[enraged_camel]

>>Most software engineers have a healthy circle of friends and social life.

Sorry, but I'm going to call [citation needed] on this. It's a rather extraordinary claim, and goes against both popular stereotypes and my personal experience.

[teppifk]

This is confirmation bias. I don't think the stereotypes are as generally popular as you claim. My own observational bias is the countless "learn to code", "anyone can code" promotions targeted at youth that make no mention of social limitations.

Depression and anxiety are common in the general population. Social maladaptation is also common, though less so. It is unsurprisingly true that these traits are a bit overrepresented in the tech professions. But tech is not unique in this, the healthcare professions also overrepresent depression, for instance. In either case, it is not even close to a majority.

People that tend to be in these minority groups though by very nature isolate themselves and tend to only see that minority. At worst, online these can lead to some very troublesome echo chambers.

[enraged_camel]

>>This is confirmation bias.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But you made the original claim, therefore the burden is on you to provide supporting evidence.

[teppifk]

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#demographics

There's nothing there that indicating mood disorders, waking hours, or screen time even are wildly outside the norm for the middle class working population.

Anyways, I don't care about this fact too much. I'm going to continue believing that the majority of software engineers have fairly typical social lives, and my own observations don't conflict with this.

I don't care much about this, because the point I was making was that categorizing oneself in buckets like "software engineer" to justify one's misery is counterproductive, and even if 95% of software engineers were miserable I still think it be worth working towards that 5% rather than worrying about stereotypes.