The Mental Health Factor in Building Top-Flight Engineering Teams

What Businesses Should Do About Poor Mental Health in Engineering & Product Teams

Welcome Leaders!

Improving mental health for engineers is the last frontier for better happiness, productivity & outcomes for technology organizations.

Companies that invest in it win, and companies that don’t just stay average.

You don’t have to do a lot to help with mental health — you just have to do the right things.

Remember the movie Office Space? The entire premise of it was about burnout at a tech firm. It’s 25 years old now and even then the premise was relatable.

This issue can be helped a great deal with the right strategies. And it can be a win-win for both companies and teams.

Cheers,

Bobby

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I’ve interviewed & worked with 100’s of software engineers over my career as CTO and one of the most common yet least talked about realities I’ve seen is how prevalent mental health issues are in our industry.

It’s hard to find reliable data on whether the rates of negative mental health amongst software engineers is more or less than any other role, but my experience with developers over the years gives me the strong impression that the rates of anxiety & other mental health issues are significantly more than average.

But, before I go any further I’m going to caveat my views with the fact that I’m not a psychiatrist and my opinions are simply informed by my personal experience of over 20 years in tech.

When I started my journey in software engineering “mental health” wasn’t a thing. So perhaps in some respects things ARE getting better since we all try and take care of ourselves much more now than perhaps we did 20 years ago.

But I also know about the struggles engineers face every day.

It’s so clear in some engineers’ demeanor, their way of talking, their sense of self, how they show up to meetings, the interactions with others…that they are going through a lot of mental health issues.

They seem very lonely at times. They might have friends & family but at same time often seem very isolated. There doesn’t seem to be enough connection for them at work.

I think the big drivers that lead to this anxiety and negative mental health in the software industry are actually fairly obvious.

Here is what I believe drives the majority of the problems.