I wasn’t sure how this talk would go over at SREcon this year. I knew a few people were interested in the topic, but would engineers in the audience tune out in favor of Slack-surfing and vibe coding?

Nay nay: engagement was high. You know when you’re on stage whether the audience is with you or not, and it was gratifying to see that this topic resonated with a lot of people. The Q&A was busy, and quite a few people came up to me afterwards to thank me for translating the psychology into relatable terms.

Notes:

• The way I talk about “ordinary” and “sensory” mind here (aka secondary and primary consciousness) is strongly influenced by Robin Carhart-Harris’ entropic brain model. You can read more in Entropy as more than chaos in the brain (MIND Foundation) or deep-dive into the papers listed on the Carhart-Harris Lab website.

• The free Maven webinar I mention at the end of the talk is available here: Practical Tools for Incident Stress.

I’m excited to keep the conversation going. I’d love to hear what lands for you and what you have questions about.

— Beth

I wanted to include some resources that might be useful to engineers who are coping with the acute stress of incidents as well as the chronic stress (which for many, turns into some form of burnout) of being on-call.

Here are a few engineer-friendly resources to explore:

• Dr. Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness Practice

• Dr. Cat Hicks’ Psychology for the Humans of Tech

• Unbound - neuroscience-based coaching for rapid change

• Jhourney - retreats to increase your baseline happiness

There are countless guided breathing and grounding exercises available online. Here’s a sampling:

• Belly Beathing Exercise

• Guided 4-7-8 Breathing Exercise

• Guided 4-4-4-4 Box Breath

• Guided Wim Hof Breathing

• Guided 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding

A caveat: One of my challenges over the years has been that many guided meditations and other tools hit me the wrong way, so I don’t use them. Maybe they’re too flowery, or the way someone speaks is off-putting. Maybe a teacher makes dubious claims that put my analytical mind in hyperdrive. Your taste may be quite different from mine; if the above links don’t float your boat, there are plenty of other resources out there. Keep looking until you find what works for you.

“She’s a machine.”

That’s the compliment we pay to someone who is impressively, unstoppably productive.

“Keeping the Lights On.”

That’s what we call the background operational work that keeps complex distributed systems up and running.

We’ve outgrown industrial metaphors.

These and many more metaphors illuminate how we think about work. Our metaphors are stuck in the industrial age; but software has long outgrown the simple, mechanistic world of the assembly line.

And humans, those clever creatures, were never mechanistic to start with.

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Continuous Re-integration is re-imagining tech work.

I’ve always been fascinated with how we work, from productivity systems to agile software development. Join me in exploring new ways of thinking about how we work in, on, and through technology.