Tips for Stroke-Surviving Software Engineers

I watch for burnout in my teams, and become burned out myself at times, but if you're burning out, tell somebody and get moved elsewhere. Coder doing some star-coder stuff the last 6 months, but can do sysadmin/devops things? Switch to that for a few weeks and come back mentally rested.

Legal protections against burnout I'm not aware of but the illness associated with elevated stress levels and 'burn out' do create other health complications.

Burn out is bad, bad stuff. Once somebody's burned out they can't do _anything_

But it does get better with exercise. I was able to reduce weekly headaches to about 1/month.

Well, I said "I'll never do IT again"... and when I say never, it usually happens in the end ;-)

I see older devs being active in the trade well into their 60s but even as I much younger person I don't see how agile development is sustainable for a ~50-year career.

I'm grateful I've managed to avoid this so far. My favorite place to work has been more akin to "we need X done in Y system before Z date, but how and when it's done is up to you".

Tech sucks. It's filled with talentless hacks who think "because we use computers" means you've got a blank check to make every individual do the work of three individuals. And then your company gets gutted by private equity anyway, because it turns out hiring talentless hacks and overworking has consequences.

This is a weird take, but I genuinely and deeply believe the world would be a far better place if everyone experienced a life-threatening but recoverable major medical event and/or had children, while young. Perspective-shifting events that are core to the human condition and help ground your reality in work not being everything. By the way: The businesses our society would build would also be stronger.

Pretty sure you'd be covered in a lot of western countries, and if not you have relatively cheap insurances that cover these things.

I have to do this every time now because I have a resume gap. I don’t have to explain in detail, but even revisiting those three years for a brief explanation sucks.

I’m sure there’s an implicit realization that I will likely ask for accommodations when I explain the gap which likely reduces my chances of being hired.

Could you get the job without these conditions and then drop the bomb on them as a disability accomodation

I'll modestly add that my sight was getting better and wasn't really an obstacle. It started with an activity of carbon ink large format B&W art prints for other photographers... then I became one too.

The "irony" didn't appear to me at that time, someone had to tell me it was ironic!

- I was under severe stress at work - I woke up with aura, realised it when looking at the mirror, I had only one eye - visual symptoms (aura) didn't go away after 1 hour. That's the limit where you MUST seek medical advice - having "a migraine" that day raised my stress level... because work... - symptoms persisted... and after getting better over a year, what was left became permanent (blind spot where the migraine started in my field of vision)

DO NOT take triptans during the aura. DO NOT take any vasoconstrictors during aura, since it's a phase where blood flow is restricted. That could have caused my stroke.

When a migraine hits, I take aspirin, stop all stressors, ALL stressors, try to calm down (I've used anxiolytics occasionally), breathe and rest. I'm often off for 2 days. It happens about once a year.

Again, migrainous infarcts are VERY rare. You'll be fine, just let the aura pass, and know to seek medical attention if it doesn't.

I remember the first months, trees felt exhausting to look at because of their complexity, and I couldn't watch an action movie because it felt too intense.

My best work happens at 2am, at about 4am I am too tired and get slow and get stuck, I think even then code quality suffers only a little bit.

That's just my experience, I believe it happens because if I am working at that time, I am hyped and or in the zone. There is a sort of second wind involved. The lack of distractions also helps I guess.

Obviously you also get those on non-keto diets since non-keto people also get strokes, heart disease, fatty liver...

I turnt the post-it note sideways, wrote `FOCUS TIME`, and put it on my temple, to block out my vision in that direction.

I joked about it with my team before, and then just did so when I felt comfortable enough with them. I utilize this strategy at home for deep focus in a chaotic living room setup.

2x Post-its, baseball cap, and over-the-ears noise-cancelling headphones is peak `focus-time` I've found.

I occasionally use them while I’m working for the reason you mention.

I love my pash. Highly recommend.

I'm not talking about meetings. relationships do not reduce to zoom meetings

and this is not about "knowledge offloading". that's a text file can do it. the key word is "help". the thing people did for each other;)