Debugging Your Brain | Mental Health for Engineers

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Key Points

Key Takeaways

Read in 30 seconds

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System Observability
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Burnout (Overheating): Burnout is not 'spoiledness' but 'CPU thermal runaway'. Once it occurs, damage (atrophy of hippocampus) remains at hardware level. Prevention is the biggest treatment.
3
Imposter Syndrome (Permission Error): Undervaluing yourself is because you are unconsciously comparing with excellent engineers (including GPT) around you. Need to review permission settings.
4
Social Protocol (Handshake): Remote work blocked 'Keep-Alive packets' called chat. If you don't consciously ping, connection will be disconnected.
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Recovery (Reboot): Sleep and exercise are not optional settings. Skipping them is like pulling power cable of production server.

Introduction: You are not your code.

When pointed out in code review, you feel like your personality is denied. When you release a bug and bring down production, you feel your value as an engineer became zero.

That is a bug. “You” and “Code you wrote” are different things. First, install this basic principle of Object Oriented Programming into your brain.

1. Burnout: Mechanism of Burnout

Burnout does not happen suddenly one day. Like a memory leak, it gradually eats up resources, and causes system down (depression state) the moment it exceeds a certain threshold.

Symptoms (Warning Logs)

Input Lag: Takes time to get out of futon in morning.
High CPU Usage: Unable to make trivial decisions (like lunch menu).
Network Error: Want to ignore contact from friends.

If these logs appear, enter vacation (Maintenance Mode) immediately. “I’ll be fine if I rest on weekend” is wrong. System reconstruction takes months.

Why We Sleep

ASIN: B079J1H3X5

Recommended by Bill Gates. A book proving with vast data how unscientific and inefficient 'working without sleep' is. Lack of sleep accumulates brain toxins (amyloid beta).

Amazon

2. Imposter Syndrome: Fraud Syndrome

“I don’t really have ability, I’m just overestimate.” “Someday my incompetence will be exposed.”

It is said that even 70% of Google engineers feel this. Especially in AI era, seeing Cursor or Windsurf writing code faster than oneself, people losing confidence are increasing rapidly.

Debugging Steps

Facts vs Feelings: List up not “what you couldn’t do” but “what you could do (Shipped Code)”. Separate facts and feelings.
Growth Mindset: Paraphrase “No talent” to “Not learned yet”.
Acceptance: AI is a tool. Just as you don’t get jealous of someone who calculates fast with a calculator, no need to be jealous of AI’s coding speed.

The Pragmatic Programmer (20th Anniversary Edition)

ASIN: B07V49J38H

'The Pragmatic Programmer' is a technical book, but half of it is written about mental set. Teachings like 'Take responsibility for your career' and 'There is no perfect software' lower the burden of heart.

Amazon

3. Operations: Brain Operation Rules

Servers need SRE (Site Reliability Engineering). Your brain also needs BRE (Brain Reliability Engineering).

SLO (Service Level Objective): Set standard values like “Do not work more than 8 hours a day”, “Do not look at Slack on weekends”.
Post-Mortem (Retrospective): When mental goes down, analyze “Why it went down” without blame. Identify causes like “Lack of sleep”, “Task was unclear”, and devise prevention measures.

4. Community: Security Hole called Loneliness

Full remote work is wonderful, but human brain is designed to live in “flocks”. Oxytocin (peace of mind hormone) is not secreted through Zoom screen.

Co-working: Go to WeWork or cafe sometimes and feel “signs of others working”.
Meetup: Participate in technical events and talk to real humans with same worries.