The single best thing I did for professional development was see a therapist. In tech, our jobs are knowledge-based. You can't hammer a nail into a board while you're sitting on the couch with your child, but you can certainly think about software architecture. I've found that my job bleeds into my personal life, and vice versa, and I believe it is far more common than most people realize. Stress piles up and it affects not only your home life, but your work life.
Taking the time to talk to a professional and become introspective and conscious of my own mental health has provided me with more value than all the books and conferences and talks I've consumed put together.
In a similar vein I went and did a degree in psychology at night. Nobody in work got it; HR refused me extra leave because they didn’t think it was relevant to my competencies ... but definitely the single best thing I have done for my career in terms of having one and having a great personal life too. Even today people ask me “what do you use it for?” to which I ominously reply “I’m using it right now” - gets them every time :-)
That's a good question - it's a while ago and the only one that really jumps out is The History of Psychology by Leahy because understanding psychology is as much about understanding how we understand the mind in the context of society, and to do that you need to know the history. Not what you were expecting ...
I highly recommend reading up on Hans Selye's biological model of stress and the HPA axis. Also worth checking out Freudelberger for the seminal article on burnout and Maslach for the formal treatment.
Organisational psychology is great but so contentious an area it's helpful to have a good teacher.
I highly recommend looking into Biopsychology, which is essentially the interplay between our mind and body and even how our mind distributed through the body.
Seconded. In particular, I've come to recognize the growing confluence of woke politics and tech management as major impediment on my ability to do my job well. Reading up on career coaching and psychology has certainly helped, but can also serve to overcomplicate the situation. My therapist provides highly personal and much more practical guidance in accepting the bs.
How familiar are you with the term? Perhaps I used an offensive slur for convenience and should reconsider the phrasing? In my experience, over-emphasizing "social responsibility" that has nothing to do with the product tends to put less competent managers in power. Less competent managers tend to favor less competent engineers. And it's a vicious cycle.
I do know the term — I’d define it as generally being aware of the historical struggles that various groups have gone through and realizing how that impacts them today.
It feels like you’re dancing around your word choice and I’m having trouble understanding exactly what you’re saying, especially as how being aware of power struggles impacts your ability to presumably software engineer well. They seem pretty orthogonal to me.
When you say “social responsibility” putting “less competent managers in power,” are you referring to affirmative action? Or something else here?
Affirmative action is about policy and the law. I was referring to a newer trend wherein middle management assumes the role of thought police and decides for others how well educated they are in "historical struggles that various groups have gone through and realizing how that impacts them today."
BTW I absolutely appreciate your concern for fairness, and encourage you to read up about the history of corporate governance and the financial scandals that arise when lawlessness infiltrates management.
I’m sorry to keep coming back for more info, but can you please give a concrete example of this and how it prevents you from being able to do your job well? I haven’t experienced middle management thought police so I’m curious what your experience is here.
In terms of financial scales and lawlessness infiltrating management — are you talking about things like Enron? How this is connected to “woke politics” I can’t figure out.
I'll pass - can't figure out how well you know about Enron and its similarity to other financial scandals, ripple effects of management incompetence, and corporate governance in general. I don't think it would help to provide just one or two examples at this point.
Thank you. I love to see the intersection of many fields of engineering, science, finance, and mass media here on HN. A truly amazing resource. But yes I struggle with the semantics when they blend together too much. I struggle to see how, when petty Us vs. Them battles flare, it's generally in circles where these fields all culminate into one. I struggle to see the sleazy culture of east coast advertising and stock-trading types (bigots from the 50's and 80's) infiltrate technology as a profession, specifically in Silicon Valley. I struggle to see that "social responsibility" and/or spiritual awakening is being packaged and sold like McDonald's.
I'm not giving concrete examples about my job, nor my thoughts on Enron in this thread. Sorry if I exaggerated the point but I do find it offensive to get a grilling about my private life. Not woke at all.
It's not "being aware". It's being required to police your speech to shield your managers from imaginary accusation of offending some group - where claims of offense usually come from people not even belonging to that group, but just enjoying the whiteknighting and the grandstanding. Being required to spend time on changing your code because suddenly established industry terms are deemed "offensive" by some busybody who would never even see this code and never had and never will since would have a look on it. Being dragged into political power games which one has no interest in and would rather concentrate on writing good code. Having work with people being promoted for reasons other than professional competency, and being denied opportunities for reasons other than professional competency. Etc., etc.
It really is. Those who embody it may have "Resist" in their Twitter bio, yet their purported values align with virtually all of the 1%, the corporations, the banks, the media companies, academic institutions, sports teams, celebrities, etc etc.
That's an interesting way to put it but I can definitely relate. When the people talk about abstract lofty political ideals all the time, it might well be the case that they have no idea what they're actually doing, or it could be a way for them to mask/deflect from the fact that their actual engineering skills are very limited. It creates a vicious cycle and a culture that drives people who actually want to do great work away.
Remember the time those two new fathers were overheard making dongle jokes at a conference and the twitter outrage mob got them fired for it? Things like that worry me. They don't prevent me from doing my job, but I could understand how someone prone to anxiety might get hung up on it.
One might also remember that the Black woman who posted about it on Twitter also got fired by her employer. "Woke politics" are an easy target for free-floating anxiety, but the real concern for 99% of us is that we have virtually no rights at work.
Publicly internet shaming someone for a middle school joke overheard at a conference is less professional than making the joke, and I buy the argument that it would "interfere with her doing her job." It'd be different for a more direct or egregious joke or if someone on stage said it.
Apparently she's been a lot more quiet for the past few years to the point that she's harder to google without second order effort. This backs up that what she did was unprofessional and interfered with her job, but I'm torn over this because it also means she got silenced. Then again, are "dongle" jokes the hill you want to die on? Or TWSS? This was in 2013 before the term "woke" was even popularized.
Not sure what her race has to do with this, though.
But at least she got silenced for doing something blatantly wrong. She took their picture, posted on a public forum without addressing the people or anyone else locally.
This is why this type of call-out culture is bad. You attack first, the damage is done, often excessive damage, without addressing the issue locally. It would have been different if they had done something wrong, she gets ignored by the police, THEN calls them out.
The other issue with these public witch hunts is they are random. Some people get no traction, others hunted down. This lack of consistency is a horrible way to enforce rules which may or may not have even been broken.
Generally they undermine patterns, and without patterns in our lives, life itself becomes quite the burden. When it happens but you aren't aware of it, you start to degrade in various ways and if you pile the unknownness (what is happening? why do I feel this way? why am I not getting done what I want to get done?) on top of it, it's not a fun time. At least, that's a factor I've read about recently; plenty more factors and angles. That's not to say that changing patterns is inherently bad, but changing too much at once or a change that must be synchronous and immediate vs. gradually and asynchronous are very different processes for us humans.
By the way, it might also be a misspelling (work politics vs woke politics); but coincidentally this applies there as well but to a lesser degree.
This is a really interesting perspective I haven't run into before. It definitely captures a subtractive strain of political and social thought I find incredibly frustrating. The lefty "woke" variant is hotly criticized lately, but its libertarian and conservative siblings have had their moments in recent years. Something in it speaks to everyone.
Of course, dismantling order is a poor substitute for refining order, and while the idea of starting over from scratch is seductive, I'm not convinced the "post-dismantling" environment is a good one for building better things (regardless of your definition of "better").
Unfortunately, the thirst for hard resets seems stronger now on all sides than I've ever seen before, which disappoints me to no end. Everything grows out of something else. And if you can't picture how what we have today could become what you want tomorrow without resorting to burning it down, you probably aren't ready to build something better from scratch. The least you can do is let the thing stand while we figure out how to make it work for everyone.
> How do “woke politics” prevent you from doing your job well?
I’m a hiring manager and where I work we have an unwritten “understanding” that if your candidate recommendations don’t include any women you are a sexist.
I just make sure I include a few female candidates even if none in the recruitment pool are capable because it’s not worth the trouble.
However, I imagine that for many “by the book” hiring managers this causes significant anxiety and stress.
It's uninclusive to put one very specific brand of politics in people's face all the time with the unstated message that if you think a little differently you had better be quiet about it.
I'm not OP but I am politically engaged with not 100% the same opinions, so sometimes I get annoyed by the environment and have to remind myself not to care.
Imagine your workspace was full of aggressive pro-Trump messaging. A bit distracting maybe?
But I don’t understand how a workspace that was full of any kind of aggressive messaging is healthy even if I agree with it? That sounds pretty toxic to begin with.
Imagine also your coworkers casually mention they'd gladly shoot any pinko commie liberal they'd encounter, good that there are no such people among us! And then discuss how liberals are filthy amoral idiots only worthy of being spit on. And you happen to be a liberal. And even though you know they're probably joking, and they most certainly don't mean you, would it influence your work relationship with those people a little? Would it make you more distracted and less motivated?
And what if they get their suspicions - say, you couldn't bring yourself to praise Trump as much as others - and then your promotion, which one of your Trump-loving managers has a decisive voice on, does not come through, would you wonder why? Would it impact your work? I think it might.
And yet, I've heard things like these (not about Trump, it was even back when Trump was a TV personality) from many people. Did it impact my work quality? I really hope not, as much as I can help it. But I certainly didn't enjoy it.
This for me as well! I used to think that if I was inward-looking enough I could handle all of this myself. But outsourcing this kind of work to a professional has saved me so much time and trial&error with how to take care of my mental health.
Is it possible for you, without sharing personal details that you would rather not share, to give a more concrete and detailed account of the value that your therapist has provided to you?
I've also always regarded myself as introspective enough not to be able to benefit from therapy. And, while I'm open minded to the idea that I am wrong about that, I just have trouble imagining or envisioning what I might be missing.
Imagine you've lived in the same house your entire life. There's a big couch taking up half the living room, but one of the legs is broken. When you were really little, it tipped over when you sat in it, so you just learned to walk around the couch over to the not-very-comfortable armchair and sit there instead.
This was so long ago that you don't even remember learning not to sit in the couch. You don't think about how much room that couch is wasting or how much time you spend walking around the couch to get to the chair. Sometmies you stub your toe on the way around, but everyone trips every now and then. You've been doing this so long that it is completely unconscious. Hell, you can and do navigate the room in the dark.
Friends ask you about your living room furniture and you—completely honestly as far as you know—say it's all fine. You describe your chair in detail. It's not perfect, but it's serviceable. Certainly lots of other people have furniture that's in worse shape. At least you don't have any of those problems.
Then you sit down with a therapist for a few hours and they say, "Hey, what's up with that couch?"
The kind of advice you'll most likely receive won't be like anything you'd hear from a friend or family member. A therapist thinks critically and draws your attention to the language you use, ideas you'd not previously considered etc. I'm a very reflective person and therapy's helped me make sense of it all.
Not the OP but I have similar experiences and am also very introspective. For me, my introspection dealt a lot with what my thoughts were and how I behaved, but I had a lot of feelings that I had suppressed so deeply they never really came into consciousness. Therapy helped a lot with that.
> I've also always regarded myself as introspective enough not to be able to benefit from therapy.
Not the OP, but as an introspective person, I've found it was actually my introspection that predisposed me to benefiting from therapy. For me, my issues stemmed from negative self-talk, which is a misfiring of introspection. I would read the world and assign negative interpretations to how I was treated or how I messed up -- all the while subconsciously congratulating myself for being a self-aware person.
Therapy was a way for me to correct this misfiring feedback loop. My perceptions of the world may or may not have been correct, but the central idea is that I was assigning inordinate weight to the negative perceptions rather than the positive, which caused my emotions to spiral. This led to a pattern of catastrophizing.
Breaking out of that entailed a third-party grounding me and giving me more balanced interpretive options, and reminding me that my reading of the world was only one of many possibilities and not even necessarily a correct one (the limitations of introspection are sometimes astounding).
The part that's the most helpful about therapy was moving past interpretation, and employing positive techniques and taking action to deal with the world positively (doesn't matter if the interpretation was true or not). These actions encompass things like setting boundaries, or writing stuff down and interrogating them from multiple interpretive lenses instead of accepting them at face value. The act of taking action also helps dispel a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies. [1]
For me and likely for most introverts, negative self-talk is our weakness. Distorted introspection, while seemingly honest, is at the root of many negative emotions. It's very hard to fix feedback loops from within (since the thing you're using to fix them is the very thing that's broken) -- so engaging professional help is often very useful.
[1] An abstract example of this would be (not true of me, but to illustrate the point): Say I was passed over for a promotion and I start building narratives as to why. Maybe it's because I've been wronged in this way or that, or there's discrimination, or I'm not part of the inner circle. All of these things might be true (or not)... but if you think they're true and you respond unproductively by sulking, you're not going to make progress. Instead, you can change the framing and tell yourself maybe it's true, but let's give room to other interpretive options. Maybe it's because I don't really sell my ideas enough, so let's work on that. Maybe I'm really not ready so let's try upskilling. And the end result is that you move the locus of control from things you can't control to things you can control, which improves your overall well-being. And though there's no guarantee, because you've improved yourself in all these ways, your negative self-fulling prophecy might even turn out to be a positive one (but again, there's no guarantee). At any rate, by electing to deal with the world differently, your mental state improves, which causes you to present differently to the world. This in turn has the potential to start positive feedback loops.
Me, for 40 years: I overanalyze things until it sucks the joy out of life and makes me feel paralyzed. I should spend more time analyzing why I do that.
Therapist, in one hour: Maybe analyzing even more isn't the solution here.
This was an interesting read because it's exactly what I talked about in my session yesterday, but would never be able to explain with my own words. Thank you for sharing, and I'll bookmark your comment as a resource to guide people to when they're on the fence about therapy.
If you're in Australia, find a therapist using the thing I built: https://www.oktotalk.com.au . If you fill out the questions, the site might be able to recommend you someone good straight off. Otherwise one of our staff will help you through the process. We try really hard to bypass that "I tried 4 therapists before I found the right one" thing, and get you in with someone right the first time.
Here's the 80/20 of getting the most out of a therapist, drawn from watching thousands of people get great results over the last 5 years:
* talk to several therapists on the phone for 5 or 10 minutes first. You're going to be hesitant and uncomfortable, it's their job to put you at ease, they're the professional. You'll learn a lot quickly about them, and about the mental health process. If you have an uncomfortable 5 minute chat, you're going to have an uncomfortable hour, so skip that therapist. Go with your intuition, either say "heck yes" or "no".
* make a plan, work the plan. Write out your goals. The way to do this is "present situation" -> "desired situation". Everyone forgets the "desired situation" because they've got so much negative mental energy tied up in "present situation". Anyway, take your goals to your therapist. Put a circle around the one you need to address first. Insist that it gets addressed, or 6 sessions will go by and you'll realise the only change is to your wallet
* ask for homework, do your homework. You're in therapy an hour a week and out of therapy 167 hours a week. Your therapist can't compete with that. What you do outside therapy matters greatly
* if after 3 sessions you haven't established a good working relationship with your therapist and seen a bit of forward motion on your goals, get a new therapist. It could improve but statistically it's unlikely. This is an evidence-based cut-off.
I've spent a lot of time with therapists but they've only had the effect of being a sort of guard rail to keep me from falling too deep when I fall; it doesn't seem like they have helped me make any lasting improvements.
Based on what I've heard from friends and on this thread, it sounds like it's possible to get a lot more out of talk therapy?
What's your range of experiences been like with better or worse therapists, and how do you know when you should look for a better one?
I've seen three therapists. The first two were a complete waste of time, the third one completely changed my life for the better (incidentally, this started out as couple's therapy for my failed marriage).
It's basically like in any profession: 80% are mediocre, 10% are so bad you never want to try again and the last 10% are the gold you're searching for. There's also a question of whether you go along with a certain type of person, but there's also clearly excellence at work.
I knew I was onto something very early on. She went directly to work, stabbing into the wounds with massive empathy and brutal honesty. She described herself as her goal being "getting rid of me as soon as possible", which contributed to my trust in myself not just being a money cow for her. But the most starring fact was that I couldn't hide. She broke through all my layers and facades and went directly to the core issue of me not accepting myself as I am.
I think these are signals to watch out for (plus: a waiting list so long you usually don't get a place with the good ones), so good luck and YMMV. In any case, it's a pain finding a good therapist, but it's still worth it.
But before you get or continue a bad therapy experience, be sure to try out Leo Widrich and his blog. He's the only other therapist I didn't see who helped me grow to being a better version of myself.
My experience with therapy is similar to yours, albeit with one therapist (so far). The guard rail is not a bad thing, but all in all the process does not seem to lead to actually solving deeper issues.
Interestingly, in talk therapy it seems to be the patient's own talking that helps, rather than how the therapy is done or who's the therapist. Mark Manson sums the research up nicely in this piece:
Turns out that any way to examine and express one's thoughts and emotions that otherwise run unattended is helpful. Therapy, journaling, meditation.
Still, to me this is by it's very nature limited - to what you can consciously dig out and express. If the issues that cause trouble are not conscious, tough luck. Like trying to fix email infrastructure issues by rigorously applying inbox zero.
Perhaps lasting improvements in such cases require forms of therapy that involve consciousness altering techniques? Psychedelics are recently making a comeback in therapy. "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan is on my reading list:
> being a sort of guard rail to keep me from falling too deep when I fall
This is a dead give away that you are functioning too close to your emotional limit. The therapist serves the purpose of the guard rail, because it is the most pressing requirement.
> lasting improvements
To make improvements , the first requirement is breathing room.
Once you feel like you have that space, you can leverage your therapist to start putting things into place. The general routines and thought processes needed for healthier lifestyles can be found on page 1 of a google search.
The real value of the therapist is two fold. As a man, it is opening up enough to truly identify the real problems as they exist. The second is helping you prioritize and shape those 'Google page 1' solutions into one that perfectly aligns with your current lifestyle.
You might just have a not-so-good therapist, but, making space for self-improvement is central to actually making any progress.
Two cents: real change is not a lot of fun while it's happening, because change is hard, and makes some simple things take a lot more time and energy for a while.
“Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
Have you tried cognitive behavioural therapy? It’s a fairly powerful set of tools that work quite well for a lot of people, though not everybody admittedly ...
I don't know who these American friends that get free therapy are, but as an American, I've never heard of that. I do know people who pay two thousand dollars a month for health insurance for their family and it INCLUDES therapy. But that seems pretty different.
Please tell us more about these American friends. I'm an American and this "free therapy" is completely foreign to me. More and more therapists aren't in-network because dealing with insurance is a pain in the ass, so even if you've got insurance you end up paying out-of-network which might cover $50 of that $150 session.
I pay $180 and have to manually claim it. Nothing is covered until I hit my out of network deductible of $1200? Then it's 60% covered. So yeah, not cheap here!
It's not free in America, it's covered by many employer health insurance plans (and probably costs more than $150/h). I imagine many Canadian employers also offer supplemental insurance to cover therapy.
mental health is probably one of the worst aspects of a very dysfunctional US healthcare system. Somehow your friends ended up with an incredibly generous health plan (by the way, not "free", I'm guessing very expensive for their employers), but I assure you this is far from the norm.
I mean sure, all the tech elites in the US get the best medical care out there, far better than those in so-called "welfare states" such as the Scandinavian countries. However such conditions are bound to their job and thus not applicable to the general cases. Don't think this is what the "narrative about US healthcare" is about. If you work in big tech in the US you live in a paradise-like condition far removed from the masses, this is pretty much widely known isn't it.
Transparent plug but also sincere offer: I'm a psychotherapist. (I'm also a psychiatric researcher, which made me something of a data scientist, which is how I ended up on HN.) I work in private practice, dealing mainly with relationship and mood issues, and I've seen no small number of men and women in the kinds of fields that make up the HN readership over the course of my career - tech, STEM, etc.
It'll surprise no one to hear me say that I agree with locochef about investing in oneself through therapy^, but I also want to say that one of the most fascinating and simultaneously scary aspects of my work is seeing day in, day out the degree to which human beings excel at having stress pile up while ignoring it, denying it, believing themselves to somehow deserve it, "tough it out" to nearly-lethal degrees, or being kind of unaware of it entirely. A corollary of this observation is that the people (or the couples, or the families) who decide to see a therapist "early", when the challenge / problem / dilemma isn't yet at crisis level, are often the ones who benefit most. Like someone said down thread, it's like any other part of health: it costs less to not eat those cheeseburgers now than to have the bypass surgery later. Small investments made somewhat early can forestall a lot of ugly shit down the road. Frankly, if half the shit I help people with every day was taught universally in the fifth to tenth grades, I'd be out of a job (but happily so).
If anyone has general questions about therapy or related topics, I'm happy to answer if I'm able (or give you a nice "I have no idea" if I don't). Email in bio.
^ Sometimes! It's not for everyone, nor even for the same person at different times of their lives, and it can be harmful or end up being something you regret. But I agree in a general sense.
Disagree. I know not everyone is lucky to have close friends but as someone who has always dealt with things alone, I feel guilty and vulnerable the few times I've spoken to therapists. Even years later I regret going.
I don't want someone who is impartial or non-judgmental. If I'm going to pay someone I want actionable advice from someone who has been in my shoes. Having friends who know me, who come from different backgrounds, cultures, countries does way more for me. Them saying "schoolornot, knock it off, you're acting immature" does way more for me than laying on a nobody's couch.
In my opinion, part of the value in a therapist is that they don't know you, so they can provide advice not clouded by a shared history or any loyalty to you.
Absolutely, I've grown hugely as a person since starting therapy, it facilitates you cutting the shit about yourself, examining yourself and the world around you and how you it influences you and you influence it.
OP said they have a professional development budget, so it's presumably from an employer. Cute non-answer notwithstanding, I don't think their employer is going to allocate professional development resources for therapy.
What about their response makes you think it was a non answer? I specifically opened this thread to share the exact same experience, as therapy has helped my professional life much more than any book or tool I ever bought.
The problem is you're dismissing a valid suggestion based on an assumption you came up with yourself. I understand your point but I feel like it was misplaced here.
Read her site, you'll either immediately say "that's for me" or "absolutely not," and either way you'll be right. Does both phone and email coaching ("Interlocutor as a Service"), which is strange but super interesting and (for me at least) surprisingly effective
I started seeing a therapist mostly about my trust issues with women, and it ended up being 90% work-related topics we discussed. Oftentimes I thought I was up against the world and I sucked, and my therapist would bring me down to earth and almost allow me to think that I'm doing a good job, and that I'm a good engineer no matter how many other, better engineers are out there.
Ironically, the word "architecture" comes from designing and constructing buildings. Likewise, someone who frames houses can become preoccupied with beams and rafter angles while not operating a saw or driving in nails.
I guess what I'm saying is, everyone - including construction workers - should take your advice.
Starting therapy earlier this year was possibly the best thing I’ve done for myself in years. It took about 3 months of weekly sessions to properly “notice” what a difference it was making, but now it’s blindingly obvious, and I’m so glad I did it.
I found my therapist through https://www.bacp.co.uk/ — I’m not sure which country you’re in, but there’s bound to be similar directories out there.
I set their filters to find therapists who deal with issues relevant to me, and within a practical distance. After that, I just systematically went through each of their profiles, read their bios, and narrowed it down to a shortlist of 10.
I then picked two based on gut instinct. I had an introductory session with them both, and immediately “clicked” with one of them, who I’ve been seeing ever since.
If you're in the US, Psychology Today's "Find a Therapist" tool [0] is excellent and lets you filter by a number of things including whether they accept your insurance plan, location, gender, specialty, and so on.
Depending on where you live, ZocDoc can be a great way to find a therapist: https://www.zocdoc.com/
I'd recommend searching "psychotherapist" or "psychologist". Psychiatrists seem to be more focused on prescribing medication than helping you work through your issues.
Sure. I can't remember exactly what led me to this point, but I remember going to workout with my personal trainer & feel really angry towards her for no particular reason. I realized in that moment that I was not OK, and I booked a session with a cognitive behavioral therapist. I basically started with "I'm super angry & don't know why", and went from there.
Taking the time to talk to a professional and become introspective and conscious of my own mental health has provided me with more value than all the books and conferences and talks I've consumed put together.