

Stress and its consequences for software development - notmyname
http://www.the-programmers-stone.com/about

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ggchappell
I've just scanned the article, and it does indeed look very worth reading.

I'm particularly interested in this (from the introduction):

> But I also discovered that I was playing with fire. Whenever I got a team
> ready to be really useful, there would be a bizarre negative reaction from
> all sorts of other people who were employed within the same organizations,
> but were not part of the teams I was working with. Sometimes this effect was
> so strong it could become a workplace hazard, and it always grew until the
> teams themselves were no longer able to function.

I know _exactly_ what he is talking about. I have seen it happen in very
different contexts (including contexts not at all related to software
development): when you get a group of people that is starting to accomplish
things, people within the organization act in _strange_ ways to shut it down.

It looks like this particular issue is addressed on the 7th page: "The Dreaded
Jungian Backlash". (It also looks like you need to read the preceding pages to
understand it all.)

I look forward to finding out what the article has to say.

~~~
TJensen
I managed a team that gelled once (not because of any skill of mine; it was an
amazing team). It was surprising how much antipathy there was from other
people in the company. Even though everybody on my team was happy and they
were being amazingly productive, I somehow got labeled as the bad manager.

~~~
gruseom
Ever hear of Wilhelm Reich's concept of the "emotional plague"? Many human
beings react with antipathy when others express a greater aliveness than they
themselves feel capable of. Reich's idea was that this was because their
feelings were being stirred to a greater degree than they were able to
tolerate, provoking a clampdown reaction. I've noticed something like this
many times in companies: when a small oasis of creativity spontaneously forms,
the larger organization often acts to destroy it.

Jerry Weinberg told a great story once about a company he consulted at where
every software project failed, except for a handful of successes. He looked
into the successes and found that they had all been the work of one team. The
team had intentionally covered their tracks (I forget how) and actually
pleaded with him not to report on their success. He didn't heed this request,
though, and told an executive about them, presumably with the intention of
encouraging more such teams to develop. The executive responded by disbanding
the team! Shocked, Weinberg asked why. "Because I didn't understand what they
were doing." Weinberg said, sarcastically, "Would you rather they succeeded in
a way you don't understand or failed in a way you do?" The executive replied,
quite unironically, "I would rather they fail in a way that I understand."

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pj
_I also discovered that I was playing with fire. Whenever I got a team ready
to be really useful, there would be a bizarre negative reaction from all sorts
of other people who were employed within the same organizations, but were not
part of the teams I was working with._

Have you ever been working in one of those organizations and your coworkers
goad you into not working so hard? They say things like, "You're making us
look bad." or "Take the day off early."

Little things like that. Some have more humor in them than others, but
everyone wants to work as little as possible for as much money as possible. If
a super team comes in and makes work look fun and easy and they actually
accomplish a lot, it raises the bar for every other team and even individual
in the organization. Like little self-organized unions who pressure other
union members through psychological stress and booby traps.

This is the same problem afflicting our culture at every level, from
kindgergarten to the board room to the white house. It has created the mess we
are in right now.

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arohner
Very interesting. I just noticed this comment, and I think the guy stumbled
into something about why FP is popular in a certain population:

"The language requirement is because Native American languages are verb based.
Hopi has no nouns at all. I argue that nouns are good for sorting objects into
categories and associating responses with the categories. Verbs are better for
describing processes and relationships. People using _verb based languages_
are very likely to be a population that assumes juxtapositional thinking is
available to them."

Update: The short version of the article is that your brain has two modes of
thinking. The one programmers use he calls "Juxtapositional", and cannot be
accessed when the chemicals associated with stress are present. He then draws
the relationship in the above quote, where Native American cultures were less
stressed, and used verb based languages.

Notice that many of the "weird" programming languages are verb based /
functional? lisp, haskell, forth, etc. Maybe some of the power of these
languages is related to the fact that only people who aren't stressed like
using them?

~~~
neilk
_Hopi has no nouns at all_

That one sentence makes me doubt the entire essay. No language can get along
without nouns. The Wikipedia page on the Hopi language has examples of nouns.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_language>

Can you imagine any normal person being able to live their life without
representing physical objects? That isn't just a functional language; that
would be like a programming language without variables or data structures.

There's a trope in North American culture of supposing that Native Americans
were or are somehow holier than other kinds of people, or even had access to
some special states of consciousness. Their cultures are nearly destroyed so
it's hard to check that. But I think it's silly and probably kind of
patronizing.

There is some work which does suggest that a Neolithic tribe can have very
different concepts of time and number, but this is still a point of
controversy. I don't believe we're going to find the key to enlightenment
here, just a different way of thinking, which is way more important than a
fantasy for nirvana via linguistics, IMO.

Although, I will forgive this author because it's not central to his argument,
and he has a point about how Native American lifestyle was the antithesis of
modernity.

~~~
derefr
> that would be like a programming language without variables or data
> structures.

I would say it's more like a language where every "noun" is really a "verb" in
disguise—e.g. combinatoric logic. You can let K and KI mean true and false
when speaking _about_ combinatoric logic, but when _using_ it, they're still
verbs (combinators), not values.

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messel
I guess Frank Herbert was right, "Fear is the mind killer."

Profound perspective. I programmed for 13 years and was increasingly burnt out
by shorter time lines and more controlled projects. I thought I had completely
lost my coding mojo and took a leave of absence Nov. 2008. I may yet relive my
hayday of coding wizardry!

~~~
pbz
Did you get better?

------
msie
Finding this essay made me glad I read Hacker News today! I don't think I
would have found it any other way.

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neilk
The article is mostly informed speculation, but its sweep is so large, the
conclusion almost becomes trivial. If we accept that the entire culture is
literally sick, there are deeper implications than just programming
productivity.

~~~
Andys
That thought scared me - are most people in office jobs stressed out all the
time? Does fear really drive our society?

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triplefox
I've followed the "Programmer's Stone" concepts off-and-on, almost forgot
about them entirely. This is definitely the best iteration of them yet.

------
willwagner
Interesting article. I don't doubt that stress can limit creativity, but from
my own experience, some stress seems to make me more productive. At times, a
little deadline pressure is a good motivating force, and I find it easier for
me to get into and stay in "the zone" where I'm completely focused and able to
work at a fast pace. Continual stress would likely make things worse, but a
few weeks of deadline pressure can really make me work harder and better.

To be honest, I skimmed through parts of the article so I hope I'm not
repeating or misrepresenting what the article says, but it seems like the best
process for me is to have some stress free time at the beginning of a project
to let things percolate, and then later on, have a looming deadline to help me
focus and grind things out.

~~~
Andys
I agree - deadline stress works best at the end of a project where you already
know what to do and how to do it, and you just need a kick up the rear to get
things moving rapidly.

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dmoney
It seems he's let the Reciprocality.org domain expire, and only put some of it
on the new domain. There was some interesting stuff there, including the
original Programmer's Stone book. I wonder if I still have the .zip of it.

~~~
dmoney
Granted, some of his theories made him sound like a crackpot, not that that
means they were false.

~~~
dmoney
Aha, it appears to be mirrored here:
<http://www.buildfreedom.com/content/reciprocality/>

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gruseom
I had trouble following this. Anybody care to take a shot at explaining what
it says, or what's good about it?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
A great deal of this is similar to the findings on management and creativity
and/or stress and creativity.

Stress kills creativity because it creates a chemical reaction that forces
your mind to focus intently and over-rely on previous experience. This might
help if you need to run away from a bear, but might hinder if you're trying to
solve a tricky problem that requires exploring and potentially letting go of
assumptions.

Similarly it's very tricky to "manage" creativity or any task where you can't
specify and measure either the process or the outcome (preferably both). You
may sadly realise this covers most white collar work but it only really gets
talked about in relation to obviously 'creative' things like advertising and
R&D.

The basic of management there is "don't", though there are some things that
help such as "clan controls" where you hire people with a particular value set
(e.g. scientists or open source programmers) and encourage them to be
evaluated, outside of work, by their peers.

It might be worth pondering a comparison between an leading advertising agency
work areas and Google's famous playgrounds.

This guy proposes that the bits of the company that can be managed
traditionally (sales, clerical workers) thrive on (or are even addicted to)
continual stress and this causes a hidden rift between them and the
programmers (etc.) who absolutely require at least some time in the stressless
mindset in order to do their job.

