Ask HN: How worried do you get over bugs in your code? Is this a mental health issue?
3 comments
Might want to stick "Ask HN: " in front of the title. I thought this was an article at first, hesitated to click.
http://paulgraham.com/start.html
What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.
http://paulgraham.com/start.html
What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.
So you are asking if there is a correlation between mental health and worries about bugs in your code? Given the fact that coding leads to watching the sun rise from your desk chair, the hope that this particular algorithm saves the world, and a disturbing reliance on Totino's pizza rolls as sustenance, I would say yes, the connection between mental health and code is not a coincidence.
Obviously extensive testing, static typing, code review, and revision control help, but that doesn't mean that your worries are sufficiently low in practice.
I wonder if there's a mental health issue to be studied here with potential solutions specific to software developers.