you were in love with every minute of it, but it a means to the end. You hear many NFL players say the same thing, they dont care if they win or lose, it's just their job. They show up, play, get a pay check and go on with their life.
It's funny how concepts that get repeated a million times in "how to be a boss" type threads are completely forgotten in "my job sucks" ones. Case in point: CULTURE COMES FROM THE TOP.
Your managers are the ones closest to you in setting the culture, and they're telling you to stop caring. Take the hint, just like they'd want you to take the (common at many many companies) hint that they aren't going to fire you, but it's time for you to move on to your next job.
I have a potentially crippling difficulty in understanding people and relationships. It's not entirely clear to me what I can do to help work through it or increase my skill levels with respect to it.
At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to accept what people say and do at the object level. Instead of at a meta level. That is to say, object level is what people actually say and do and meta level is like the subtext to borrow a literary term of what people say and do.
The boss saying, "let's all work hard and do what it takes." Is something that I want to take literally. What they mean is, "Just put in 8ish hours a day and don't take a two week vacation right before a release." However, I'm deeply uncomfortable with taking the meta version.
When the meta version is totally divorced from the object version is where things completely go off the rails for me. "Let's all work hard and do what it takes." => "Don't rock the boat because none of this was ever going to work in the first place."
Fortunately for me, I've only seen such bosses (or I suppose scenarios) from afar. As far as I know I've never worked directly for one.
There's no way to cap the actual health care costs, but the health insurance is about 30k/year for a family of 4 on COBRA.
That is a lot or not depending on how your job is affecting your health.
I'm right now spending a year off work and leaving my job has definitely improved my life more than paying me 30k would (of course, there are other expenses too - it's like a 120k/year burn rate in the bay area).
My father ended his life from issues related to work stress (it had to do with violent naxal robberies and being personally threatened, but still no sleep for 3-4 days messes you up), so I might have a very skewed point of view on this, but the lesson was to never take the "retire and do hobbies at 60" for granted & to draw-down the financials into time spent when you can keep up with your kids on shared things.
You do not have to sign up when you terminate your employment. You can sign up when you actually need medical care that you want to be covered. Though, at that time you have to pay back for the time since termination.
It makes it a little easier to walk away and "hope for the best" on the healthcare front.
I don't know you, but if you have the savings to do it, I'd say go for it. I've done it and it was wonderful. The day I realized I could just quit my job without having another job lined up a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I couldn't manage to find the effort needed to go through a job search while still employed, and taking a six month sabbatical also was great for doing a lot of new things I didn't usually have the time for.
But, that way you can actually have a breather, get back into a healthy headspace, etc, before starting in. My best job transitions have had a break in between; my worst were quit job 1 on Friday, start job 2 on Monday.
Normally I have few meetings, but recently it's gone up a bit. I told people I'll be available so they can call me in if they have a specific question. Suddenly I got stuff done again.
> Managers don't care.
This is part of the reason why I looked for a smaller company, where passion is required to survive.
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That's really the problem, right there, and I think she pretty much says it.
I've worked with standards people before (not on the committees, themselves, thank Cthulhu). It's a really rocky environment.
Usually, everyone involved is full of self-interest, and they want to push their own agenda, because billions. Having a standard give you an edge, can be quite valuable. Look to some of the video codecs, and see why.
In that environment, it's often difficult to get everyone to agree on a "The Buck Stops Here" leader. Usually, a Chair is appointed when the committee is formed. Sounds like this one just sort of congealed.
I sincerely wish her health and happiness. In my case, being forced out of the rat race was one of the best things that could have happened to me.
I might be missing something here, but this feels a little like unnecessary pressure. As I understand it, billions of people wouldn't be using the API; a few compiler authors would. I thought that's one of the nice things about WASM: recompile to upgrade. Security is a good concern to have, of course!
People today aren't a lot smarter than people were 20 years ago, and we kind of forget that fact when we try to do grandiose projects like "replace the entire stack and make sure that it works equally well to the old stack in all circumstances." The old stack was built well for its goals, and had the benefit of 20 years of tuning. The replacement needs to come when the goals change. There is plenty of opportunity still: peoples' goals change frequently.
If the goal was just to allow you to write webapps using toolchains for native apps, then you can put in an LLVM-like sidecar next to JS that has terrible performance but amazing security (I think this was closest to the goal of WASM). However, if the goal was to bring native performance to webapps means you can target your spec toward efficient JIT compilation on x86 and ARM (and RISC-V), without worrying a lot about portability to other architectures. I have heard a mix of the two looking at the WASM project from the outside: that they wanted native performance with 100% portability of both hardware platforms and development languages, and they thought they could achieve it.
A great TPM (technical program/product manager - the Google term for an engineering-focused product manager) can help define these exclusions, and it sounds like OP really tried hard to get one. I'm surprised that Google didn't give them one to start.
Yes, but billions of people may suffer the consequences of the WASM design doing something stupid and then the few compiler authors having to semi-successfully deal with it. That may be stressing, assuming that you care about such things as your brain child being an improvement (not a regression) on what came before.
https://ronmayhewphotography.com/2020/02/06/if-a-butterfly-f...
What sorts of places are they working that they have seen this multiple times?! Maybe I’ve been very fortunate, but I’ve worked for a Fortune 500 company for 20 years and I cannot think of a single times things have become so stressful that anyone was close to tears. Usually things are very calm and when managers talk about work life balance they really mean it and walk the walk and don’t just talk the talk.
I've seen it at the bottom of the org chart all the way to almost the very top and even client side. It's not uncommon for race cars to be pushed until the engine blows and it's not uncommon for people to be pushed (or push themselves) beyond what they can bear. Everyone has their limits and there's no shame in reaching/crossing them. I've been there and it sucks, it really does.
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Never stay with a thing that is giving you chronic stress. Damage is permanent. Leave it, or find a way to not be insulated.
A really excellent book on chronic stress and its effects on physiology is "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers", by Robert Sapolsky, and endocrinologist. (It is beyond me how anybody can become an endocrinologist without suffering chronic stress!) I had to read the last chapter at 30 minutes per page, plus breaks, because he was tying up threads from the whole rest of the book.