[enthalpyx]

"stress"

Being the engineer on-call when the website/service/app is down and the company is losing $xMM/minute while you debug the problem is the very definition of stress.

Some companies like Google cordon this responsibility off to SREs. While Amazon has started developing a similar job family, the burden of supporting critical services still largely falls to software engineers.

While software engineering is certainly not the worst job from a stress perspective, my experience (particularly with operations at Amazon) is far from the zen-like state the author describes. It can also be pretty exciting.