Which part about your job/studies/etc. gives you the most anxiety?

Bugs in production.

Working directly in production.

Anything related to working on the live version of a website.

Currently: Picked up a call center tech support gig while looking for a developer role - tech support isn't unusual to me, but I hate being on calls.

In development: Getting anxious/nervous, particularly during interviews, causing me to freeze up and sound like I know absolutely nothing about development.

Work with Ugly Legacy code.

I mean, it is not bad to work with legacy code, more if it is a legacy code that works in a good way. But, the things go messy when you're new at the company and all the code is:

1. OOOOLD legacy code. For example, at work, they we're working with JS - ES3.
2. NO CLUE of how the legacy code works or poor documentation about the code. The only documentation that we have is a Wiki that only explains the API of some internal libraries, but not how the BL works. Now, add the pain of trying to debug your code without any clue of the data flow and the only way to print something to stdout is running the entire app over and over again.

Please, if any CTO or lead dev is reading this ... DOCUMENT YOUR CODE, every new developer from experienced to juniors will appreciate 🙏

My job: entrepreneur.

I recall in college I was out having a drink with friends and I snuck a peak at my phone to check Google Analytics. I had this real moment of "Damn, am I going to be sneaking peaks at analytics for the rest of my career? Is this my life now?"

So far: Yes.

That's been the steady thing. Any period of downtime anxiety is probably 100x worse in the moment.

I'm going to use this opportunity to vent a little bit, because it'll be good for my mental health.

I'm going to start by saying that my job is pretty great. I love 3D CAD design, solving problems, doing math, coming up with solutions that are manufacturable, and especially teaching the newer engineers how to do the same things. There are only a few small areas of my job that are unpleasant.

The absolute worst part about my job is Quality Control. We are a small machining/molding company, and because we have a lot of medical customers, they require us to be ISO 9001 certified. It's a quality certification that basically says that your company can handle keeping track of metrics, continuous improvement, and track down root causes of issues when they come up. None of us had any experience with it, but as the only engineer, I was tasked with putting together the system, writing up the manual and procedures, and then handling all of the quality issues going forward.

The two main things this "handling" involves are getting audited several times a year by accreditation bodies and some of our customers and handling any quality issues that come up.

These two things spike my anxiety the second they come into my inbox.

Audits generally consist of someone who has been trained, gotten certifications, and made it their general career grilling me, untrained with only knowledge that I've gotten from being audited before (and some gracious mentorship from a couple of the nicer auditors). They pick through my system trying to find any flaws, and if (when) they find something, each thing is a ding on our record and a report that I have to write up.

Quality issues happen any time our parts aren't quite right. We send parts out (that I have no part in the actual manufacturing of), and if any of the dimensions on any of the parts is off by even .005 inches (~.12 mm), they generate what is known as a Nonconformance (with a very capital "N"). The parts get shipped back to us to fix it, and often I have to do a Root Cause Investigation to figure out why the parts weren't right. This involves finding out which person did what on which machine, what exactly wasn't right, why did that happen, and how can we definitely keep that from ever happening again. Again, someone who has spent their career looking for mistakes in reports like these will be looking at this and picking it apart for me once I have finished.

If I get an ulcer, I'm naming him Nonconformance.

Anyways, I'm trying to train a replacement so I can get out from under this accidental responsibility, but I've been audited 4 times in the last month, and had several Nonconformances all come through (most of which while I was on paternity leave), so I needed to let some of that out.

I love my job. I love to teach. I love to solve problems. Quality Control is important, but I do not have the mental makeup to enjoy it. Nonconformances can jump in a lake. Thanks for the opportunity to vent. :)

Down time. Both if the server for the app I'm working on goes down or needs to go down, and if there isn't much work to do.
I constantly have anxiety over being replaced, even though I know I'm good enough for the job.

Two things, first being that I am working with a legacy framework at my current job and worrying about playing catch up and falling behind on all the new front end stuff. Second being that I job hop a lot and that at some point in an interview I will be rejected for it.

SEO and single page applications. Whilst there's currently quite a bit of tooling available for frameworks like Vue like Chris Fritz' prerendering plugin, it's still quite a challenge to get good SEO rankings, especially with dynamic content. You either have static pages hosted on CDN's like cloudfront and pay next to nothing, or have server side rendering which out of the box gives way better SEO with less hassle, but have to pay for server costs, which vary depending on how much traffic you're expecting to receive. Sometimes you're not given the choice and have to make do with what you have available which can be challenging especially when you feel like you're not getting anywhere, but could be if you had a server available.

Talks & presentations in front of crowds. And yet I do it again and again.
I have this weird relationship with public speaking, where I feel like I want to die before doing it but end up having an amazing time and want to do it all over again.

I worry about the areas I choose to dive deep in. I have no problem sitting down and studying. I worry whether I’ve chosen the right languages, the right area of CS, and the right position on the tech stack.

I worry that writing tech blogs is a form of procrastination for me. Even though I learn so much while researching, coding, and putting them together.

However, providing value to the community is very rewarding and can’t really be measured 😊

Estimating points for a user story.

My job: full-stack developer on a DevOps team in a non-tech, too-large-for-its-own-good conglomerate

In my company, upper management uses the amount of points completed in a sprint to measure progress. If I don't complete a user story, my whole team gets ding'd. I get extremely anxious about committing to a story at the beginning of a sprint, especially since much of my work is new to the organization (we're the first true DevOps team).

We've expressed many times that using points as a metric is NOT the purpose of Agile. Unfortunately, communication between technology and business does not seem to ever go as planned....

In general, the unknown.

How this relates to work is being in client meetings and knowing very little about the actual project. I get very anxious and nervous if I don't think I know the answer to something right off the top of my head or even a solution to something off the top of my head.

Sadly my current work atmosphere hasn't made this better. Tend to make it worse.

I live in a small city, and not being able to get a job as junior developer generates anxiety every day

Definitely calls. Since very young I have hated having phone calls, and after having a job which would call me on my free time to go to work again it only got worse :(

I get butterflies in my stomach right before the exam. I am scared that I may not be able to put my knowledge on a good use due to stress and probably I cause the stress that I am scared off having.
This is probably student version of how others are feeling about interviews.

Thinking that it is not the end of the world if I can't pass the exam helps a little but this method may probably not work for interviews. After all, there probably is a family counting on you for survival.
Sorry for adding to your anxiety 😥️