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Correlation Between Stress and Technology?
marshman113 asks: "I'm an undergraduate Cognitive Science major at a famous public university and currently enrolled in a Stress and Disease course. Being somewhat of a techie myself, I've decided to write my term paper on the relationship between technology and stress. I'm sure all of you hard-working Slashdot readers experience a fair amount of stress, on a daily basis. Has the evolution of technology in the workplace (computer, internet, email, etc...), which is suppose to make your job easier, made it any less stressful? If so, how? If not, why?"
I don't see how technology can cause stress.
When I'm working, I'm almost always multitasking on my 3 computers (gotta keep that productivity up!!). I have to make sure to answer my cell phone, pager and work phone, often using the phone while typing or working on a project. Those people who used to concentrate on just one thing at once were really missing out. No matter where I am, someone will always be able to get ahold of me, but it doesn't matter, I don't need any time to myself. Of course, I have to work more in order to keep up with the tech trends. When I'm too busy working, I use my TiVo to record anything I may miss.
However, I can't watch TV without glasses, as my eyesight has degraded due to staring at monitors all day. Although, that doesn't happen much. I have to work overtime so that I don't get outsourced.
...don't question it!!!
Years ago I was a happy little coder, plodding through Pascal, Basic, Assembler, C, etc., doing amazing things, datawarehousing and stuff with simple terminal interfaces
Then came GUI's, not so bad but designing a GUI application required more time.
Then came GUI apps for people who can't follow directions or need lots of verification so apps have to access servers constantly and there's always the worry about time-out, so it has to be bullet-proof and tolerant. More time developing.
Last came web apps, which are a masochists dream come true. The target browser behaves stupidly (I'll let you guess which one, but it starts with an 'I') and you have to trap all sorts of junk with javascript before you even get to the app. I needs all sorts of little pop-up doo-dads to help people so they don't need to memorize anything or have a guide by their desk. Then the server has to make sense of things that you've already tried to verify at the point of entry, then you've got dozens of stored procedures and modules and the spec changes in some critical way you have to go back and completely re-engineer the app, because some things can only be done in a certain order (pre-requisite info). All this is expected to be done as fast as when I coded in all those old languages for a dumb terminal. You also have to work out the interfaces and how to do things in a half dozen toolkits, some or all of which you get no training on because there's no time for it or no budget, or nobody even offers training. Budgets are lean, so there's no Q/A people or their stretched very thin, do the testing yourself, do the docs yourself, do it all yourself. Very stressful.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
To most non geeks, technology is just a means to an end. i remember when i tried convincing someone to use linux instead of windows, he found it so miserably different from what he was used to. To him, the philosophy and ideals behind the software weren't any concerns whatsoever, he just wanted stuff that worked, worked the way that he already knew how to. Yes, his experiences on linux did cause him a great deal of stress, for ex, when he saved a document, and wanted to open it again, he noticed that there weren't any "drives". Technology is indeed traumatic and stressful to those who use it only as a means to an end.
Just by testing your backups every so often...helps with sleep problems I heard.
I work from home. In the spring and summer I garden, every few hours I go outside and "de-tech", I take a good old garden hoe and shovel and go dig in the dirt. I notice I have a *LOT* more unrelieved stress in the winter when I don't get out and get the light and a good blast of sunshine. I close my eyes and look toward the sun to get my body clock back in sync. Then, after a few minutes outside (or just barefoot in the garden), I'm ready to go back to coding.
meh
Maybe less stress for people using tech if the tech is well designed (ie no linux or microsoft crap). Cool cellphones and pda may help them destress their lives by making it more organized. But for the people designing the technologies themselves, it is stressful. Think about it, technology changes so fast that you can't just graduate from college and expect to work till you are old with no retraining -- and you shouldn't expect this. But all this retraining and competition is of course adding stress.
So are people in technology more stressed out than the rent-a-cop down the hall? Sure, but we also make more money, so what's your point?
And yes, I am stressed out.
Getting rid of the commute is a real stress buster. That and refusing to own a cell phone. And hydroponic weed and my treadmill. So I'd have to say technology is a real stress buster. (Except for cell phones, of course)
Considering what life was like before technology, I think I can welcome the stress. I don't have to worry as much about dieing from a broken leg. If my house isn't built before winter, I can just stay in my apartment with the heat on 80 instead of freezing solid in the first blizzard. I get email notifications on my cell phone telling me that my flight is cancelled. My bills are auto-paid for me.... and the list goes on. Technology, for better or worse, has put more structure in our lives. I drives our daily schedules telling you when to wake up, when to proceed through the intersection and that you're probably going to die in 5 months from the headache you have now. For me, technology only becomes stressful when its something that I've failed to keep up with.
Duh.
No matter what we build for ourselves to make things "easier", it is human nature to push ourselves and also the job of management to push. Even though we invent "X" to reduce 20% of the time spent doing "Y" task in the workspace, that extra 20% will be filled up with a new task.
Now, if management didn't KNOW about invention "X" and we were away from them so they never knew our effeciency, then we could relax, because we're optimizing that one particular job. But when things become "dynamic", we'll always be pushed to the limit.
This whole "to make our lives easier" is just marketing spin in order to appeal to the masses. You have your basket of primal urges that marketers can pull from, laziness is one.
You wouldn't get away with "eWhammo! brings together 10 exciting technologies into such an easy product that you double your productivity. It's never been eaiser to cut costs (lay-offs) and boost productivity 20% (overtime, because remaining employees are scared shittless)."
I work in technical services in an academic library. In library parlance, "tech services" refers less to library automation per se than it does to acquisitions, cataloging, processing and all those other "behind-the-scenes" things that happen that get the books on the shelf where they ought to be. For libraries, the advent of the computerized catalog was a HUGE breakthrough, for a number of reasons. For starters, thanks to the Library of Congress and consortia like OCLC and RLIN, any library can (for a small fee) download existing cataloging records, insert library-specific data (such as barcodes, for instance) and have a full record for that title much faster than the days they had to catalog everything by hand.
Library automation has also made online catalogs themselves much more accurate and much more precise. If I'm looking for a book about CowboyNeal, back in the days of the card catalog, it would be hard to track down unless I knew a title, and I'd probably have to ask a librarian for the approximate call number. Modern online catalogs are essentially search engines that use search engine logic. Some even have the capability of searching specific fields within records (subject= cowboyneal & author= cdrtaco)
On the surface, this is a very good thing, and has made libraries a LOT more efficient. One library I used to work at had a card catalog backlog of several weeks. Once they automated, the turnaround on new materials is generally not more than 24 hours.
The downside to all this is that this power has made online catalogs quite unintuitive. Average Joe Library User is just as confused about the proper use of the online catalog as back when he was confused about the proper use of card catalogs. The other downside is that I'm finding that there's a definite tendency to fight the library system rather than work with it: the assumption is that the computer is in error and therefore requires lots of checking. The very concept of assuming that the system is correct is rather foreign.
In some libraries, at least, the stress comes not because of automation, but rather from not knowing how to implement it correctly.
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Something cleverWell, in general, I do more sysadmin than programming, but when I'm dealing with programming, the only stress I feel is when people want to drag me away from programming. I love to make the electrons dance!
But, in the sysadmin side, I've had a stressful week when I did a routine thing that should've made the main system I admin much better and cooler, but ended up destroying critical data, and the helpdesk people who could help did not consider my cries for help and the rising chants for my head to be implaled on a pike and placed in front of AR as a warning did not constitute justification for their assistance. So, I was powerless to effect change but held responsible for said change. Therefore, insufficiently understood technology is indistinguishable from stress. Or something.
There are other technologies I use. My family has TVs and VCRs and have been known to record shows in order to watch them later. (No DVR yet.) We also have DVD players. My wife does not understand the controllers and is thus stressed by them. I set everything up and thus understand them fully and have no stress.
There are also phones. We have a land line and two cell phones. I only get stressed out by that technology when 1) I'm in a place where it doesn't work, like the two drop-off points on the way home; 2) the device is resistant to understanding and modification, like the inability to upload or download ringtones (although I can program them via the keyboard); 3) The technology is used to invade my life. Telemarketers, popups, spam, are all intrusive, stress-creating technologies by design.
Most other technology-related stress points are more cultural than technology. Is the stress over carrying the midnight reboot beeper stress over beeper technology, or is it because we have a culture that values responsiveness and runs ever-more 24-7? At best (worst?), technology enables workaholics with that sort of total communication, ever on-call capabilities the same way it enables slackers with gaming systems and on-demand pizza delivery.
Technologies that stress me out at work (rated in order of aggravation, 1 being the worst).
1. Telephones: The god awfull ringing all day long is distracting. Speaker phone conversations are incredibly irritating. The constant interruptions to the work you do are infuriating. And the coworker in the cubicle next to you shushing you because your talking about a REAL problem with your other coworker is louder than his Goddamn conference call ON SPEAKERPHONE.
2. Email: People who expect an immediate reponse from you for every stupid little infuriating Email they send. If you want a response, turn on return receipts, I have work to do and can't be checking my email every 30 seconds just for YOU. I have a company with a couple thousand people in it, you're not that special. I also hate Email filters (OUTLOOK) that still popup the new mail notification icons/noises/dialogs/whatever when you get an email, EVEN IF YOU SET IT TO BE DELETED OR MARKED AS ALREADY READ!@!@#%!#%!#
3. Windows 5 minute boot: Every Goddamn morning I get to work, something is wrong and needs to be fixed NOW NOW NOW, but I have to wait 5 minutes before my stupid laptop finishes booting (and that includes the three minutes I sit at the desktop waiting for all the background services to load). I have a P3 and a gig of RAM on the damn thing, and it's a standard W2K image that the WHOLE COMPANY uses!
4. Pop/Candy machines: It's 6pm. I'm thirsty/starving. There's one Gatorade left. I put in my dollar. The Goddamn Gatorade gets stuck. COME ON!! It's 2004! Can't we make a freakin' pop machine that works already?!?!
5. Computer Software: Nothing every works right and I spend a good half hour each day recovering from crashed programs, or whacked out states of all the software I used. None of it ever works right. I've even had Notepad crash my computer (I'm sure it was a symptom of another problem, but it's still shocking when it happens).
Stuff that doesn't bother me right now (because we don't use it at my current job), but would be in this top 5 list if we did:
1. Instant Messaging: It's the living hell of Telephone and Email combined into a single system. Worst of all, if you don't configure it properly, it tells everybody EXACTLY when you are at your desk.
Bryan
As I watched that movie, I realized that there are probably other cultures, the Japanese being one of them, that do a *much* better job of utilizing technology than Americans do. Even though they have a population density that is something like 5x ours, they seem to do a decent job (better than we would) of dealing with stress and finding "alone time" for themselves. I think that technology, when properly integrated into our lives, can help us deal with the hectic schedules and stresses of dealing with other people instead of adding to it.
Americans tend to use new technologies as a plaything rather than as a real tool. Segways, computers, and all those handheld things make great examples. Consider that paper usage went *up* as computers and printers began to be adopted in US businesses and you'll see what I'm talking about. Most businesses I deal with are more interested in tracking their employees goof-off time on the internet than increasing their productivity with new ways of doing things. It's the American way: If we can't understand it, we use it for Solitaire.
Some things I'm thinking about that "Lost in Translation" specifically reminded me of:
cars: these cause more stress than they solve, and health problems to boot.
swimming pools: these help people deal with stress. The problem is, those who can afford them *don't* need them by definition. In the US, you don't own a pool unless you're retired. Even then, you can only use it for goofing-off since it's outdoors.
home automation: In the US, home automation is to impress your friends. I'm sure elsewhere, it's to help you live your life more comfortably.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I think your task is simpler if you define your terms first. Psychologists often define stress as being the result of conflict...normally internal ones. Conflicting desires, or desires at odds with your environment, or an environment hostile to your physical needs can all cause stress.
If you examine the way technology has altered our environment, both physically and psychologically, I think you will find plenty of correlation between it and stress. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to notice how maladapted we are for our twenty-first centruy lifestyle. We are overpopulating, overeating, and generally abusing ourselves and one another to an extent unheard of in societies further back along the technology curve. (I have rarely seen obese people anywhere but America. Think of tha amount of pain and suffering caused by simply being overweight...) We are bombarding eachother with advertising specifically designed to make us unhappy with our lot in life, killing eachother at wartime casualty rates on the highways, and poisoning our air, water and food supply with an ever-increasing output of waste. We cram ourselves into little boxes all day long, devoid of fresh air, sunlight and constantly exposed to electromagnetic radiation, sitting unblinking in front of CRT's and LCD's while stuffing industrially produced food into our faces, then go home and do the same thing.
I'll tell you what: when I was 18, I was a bit of a vagrant. I lived on the street for several weeks. I was certainly not a pillar of the community.
But I never felt freer or more stress free than I did then. All I had to worry about was where I would eat and sleep next. Simple. I didn't have things to clean, things to fix, things to do, people to pay, people to boss me around, people to be prettier than, places to go...I simply had to survive. There is a clarity of life that rapidly gets blurred by twenty-first century living. I will probably end up moving to a log cabin in the mountains to recapture that feeling.
Technology can make you comfortable...too comfortable, in fact...but it will never make life simple, and I think it is an excellent source of stress. The only thing better at producing stress than technology is other people...and there wouldn't be so damn many of them if it weren't for technology.
Can I write your paper?
Technology certainly doesn't cause stress in itself. I think stress comes from several different areas. In terms of software, I think the issues are generally buggy software, failure of people to communicate properly, and probably misguided or unrealistic expectations. I think these three things are my biggest sources of stress, in no particular order.
Buggy software isn't usually a huge stress problem for me, but it is for a lot of people. Failure to commmunicate for a software developer can be a huge source of stress, though. For example, I have a client right now who, after we finalized the requirements, made several major changes (and countless small ones) to the system after it was developed. I tried to communicate the impact that would have on the timeline. He seemed to understand that, but then he started talking about how it was supposed to be done months ago (based on the original requirements) and now can't seem to understand the impact his changes had, even though I told him from day 1.
This same client is causing issues with unrealistic expectations. The software was about 8 months in development and we're nearing the end. It's been in testing for 2 days and he's frustrated because they're finding bugs. I made it clear to him before we started testing that I expected us to find bugs and that's why we are testing. Now he's talking about throwing out the entire project and starting over from scratch with a different developer (which frankly, at this point, would be fine with me).
So, from my point of view, as a software developer, these are the things that cause me stress.
Now that we live in cities, our visual system is deprived of much of the 'beatiful' input. Instead we have geometric shapes, which architecture employs to make buildings that don't fall down. (Remember when fractals first hit popular media? Eveyone was all 'ooh aah' -- even when you see one for the 100th time, it still has this intriguing beauty. Geomtric shapes don't have this.)
Also, our soundscape has radically changed. Instead of forest voices, we hear whirs and hums of machines. I know personally that my stress level drops immediately when I turn of the computer that has loud fans.
Long story short, our evolution in Africa created brains that was attracted to certain things, and sought them out, becuase they helped us survive. We are deprived of that stimulation these days.
Now, I'm not saying we all need to go back to living in caves, but maybe as a start, we could have more plants in homes, or trees in cities. Perhaps use fractal shapes in our architecture -- an interesting person to look at is the artist Hundertwasser. He drew pictures and designed models of buildings that had a natural appeal. They were based on wavy shapes, not geometric.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
So even if the technology reduces stress for the same workload, the workload increases, so that stress remains the same... so that:
DIFFICULTY x WORK = STRESS = a constant
make that your thesis.
J
Hi!
I think you should bear in mind that the concept of "stress" as we think of it is relatively new. In earlier days people would not think of an atmosphere where one was
...as having any down sides at all. Lots and lots of jobs--even "professional" jobs--through history have involved real risk. A lot of software developers are infatuated with the notion that software is a form of engineering--so for fun, let's compare a software developer's job with some of the real engineering disciplines. The comparison might be informative.
Civil engineering
These guys build tunnels, which might cave in; they build bridges, which might collapse; they climb mountains, ford streams, confront wild animals, and deal with all sorts of heat, cold, rain, snow, etc., while surveying.
Comparison: The software "engineer" moves into a new cubicle with a $900 Herman Miller Aeron chair, and bitches because his new cube is one hundred feet further from the cappucino machine.
Conclusion: Software is a lot less stressful.
Electrical engineering
These guys build electrical devices, working in shops or offices with long plastic hooks displayed prominently. What are the hooks for? To pull you off in the event that you are being electrocuted.
Comparison: The software "engineer" is given a new computer with USB mouse and keyboard. Which means his MP3 player has to be plugged into a USB port on the back of the box.
Conclusion: Despite this enormous stress on the poor software guy, the persistent risk of imminent, excruciating death causes us to conclude that the EE's life is just a tad more stressful.
Chemical engineer
As a general rule, ChemE's work in one of three fields. Stuff that blows up; stuff that is incredibly toxic; and stuff that will kill you in some other way. Sometimes (working with liquid hydrogen springs to mind) the stuff can kill you multiple ways.
Comparison: The software "engineer" is stuck working for a dot-com startup that only offers two flavors of smoothies in the company cafeteria on Thursdays. And do you realize how painful a brain freeze from that smoothie can be?
Conclusion:The ChemE trying to identify a "stable" mixture of phosphene and silane (if the explosion doesn't kill you, the nerve gas will) has just a bit more stress to deal with.
Mechanical engineer
These guys lead a cushy life--they sit in an office, working with CAD tools to create neat drawings. Which they give to machinists and other employees to actually build. Except--those "machinists and other employees" are dues-paying members of the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, or the Machinists' Union. You have not known stress until you have had to explain to a Machinists Union shop steward that existing work patterns will have to change.
Comparison: The software "engineer" has to deal with LAN admins in IS. Who may have read the BOFH files. And believed them.
Conclusion: The MechE has more stress.
My point:
If you look at the course of labor history, technology has consistently been used to eliminate expense--almost always labor expense. And the labor that has been eliminated is typically dangerous, routinely debilitating, and generally a lot more "stressful" than any office job that might be created instead. Where you might make a point about stress is when technology is used to raise productivity (e.g. we give everybody a computer and expect them to type their own email; as a result we don't have secretaries for each middle manager any more, and most companies do not have a mail room staff). If we implement technology that saves 20% of a person's time, we then only need four people to do the work that five used to do. I submit that that change does not--per se--cause stress. If the company fires one of those five, saying that he wasn't needed because of the new technology, that would cause stress. I think that's stress caused by a whip-cracking employer, not stress induced by new technology.
This works pretty well -- except for when it is actually true.
For example, my phone sometimes does not ring when somebody calls me (not sure why, but probably related to my carrier (hint: rhymes with Shint). It works great for an excuse. However it backfires when we have to do a deployment at 2:00 AM and people might need to be in touch with me. In that case I have to be up and on the conference call (or check in every so often) to make sure that they *really* don't need me.
Oh well.
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
I USED to get stressed out at work. But, I realized that they can't fire me, because I am the only programmer. Not a single person around here can even write a simple Excel macro.
So now I just don't care. That is the real stress reliver JUST "DON'T CARE".
The faster and better I work, the more work I am asked to do. So now, I come in, I work 8 hours and what doesn't get done, can be worked on tomorrow. I leave my work at work and never, ever put in one minute of overtime.
If I ever did get let go, all the work I have done would eventually break, and since I never have time to create procedures or document my code, they would have to ask me back. Can you say $200/hr consulting fees?
Oh no, hear comes the pointy haired boss. She has no clue what slashdot is and can never tell if I am working or not. Gotta get back to --- what was I doing?? Oh yeah, I don't care.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
I've looked for on the net a couple of times, but didn't manage to find it.
Does anybody know of a patch that turns clippy into Tux, and then has him make smart-arsed comments about windows at random intervals?
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
I see that you are exceeding the speed limit...
I see that you are running low on gas...
I see that you are parallel parking, would you like some help?
You have turned the ignition switch, would you like to:
Start the car
Turn on the radio
Turn on the headlights
Then again, there are enough folks out there that need this sort of thing. Most of them are small children. The ones that aren't should be sterilized before they breed.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
compare and contrast the civilization now with that 1 year ago, 10 years ago, 100 years, etc. First of all, technology occurs in booms, so you if you want to more data: research historical accounts. Now, you might find interesting patterns if you try to compare "techno-revolution" eras with periods of slow progression. Perhaps people weren't as stressful during the slow periods. However, one era's slow progression (like say, dark ages) may have seemed revolutional. There are other factors that will control EMOTION too, So results should be relative to perspective from that age.
Lets look at todays perspective. If we assume that emotions are ONLY effected by the stress we experience from technology, then you may be on to something. You may even find a correlation. But that assumption would be bogus. Take, for example, the differing perspectives on violent video games, violent tv, controversial radio, SCO, etc.
Personally, I have found technology to be challenging, frustrating, and rewarding. Take Procmail for example. I use it to sort my incoming email into different folders, while many others try to use it to sort out spam. I subscribed to a few high volume mailing lists, so I was always worrying about deleting an important mail by mistake. Now procmail decreases the probability of that event occuring which decreases my stress at the cost of the stress with learning something new. The point is that you will always find stress in technology because many times you have to learn something new (which *someone* probably spent years trying to model/program/study/invent/etc.). But why do many people interpret this stress as bad? Could it be that they are afraid of learning something new, or rather feel that they have learned "enough"? Assuming our minds will "forget" stuff after a lengthy period of time, then our knowledge appears to decrease over time. Doh! Time to apply for that grad degree...or two. Or could it be that people are just lazier now, so their stress levels are relatively higher? This could also explain the explosion in obesity and job outsourcing from the US -psychological disorders aside-, but lets not go there. Or could it be that technology is really just a BAD thing because it only complicates our lives? Hmm, sounds pretty logical and open minded... in a sun-revolves-around-the-earch sort of way, but then we would have to attribute the computational solutions which broke the Enigma cipher as bad too.
Stress isn't a bad thing. Repeat after me, "stress makes me feel alive". By definition, we stress during sex, excercise, reading, etc. We can stress over anything. How about this: try correlating "laziness" or "productivity" versus "stress" in certain cultures/businesses/states over time. Definitions will vary.
...small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri...
I don't think that there necessarily has to be a correlation between technology and stress. Not that there isn't, just like there may or may not be a correlation between stress and showing up to work on time. If you get your routine down, you will be on time. If you wake up in time, you won't be late.
Stress is created by improper management of things. Manage your time improperly, and you will have stress. Manage your employees improperly, and you will have stress. Manage your technology improperly, or your projects improperly, and you will have stress.
Stress is bad, and it kills. There are ways to overcome it, but you have to be willing to make sacrifices to get rid of stress, which might mean pushing back a deadline, or hiring more staff, or something along those lines. Office environment, ergonomics, working with co-workers who have a high level of skill; these are things that can reduce stress.
Another thing that bothers me is how software, sometimes hardware manufacturers present you with "the latest" of whatever it is that they sell, and then describe to you how it will make your life easier, and why version (+1) of their product is better than the current version, and why you should shell out a couple hundred grand for it.
I think that it is better to ask "Can this computer do this for me?", rather than allowing a representative try to talk you in to buying an expensive product. With the outsourcing phenomena that is going on, software products and software companies, in many people's minds, are always going to have a certain amount of financial and job-related stress accompany them.
The concept of "environment" needs to be extended into the workspace, and into the human interactions that we have with each other day in and day out. So not only does industrial waste, improperly managed, pollute our rivers and lakes, but stress, improperly managed, pollutes our work environment. How much technology went into that top of the line ergonomic chair, that fancy expensive keyboard, or that articulating keyboard tray? Technology, by definition, can be very helpful; it can reduce stress and increase productivity. But reducing stress "costs money", money that many employers don't have, or aren't willing to spend. It is unfortunate. Technology is being used to do what: increase profits? save lives? make things easier for the consumer?. We have to intentionally go out and apply technology to stress reduction, and bingo!
I don't think that there needs to be any correlation between technology and stress. I think that it is entirely possible to use technology and not be stressed out. Furthermore, if you do find a correlation between stress and technology, take your sample environments and remove the technology, and I bet you will still have stress.
People create stress by not managing it in the first place. Technology magnifies things that already exist. The drive for wealth and profits creates stress; technology focused on creating more wealth and profits will do the same. The drive to make things easier for the consumer creates stress; technology focused on the making things easier for the consumer will do the same.
The drive to reduce stress reduces stress; applying technology to the drive to reduce stress will do the same.
I've found an interesting thing among myself and my friends. It seems that many of us have become so used to our technology that when something breaks we feel stressed and a little off center until we have it replaced or fixed. I thought that might be an interesting thing to note in talking about this. Now, I'm not certain as to whether this is a new stress caused by technology or a manifestation of how that technology helps us to normally reduce stress. Have others experienced this? Or are me and my friends just weird?
Because no matter how reliable technology is, anything can break. Complex technology tends to fail from obscure problems that ordinary people can't fix or even understand. Our ancestors dealt mostly with things they could see and understand. No matter how reliable your technology is, putting your confidence in a collection of black boxes that you have no idea how to fix is fundamentally different from having confidence in your own ability to cope with problems that you can see.
Here's a short little anecdote that I didn't learn about until recently.
My cheapy workplace gave me a bad monitor with a not-so good video card. After several weeks of use I started getting massive headaches, dizziness, and general nausea. I thought maybe I was sick or I was working too hard. I thought maybe I was stressing out too much. I think I was stressing but it was because of all the ill feelings I was get due to the hardware.
Eventualy I got so stressed my hair started falling out.. literally. I guess there's this condition where this can happen if you face times of continuous high stress (mind you I had these ill feelings everyday).
I learned several things at the optometrist. 1) I was using my glasses wrong (needed for far viewing not close viewing.. ergo i was making my eyes work extra hard. 2) had low refresh freq monitor replaced with nice laptop monitor. 3) blinking and eye resting is very important. If you don't it's easy for your eyes to dry out because you're constantly staring at code. This can be more lethal than you think as dry eyes make it more difficult for you eyes to focus and this constant pressure can also lead to headaches/migranes as I've experienced.
The thing that sucked about it was that I had no real idea what was going on. Back in college I had issues with a monitor that ran low refresh rate and that too gave me headaches. I thought I was just using the comptuer too much but I was using my glasses incorrectly then as well. Who knew?
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
When I was studying the history of technology, I thought a professor at York University named George Grant was incredibly insightful in his analysis. He pointed out that technologies necessarily manifest the values of the cultures that create them. Computers are a great example, because having a society that operates through corporations with a feudal governing structure have resulted in computers that are based on a similar structure. File permissions are a great example of this. Therefore, if you are in a comfortable position within this feudal structure, you are probably in better shape as far as technologically-based stress than say, someone operating a point of sale system for your company who is dealing with a situation the developers never thought of and didn't implement, and over which you have no overide authority. A tool is only a tool, but at the same time, that tool is the embodyment of the culture and values that produced it. The further you deviate from the values or the power structure that the tool was designed to embody, the more stress you are likely to find.
is your source of stress.
People need to multi-task in more jobs today because all the single-tasking jobs are getting automated or moved overseas.
You know, it's not so much the multi-tasks that's the problem, because doing different things is really more interesting.
It's that today's typical set of tasks are subject to constant interruption that's the problem.
I know woodworkers that do lots of different things, but they decide when to move from one task to another; not some buzzer, phone, email, or person bursting into the office with "Guess what!?!" Consequently, they're more relaxed .
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The safest and most effective way to relieve the stress levels of the products that you create is to document them.
Imagine what you believe is an good level of documentation and multiply it times ten!
If you are in the software creation business then your natural comfort level of what is an adequate level of documentation is much too low.
The best way to do documentation is to get one of the speech to text systems, like Dragon or IBM. Train it till you get to the point where it puts the vast majority of what you say into the correct words on the screen. Get a fast enough processor so that there is no or very little delay between what you say and the appearance of the text.
Get another computer that has the application and the source code that you've written. Put it next to the text-to-speech PC. Don't multitask speech-to-text and your display of the source.
Now get a picture of someone whom you feel stongly attracted to and put it between the two PCs. Pretend that that person is seriously interested in you and your work.
Start the text-to-speech program. Look at the picture and the code screen. Start describing in long precise detail what you did, why you did it, how it works, and why it is so cool that you did it this way. Pretend real hard that the person in the picture between the PCs is seriously interested. Keep talking. Describe why all the other programmers are not doing it right and why your code is so much better. Read the lines of code occasionally.
Go on for hours. Occasionally ramble about things that are off-subject. It doesn't matter.
When you reach the end of your code description.
Stop the text-to-speech program.
DON'T Edit It! Attach the text file of your description to the end of your source code with comment characters or symbols at the beginning of each line if necessary.
You have documented your work in a 21st century style. Your users will be able to follow it and they will get great satisfaction and productivity from your having done it in this way.
One last thing. No matter what anyone says about the 10000 lines of 'comments' attached to the end of your source code file, Don't go back to the 1970's method of code documentation. It doesn't work. This method is superior. Memory is pennies a megabyte. Disk storage of the file is a dollar per gigabyte. Long detailed documentation is priceless.
Thank you,
Simonetta
The new century, the new technology, the new way of doing the same old shit.
I think e-mail is my #1 reason for stress. It's taking the place of voice conversation and has little to no structure. It's expected that I read and know all of it a work. My inbox has 2000 messages in it.
#2 reason is non-standard interfaces, not being able to find what you want to do and finding 5 ways to do things you don't want. I also include remote controllers, digital cameras, and mobile phones in this category.
#3 reason is high-level OS. Rapidly becoming a "black box," stability is down and software bugs are way up.
#4 is too much distraction. I realize this is my problem, but internet news and quick surfing keep me from my appointed tasks.
With the exception of #4, of all the reasons seem to be related to good computing, database, and OS practices.
Stress is the body's reaction to environmental pressures. Despite the common connotation given the word, stress is neutral. It is simply an arousing factor. And, as you've probably learned by now, it takes a certain level of arousal to do anything; we live between too much and too little.
The result of stress depends on our reaction to it. We can react negatively (distress) or positively (eustress). With respect to disease, you're focusing on the negative reactions, and that's fine. We don't much need research or clinical applications for things that don't cause us problems and can in fact be beneficial. But for your own edification, and probably also to impress the hell out of your instructor, you should cover stress, distress and eustress as described by Hans Selye. Here's a link to Wikipedia's page on the subject, with links to info on Selye. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(psychology)
I deal with large amounts of different kinds of technology every day. Since I'm an experimenter, I'm frequently trying to do things that either haven't been done before, or have been done a different way and it's up to me to get my stuff to work like that. The stress causes distess at first, when I'm frustrated. However, when I get it working, I get a rush of elation, obviously eustress. This is much the same as happens to programmers when their code finally runs right; it's called a "prograsm".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Stress == anxiety caused by the lack of consciousness about the where's, why's and how's of general impediments of everyday life.
Given the definition above, which, imho, is quite percise, and the fact that we live in an age which is growing more and more complex in the material world I'd say yes, stress is more or less directly proportional to the 'amount' of tech around you.
Quite fitting that I've spend half my day today trying to hush my PC a little more with a fanless powerunit and a fanless grafics cooler. A lot of stress is caused by noise that we aren't directly aware of.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Let's see, I don't have to worry about starving this winter because of a bad harvest in fall. I don't have to worry about some minor cut getting infected and causing me to die or have to have a limb amputated. I don't worry that a hurricane will sneak up on me and wipe out the town.
I do worry that modern air travel would allow a new pandemic; but that would really not be new stress as much as the return of old stress. Even the environmental effects of technology so many like to worry about are no more stressful than worrying about the darn village upstream peeing in the water must have been.
I'll take the stress technology brings; the constant expansion of the average lifespan suggests strongly that it is less serious than the stress of not having technology.
Computer technology allows me to complete my assigned tasks sooner than without the use of computer technology. Indeed, my job would not be possible without computer technology. A popular assumption in regards to computer technology is that it reduces "workload". That is definitely one of the reasons espoused for creating new applications of computer technology (and technology in general). However, in practice that is not the case. When my workload has been reduced by the automation and/or reduction of tedious steps to complete my task. I have received additional tasks to continue to keep me productive. Productivity is usually measured (in corporate America) by a term known as utilization (how many tasks you complete in a number of hours worked). In the case of client service, your utilization is based on the number of hours you charge to the client. The more hours you work, the more you are utilized. If you are in a business in which an increase in utilization translates to an increase in revenue, then it only makes sense to increase the number of tasks you complete or hours worked (within reason).
So, the short answer is that there is no real "net" change in stress levels for me (at my current position) with the use of computer technology. The stress removed by using technology to complete my tasks is offset by an increase in stress caused by an increase in workload (new tasks). My stress level would increase further as I progress up through the corporate hierarchy as more responsiblities are placed under my charge.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
I'm sure all of you hard-working Slashdot readers experience a fair amount of stress, on a daily basis. Has the evolution of technology in the workplace (computer, internet, email, etc...), which is suppose to make your job easier, made it any less stressful? If so, how? If not, why?"
I suspect a substantial majority of the hard-working Slashdot readers are in the business of supporting (in some capacity or other) all that "computer, internet, email, etc..." and/or the end-users who use it all. So around here, I would hazard that technology doesn't make peoples' jobs easier or harder--it constitutes the basis for peoples' jobs.
You'd do well to put this question to groups of accountants, office workers, teachers, car salespeople, doctors, or anybody who isn't doing computers or information technology for a living. Their answers might be more what you're looking for.
I suspect you'll find that everyone, into computers or not, experiences stress. Having to worry about installing the latest round of Microsoft updates to a roomfull of servers (and having to answer to some manager somewhere who can't understand why) is stress. Wondering why you can't send an important e-mail to a client this afternoon (thereby closing a deal that will ensure your livelihood as a widget salesman) is also stress. Who's more stressed--the person who knows precisely why the e-mail isn't working or the person who understands only that he needs to use it and can't? I'd have to say it's a toss-up.
Just suggesting you might want to refine your definitions a bit and decide who your subjects will be--the developers, maintainers and sustainers or the final consumers of the product.
Anne
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