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Do You Thrive or Crack Under Pressure?
Flatline5150 writes "The New York Times has a good article on why some people thrive under stress while others crack under pressure. Among other tidbits, pessimists make great lawyers..."
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"When people start feeling that what they're doing is not meaningful, then they take more sick days, begin looking for another job, and complain of health problems."
This should be required reading for all managers.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
is perceived stress. ever come across a difficult coding problem that needs to be implemented asap, but you've become lost in it, perhaps for 2 days straight and come out the other end going "wow" at yourself?
Some people are like that when dealing with people, dealing with law, public speaking, managing teams, groups, or entire corporations. It's just not 'stress' in the way that many would imagine the stress of a responsibility for many people or millions of dollars.
I've noticed that people (including myself) who enjoy working under massive amounts of pressure don't work really well when there is no pressure at all. Go figure, huh?
Definately. This is the key to good management. Most people respond to some pressure - too much and you just piss them off. Some people put too much pressure on themselves and you need to help them take some off to get the best out of them
I like pressure. If there's no pressure, it's not a challenge. If it's not a challenge there's no joy in doing a good job
As someone that needs to manage techs daily this is probably the skill I'd like to be a master of - giving each my staff the right pressure for them to perform at their best.
Oh, and I wish my manager would become a master of this!
Chronic stress has been linked to an array of illnesses, including heart disease and depression. But people who cope successfully, studies have found, punch in at work with normal levels of stress hormones that climb during the day and drop sharply at night. Their coworkers who complain of being too stressed have consistently higher levels of hormones that rarely dip very far, trapping them in a constant state of anxiety.
That means being able to "decompress" or forget about work after you leave. When I leave work my thoughts about it remain there. It's easy to do when you lead a completely seperate home-life than work-life.
Personally the way I do it is to not maintain any post-work social contact w/my co-workers. This keeps job talk to a minimum when I am out and about. It keeps workplace drama to a minimum because no one knows what I do when I leave (this might not be a problem where other people work but in an institution full of females I do notice a lot of petty bitching going on).
I don't work my hobby. I have several hobbies that I take part in that aren't work related at all. It gives me something to further seperate my life from work.
I really do feel for people that can't let go of their problems once they leave the job. Might want to try something different to get out of that rut. No one wants to die thinking about how much they hate their job.
Understanding whether people "thrive or crack under pressure" is relevant. All of the things the troll is complaining about are VERY stress inducing. If we could learn to not crack, or to deal with stress in ways other than lashing out against those we percieve as "enemies", maybe we and our "enemies" would both live in less fear. Less fear all around leads to less violence, which leads to less fear, which leads to less violence...
Hopefully it also would allow us all the levelheadedness to adress our disagreements constructively.
In college, I wavered between procrastination and being insanely ahead of schedule.
I find that my life is better when I beat my deadlines way ahead of time. I'd write papers as soon as they were assigned... I was taking a self-directed course where I was teaching myself some new (to me) programming languages. It was Spring semester, and in the first week I finished my entire semester's worth of work.
Which meant that I spent a lot of time studing how fast I could beat NES Super Mario Bros. Level 1-1... with varying levels of intoxication.
Seriously, though - in the working world, I find that the more ahead of schedule, the more work my bosses will pile on me. The faster I perform, the less they will quote next time. Which boils down to the better I am, the less I am paid. So now I just work slow and take my sweet ass time or get it done fast and lie about how long it's taking.
Oh, and I'm starting my own company so I won't have to put up with this shit anymore.
There is childhood, and adulthood ADD symptoms. Most good providers want to see significant symptoms in both childhood and adulthood. Here is a little self test (I have no connection to them, I found them by google). Most good shrinks will interview you, and then someone who knows you well, to get a better picture. Be careful before you hop onto the Ritalin Express. Therapy, behavior modification and things like yoga often help ease some of the symptoms assocaited with ADD. Good Luck
Save a Life. Donate Blood. Please.
pessimists dont make great lawyers. it is the other way around. I am in law school and let me tell you that the legal professions is one depressing undertaking. My law school does surveys about job satisfaction and the longer the person has been working ina firm the less satisfied he is with the work and the more he feels like he cant get out of it. So the longer a lawyer works the more experience gets and the depresion he faces.
People who need stress put on them are the reason managers create unrealistic deadlines and tell employees they're not good enough. Put another way, these people are not self-motivating. They can't maintain a steady pace of work on their own. Their work ethic is too weak.
The article blurs the difference between what people do under occasional, warranted stress like a death in the family and continual artificial stress. People who need the latter kind need to re-evaluate themselves, people who can cope with the former are simply healthy.
Thug with a baseball bat trying to kill you? Crush his throat. Firetruck 20 feet away going 70km/h? floor it. Lying in the street with broken bones? Get out of traffic, do (minimal) self first-aid, and make sure someone's called an ambulance.
Most of the real emergency things that have happened to me, I was too busy dealing with the situation to notice stress. What gets to me is the things that I can't do anything about.
Oh, and I'm starting my own company so I won't have to put up with this shit anymore.
:)
Hahahahahahahahaha
The only successful self employed people I've ever met (myself included) have a complete slave driver for a boss.
I spend a good chunk of several weeks of the year sitting on my ass doing not much of anything at work, which would suck ass if I didn't have linux to learn.
:P
:P
Underutilized employees are in all likelihood unnecesssary- which means they're a waste of money, right?
Fortunately, the variety of things I do adds up nicely- they'd need three different people to replace just me, so I'm cheaper. And I'm not the only one with occasional VAST GULFS of slack time. And I don't get training or any kind of tuition incentives. So I use that time to learn stuff, since it's the only way I'll be able to leverage myself out of this place.
Am I a Workaholic? Yes. Just not for the day job.
I think this kind of thing is also useful for many kinds of computer programming, especially in high-reliability areas like operating systems and compilers. I've had to fix an awful lot of bugs in programs written by optimists.
Have you read my blog lately?
I thrive when I have responsability and when I have to do important things during short periods of time. What I can not stand is when there are many things that have to be done during a longer period of time, and where there is no fixed time schedule for doing them. What stresses me up then is that I have several things in the back of my mind that I feel that I need to do. In such situations in the past, I have usually slacked off as a way of calming myself down .. but besides from being a bad side effects (nothing done), the intended effect has often been missing.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Stress is a biochemical reaction of the body on exceptional situations, like threats, danger and excitement. The oldest part of the brain (reptilian brain) sends messengers which make it possible to deal with those situations. These exceptional situations are often called stress. But the messengers can also contain endorphines which let us feel good with the so called stress.
In fact stress is a very clever builtin algorithm to ensure survival.
We are even not aware of many situations which are handled by the stress algorithms in the human brain, like accident avoidance and life saving. If you ask people who rescued someone else under totaly weird circumstances why they have done this and why they did not think about the danger, then most of them will have no answer because the survival mechanisms of the brain take control over the rational waging of feasabilities. This can also be observed on job related challenges where the either technical challenges or the competition against a coworker or a competing company pushes people over their limits. Most people set those limits very low due to unawareness of the own abilities and everything exceeding those self set limits is called stress. The stress complaint is hip in our modern society. Our ancestors would laugh heartly about those complaints.
On the other hand there are people with limited capacity of dealing with those challenges. This is often caused by personal deficits, but those deficits are not seldom a result of education in a sheltered environment where all sources of natural and healthy stress were hold off from the kids and young adults. If they are confronted later with the reality of challenges they are predestinated to fail.
tglx - I personally need challenges to be productive
I just finished reading a book about ADD, and that's the first thing that came to my mind. The book also said ADD occurs in about 1/20 of the population, so that would only account for a small number of the "survivors". But I'm also wondering if a greater proportion of the population has some degree of the symptoms of ADD. A lot of what I read about in the book seemed normal to me, but I didn't even score as borderline in the included evaluation questions.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
All my work is done under pressure, so I must thrive on it. I delay everything until right before the deadline and suddendly I have to much work and a lot of pressure to get it done... The upside is, the total 'worktime' is significantly less ;).
"Some of it is genetic, some of it is how you were raised, and some it is just your personality," Dr. Bruce McEwen.
and what, pray tell, is your personality? i would guess it's something that is shaped predominantely by two factors: genetics and how you were raised.
I think you can get anyone to do anything provided they know they're appreciated at the end of it. I usually get paid, so that's appreciation enough!
The first sentence is very true. The second one, well, I guess that is true if and only if your pay is appropriate to your job's risks/required skill level/experience.
Me, I don't know how much my work really matters at the end of the day. But the fact that my bosses go out of their way to tell (and show) me that they appreciate the job I do, plus admiring remarks from colleagues who also do what I do (Web designer/Webmaster), make it worthwhile to me to get my ass out of bed in the morning.
I think one of the most fundamental needs of the human animal is to be appreciated.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Regardless of the validity of this statement, I find the opposite to be true. In my law school classes, it is the optimists who seem to be the better lawyers.
Many cases can be looked at as losers. "You did what? Crud, we're sunk" is not the lawyer I want to hire. "You did what? Hmmm, well maybe we could stretch the reasoning on this case and apply it to yours. Or maybe this decision from a neighboring jurisdiction, tough no decisive, may be persuasive." That's the lawyer I want. Everything can be looked at from different angles and being pessimistic is the worst thing you can do.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
What a surprise. Who would have thought that the mouthpiece of the corporate world would turn out an article like this that essentially glorifies the Velvet Sweatshop that America have become. The article here subtly hints that if you do not thrive under pressure, and accept the sweatshop environment, well, then there must be something just a bit wrong with you.
People, when are you going to open your eyes and see the grave looming in front of you a sparse few decades ahead?
When are you going to take a look at the workplace environment and rules and social safety net that many European countries have created, thus ensuring that their citizens are somewhat shielded from overwork and sweatshop environments?
PLease consider the perspective taken by this article. Could it have been written another way? Why was it written with the particular perspective it took?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Actually there's truth in this. Some of my BEST creative work ever has come from wracking my brain for weeks and weeks and coming up with nothing, until the last 24 hours before I was supposed to present design concepts to the client .. and when there is no more time to screw around, brilliance pours forth (somehow), the client is thrilled and I wind up astonished: where the hell did that come from??
Can't say why this happens, but it does happen.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
On the other hand when I have to work extended hours on a closed source project for hire, I practically have to flog myself into submission to get it done. I have to force myself to get up in the morning. It eats away at my soul that I'm wasting my creativity on something for which I'll receive no (public) credit, no copyright interest and which will forever be hidden away from the world. I'll do a good job because I'm that kind of person, but I know deep down I'm basically doing it for the money, and the stress level can be very, very high.
Of course that is just me. Other people do of course find fulfillment working on closed source projects. Perhaps the recognition from their immediate peers is sufficient. But whatever, the bottom line is that if you're truly passionate about what you're doing you'll never get stressed out.
From an earlier post by me: "...as an employee of said [government] contractor, who wouldn't have any copyright interest in whatever I produce anyway, I think I might be more motivated to produce better work if I knew it would ultimately be subject to public scrutiny and benefit the public good. Compare that to dedicating your life to writing code that will be secreted away in some closed-source product with no acknowledgment whatsoever to you other than a paycheck that lets you survive. The thought of such a dismal and pointless existence is kind of depressing."
Situations aren't stressful when you're completely out of control or your task and responsability is clearly defined. For something to be really stressful, you have to be missing part of the picture.
When you insert a bunch of unknowns, like oh... The main database server is unreachable, the CEO is unreachable, and you can't even start to work on the problem until the guys on-site respond... It's 12:00pm, you're low on sleep, and you have to meet with the customer at 7:00am... which they're on the other side of the country and not responding! Nothing to do but sleep... yep. Sleep well.
...or maybe someone cut the fiber to this block, we gotta move from one colo to the next in 17 hours, and the police have taped off the area as a murder scene... it could open up in the next three minutes or next 30 hours, it's anyone's guess.... it's a shame the I.T. was out of your hands and you can't reach the customer database to notify everyone or provide a status update before they call.
Here's one... your car breaks down on a highway with no shoulders in the middle of the night, your electrical system fails, you've got no flares, and your handicapped mother is in the car... I hope nobody's doing 130MPH when you step out onto the ashphalt.
I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me - Hunter S. Thompson
I clearly stated that I was comparing America to Europe. Yet you ignored that, and compared America to Indonesia, a third world country. I find it very telling that you chose that comparison. So I guess as long as we are better off than the 3rd world, then everything is hunkydory?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Let's take a look at some of the language used in this article, in order to see what connotations are associated with people who thrive on a stressful environment (i.e., a sweatshop, as opposed to those who do not thrive. Tell me what message this article gives us.
Here are some selected excerpts from the article:
"juggling multiple projects and running on four hours of sleep is business as usual."
So that is the Brave New Workplacein America. But that is not the workplace in France, and many other countries in Europe, where 35 hours per week is the mandated maximum work week, and where everyone gets 4 to 6 weeks of time off.
"But for Mr. Jones, the stress is worth it, if only because every now and then he can gaze at the Manhattan skyline and spot a product of his labor: the soaring profile of the Chatham apartment building on East 65th Street,"
Teaching us to accept our place in the sweatshop. Slavery is Freedom, dontcha know, and sweatshop workplaces are heaven.
"Mr. Jones belongs to a rare breed of worker"
Oooh. I wanna be a "rare breed", too. How about you?!
Let's take a look at some of the words used to describe our stress-loving heroes:
"they grapple
Wow! If only I could just be like them!
"People who are high in hardiness enjoy ongoing changes and difficulties,"
OK, Slashdotters, did you get the memo on our Brave New Sweatshop Economy. No, it is not a Velvet Sweatshop that we are headed for, it is just "changes and difficulties". Now get back to work!
But what about the rest of us non-heroic types? How does this article describe us?
"Their coworkers who complain of being too stressed have consistently higher levels of hormones that rarely dip very far, trapping them in a constant state of anxiety.
Oh. OK. We are "complainers" trapped in our anxiety. Gotcha!
"Some people will say 'No, I don't like a lot of stress,' but they find themselves in one stressful job after another, so there must be something that's pulling them.""
Hmm, or maybe, just maybe, it is because our government has sold us out to the corporations and the wealthy, thus creating a sweatshop environment where nearly EVERY job is becoming more and more stressful. Naw, that couldn't be it. Could it?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
An interesting thing I've been thinking about recently, actually. I'm a pediatrics resident and recently did a month in the pediatric ICU at my hospital. We can be on call for 33-36 hours and I've noticed that, no matter how tired you get, when things start getting nasty you get very very focused. Never really nervous, but focused. I thought that was interesting in a way. Just a thought. Mistakes are made when things aren't going to hell. That's when it's hard to focus for so long...
The article points out that pessimists make good lawyers because they are always on the lookout for loopholes int the contracts they write.
Seems like that also makes for a good coder - you always have to be on the lookout for security vulnerabilities, threading issues, etc.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
On one side we have those who want the United States to adopt the social-based work structures of western Europe. Maximum hours-per-week limits, six weeks of vacation per year (plus holidays, plus sick days), and guaranteed year-long maternity leave is what humanity should strive for.
On the other hand, we have pundits crying that outsourcing our jobs to eastern Asia is a natural result of how lazy Americans have become. To its proponents, outsourcing is capitalism at its finest. As long as someone else is willing to work more/harder for the same amount of money, the invisible hand prefers those who work more.
If we favor a social-based approach, we welcome downtime and life away from work at the cost of making cheap-labor markets look more enticing. If we favor outsourcing, it looks like we lose domestic jobs unless we work harder. Therefore, outsourcing convinces Americans to work harder to avoid losing every thing to others.
So, which side are we to favor? Working less seems nice, but is it viable?
I'd like to hear what these people's spouses and kids think of their "resilience". They'd probably use a different word, probably one like "selfishness".
Yes. It will require legislation, but so will anything else.
With outsourcing, you're job can go to someone who can live on pennies per-day. Do you possibly think you can make that up by working harder? Unless you've been completely useless up to this point, there's no way you can work an order of magnitude harder... So working harder isn't even a real option.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Underutilized employees are in all likelihood unnecesssary- which means they're a waste of money, right?"
In many situations the systems run by themselves most of the time, so employees want an SA that knows the system and is available at the drop of hat in case there is a problem that requires immedite attention.
It seems like such a guy is doing nothing, but the peace of mind he provides to a business relying on technology more than justifies for his salary and apparent idleness.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.