Learn To Relax
There are many secrets I have learned to surviving a programming job over the past few years. The most important is the ability to relax under any situation. I don’t care if people tell you that stress helps you code better. That’s pure nonsense. The more relax you are the more you’re brain is better able to function. I personally listen to music on my iPod as a way to reduce tension.
It does no good to get nervous if you encounter a bug that you have trouble fixing. Whenever I have gotten nervous or stressed in the past it has hurt my productivity. Sometimes all you need to do is go home and forget about the problem over the weekend or overnight. When you come back later on to work on the problem you will be better able to think about the task from another angle.
The other issues that you have ignore are other things going in your life. As a Java developer I have learned sometimes just to not give a dam and relax even block out all distractions temporarily.
March 20th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
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March 21st, 2008 at 10:58 am
Hi Mike, I have to agree with your advice. As you know, for several months now, I’ve been working as a Programmer/Analyst for a Boston based medical software firm.
My worklist involves dealing with software anomalies within a hospital’s medical system. It can be very stressful due to the nature of the business, which is to be fast and efficient.
My job is to rectify issues as they are encountered. In the beginning, I found it difficult to concentrate. One reason was, I had multiple customers to attend to and in many instances, demanded that their issues take precedence.
Another reason is that when you trouble shoot software issues in a large market system, there are literally hundreds of programs with many lines of code to comb through. The time to discover an anomaly may take days if not more.
I have found that by listening to music while working, subconscious thoughts that had me doubting myself and my ability to perform in this new position, have vanquished. I am able to concentrate better and solve issues faster.
Thanks to music, I’m not worrying if I’m taking to long on a task or afraid to take on an issue that spans multiple modules. I just relax and go for what I know!
P.S. your right, the lessons you do in college barely scratch the surface. Especially for someone like you who is doing J2E. It’s an whole ‘nother animal!!!
April 5th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Hello Mike,
I’m not a programmer but I wish I could be in next few years, I got your blog from AdBrite advertisement and found it very interesting, unique & useful. Your advices will help me allot in future. Thanks for blog & best of luck. Keep it up ! Bye
April 5th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
It’s good to know that people actually are reading my blog and that my promotion on AdBrite is working. I’ve spent alot of time over the past few weeks and the comments that I get make it worth it.