Life inside of a high-stress programming job

Programming for the most part has been seen as the cozy 9 to 5 office job where you listen to music and partake in snacks throughout the day while high fiving over commits and merges. Where nothing could possibli go wrong. Possibly. And it can be those things, some of the time. But much of this depends on where you work and who you are working with.

My very first job as a programmer was not one of those jobs. In fact, it might be the most stressful job to grace my career and my life and will go down as such until the end of time.

From the outside this company was functional, stable and had their act together. They weren’t known, but they had over 200 employees in a tucked away 2 story office on a cul-de-sac. They had a dress code and everything.

Nothing about it would speak horror stories or imply panic to the outside world.

The programming team was a small unit tucked away near the entrance of the building made up of 5 programmers, one VP of tech and the Director of Tech. I would make up the 6th member to help offset the load on one particular project that the team had been working on for almost a year at this point.

That should have been the first hint.

Still new, I was mainly shadowing other programmer and taking notes diligently awaiting…