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As a software developer I have been doing this exact thing for the past twelve years: think of all the possible reasons why something can fail. The downside is

As a software developer I have been doing this exact thing for the past twelve years: think of all the possible reasons why something can fail. The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively. (or maybe I'm just wired to be a doom thinker and that is what makes me a good software engineer)

maps7 6y ago
For me, it has made driving difficult. I think of everything I can do incorrectly and everything others can do incorrectly. I think of all possible events happening on the route. On the plus side, I am a careful driver. On the negative side, I _really_ hate driving.
- binsh 6y ago
  I think this is healthy and actually comports with reality. Driving _is_ dangerous, and a lot of people do it really badly. I see way too many people on their phones on the highway to ever feel safe driving.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    I agree. Now recently after having spent days reading and thinking about a legal agreement with another company, I'm wondering, why am I so careful with that, but at the same time accept being a passenger in other people's cars -- when I know some of those drivers text-and-drive, making them as dangerous as drunk drivers. Or they don't keep the distance to the car in front, or try to overtake two large trucks at once, limited sight. Should I be fine with that, saving me a few hours, Whilst spending days reading an agreement?
- fendy3002 6y ago
  So it's not just me being paranoid. If my luck is any worse and the worse possibility happened, I've already hit 5+ people and crashed my cars 5+ more times. Driving is very very dangerous but not many realized it.
  - james_s_tayler 6y ago
    Apparently everyone experiences an accident once per every 17.9 years of driving. My wife just got hit by a truck on the freeway yesterday. Amazingly there was not a scratch on her. It made us re-evaluate what we drive though as when we checked our car had only a 2 star safety rating and apparently where we live 2/3 of fatal crashes are from 1 and 2 star safety rated cars. Today we're car shopping for a 5 star safety rated car. So, yeah it carries an inherent risk and it's important we do what we can in terms of driving safely, driving the safest car you can afford and upgrading to a safer car when you can afford in order to minimize those risks.
- jyriand 6y ago
  Sometimes while driving I wonder how come I’m always crashing cases in video games, but in real life i can survive for hours.
solidr53 6y ago
Can be very difficult when you can only see the problems in other people's ideas. Knowing that it's not the purpose, but rather to actually help, people that don't know you will not appreciate it. My advice is to stop doing it with people that don't know how you think. It's usually the people who have unexpected problems again and again in their life.
yetanta 6y ago
There is a secondary issue on this sort of thinking too. Sometimes you can doom out anything worth doing. I see it on the internet quite a bit. "look at the cool project I built". Then come out the doomsayers. How everything is wrong with it. The opposite happens too. But the negative ones stick out in my mind this morning :)
- pythonaut_16 6y ago
  You can always answer those doomsayers with one of my new favorite quotes: "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly"
- webmaven 6y ago
  Back when blog syndication tech was being actively developed, Dave Winer called that sort of reactionary response "stop energy".
eumenides1 6y ago
Try inverting your perspective outside of work. The basis of the advice is I have a hard problem --invert problem statement--> new perspective/approach angles. Your problem is just a little more meta.
jimbokun 6y ago
> The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively. I think it's important to remember taking on too little risk can be dangerous and lead to negative outcomes. Maybe you need to invert and ask questions like "What is keeping me from spending more time with family?" or "What is keeping me from going to more parties?" or "What is keeping me from asking that person out?" or whatever the situation is in your personal life.
teekert 6y ago
I wanted to contribute the same to this discussing. At work, I'm really good at thinking things through and avoiding unnecessary work. Outside of work, I worry that when we restructure our roof, we will negatively impact the neighbors solar panel output. I constantly grind about how I'm going to discuss this with them. Even though we may not even restructure the roof. Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not, for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way out. Now the wife and kids want chickens, and I'm sitting here discussing (in my head) how our neighbor is wrong about all the downsides she may bring up. Even though she may even like that we have chickens. It's tiring and impacts my life negatively. At work I do manage to keep a "do-ers" attitude, I mean I will start many things, take in criticism, change my approach. I think I'm generally pretty good at my job and radiate a positive attitude. I wish I was the same at home.
- throwaway7uA4 6y ago
  Yes, I am exactly the same. While at work I feel very productive eliminating future risk by being very conspicuous towards all design decisions, but the same attitude in "real life" is very troublesome. For example, a very small random sample of thoughts that routinely pop up: - Lent somebody your bike? Oh my god he/she may die, because it's badly maintained (and thinking about the details about different kinds of breakage vs. harm caused). - Opening plastic containers or cans for food: oh my god, sharp edges may fall into the food (how to keep parts of packaging from falling into food while opening is surprisingly complex topic, think about knifes vs. scissors vs. tearing it open, all have very different hehaviour wrt. creating debris :) - doing mistakes when filing taxes vs. the risk and penalties that may ensue - furniture / cupboards being insufficiently bolted to the wall and coming down (and thinking about how it would move, where it would hit and the likelhood of bad injuries) - risk of injuries due to electricity after fixing electric installation at home (am I sure I didn't damage some insulator, is the ground wire really properly attached, is the strain-relief properly done etc.) For me this is pretty much modulated by stress level. Doing a lot of sports, less coffee, and sleeping enough usually leaves me much less inclined of doing these not so helpful analysis for stuff outside work. And I'm always amazed how other people can just "wipe away" such thoughts as unnecessary without any analysis at all. Maybe that's the difference between employing proper intuition vs. striving for "mathematical proof" kind of certainty in all areas of life. [edit] adding another perspective that is sometimes helpful in stopping overthinking: trying to analyse the full tree of possibilities is the chess computer kind of reasoning (alpha-beta search). It is pretty limited in what domains it can be applied to (e.g. it does not work for Poker or the Game of Go). On the other hand try to learn some Go and feel the difference: after gaining some experience you will give up on exhaustive analysis in many situations and just start relying on intuition, because it's the only thing that actually works for complex, unclear situations. Now sometimes I try to remember how playing Go feels when faced with real-world problems where I'm tempted to do an exhaustive analysis. See also [1]. [1] https://xkcd.com/761/ https://xkcd.com/761/
liveoneggs 6y ago
this has been identified as a regular personality trait in operations teams where it is a benefit in work context.
neal_jones 6y ago
The best coder I know is also the most paranoid coder that I know, I don’t think it is a coincidence.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  Do you know if s/he is a bit paranoid also in the spare time?
mtgp1000 6y ago
To all of the people who feel similarly, and have problems ruminating: Try thinking in terms of probabilities - that's the real way out, to recognize that all of the negative scenarios you keep replaying in your head are very unlikely to happen at all. Once you realize that much it might get easier to brush these thoughts aside sooner.
munificent 6y ago
God, yes, this. I have twenty years's of failure-mode engineer mindset training, and my wife has generalized anxiety. Between the two of us, we are constantly in this state of trying to prevent bad things from happening. And, in many ways we have. And that's good. We're in a pretty stable, safe, comfortable state, which not something everyone can say in 2020. But as an unintended side effect, we have also prevented good things from happening. Because we are so focused on controlling outcomes, we have eliminated almost all serendipity from our lives. The only surprises left are unpredictable, unpreventable bad ones: health issues, political disasters, stuff breaking in the house, etc. It is a recipe for slow-burning misery. Even before COVID-19, we found ourselves going out less and less, trying fewer new things, and just... sort of winding our way into an introverted, over-thinking, ball of anxiety. I'm now trying to re-train myself to consider the inverse of that mindset: what's the best that could happen? If we knew for certain that activity X was going to work out, would we give it a try? Do we need to keep thinking about and analyzing this, or is our anxiety just using "you need to think about it more" as a rationalization to keep us inside our comfort zone? It's a hard habit to break. And, obviously, 2020 is like the worst possible fucking year to be dealing with this. (Though, conversely, we entered the lockdown pretty well-prepared to handle being stuck at home since we're so used to it...)
- kkotak 6y ago
  Sounds like paranoia to me. I'd suggest therapy.
- mleonhard 6y ago
  How about asking yourself a new question. "How can we make sure that we never try anything new or experience happy surprises?" and try to avoid doing that?
  - phogster 6y ago
    How about asking yourself where does the inversion principle apply? and avoid applying it where you shouldn't?
  - keithnz 6y ago
arthurjj 6y ago
Something I've taken to doing is a pre-mortem with my team. A few months before launch I say "Let's fast forward and pretend the project failed. Why did it fail." This usually catches a list of things to make sure you're keeping an eye on.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  Sounds as if this has been working fine :-) I very much like the idea
cutemonster 6y ago
> difficult to turn it off outside of work May I ask what situations do you have in mind? > influencing my personal live negatively. What if everyone else is crazy not you

maps7 6y ago

For me, it has made driving difficult. I think of everything I can do incorrectly and everything others can do incorrectly. I think of all possible events happening on the route. On the plus side, I am a careful driver. On the negative side, I _really_ hate driving.

binsh 6y ago
I think this is healthy and actually comports with reality. Driving _is_ dangerous, and a lot of people do it really badly. I see way too many people on their phones on the highway to ever feel safe driving.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  I agree. Now recently after having spent days reading and thinking about a legal agreement with another company, I'm wondering, why am I so careful with that, but at the same time accept being a passenger in other people's cars -- when I know some of those drivers text-and-drive, making them as dangerous as drunk drivers. Or they don't keep the distance to the car in front, or try to overtake two large trucks at once, limited sight. Should I be fine with that, saving me a few hours, Whilst spending days reading an agreement?
fendy3002 6y ago
So it's not just me being paranoid. If my luck is any worse and the worse possibility happened, I've already hit 5+ people and crashed my cars 5+ more times. Driving is very very dangerous but not many realized it.
- james_s_tayler 6y ago
  Apparently everyone experiences an accident once per every 17.9 years of driving. My wife just got hit by a truck on the freeway yesterday. Amazingly there was not a scratch on her. It made us re-evaluate what we drive though as when we checked our car had only a 2 star safety rating and apparently where we live 2/3 of fatal crashes are from 1 and 2 star safety rated cars. Today we're car shopping for a 5 star safety rated car. So, yeah it carries an inherent risk and it's important we do what we can in terms of driving safely, driving the safest car you can afford and upgrading to a safer car when you can afford in order to minimize those risks.
jyriand 6y ago
Sometimes while driving I wonder how come I’m always crashing cases in video games, but in real life i can survive for hours.

solidr53 6y ago

Can be very difficult when you can only see the problems in other people's ideas. Knowing that it's not the purpose, but rather to actually help, people that don't know you will not appreciate it. My advice is to stop doing it with people that don't know how you think. It's usually the people who have unexpected problems again and again in their life.

yetanta 6y ago

There is a secondary issue on this sort of thinking too. Sometimes you can doom out anything worth doing. I see it on the internet quite a bit. "look at the cool project I built". Then come out the doomsayers. How everything is wrong with it. The opposite happens too. But the negative ones stick out in my mind this morning :)

pythonaut_16 6y ago
You can always answer those doomsayers with one of my new favorite quotes: "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly"
webmaven 6y ago
Back when blog syndication tech was being actively developed, Dave Winer called that sort of reactionary response "stop energy".

eumenides1 6y ago

Try inverting your perspective outside of work. The basis of the advice is I have a hard problem --invert problem statement--> new perspective/approach angles. Your problem is just a little more meta.

jimbokun 6y ago

> The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively. I think it's important to remember taking on too little risk can be dangerous and lead to negative outcomes. Maybe you need to invert and ask questions like "What is keeping me from spending more time with family?" or "What is keeping me from going to more parties?" or "What is keeping me from asking that person out?" or whatever the situation is in your personal life.

teekert 6y ago

I wanted to contribute the same to this discussing. At work, I'm really good at thinking things through and avoiding unnecessary work. Outside of work, I worry that when we restructure our roof, we will negatively impact the neighbors solar panel output. I constantly grind about how I'm going to discuss this with them. Even though we may not even restructure the roof. Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not, for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way out. Now the wife and kids want chickens, and I'm sitting here discussing (in my head) how our neighbor is wrong about all the downsides she may bring up. Even though she may even like that we have chickens. It's tiring and impacts my life negatively. At work I do manage to keep a "do-ers" attitude, I mean I will start many things, take in criticism, change my approach. I think I'm generally pretty good at my job and radiate a positive attitude. I wish I was the same at home.

throwaway7uA4 6y ago
Yes, I am exactly the same. While at work I feel very productive eliminating future risk by being very conspicuous towards all design decisions, but the same attitude in "real life" is very troublesome. For example, a very small random sample of thoughts that routinely pop up: - Lent somebody your bike? Oh my god he/she may die, because it's badly maintained (and thinking about the details about different kinds of breakage vs. harm caused). - Opening plastic containers or cans for food: oh my god, sharp edges may fall into the food (how to keep parts of packaging from falling into food while opening is surprisingly complex topic, think about knifes vs. scissors vs. tearing it open, all have very different hehaviour wrt. creating debris :) - doing mistakes when filing taxes vs. the risk and penalties that may ensue - furniture / cupboards being insufficiently bolted to the wall and coming down (and thinking about how it would move, where it would hit and the likelhood of bad injuries) - risk of injuries due to electricity after fixing electric installation at home (am I sure I didn't damage some insulator, is the ground wire really properly attached, is the strain-relief properly done etc.) For me this is pretty much modulated by stress level. Doing a lot of sports, less coffee, and sleeping enough usually leaves me much less inclined of doing these not so helpful analysis for stuff outside work. And I'm always amazed how other people can just "wipe away" such thoughts as unnecessary without any analysis at all. Maybe that's the difference between employing proper intuition vs. striving for "mathematical proof" kind of certainty in all areas of life. [edit] adding another perspective that is sometimes helpful in stopping overthinking: trying to analyse the full tree of possibilities is the chess computer kind of reasoning (alpha-beta search). It is pretty limited in what domains it can be applied to (e.g. it does not work for Poker or the Game of Go). On the other hand try to learn some Go and feel the difference: after gaining some experience you will give up on exhaustive analysis in many situations and just start relying on intuition, because it's the only thing that actually works for complex, unclear situations. Now sometimes I try to remember how playing Go feels when faced with real-world problems where I'm tempted to do an exhaustive analysis. See also [1]. [1] https://xkcd.com/761/ https://xkcd.com/761/

liveoneggs 6y ago

this has been identified as a regular personality trait in operations teams where it is a benefit in work context.

neal_jones 6y ago

The best coder I know is also the most paranoid coder that I know, I don’t think it is a coincidence.

cutemonster 6y ago
Do you know if s/he is a bit paranoid also in the spare time?

mtgp1000 6y ago

To all of the people who feel similarly, and have problems ruminating: Try thinking in terms of probabilities - that's the real way out, to recognize that all of the negative scenarios you keep replaying in your head are very unlikely to happen at all. Once you realize that much it might get easier to brush these thoughts aside sooner.

munificent 6y ago

God, yes, this. I have twenty years's of failure-mode engineer mindset training, and my wife has generalized anxiety. Between the two of us, we are constantly in this state of trying to prevent bad things from happening. And, in many ways we have. And that's good. We're in a pretty stable, safe, comfortable state, which not something everyone can say in 2020. But as an unintended side effect, we have also prevented good things from happening. Because we are so focused on controlling outcomes, we have eliminated almost all serendipity from our lives. The only surprises left are unpredictable, unpreventable bad ones: health issues, political disasters, stuff breaking in the house, etc. It is a recipe for slow-burning misery. Even before COVID-19, we found ourselves going out less and less, trying fewer new things, and just... sort of winding our way into an introverted, over-thinking, ball of anxiety. I'm now trying to re-train myself to consider the inverse of that mindset: what's the best that could happen? If we knew for certain that activity X was going to work out, would we give it a try? Do we need to keep thinking about and analyzing this, or is our anxiety just using "you need to think about it more" as a rationalization to keep us inside our comfort zone? It's a hard habit to break. And, obviously, 2020 is like the worst possible fucking year to be dealing with this. (Though, conversely, we entered the lockdown pretty well-prepared to handle being stuck at home since we're so used to it...)

kkotak 6y ago
Sounds like paranoia to me. I'd suggest therapy.
mleonhard 6y ago
How about asking yourself a new question. "How can we make sure that we never try anything new or experience happy surprises?" and try to avoid doing that?
- phogster 6y ago
  How about asking yourself where does the inversion principle apply? and avoid applying it where you shouldn't?
- keithnz 6y ago

arthurjj 6y ago

Something I've taken to doing is a pre-mortem with my team. A few months before launch I say "Let's fast forward and pretend the project failed. Why did it fail." This usually catches a list of things to make sure you're keeping an eye on.

cutemonster 6y ago
Sounds as if this has been working fine :-) I very much like the idea

cutemonster 6y ago

> difficult to turn it off outside of work May I ask what situations do you have in mind? > influencing my personal live negatively. What if everyone else is crazy not you