Working hard does not cause stress

But if it doesn’t, then what does?

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Let me start by admitting that the title of this article is not entirely true. Hard work can cause stress, for the very simple reason that hard work makes you tired. If you then combine that with not enough time for relaxation, your focus narrows, your capacity to deal with setbacks diminishes, and your health deteriorates. All of that contributes to stress.

Please note that the opposite of “stress” is not “fun”. Many people who lead stressful work lives also lead stressful private lives.

Instead, the opposite of “stress” is “relaxation”. It is quite alright to do nothing for a change, your weekend does not have to consist of mountain climbing, parachute jumping, off-piste skiing, nitrox diving, or aerial acrobatics. Binging The Good Place for the sixth time probably does more to combat stress than exciting, fun, but tiring, pastimes. Also: If you find it hard to do nothing, you really need to do nothing for a bit.

However, I posit that hard work is not the biggest cause of stress. "Hard work never killed anyone", the old-timers say. As was stated above this is of course not true, but it does represent a bit of folksy wisdom that hints that there must be other, more important, causes for stress. I deal a lot with teams that are stressed out, and, though an abundance of work is always in the mix, if you scrape the surface just a little bit, the root causes are always different.

So if hard work isn't the most prevalent factor leading to stress, what is? 

The answer, summed up in one word, is fear.

Fear is the mind killer, Frank Herbert sagely wrote. And without a mind that is alive and kicking, you start doing dumb things which, to put it mildly, is not the best way to beat a path out of the suboptimal state you find yourself in.

Fear, per the dictionary, is an unpleasant emotion that is a response to perceiving or recognizing a danger or threat. Hear bump in the night? Fear! Walking down an unlit back alley at night with some unsavory types lurking about? Fear! Your executive telling everyone that we are going back to the cost structure of 2019? Fear!

Fear is knowing that the other shoe is going to drop, but you just don't know when and where. To deal with that uncertainty, fear heightens your senses and you are constantly on the lookout for that other shoe and for any signals that it is about to drop. Unfortunately, with your heightened senses, you are much more aware of all these little sights and sounds that could indicate a shoe dropping event. Suddenly you see shoes everywhere, all about to drop. Ever woke up at night while alone at home with the wind howling outside? You hear effing everything.

In our industry a lot of shoes have been dropping lately and consequently a lot of people are stressed out because their futures, which once looked secure and not in danger of something as mundane as lay-offs, suddenly seem way less secure. This new world has put a large bonus on being able to deliver what was asked on time and on budget, and anything that gets in the way of that causes fear and hence causes stress.

So what causes stress at work these days?

Let's start with ever changing priorities. It is kinda hard to deliver the most important thing if the definition of what is the most important thing keeps changing all the time. In the past I have been in projects where it seemed that we got a new project direction communicated to us every other Monday, but at that time that didn't cause a lot of stress because none of us feared for our employment. Right now, new priorities inevitably come with teams being scrapped and the people left behind being tasked with meeting these new priorities on a now significantly reduced timeline.

Another “favorite” of mine is low-value work. Way back in school we used to joke that in the real world we would first build the application and then, when it worked, we would create and submit the logical and physical designs, because then at least we knew for a fact that these designs would reflect what was “going to be” implemented. How prescient we were. These days I seem to be regularly working backwards, not from the customer, but through some process.

Here is an example of that: There are still too many design review meetings where a design is presented that is already being implemented. This is mostly useless; the value of a design review is to get input that could still influence the design while it is being worked on. Presenting a design as a fait accompli where nothing can be changed anymore because the team has already committed to this design (mostly by committing code) is a huge waste everyone’s time.

Design reviews have become checklist items and too often teams need to “check the box” before they can launch. When things go wrong and postmortems have to be written, teams get asked: "But did you go to design review." In all honesty they can answer this affirmatively, but the answer is misleading. A smarter question would be: "Did you present your design for review at a time when changes were still possible and did you include the suggestion from the principal engineers in your designs?" Not that principal engineers hold all wisdom in escrow or anything, but at least that question uncovers whether the team really tried to get useful input instead of just checking the box, thereby making design review a useless process.

There are countless other examples of working backward through the process in order to tick off a box or two. Maybe it is creating some document that nobody will ever read or doing a postmortem six months after the incident when memories are long gone and the people involved in the incident are too. 

Another great example of useless work is useless meetings. 

Does anyone in corporate America today realize how weird meetings have become? I try to make the meetings that are of importance to me useful by preparing and not beating about the bush, but despite my best efforts I still spend quite a bit of time in meetings that are, all things considered, not that effective. Meetings have become a strange corporate ritual and normal people can be forgiven to be somewhat mystified by them.

Every now and then I rush out of my weekly piano lesson because I need to hop onto a meeting. My piano teacher, who spent his working life playing in bands, on records, at parties, on cruise ships, and in bars and hotel lobbies, once asked me: “But what actually happens in these meetings?”

Great question. Also a question that is hard to answer. But I will say that they take up a lot of time. 🙂

Probably the best indicator of how useless many meetings have become is that people have started bringing their laptop so that they can work on something else during the meeting, most probably doing a crappy job at both attending the meeting and the thing they are doing in parallel. Sometimes in a meeting, I suddenly wake up from looking at my laptop screen when I hear my name being mentioned and then see everyone stare at me expectantly because I am apparently supposed to answer a question. Too often I need to admit that I didn’t hear the question and that, in fact, I have no clue what we have been talking about for the last ten minutes (if not more).

Another stress factor is good deeds being punished. I have dealt with many stressed out engineers who were afraid for their jobs because they volunteered to solve some long standing problem that then triggered a bug and now they were left holding the bag for all of their good intentions. Two problems with that: First of all that creates stress and stress is bad, but secondly it creates a culture of not doing the right thing because really, what is the upside? That inevitably creates systems that are full of half-known and vaguely understood problems, which also causes stress. A culture of punishment is a lose/lose situation for the organization. Really the only people it works for are the sadists that get off on handing out these punishments.

On top of the obvious physical and mental health problems associated with stress, stress makes you stupid. Stress narrows your field of vision and you start making decisions that seem like a good idea to the part of your brain that is only concerned with immediate survival. Some of the dumbest things I have ever done in my life, I have done under the influence of boatloads of stress. As an organization you want everyone to destress as much as possible because people that are continuously stressed just don't deliver great work. Maybe, rarely, in the short term they do, but they pretty much never do in the long run. Some of the worst code I ever wrote, I wrote when stressed. It worked, but that is really the only good thing that can be said about it.

Corporate life is full of blockers that impact your ability to deliver. That is unfortunate because really the only thing that engineers are asking for are clear priorities, a shit ton of interesting work, and no distractions. What they get instead is a shit ton of work and an environment that seems to be designed to optimally interfere with their ability to deliver on that work. Kinda weird if you think about it, innit?