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After three decades slinging code, my stress response to high pressure tends to be inversely proportional to the size and competency of the org/team. Suitably sized and capable team? Not going to sweat too much about it. The smaller or less experienced the team, the more other factors come into play. Lately, I have been working solo, so my stress tracks more closely with development cadence and deadlines. When seeing (or anticipating) the pinch here, I push back with “you can have features or deadlines, but not both”. If you do not push back, you will find yourself being tasked with writing fixes or features for an impossible deadline, and you are not going to have a good time. Beyond that, your nerves should diminish over time, as you gain more confidence in your ability to produce production quality code. Use language servers and linters, run static and runtime analysis tools, enable every warning, treat warnings as errors, write tests, and so on. Warn the powers that be of the consequences of skipping such steps; once you have clearly warned of possible outcomes from such action (e.g. shipping bugs, slipped deadlines, dropped features), you should not need to carry the burden on your own shoulders. Good engineering requires constant trade offs, and you should look for a new job if management does not understand and respect such principles. Good organizations should not be stressful places to work. |