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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
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.
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
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.
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.