I think that it's just another herd behavior your see on the internet. When faced with a choice, for vs against, someone would typically choose the crowd. The herd is usually wrong as you'll see many times in the stock market throughout history. All in all it's ugly to see, people jumping on the bandwagon for the hell of it, for the same reasons people join riots, for the hell of it while there may be legitimate reasons too.
1) I learned coding in a big way by buying a $1500 Java library with my student loan without knowing Java very well in order to build a software without really knowing where to start. But this forced me to learn damn it, I worked so hard to try and recoup that $1500 and I ended up being shy about 70% of that amount. I open sourced it and well I can't even look at that code anymore!
okay I'm ready to ditch dreamhost PS for linode if they double the ram. basically linode is offering several fold more than what dreamhost private server is giving me for the same price. looking forward to this double ram.
don't think I would've ever read it without the word Sex in the title. Not a lot of headlines here have the word Sex in them. YC needs a sexual revolution.
I think the actual software programmer job working for a company is different than someone working alone erratic hours, building apps, marketing, selling, and breaking even. It's quite challenging in itself to produce good software product let alone selling it and breaking even so it'd be interesting to see some statistics for single founder startups or micro software vendors.
I would say the stress is the biggest for SaaS type of software products, as someone posted a video here about "Constant Contact", it's described as the slow ramp of death because it takes so long and hard to reach that magic upward slope.
These are all just my magical assumptions based on my own situation and experience. I'm sure there's ton of positive, empathetic, emotionally intelligent coder/hacker/entrepreneurs although there's lot of Aspies, who studies have shown to be greater risk of depression.
Also a more interesting question would be, are people working in startup, especially single software vendors more susceptible to depression? Look at Aaron Schwartz guy, all those times he was depressed, look at his increasingly erratic and tendency towards martyrdom. The pressure from idiot zealots finally tipped him.
Heroin helped me beat my bouts of depression, although the downside being extremely addictive which seems to bring you right back where you started but in all honesty, depression is caused by fixation, ironically heroin taught me how to relax and "let go" of the angst caused by fixation while at the same time my mind was completely fixated on it. To each his own, you gotta stop reading about how to cure an illness, you have to act, find meaning even though it's meaningless.
Everything you've described is pretty stupid. I hope nobody is working on the next Google killer or yeah another Facebook alternative. All the big names were purely by accident and luck. Tell this to the graveyard of all the smart ideas that never took off because the market didn't need them.