Ask HN: Which types of tech jobs are best for people that can't handle stress? - yasp
======
gordaco
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.

~~~
ioddly
> have something to do on evenings. Something for yourself, something not
> related to your job

I'm curious what everyone does for this. I've attempted to find a few things
but nothing has strongly clicked with me. Most of my interests right now are
on the computer, which makes it hard to disengage, and I definitely need to do
more to get a handle on it.

~~~
domepro
I was always a gamer and therefore a lot of my time at home is spent at my
computer.

I have a neat trick that I started doing during my university time (ymmv as
not everyone will be able to use it). I started with using exclusively linux
for any programming and/or homework assignments. When I'm at my personal
desktop - it's always windows, at work I'll use linux or OS X, depending on
what my options are.

It works pretty well for me, as it's a context switch for my brain - native
terminal = work, windows = fun.

As an additional bonus, a dog which I can't reasonably leave home for extended
periods of time (bringing her to work would never be an option, even if my
workplace is dog-friendly) and have to walk so that gets rid of anyone
(including myself) trying to squeeze OT out of me, and gets me out of the
house for regular walks.

~~~
stemuk
The same thing works perfectly for me as well. I configured my ThinkPad to
dual-boot both Ubuntu and Windows 10. All work related things are on Ubuntu,
all games and entertainment apps are on Windows.

I found that this really helped me to focus on my work when I am on Ubuntu,
and in my free time it makes gaming much more enjoyable on Windows without
constantly getting reminded of my work.

------
TamDenholm
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
>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
Yeah, there's nothing like already being rich. This is terrible advice, not
everyone has rental properties or passive income.

~~~
adamcharnock
Indeed they don’t, but that doesn’t make this bad advice. S/he is explicit
about their financial security, and this advice may be useful to some.

------
scarface74
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
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
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....

~~~
hvidgaard
It sounds stressful. And I don't doubt that it happens, but that was a case of
incompetence, and inability to face the reality of not knowing enough to
actually use AWS. It can be perfectly fine, as long as the management know the
facts, and decide that budget/deadline of the project is more important than
running costs down the line.

------
inostia
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.

------
Nokinside
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.

------
swatcoder
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
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).

------
segmondy
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.

------
DoreenMichele
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.

------
martin_ky
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.

------
alphanumeric0
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).

------
star-techate
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".

------
EZ-E
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

------
arh68
Public sector? Less stress, more politics. A lot of people are RIP, but I
doubt that's _really_ what you want.

~~~
kristianp
What's RIP in this context? Not dead, I assume?

~~~
hellogoodbyeeee
I think he means they are as good as dead. They are so useless, they might as
well be dead.

~~~
bitshepherd
Retired In Place is likely what was intended here.

------
rasengan
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
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.

------
twblalock
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.

------
byoung2
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-...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-low-stress-jobs-for-it-pros/)

~~~
yasp
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
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
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
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...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/03/is-yelp-an-
extortion-racket/346166/)

~~~
maccard
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.

------
cryptozeus
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
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
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

------
stevebmark
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
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.

------
rboyd
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
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.

------
bobosha
Government jobs

------
telltruth
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.

------
st1ck
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
Part-time programming? Never seen such a position, where do they exists?

~~~
st1ck
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).

------
sgroppino
Probably the lowest paid ones.

~~~
odyssey7
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
Why would people stay in a high stress low paying job?

~~~
duggan
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.

------
analog31
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.

------
pasta
You first should define stress:

Being responsible (of thinking you are responsible) without having full
control to change a difficult situation.

------
stbn
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)

------
taway_1212
Maybe tech writer (author of documentation, tech blog posts on company website
etc.)?

------
closeparen
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
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.

------
collyw
Academia tends to be fairly low stress.

~~~
CyberFonic
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
I worked in academia for a number of years. Not as a researcher but as a
technician.

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guilhas
Development of tools or web apps for internal company use.

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

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evervevdww221
quality assurance positions

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

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rhapsodic
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.

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b0rsuk
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
> 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.

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avcdsuia
Try some nooptropics before you go for stress-free jobs.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics/wiki/faq#wiki_what_suppl...](https://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics/wiki/faq#wiki_what_supplements_are_possibly_good_for_mitigating_anxiety.3F)

~~~
mlevental
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
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.

~~~
toyota786
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.

