Comment by jvanderbot
8 hours ago
This is one side of the elephant.
It's true a steel inner strength is required in day to day engineering. It's hard, and it lacks positive reinformcement almost always. When you hear something it is bad.
But let's define "buck up" and see the other side of the elephant. That blog post is a textbook example of negative self talk. You can have a world that looks down on you and spit back at it and do your best work, but if you look down on yourself you _will not_ bootstrap your way out, because you learn to believe you cannot.
That is depression, and depression is reinforced if not caused by that self-talk. Addressing the self-talk and stopping the flagellation will allow that steel inner strength to build up. Medication is a parachute but the wings and engine need to be rebuilt using self confidence, and that's a long road of:
* reframing failures as lessons
* honesty with self about your own role in your depression
* careful build-up of support
* learning to find the important and good in each memory, vs the deprecating and painful
I think the point was that there are people who don't need all this extra work, it just comes naturally. And they are more suited to engineering than people who need to spend a lot of energy on emotional and mental regulation as well.
Yes - you are identifying a non-depressed engineer. A depressed engineer can become one of those by removing the depression.
No, the point is that not everyone is cut out to be an engineer. If you find yourself being depressed as an engineer, one possibility is that it's really not the job for you. Not everyone is capable of being an engineer, and being prone to emotional disregulation is probably a good indicator. Not to say you can't muddle through, but the original post was saying that you should at least ask yourself if you'd be happier elsewhere.
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There is no cure for depression. Like there is no cure for diabetes. There is a big difference between having the disease, and feeling sadness brought on by circumstances. There is no such thing as simply "removing the depression".
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I think there are methods and patterns to be learned. Engineering is mostly a succession of problems, with a somewhat illusory prize at the end. But a lot of people currently in software development are not trained well to withstand the journey. And for some, it’s just that they have been doing it since high school or something.
One of the thing that is important is to segment the work and have checkpoints and mini bosses. You don’t climb a mountain in one go. That’s one of the reason I dislike LLM in coding is because coding is my down time after a deep thinking session.
Another thing is to have an end goal in mind, and plan the journey according to those. You do this by having enough information about the business domain. I’ve seen people rush blindly into solving problem and get a burnout in the process. This also help with pacing yourself to a sustainable rate of effort.
Too much therapy speak here. You can't think your way out of depression. Only by taking action can you change things. Fix your body first. Then learn to socialize. Then get good at something (ideally something you can make money from). Think in terms of systems not goals. As a man your only way out is action (I can't speak on the female side of things).
If your body is in shape, you can socialize, and you're good at your job that pays you well, you can still suffer from depression.
Right, it's very easy to dismiss the general therapy talk. I'm not a fan myself.
Exercise, cultivating positive fear responses, self-challenge are all important.
What you're pinning as "therapy talk" is just that last one - you need to think critically about how you approach life problems, not just accept the most negative interpretation of events and your inner monologue.
I think any stoic would agree with that statement.