Seasonal Affective Disorder - Tag - In a past life… https://archive.jtimothyking.com/tags/seasonal-affective-disorder/ Seasonal Affective Disorder - Tag - In a past life… Hugo -- gohugo.ioen-usFri, 17 Apr 2009 15:10:41 +0000 Depression and the Software Developer https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2009/04/17/depression-and-the-software-developer/ Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:10:41 +0000 J. Timothy King https://archive.jtimothyking.com/2009/04/17/depression-and-the-software-developer/

Knowing what I know now, I wonder how I avoided depression for as long as I did:

  1. Stress causes depression.
  2. Perfectionists are more prone to depression.
  3. Isolation reinforces depression.

As a software developer, those frequently go along with the job description. Seasonal Affective Disorder has gotten the rap for at least some of the funk, because many software guys spend most of their time indoors, duty-bound to their office chairs. But surely SAD can’t take all the blame. Long hours of solitary work in front of a computer screen, the amateurish demands of tech-heads-turned-managers, the over-constrained projects, the intolerance we have toward bugs, the widespread myth that software is “free,” and (most importantly) how we as developers respond to these pressures, all these must take some share of the blame for developers’ depression.

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