Is software development a good job for someone with depression?

March 2, 2015 2:41 AM

My job is most likely making my depression worse. Is software development a viable alternative, or am I going to run into the same issues there? (Details inside)

I've had serious bouts of recurring depression with anxiety for the past 4-5 years. I'm currently seeing a psychiatrist and getting treatment, which I'm hoping will help, but I'm fairly certain that my job is at least a contributing factor.

I work in a niche area of IT consulting for one of the major professional services firms (one of the 'Big 4', if that means anything to you). There are times when I love what I do, but there's also huge potential for stress: sudden, urgent deadlines; unexpected late nights; having to juggle multiple projects at once; constant communication with clients, usually in situations where saying the wrong thing could cause massive problems down the line - you get the idea. The business is based around billable hours, meaning that management will almost never turn down work even if the department is already fully booked on projects. The work can also be incredibly tedious, involving a lot of very boring non-technical assignments.

I want out, but the skills I've developed at this job would really only let me transfer to an identical position at a similar company. I was good at programming in college, and had a passion for it. I'd be willing to put in the effort to retrain once I'm well enough to do so, but I'm afraid that I'd just end up in the same situation again.

Is programming a good job for someone with depression? (Or, I guess, can it be a good job; I know it will depend on the company you're working for.) I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who are living with chronic depression and are working in this area, given the conflicting accounts/data I've found from googling for answers. Would you recommend it, or should I be looking somewhere else?

posted by anaximander to Work & Money (10 answers total)

To me it sounds like poor management and unhealthy office culture... Which can happen anywhere. I've had nearly identical jobs at multiple places and hated one job and loved the other. What you mostly mention seems to me like office culture rather than inherent aspects of the tasks of the job itself. I know my dad experienced this as a programmer, fwiw.
posted by jrobin276 at 3:45 AM on March 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: No.

Or rather, I think it will depend not just on individual company but maybe on sector. Startups, for example, will likely be similar to how you have described your job, with late nights, long hours, uncertainty, and anxiety about how the company is doing. (Obviously, there are exceptions.) Then you've got freelance/independent consulting: more freedom, but possibly anxiety triggering based on worries about your income and managing client issues directly instead of through a company filter. Established for-profit companies probably vary more, but can be full of anxiety about impossible deadlines, middle management nightmares, fights over requirements, and so on. Those are the types I'm most familiar with personally. Talking to friends, consulting for a big company is probably rather like your job now (with maybe the stress spread out a bit more, because it's not "the client is down GET THEM UP NOW" but "we were supposed to be done LAST FRIDAY WTF IS TAKING SO LONG.") Friends with government or non-profit jobs seem to feel the least stress and anxiety, and more "go to work, do the work, go home, relax, do it again tomorrow."

But honestly, a lot of this is office culture, as jrobin276 said, and a lot is your individual personality type. Or rather, the individual programmer's personality. If I were thinking about it myself, I'd try to separate out what makes me anxious (tight deadlines? Performance anxiety? Angry coworkers? Bad planning?) and then look into different sectors to figure out if some might be more compatible than others. When you get to the point of looking at individual companies, you should ask around in your network or look on something like Glassdoor to check out their work culture.
posted by instamatic at 4:01 AM on March 2, 2015

Best answer: A related useful question might be "if I switch to programming, what should I look for In a company to decide if the work culture would cause less stress, depression, and anxiety?" I'm sure this varies greatly, but in my experience:
- I found agile departments less anxious those using waterfall by a lot
- departments where the management models good work/life balance-- taking vacations regularly and leaving their laptop at home-- made a huge difference
- places that gave development teams more creative freedom/less lmicromanaging
- companies where people were excited by the mission and were there because they really believed in it (maybe more common in startups or non-profits).
- lack of death marches goes without saying, and I found that most closely related to agile vs waterfall
- a diverse development team: not all twenty-something guys, but people in all phases of life from many different cultures and backgrounds. Doubly so for diverse management

Hope this helps!
posted by instamatic at 4:12 AM on March 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

Best answer:

sudden, urgent deadlines; unexpected late nights; having to juggle multiple projects at once

There are lots of great things about working in software, but this is a description of some common problems in software companies. So yeah, I'd say if you think the root cause of your depression is sudden deadlines and need to juggle different, conflicting priorities, software may not be for you.

That said, I would look very carefully at the assertions you're making. When you're stressed out because of work, it's very easy to convince yourself that if you just fixed this one problem, the mental health issues will go away. They won't. Stress and depression are, I think, orthogonal. Stress as a transitory state, depression is more existential.

I try to think of it this way. If I'm stressed out at work, but I know it's because I have a difficult problem to solve and not because of some other factor (like the company struggling or my coworkers being jerks or an incompetent manager), it means I'm working on something important and interesting. I consider this "good stress." Yes, it contributes to my overall sense of anxiety/exhaustion, and if it's too much it can be a problem, but I actually like being perhaps 10-20% stressed out at any given time. I learn a lot in these conditions and I can get a ton of work done with a little fire under my butt. That is my optimal operating condition, if you like. I know this about myself. But if I knew that I couldn't handle being at more than my resting level of anxiety without getting seriously depressed, I would probably not be working in software.

To be honest, I have considered abandoning the career but then I realized that my unhappiness was 95% due to bad management or other circumstances, so I just got another job, and I was happy. Could be you're in the same place, I don't know. Honestly, I think a big part of it is probably the billable hours stuff. Your managers are incentivized to overwork you. Every second you're not working, you're costing them money.

So my main advice, i guess, is to consider how much your current problems at work are due to chance circumstances like poor management before you consider if switching to another field would improve your working conditions.

But if you're interested in programming, there are plenty of resources online nowadays to help you get started on some personal projects to gauge your interest level. I daresay it is easier to get into a software job now than it was 5-10 years ago.
posted by deathpanels at 5:47 AM on March 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

There are very few jobs today that don't come with a large dose of time and performance based stress. Welcome to the workers paradise of 2015. I don't think changing jobs is the answer, because the job isn't the issue. You could spend the rest of your life looking for that magical high paying, low stress job at a well run company. Most of us never find that job, so you need to figure out how to better deal with the stress. It sounds like you are started on that path, so keep working at it.
posted by COD at 5:55 AM on March 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

Do you like the work you do? If so, you might find a firm with office culture that is better for you. Some of your issues are going to appear at any job, and certainly any well-paying job, but a better culture will help with them. It just seems like trying to find a new but related/similar job is a better first step than changing career paths entirely. (You can of course start looking into programming while you job search.)
posted by jeather at 5:59 AM on March 2, 2015

Every stressor you listed seems linked to the office, not the position. Software development might require less client interaction, which might mean less stress, but it might not. Again, depends on the office. And keep in mind that career shifts are in and of themselves extremely stressful.

The best things you can do are:

1. find an office that manages their time better (someone mentioned government work being less stressful and I agree.)
2. pick a career based on interests, not temporary stress
3. find appropriate help for your depression
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:06 AM on March 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers so far, everyone. I think you're all probably right that office culture has a lot to do with the problems I described, although there are issues specific to my field that I know wouldn't exist in a different one. (I don't want to get too specific because it would quickly become obvious what field I'm talking about, and it's a very small and incestuous one).

Just to clarify one point that's come up: I'm certain that my job isn't the main cause of my depression, just a contributing factor. Moving to the same kind of job at a different company is not an option - I can count the places that do what I do in my country on one hand, and I know from speaking with people who work at them that they all have the same problems I listed above. The reason I was thinking of programming in the first place is because it's something I enjoyed, so the stressful aspects of the job might not bother me so much. (In my current job I'm frequently stressed about things I have zero interest in or attachment to.)

Again, thanks for the advice so far, and I'd still love to hear from anyone who can speak from personal experience about whether they managed to find a job in development that was compatible with their depression.
posted by anaximander at 6:57 AM on March 2, 2015

I'm not depressed (in the sense that I haven't had that diagnosis) but I do have a very adverse reaction to stress and have basically structured my life around avoiding it. I've been a contract/freelance programmer for 13 years and truly horrible clients/jobs do come along fairly frequently. However as long as there's plenty of money in the bank so every day I know I can just turn around and walk away, it's all pretty easy to deal with compared to handling the same stuff in a permanent position. For me personally, and probably others too, when more aspects of my life are under my own control I feel a lot less stress. Small to medium sized companies are the best clients (though not the best paying clients) because there's a lot less politics, I'm normally dealing with a director or upper manager.

It's not a path I necessarily recommend to anyone else, but it's worked for me.
posted by dickasso at 8:02 AM on March 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Maybe you would be happier stressed out while you're learning something that you wanted to learn. Programming jobs have plenty of that. Just manage your expectations a bit because a lot of what you describe is common in software. Look up the term "death march" for example.
posted by deathpanels at 3:09 AM on March 3, 2015