ProgrammerHumor
lowStressJob
Discussion
did you try not giving a fuck™?
anyhow, half of our stress is self-imposed.
Very much so. Low EQ group of people who have a skill, they'd be stressed out anywhere that was paying them to perform.
Yeah. I'm the one who lays 5 different high priority initiatives on everyone, says "I understand it's not ideal, but do your best", then fires people for performance issues when they don't all get done well.
That said, that's pretty much every job.
Well, if you gave a f*** and stressed just a little bit more before your math test, you would have realized how little it means to talk about this using fractions that way, unless you're a bad manager.
I second not giving a fuck. Makes my life stupid easy
90% of my stress is self imposed but idk how to stop it
It's funny how programmers can be so intelligent while still being too stupid to realize that "too much work to finish on time" is a manager's problem
It will very quickly become your problem when your teammates are putting in 60 hours per week, while your ass gets put on a PIP
It is your problem because you will get fired, not the manager
If you're not stressing right now, it's a good time to start
God knows why
The fact that 90% of us will see this meme during their worktime will tell you, that software engineering is indeed a very low stress job.
Look I’m on my phone because goddamn duo dual factor authentication keeps asking me to trigger my ADHD distraction.
i invite anyone here to work with art and dont lose their shit in the first week.
I saw an art once, immediately shat myself.
dude I'm in a band on the side and while that has very high highs and I wouldn't trade it away for anything, it is also a never ending generator of both acute and chronic stress.
I've worked in kitchens during big events where you'd have managers screaming about beating your ass and firing you if you didn't do [thing] in an unreasonable amount of time.
Software dev is only really close to half of that stress when shit's going wrong and coworkers/vendors/etc are pointing fingers trying to pawn off their responsibility on everyone else.
Having worked in those similar conditions before (kitchens), I find software dev to be a different kind of stressed. When I clocked out at the restaurant, fuck everyone and everything there until my next shift. I don’t really get to clock out as a software dev, even if I don’t work for a bit
Why? I shut down my laptop and my work-phone when I finished and I only turn it back on the next day. If shit really hits the fan, I am available for a select few people through my private phone, but that never happened so far.
My mind is also away from work at that time, I just do sports and whatever.
All of our brains are different and we all have different abilities when it comes to shutting off our brain to work issues until the next day
Being on my phone is just a less dramatic version of crying in the walk-in.
everyone should have to work a low paying service job before they do internships in their field, just so they can appreciate what stressful work actually is.
I think everyone should have worked a service job at least once in their life to get some empathy. It's insane how rude and entitled some people can be. If they experienced it themselves maybe they'd be less of an asshole.
Yep can confirm
Exactly. I've worked a lot of different jobs and since I've been an engineer I'm making way more than I was before and I'm way less stressed out day to day.
Try working at an amusement park where you've got to be out in the summer heat all day helping screaming lost kids find their parents one minute and sprinting up to the top of a ride to respond to someone fainting from heat stroke the next.
Planning while pretending my camera’s "not working" feels pretty low stress. Until prod breaks. Then it’s war
you caught me…
and then there's game developers sobbing in the corner lmao
Nah.. You sometimes have a little time. But you can also have a lot of stressful deadlines.
Btw; we actually have shit to deliver. I’m not talking about procrastination consequences. Doesn’t mean one can’t find 5-10 minutes in between to do something else to get their mind off of things. Even factory workers do that from time to time.
Besides: if you’re going to compare almost any office job to a factory line, you can conclude it’s low stress. But I wouldn’t say that software development is low stress across the board. You got crunch, you got high expectations, you got clients breathing down your neck, you have to keep up with all the technologies and thus you’re constantly learning and challenging yourself, etc etc.
Unless your software job is adding buttons to a site and you’re not working under any deadlines. Meh..
Burnout is fairly common amongst software devs. Stress can come from a lot of places.
Yeah but compare that to a factory job, farmwork or construction. You won't find time there. Compared to most other jobs, software engineering is extremely low-stress, even with sometimes stressful phases
Compared to most laborious and physical jobs any office job is low stress you mean..?
Try the game development industry. All they know is crunch lmao.
It’s just a different type of stress and people like to downplay that. As someone who worked blue collar jobs for 10 years before going back to college, I was never sitting in bed at night worrying about how I was going to stack those pallets tomorrow.
Exactly.
Lots of people have a harder time shutting down unprocessed thoughts than worrying about upcoming physical workload.
Workload that spans days or weeks or even months vs workload that shows up when it does.
If software development was just picking up simple well-defined tickets without any indirection or potential ambiguity, it would be quite low-stress.
But when you're a senior working on complex projects and developing new systems and solutions, making architectural decisions and doing research on not only client requirements but every little tool and technology you're going to need, that's going to be quite a mental load that doesn't simply end when the workday ends.
Your head is likely still filled with all the thoughts you couldn't process that day.
Especially when you add tight deadlines to the mix.
That's gonna keep you up if you can't let go.
Whereas a typical day in a warehouse is working through whatever comes your way.
There is some planning involved.
A lot more step-by-step work where you don't have to consider the far future.
I've done both now.
Amazon warehouses are literal hell though.
In such a workplace, workers will worry and stress about the workload too.
Am in game dev, can confirm.
Though we also have a lotta fun in the prototyping stages so maybe that balances out the later crunch.
Perhaps. But then it’s not really a low-stress job. It’d be “normal” i guess.
Thats because you spent the last 4 days doom scrolling and have 1 day to do 5 days of work.
Don’t remind me; you’re interrupting my Reddit time before our standup in 8 minutes
Lol my stand also at 930. Though working remote means i can doom scrolling through stand-up.
lol damn it dale, same.
There are periods of low stress and periods of HIGH stress. That’s how my rollercoaster has been. But wouldn’t change this job over anything
google is right.
skill issue
After about 10 years of stress it becomes a low stress job
Yeah basically this. First 10 years of my career was stressful as hell, But since then it's mostly been much less stress.
I think partly my current company is better managed than a lot of my jobs but also being senior level, I get more say in what I do, and how things are done.
Hair stylist is crazy to me. Idea of cutting strangers' hair is about as stressful as it gets
I worked as a temp at a cellphone repair place. The realization that if I screwed up, I could effectively wipe out someone's life made my hands shake horribly, and was too much for me and my psyche to take. I lasted a day.
I gross out at the idea of touching other people's hair, which is weird because I have no problem in touching my hair and I have no problem when other people touch my hair (in the appropriate circumstances of course). It's just the idea of putting my fingers in other people's hair... ewwww I don't know how hairstylist do it, max respect
Programming took out all my stress and all my HAIRLINE
Weird but my partner has had great success with hair regrowth using just peppermint oil.
He uses gloves and just pure oil and has had remarkable success.
I mean there's highs and lows. I've been on teams where every single sprint was a stress fest, no breathing room, no time to even take lunch sometimes. Absolute dread for the job
And I've been on roles where people will complete a ticket every 2 weeks
Bad management will lead to both ends
Low stress jobs
Graphics Designer
lol. lmao even.
Ex-FAANG here. I’ve solo maintained systems tied to $80M/year in entitlements. Some of you in this sub have clearly been blessed never to deal with a 2 a.m. conference calls.
Dismissing stress as a “skill issue” is peak arrogance that reveals more about the limits of your experience and scope than it does about anyone’s actual competence.
Shhh don't you know ALL software engineers do the same thing everywhere? We all sit in offices/wfh and drink coffee 9-5. On call? No one does that. B2B Technical Support? No one does that. Fixing downtime issues on weekends? No one ever does that.
Edit: Forgot the /s
I feel called out because I do all of these things 🥲
That sounds exhausting. I honestly believe that such roles are the exception, rather than the norm.
High-stress dev positions definitely exist, but there are also many low-stakes ones where people can slack-off often and practically never get called on outside of office hours.
It is very much a question of company and management.
Bomb defusal is a very stress free job, you either defuse the bomb, or it's no longer your problem
WTF is a "Remote sensing Scientist?" Is that like looking for ghosts and shit?
Everyone in this thread doubting the image has never worked retail, customer service, or education. Sure, if you’re really unlucky you might be a bad fit for your team or at the better end of the bad luck scale you and a teammate might have a mutual assumption of the other person being an asshole. You’ll always have coding even then, which is mentally satisfying and provides regular hits of dopamine when you move issues along and collect your relatively high paychecks.
There are jobs that are abject misery every moment or close to… and outside of extreme cases software engineering ain’t it.
Guess it depends on where you are working
Everything is easy if you don't have to do it yourself.
I will never understand how people willfully go into fields that involve touching and/or modifying other people’s bodies. I think this not only about hair stylists but almost all doctors (esp proctologists or gynocologists—no amount of prestige or compensation could have made me consider doing that), nurses, physical therapists, dental hygienists, phlebotomists, etc. Like SO much could go wrong. And also people are fucking gross. How do you wake up and think, “I wanna scrape someone’s disgusting teeth for half an hour six times a day and by the way they could move and get cut and I’d get the blame, or they could be super whiny or difficult?” Who are these people???
And back to the hair stylist—you don’t get paid much unless you’re really good and experienced and also super social and friendly and likable, and people are really picky about their hair. Plus hair can be so gross.
I feel like programming is way lower stress than any of that stuff and the jobs listed here unless you are at a uniquely sucky company like Amazon.
Everything is low stress if you dont care
If you don't care about your job, you don't deserve one. Should be fired on the spot and replaced with somebody who actually gives a fuck about what they're doing
Look who is goblin deez corporate nuts
I know there are plenty of exceptions but I’ve held many jobs over multiple career paths and this has been by far the chillest
Stress? What stress?
I felt bad at my last job cause I was worried management would notice my leisurely pace and amount of down time.
Then I got a new job, where everyone was also very chill, then I got promoted. I browse Reddit at least an hour of every work day.
Y'all can't do ANYTHING
I'm an expert Reddit commenter. Look at how many fake internet points my account has!
I've worked as a pharmacist. I hate people in all professions
Some parts of software development are much like solving puzzles, which can be really relaxing, right up to the introduction of a tight deadline.
idk my job is pretty relaxed 99% of the time
im not coding for any companies and i still get stressed and play songs like stick it to the man, coding is never chill in my opinion
I've heard that soldiers have a saying: "War is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror". My job at least is much the same - chill and low stress for the vast majority of it, and then suddenly major prod issues that spike my heart rate and cortisol.
Still consider myself extremely lucky - people in much worse paying jobs work far harder on average than I do. The randomly interspersed moments of terror are just part of the game, and the price of a good life otherwise.
I think it's important to consider how fortunate we really are. I know software development can vary a LOT between companies and some people are worked to the bone for pennies, but the majority of us either have really good work/life balance, amazing pay, or both.
This hasn’t been nearly as stressful as my prior jobs.
Most stress I’ve ever been was when I was plumbing and I would have to cut into water lines. Even though I swore to God I turned the right valve off, it still made me absolutely stressed.
Flooding a building was never something I wanted to do.
Absolutely. If you think otherwise younmake it up yourself
My memory of my first 10 years of dev was alternating between imposter syndrome and feeling like a god … then having to manage the PM over promising what the system actually does.
You work in an air conditioned office, sometimes remotely. You don't go into the inferno like firefighters do, you don't endure the elements like construction workers do, you don't work 12 hour shifts for peanuts like retail employees do, you don't have to take bullets like law enforcement does, you won't be held liable if a patient dies, unlike nurses & doctors.
Boo-hoo.
It’s extremely low stress. Just accept you’re a pampered baby. It’s ok. High stress is reconnecting electricity transmission lines after a tornado. With a nonzero chance you get turned into a flash fried chicken wing.
The worst thing that can happen to you is you break production. Software dev is not an easy job. It is definitely low stakes and subsequently low stress.
The only stress is self created.
Software engineer working on remote sensing applications. Yeah I’m really not that stressed lol
All jobs are high stress jobs with the right management
Any machine can be a smoke machine if you operate it wrong enough.
Any room can be a panic room if you just give me a fucking second.
I felt that in my soul.
You meant with a wrong management? Didn't you?
No, he meant that they are right for creating a high stress environment
No. See Ponbe's comment
No. See Fluffys comment