Oh the Stresses You’ll Feel : Stress in the Tech Industry

The archetypal positions in tech generally win when they work together but each buckles under a different type of stressor. Over my career I have transitioned between some of the key roles in an unorthodox manner so why not give a review.

Designer

The first few years of my career were pure graphic designer positions. Not a line of code was written. I lived and died by adobe products and submitting drafts in three variants.

For creative-types success looks like a perfect concept that unravels without frustration and receives unanimous approval and accolades from the client and industry.

The creative takes by far the most inconsistent type of stress. They are predominantly at the whims of their own creativity. And towards the final hour of a deadline they get to make the soul-sucking decision of whether or not they want to crank out something that is technically sound but derivative and uninteresting.

I happily gave up the trade-off for something more reliable and reserved myself to design in my spare time.

Developer

What’s more reliable than a programmer? They receive a task or system to build and it either works as expected or it doesn’t. Software is where it’s at, that’s the ticket, and so I did for five years.

For the technical journeyman a success is often solving the puzzle and executing a spec well above and beyond, in time, quality, cost, and or ingenuity- and also to prestige of ones peers.

Stress manifests from being given the impossible task and unfortunately the much more common near-impossible task. The near-impossible task is why we have the word crunch, and why an engineer lingers at their desk instead of driving straight home after work. At a point even when they’ve seen it all and implemented every type of solution they have to accept that they are limited to the speed with which they can type on a keyboard. And if the deadline doesn’t align with their GWAM then they are out of luck.

Though the burn is much slower and you can wander into higher level more abstract positions I decided instead to leap into something softer that takes advantage of my desire to hear myself talk.

Manager

So this is it, I am now officially The Man. I am now reserved to design and program for fun but I doubt I will ever do this for fun.

I do not have a product that I personally create to be judged by. A win is when everyone follows procedure, nothing is misinterpreted, and there is no excessive bureaucracy. There is always a way to optimize further.

I am now above the stress of my two previous compatriots as I monitor and set their deadlines. It still manifests but now as having too many simultaneous tasks and not enough resources to delegate to. So really more of a staffing problem than a reflection of my ability to get things done…

Maybe I should go back to design-