
Anxiety in product development - fidrelity
https://andreschweighofer.com/agile/anxiety-in-product-development/
======
neutronicus
I think the serenity prayer, sans unnecessary theological content, is relevant
here.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to
change the ones I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

For a lot of software products, there is no winning in the long run. You've
got good product-market fit and customer loyalty, but your code base is a huge
mess and the hard technical problems are solved by third-party libraries. Your
tech is a liability and eventually someone with better tech will be smart
enough to study your customers, or the students who will eventually replace
your inevitably-retiring customers on the front lines and push adoption going
forward.

And this is okay. The advantage corporations have over government institutions
is that they can be created and _destroyed_ with much less friction.

If you're lucky, your growth curve looks like double-sigmoid table-top.
Probably it looks like an asymmetric Gaussian. What it doesn't look like is an
exponential. Understand where your product is in its life-cycle, and maximize
ROI.

~~~
koheripbal
I find that emotional compartmentalization is a critical skill.

A couple years ago, I faced a very tough time in my life. My business was
collapsing, my family's finances were in jeopardy, and there was a serious
health issue going on.

The emotional stress was incapacitating. I couldn't sleep, let alone focus
enough to fix my problems. It was the downward spiral nightmare scenario.

If I didn't have dependents (wife + 3 kids), I might have withdrawn into
depression. Instead I was forced to fix my emotional state...

I constructed a personal prayer...

    
    
        I am the man in the dark room.
        In here, I am my loves, my principles, and my ideas.
        Who I am cannot be changed by circumstances outside this room,
        My loves are my legs which carry me to life outside this room.
        My principles are my shield from the burdens the world assaults me with.
        My ideas are the sword with which I shape my life.
        When I return to myself in this room, the world remains outside, and I evolve to be better prepared tomorrow.
    

I found that even just stopping to say "I am the man in the dark room" was
often enough remind myself that I wasn't defined by my circumstances.

To sleep, I found I could play the audio from old familiar TV shows to drown
out the worries to fall (and stay) asleep - it was a surprising turn-around.

These two things changed my life. Hope this helps someone else.

~~~
cmehdy
It's pretty useful for most day-to-day things, but (1) who you are can
absolutely be changed by external circumstances - see TBIs and other long-
lasting traumas, and (2) there are medical illnesses where you can be mostly
robbed of your ideas - which by this mantra leaves you powerless to change
your world.

I'm not saying that to take away anything from the well-being brought by this
interesting personal prayer, because it holds some insights about resilience.
Only adding some context for the people out there whose depressive disorders,
schizophrenia, or brain injuries, could leave them on the curb when it comes
to these thoughts. Those people might need surgeries, medical treatment, or
external support, before being able to strengthen themselves with this sort of
thought.

~~~
pathseeker
>who you are can absolutely be changed by external circumstances

Yes, but that's focusing on the very unlikely external circumstances and
defeating the point. 99.99% of the daily stuff that seems important actually
is not and it's healthier to live a model assuming it's not important rather
than worrying that everything could be that devastating brain tumor or IED
taking out your bus.

~~~
cmehdy
In the US alone, for TBI alone, there were almost 3 million TBI-related
emergency department visits in 2014[0]. One in 4,000 babies born in the US
have hypothyroidism[1]. At the lower bound, there is 0.25% of the US
population subject to schizophrenia[2]. If we go and look at things like
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), 2.7% of US adults have had it in the past
year, 32% of which had serious impairments associated with it[3].

I would invite you to seriously challenge the formulation of your idea: it's
not that 99.9% of stuff "seems important and it's not", it's that not 99.9% of
people have the ability to deal with it through just the one therapeutic
aspect of self-talk. Moreover, there is a propensity to share these words
because they are inspirational, yet there is very little put forward for the
people who do need more than that - and who, in turn, tend to suffer from
ailments which in many cases could be alleviated if as a society they were
more acknowledged.

If you re-read my message, I hope you do see that I am appreciating the
original words, and simply highlighting additional options to people out there
who need more than that. That's all.

[0]
[https://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/get_the_facts.html](https://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/get_the_facts.html)

[1]
[https://www.rightdiagnosis.com/h/hypothyroidism/stats.htm](https://www.rightdiagnosis.com/h/hypothyroidism/stats.htm)

[2]
[https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/schizophrenia.sht...](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/schizophrenia.shtml)

[3] [https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/generalized-
anxie...](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/generalized-anxiety-
disorder.shtml)

~~~
jka
I believe you and hear you. Not all events are under our control, and not
everyone is able to lead a pain-free life. The general audience here may have
some skewed (and perhaps limited) experiences.

Those of us fortunate to have good health and the ability to improve our
circumstances should be glad for those opportunities, not take them for
granted, and try to extend them to others.

~~~
anon_1357111317
Nicely written : )

> Those of us fortunate to have good health and the ability to [...]

And it's not easy to see from the outside if that's the case for another
person -- I think often they'd want to hide things like anxiety and
depression. Or me, when I had those anxiety and sadness problems -- I spent
most time at home alone

------
codr7
I've spent around 34 years writing code so far. My last project was an online
order system for a lunch restaurant. To get an idea what kind of problems
they're dealing with, I started by working two weeks in the restaurant.

To my surprise I found that I actually enjoy delivering food more than writing
code. As long as the customers get the food they ordered delivered in time,
everyone is happy. And once I'm done, I'm done. No more lying awake at night
going back and forth over some design decision and worrying about consequences
from choices already made.

It's not as mentally stimulating, and I earn way less money, but I'm finding
it harder and harder to find the motivation to go back to writing code.

~~~
wpietri
I get this entirely. And for me, this is driven by broken feedback loops in
software.

Some years back, I started a company with an excellent product manager, one
very focused on actual user impact. One of the first things we did is build a
tiny, cheap usability lab; every Tuesday we'd have 4 users in to try things
out. We rigged it so engineers could watch the sessions remotely, and for the
sessions we didn't watch, he'd share key bits. It was really satisfying to see
stuff getting used, what worked, what didn't.

Later, as we grew, we still kept the user tests, but added on a slick system
for experiments. All of us were involved in thinking about what to test next,
how we could make things better. My cofounder was definitely the best at that,
but we all made contributions. We all were engaged. We all paid attention to
what we were doing for users.

And it helped that despite being a startup, we were big on automated testing
and pair programming. When my mom got sick, I took two weeks off and everybody
was fine without me. They carried on releasing a few times a day, trusting in
each other and in the safety net we had built for ourselves.

It seems to me that the average development process, which is generally about
building whatever people with organizational power want, is emotionally
corrosive. It wears us down, because it isn't satisfying on a human level.
Which, IMHO, makes it way less efficient.

~~~
PragmaticPulp
Tight feedback loops that include everyone from the customer through to
developers have been the key to success on every successful product I’ve been
a part of.

It’s been difficult for me to reconcile these feedback loops and whole-team
involvement with the current online push for asynchronous workflows. In my
experience, the developers who want to isolate themselves at home or in their
office, pull tickets out of a queue and submit a PR at their leisure were the
least likely to succeed at improving the product. The developers who never
hesitated to jump into a discussion or meeting with the rest of the team or
get involved with the product planning sessions were the ones who moved the
product forward the most.

Don’t get me wrong: There’s a time and place for isolated, heads-down work.
Frivolous meetings and endless planning sessions must be minimized in favor of
action. However, the current online mentality in favor of asynchronous work,
minimal real-time in-person interaction, and strict “not my job” separation of
developer/product manager roles is swinging the pendulum too far in the other
direction, IMO. Everyone, from developers to customers, tends to be happier
when they’re all included and active in the decision making processes.

~~~
wpietri
100% agreed. This is my big fear about the shift to remote work: it can deeply
exacerbate organizational pathology.

For what it's worth, I've worked with a couple teams that were remote and
great at this, so it's not impossible. One was a small startup. The developers
had worked together in person for years and were really well bonded. Once they
added in some remote pairing, it was fantastic. The other was a Mozilla team
where they put a lot of emphasis on close collaboration. Between the two, I
have a fair bit of hope.

~~~
hinkley
Screen sharing is a big deal when doing validation as well as usability
studies. Random movement of the mouse and the tone of voice can tell you a lot
about how the user is handling the new functionality.

Maybe one of the silver linings of this mess will be that people are more
familiar with screen sharing software after this.

------
carapace
> Awareness is the first step

Literally. This is _another_ reason why meditation is important.

Anxiety is always accompanied by patterns of muscle tension. It can be
relieved by mechanical relaxation of the tissues. Relaxation is achieved by
awareness, which is fostered by meditation.

A calm, clear mind flows from a calm and relaxed body.

\- - - -

In my career I've observed that business is a kind of theater for people's ego
trips to play out within, and the form and methods of a business reflect the
_karma_ , if you will, of the people running it. It's one of those things that
sounds trivial once you type it out.

Anyhow, it reminds me of Conway's Law.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law)

~~~
circlefavshape
I read Keith Johnstone's "Impro" earlier in the year, and realised that almost
all human group interaction is theatre. I never really understood "all the
world is a stage" until now

------
asdfman123
Yes, but what leads to anxiety? Toxic team dynamics. Google did a study and
found the number one predictor of strong teams was a feeling of "psychological
safety."

> Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like
> ‘‘conversational turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects
> of what’s known as psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard
> Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by
> members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’
> Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not
> embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ Edmondson wrote in a
> study published in 1999. ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by
> interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being
> themselves.’’

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-
lear...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-
its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html)

My takeaway is you need to be nice, be respectful, and fire toxic people even
if they do jump through all the right hoops.

~~~
gramontblanc
I wonder if the same effect holds true if a team is made up of mostly
confident/brash people, or if safety-to-project-yourself can be trained and
elevated independent of any other aspect of social environment.

Maybe improv classes or subsidizing employees to exhibit art or publicly
perform music?

~~~
asdfman123
False dichotomy. You can be confident, brash, and rude to each other all day
long, as long as everyone is in on it and everyone is socially intelligent
enough to know each other's boundaries.

The problem is when people tell themselves "that's just how I am" and don't
have a high enough EQ to notice that they're coming across as jerks.

Everyone is different and everyone requires a personal touch. It's important
for people to understand how to get along with those who aren't exactly like
them.

~~~
gramontblanc
Didn't mean to assert a dichotomy, more wondering whether the size of the
effect of importance of emotional safety for expressive freedom varies with
some kind of external measure of confidence

------
openfuture
Funny, to see this pop up finally.

I've been talking (with my friends) about how all development is 'fear driven
development' for quite a while now.

Of course I don't mean just software development, but the way it manifests in
software is instructive.

The different fear responses range from formal methods to FOMO but in general
we latch onto something as a source of comfort.

Conway's law expanded to how you communicate with yourself.

~~~
pogorniy
> development is 'fear driven development' for quite a while now.

Do you have examples of fear-driven and non-fear development approaches? And
what flavors of "non-fear" development are possible?

~~~
artsyca
Yea dude it's supposed to be a fun learning experience. We got into software
so we wouldn't have to work, not to be driven and crunched to death by self
serving management culture.

Look at all the early software pioneers do they look like they were suffering
from constant anxiety vis how productive they have been for decades?

------
nautilus12
Its a little known secret that managers deliberately promote anxiety driven
development because it keeps workers at "peak productivity". A couple of the
major things i've seen companies do in the past over and over again to myself
and to others I worked with:

1\. Ambiguous or no deadlines, frequent check ins, "crunches" when their
deliberately poor planning doens't work, keeping an air of uncertainty around
everything.

2\. Giving the same tasks to multiple groups and deliberately pitting them
against one another in a kind of unhealthy competition. Constant fear of
obsoletion.

3\. Little or no positive feedback, only give feedback when things are wrong.
Deliberately vague about future career prospects or growth, holding the carrot
out but with no promise to deliver.

The problem is that each of these are tied into natural "sources" of anxiety
that are likely to happen with or without the company actively promoting it,
but the company promoting it can make people work even more frantically. The
problem is they don't realize people produce their "best" work when they have
creative freedom from anxiety.

~~~
thorin
1\. They don't keep an air of uncertainty on purpose most of the time,
generally it's because a lot of businesses are uncertain and a lot of the time
product/project managers don't have a good idea of what's going on!

2\. Again this could be incompetence rather than cunning

3\. Most great bosses and a lot of rubbish ones aren't great with positive
feedback. Have you read Steve Job's biographies or Shoe Dog? Not much praise
there. One guy I really respected once told me I wasn't a great programmer,
but I got the job done and that was probably the nicest thing he said about
anyone...I was pretty happy with that!

I agree with all of your points, but maybe not your reasoning behind them.

~~~
nautilus12
No I actually agree with you on all these points, Hanlon's razor applies to
all of these which is why I made the last statement. However, I DO think there
are managers and I've certainly run across them, that deliberately push on all
these natural stressors to try to juice productivity.

~~~
thorin
Yeah, I had one of those, he was either a dick or a megalomaniac. Fortunately
he emigrated so I'm unlikely to see him again!

------
vorpalhex
I've had a few engineers who struggled with the issues mentioned at the
beginning of the article. They were skilled engineers who typically knew the
right thing to do, but felt they needed permission or approval to do the
things.

And the solution I took was to gently encourage them, but also let them be
just a little bit uncomfortable. They need a safe environment they can fail in
with no repercussion, but also need to practice overcoming the unknown and
being willing to take on some risk.

~~~
asdfman123
Well, you're probably training them to be autonomous just like I'm training my
dogs to use the dog door.

They're still uncomfortable doing so because they're used to me letting them
out, but every so often I let them do their own thing and they eventually find
their way out.

Soon it will become habit and they won't depend on me so much anymore.

~~~
war1025
Serious question I've had about dog doors:

How does a dog door prevent rodents and other riffraff from coming in?

~~~
rurp
I would guess that the smells and activity from the dog would keep a lot of
the critters out. Most wild animals avoid dogs and don't want to risk getting
trapped in an unknown space with one. Not that it will always work, but I bet
the critter traffic is vastly less than if the house was left empty with a dog
door.

Somewhat related, many of my neighbors have had issues with rats. I have seen
them on the edges of my yard but never seen or heard one inside. I haven't
done anything to prevent them except for having two indoor cats. These are
fully domesticated chubby cats that probably couldn't catch a wild rat to save
their life, but I suspect their presence deters rodents for the most part.

~~~
cutemonster
> never seen or heard [any rat] inside ... two indoor cats ... chubby

> ... couldn't catch a wild rat

I'm seeing a possibly different reality

------
georgeecollins
I loved the Permit A38 (too much specification and process) description.

I once came into an app project that was really bogged down. The team was
good, but inexperienced, as was the management. The devs weren't doing
anything. When I came on they said they told me there were no specs for what
they should work on. I found a folder with several folders with ten, twelve
page documents for individual features for the app. They would include nice
mock ups, documentation including back end features, analytics hooks and so
forth. And we are talking features that were generally changes to a screen or
a UX widget.

"Why don't we do some of these?" Answer: They needed to go through some
executive review meeting. Or, they weren't really specific enough because some
lazy team member could say all the edge cases weren't defined. The key was
convincing the team that as capable people that if the intent was clear, and
important details specified, they were smart enough as a team to figure out
the rest. And they were.

------
jmhnilbog
While I agree with this framing of the problem, it feels like another
expression of dysfunction in development increasing as direct interaction with
clients and users decreases.

~~~
fidrelity
Author here. I think you have a point here. Anxiety can certainly stem from
the point you mentioned. But I also think anxiety from other sources can
affect your development negatively.

~~~
jmhnilbog
Agreed.

Anxiety can also be expressed as a realization that what's being worked on is
useless, adds negative value, or just personally unfulfilling or unimportant.
Cops firing teargas at peaceful protesters a few blocks away has cause me a
good deal of that flavor of anxiety, which I don't think is necessarily a
negative outcome. Do you have any insights along those lines?

~~~
fidrelity
Although I have never been in a situation like yours, for me personally A
Guide to Rational Living
([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22673.A_New_Guide_to_Rat...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22673.A_New_Guide_to_Rational_Living))
and meditation with the Waking up app helped tremendously.

~~~
jmhnilbog
Do you think instances of anxiety are inherently irrational or unhealthy? I
know of the effect of sustained stress on people, but I was trying to bring to
light potential positive effects of anxiety bringing clarity or insight into
ways to relive that same anxiety. It seemed like your post was something born
out of such a thing.

I've encountered so many younger people in tech, making $200K+ in places that
support lifestyles that need less than a quarter of that for comfort, who
complain about their jobs and the golden handcuffs that keep them there. They
seem to be locked in much stranger and fantastical anxieties than those I
understand.

~~~
wsantas
I have a theory that the massive amount of data at our finger tips an
inability to control social media lack of self care (or read awareness) has
cause an inability to focus and a hyper active brain.

This habitual scroll, scroll, feed, feed, dopamine, dopamine cause the brain
to be over active and thoughts hard to control. People get heightened without
even being aware. Never-mind if you dont carefully curate your feed.

But that's just something Im mulling over lately.

~~~
karatestomp
Relatedly, I found my "night owl" tendencies, which were "natural" and just
about impossible to fight, went away completely when I limited myself to a few
dim candles for light after sundown, and _no_ glowing screens of any kind—no
TV, no computer, no phone, period. You can still do a _ton_ in low light—board
and card games, reading, playing music, listening to music (small exception to
the no-screens thing may be a practical necessity to get an album or playlist
started or whatever if you don't want to go for physical media, but no
fiddling with the playlist), writing. A very low candle power electric light
(think nightlight, most of which are still brighter than what I was using and
I could see just fine for most anything) would probably do. Obviously you
might need a bit more if you're older and your eyes are getting worse, but you
really do adjust to lower light levels than one might think. Dozens to
hundreds of times lower than typical nighttime lighting, for sure.

I only did it for a couple weeks but soon found whole-room artificial lighting
at night obnoxiously and needlessly bright. A candle for the room and ~2
candles per person (or equivalent from small electric lights—it's actually
hard to find them this dim, though) provide entirely enough illumination to do
just about whatever you want, and, crucially, _let you get tired_.

I _strongly suspect_ a huge proportion of people who are "naturally" very
active at night or just "can't" have a normal sleep schedule are in fact
suffering from the availability and use of particular technologies.

------
maximum_stress
It's funny this came up because I was about to create this throwaway account
and post an Ask HN for advice anyway.

Me and my team are in the process of delivering a new infrastructure
provisioning system that will bring 9 figures worth of equipment online this
year. For the most part we're on time modulo the usual bobbles that come from
a year-long project this size.

My upper management regularly says We're in a new safe space and there's room
to fail, we're trying to be more like Silicon Valley, etc. My new manager told
me in our last 1:1 'If you don't take your application stack you're delivering
and turn it into a service in the next 60 days, I'll eliminate your job by
year end.'

So we're right back to Go Big or Go Home pressure that the company has always
exerted on people despite lip service to the idea we've shed our bad old ways.
At least it feels that way to me. Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe I should look
for another job. LOL.

~~~
gav
How I think about a situation like this is that your new manager has given you
new information that you need to decide what it means.

Either:

1) You've never been in a safe space with room to fail, you've just been
operating under this misunderstanding.

Now you know this, you can correct course and change the goal: instead of
trying to deliver the best system possible, your team should focus on
delivering the minimum required to meet the goal of having it in 60 days. You
can cut scope and reduce quality to meet that goal. They are prioritizing the
minimum, not the best long-term option for the company.

You also now know a new fact about the organization: you don't want to be
there because it's the type of organization that will change the rules on you
and fire you for not meeting (what sounds like) unreasonable goals. You now
have a new goal: find a new job. Your manager has helped you re-prioritize,
this is priority #1 and your project is relegated to #2. Even if you don't get
fired in 60 days, you risk being fired in 65 or 90 days, you don't want to be
there one day longer than necessary.

2) You are in a safe space, but your new manager is rogue. Even if this is the
case, trying to discover that this is the case, and trying to remedy the
situation if it is, has a huge personal risk to you with little benefit.

Your best bet is to look after yourself, not the organization, and start
looking for a new job. If you go to upper management and they don't fire him,
you're going to have somebody that has power over you that is going to be
working against you.

\--

It might hard advice to hear, and hard to follow, but you should be less
stressed about the situation. You now have a clear understanding of what you
need to do.

Sorry for the long-winded reply. My contact details are in my profile, I'm
happy to be a confidential sounding board if that helps.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
One of the things about fear, is that it is not a useless reaction.

Fear isn't really an "emotion." It's a "reaction." It's a temporary state that
we are designed to engage when we are in danger, and exit when the danger is
past.

And it works very well. When we are scared, our adrenaline amps up, our
capillaries expand, our blood pressure increases, our senses sharpen, etc.
There's been a gazillion studies on the physiological manifestations of a
state of fear.

Our thinking also gets affected. It becomes fairly "binary." Stand very still,
or run away. Don't just stand there thinking. Make a decision. Do something.
No time to evaluate. No grey areas. It's either good, or bad.

Anger is really a manifestation of fear. The reactions are quite similar.

They are both reactions that are designed to be _temporary_. Being in either a
state of fear, or anger, for extended lengths of time, is corrosive to our
health; both mental and physical.

But the really dangerous thing, is that the "binary" thinking is bad;
especially in areas where we are making long-term decisions. If we need to
make a decision to run, we don't look further than the next bend. That's why a
squirrel runs in front of a car, escaping someone walking down the sidewalk
(happened to me a couple of days ago. The squirrel was fine, because the
driver saw them, and jammed on the brakes).

Many managers work on fear. They like to keep a state of anxiety going. I
won't dwell on the reasons, but I feel as if it is a bad thing, for engineers,
because it encourages us to take tactical shortcuts and "patch" fixes, as
opposed to considered, strategic reasoning, and long-term, "holistic" fixes.

I was a manager for many years, and I feel that one of my most important jobs
was to shield my team from the immense pressure that was piled onto me.

------
sebringj
The good bit I get out of this is to provide value but in a way that isn't
making you into a commodity. A way I do that is have some area of the business
that I know very well that someone cannot just know with skills alone and then
have some set of ownership of code that I created around this. Then repeat
that in other areas to increase that value etc. You can also think of it as
entrenchment...meaning if you don't know the point of what you are doing and
don't have ideas on the roadmap and improvements etc., you probably are less
important and can be replaced without much issue.

------
MattGaiser
The industry term for this is Scrum.

------
david_draco
The intersection of people understanding both Catch-22 and Permit A 38 is
probably pretty small.

~~~
albntomat0
For those, like me, wondering what Permit A 38 is:
[https://asterix.fandom.com/wiki/The_Place_That_Sends_You_Mad](https://asterix.fandom.com/wiki/The_Place_That_Sends_You_Mad)

I wasn't familiar with it before, but might start using it, as it's
unfortunately relevant at work.

~~~
bdefore
I discovered that the full animated film (in English) can be watched here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOhRhq6Pr6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOhRhq6Pr6g)

~~~
abegnoche
I want to add, the permit A38 part starts at 40:20
[https://youtu.be/JOhRhq6Pr6g?t=2420](https://youtu.be/JOhRhq6Pr6g?t=2420)

~~~
bdefore
I watched the whole thing this evening. Some really clever animation trickery,
amidst really uneven quality. Some bits that show much we as a society have
evolved (the isle of pleasures).

The Permit A38 thing was worthy. I imagine someone who's never worked would
probably find that segment dull, but I winced in sympathy.

------
wolco
I live by this. Anxiety fuels increased work speeds. Without unnecessary
anxiety I wouldn't have gotten anything done.

Mixed with weed driven development it seems to get positive results but awful
for meetings.

~~~
mumblemumble
The article is talking more about making product design decisions that are
fueled by anxiety. While it's not directly stated, it's clear from the
examples that the author is particularly concerned about the phenomenon
_slowing you down_ by causing you to waste effort on building features that
you don't need.

------
sradman
I’ve often thought that pair programming and daily stand ups work because they
align with our natural social behavior. This could be fear or anxiety driven
but it doesn’t have to be. Do scientists have a non-intrusive and accurate
mechanism to continuously monitor the endocrine/nervous system response over
hours/days? Working on a software project is often an emotional roller coaster
ride.

------
cjfd
Fear is just a source of information. The emotions we have we have because
they provide information in one way or another. Much like the senses. One
cannot let oneself be paralyzed by it, though. If one doesn't dare to refactor
anything because of fear, something needs to happen. E.g., one needs to be
able to test more effectively or something like that.

~~~
hammock
Fear is not raw intelligence, and rather a type of intelligence assessment.

------
alexheikel
Do whatever you can to move forward. Every time you start getting anxiety,
stop. If you can do it harder, while taking care of you, do it harder. If you
are doing your best, but still thinks its slow, don't try to force the
situation. Sometimes negative results lead to better results. Just keep
trying.

------
gtm1260
As a new developer, I think I fall into this trap a lot! I always don't want
to touch other people's methods or introduce bugs, so I only make tiny, tiny
little changes before thoroughly testing everything. It really slows me down.

~~~
onemoresoop
You should be slow with other people's code. I bet that if you work on
something solo you'd be much faster and that is because you're intimate with
the code, you know what could go wrong, where, etc..

Second, the slowness comes from the fact it takes a lot more time to read and
understand code that to write it, let alone trust that it is doing what is
doing correctly. If you don't introduce bugs and are very careful you won't
have nightmarish surprises. Keep up.

------
Tade0
_It highlighted how it can surface in atypical symptoms such as anger._

This caught my attention, because out of all the men and women I know who
experience anxiety, this was the most typical way the former expressed it.

Who is the benchmark for how anxiety is expressed?

~~~
war1025
When all of this Coronavirus stuff was kicking up I found myself having a much
shorter temper with my kids and in general more angry outbursts. My heartrate
also kept popping up into the 150bpm+ range. I think it was like 177 one time
I checked.

Didn't really connect it all together until after the fact, but it was very
much related to the anxiety and uncertainty of a rapidly changing situation.

About a month later, I was feeling pretty relaxed and checked my heart rate
again. 50bpm.

I think I read somewhere that people have a hard time focusing if their heart
rate gets above 100 or 120 bpm (I don't remember which). Definitely proved
true for me. I couldn't think straight for most of March.

------
haolez
The author's blog is incredibly good. I'm binging some articles right now :)

~~~
fidrelity
Thanks! If you have anything you particularly like or dislike please let me
know. I'd really appreciate any feedback.

~~~
haolez
I'd like to make a fan request: what do you think of this?

[https://riskfirst.org/](https://riskfirst.org/)

I read this a few weeks ago and some things there made a lot of sense, but I
still can't envision the whole development process with Risk First being a
protagonist.

~~~
fidrelity
Hey! I also saw that page not long ago on HN and I quite like it. I think
under certain circumstances it makes sense to view software engineering
processes mainly under the lense of risk. There are a few thoughts I have
about this though: it reminds me of the saying that if your only tool is a
hammer every problem looks like a nail.

I think what it really is about is managing _uncertainty_ and talking about
risks is one of many tools for that.

------
jpm_sd
A professor at MIT once told me "Fear is the only motivator."

Fear of poverty. Fear of shame. Fear of loss.

Maslow's hierarchy suggests there might be a few others, but fear is a big
one.

------
_pmf_
> "t highlighted how it can surface in atypical symptoms such as anger."

That's only atypical if you consider women to be the default, right people.

------
wsantas
CBD, Meditation, self-care, reduction of social media usage, reduction of news
watching...

CBD is a highly effective tool for the toolbox, imo

------
hajderr
Thanks for this! I'll continue on this and gonna write my own article soon
hopefully adressing this!

------
darepublic
this probably manifests itself not just at the product level, but in the
minutiae of team programming dynamics.

