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Uploaded byJustin Lintz
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Dealing with Anxiety in Operations - Velocity 2016

The document is a presentation by Justin Lintz discussing anxiety disorders, their prevalence, and how to manage anxiety in high-pressure operational roles. It covers symptoms, the impact of workplace stressors, and strategies for providing support to those affected, emphasizing collaboration, training, and communication. Lintz offers personal insights and resources for seeking help and managing anxiety effectively.

Engineering◦
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Dealing with Anxiety in Operations Velocity Santa Clara 2016 Justin Lintz - @lintzston - jlintz@gmail.com
Me ● Chief Anxiety Officer Director of Web Operations @ Spring ● Sys Admin since 2006 ● Cannot dunk a basketball
Spring is a marketplace of 1,000+ amazing brands that people can shop on app and web. Our goal is to enable people to shop all their favorite brands in one place in a way that's convenient, easy, and fun. shopspring.com
Goals of this talk ● Educate you about Anxiety disorders ● Discuss anxiety/stress in our jobs ● Methods to mitigate those anxieties ● How you can help
Quick Disclaimer This is not medical advice. I am not a mental health professional or a doctor. These are my own experiences…. Please don’t sue me or O’ Reilly But if you had to pick one...
Survey Says...
Anxiety Statistics “Anxiety disorders affect about 40 million American adults age 18 years and older (about 18%) in a given year, causing them to be filled with fearfulness and uncertainty.” ● 22.8% of the cases are classified as “severe” ● Only 36.9% are receiving treatment Average Age-of-Onset: 11 years old!!! Sources: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2847357/ http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/prevalence/file_148008.pdf
My Illness ● Generalized Anxiety Disorder ○ With a Panic Disorder ● Symptoms appeared around 13 ● Wasn’t diagnosed until 17
What is Anxiety? ● Feelings of panic, fear, and uneasiness ● Problems sleeping ● Cold or sweaty hands and/or feet ● Shortness of breath ● Heart palpitations ● An inability to be still and calm ● Dry mouth ● Numbness or tingling in the hands or feet ● Nausea ● Muscle tension ● Dizziness http://www.webmd.com/anxiety-panic/guide/mental-health-anxiety-disorders
Which shares symptoms of…. ● Heart Attack ● Stroke ● Flu ● Common Cold ● Whatever Virus is currently in the news at the time
Panic Attack Sudden onset of intense anxiety symptoms without warning and sometimes without reason ● Fight or flight ● Logic goes out the window
Good Anxiety vs Bad Anxiety ● Having Anxiety doesn’t mean you have a disorder ● This is the job of a mental health professional to help you figure out!
Stressors of Operations
Oncall https://www.flickr.com/photos/churl/263989110
Guaranteed Outages
Maintenance Windows
New Technology https://www.flickr.com/photos/techbirmingham/76169852
Complexities ● Nginx ● Django ● CockroachDB ● LDAP ● Kafka ● Logstash ● Elasticsearch ● Kibana ● OpenVPN ● YubiKey All in a giant Docker container Sitting in the Cloud Which is all powered by #serverless technology That requires #NoOps to run
A “team” of One https://www.flickr.com/photos/piratescott/481789838/
Power and Responsibility root@spof.justinlintz.com:~# rm -rf /
OMG WHAT WAS I THINKING?
In our operations jobs Minimizing Anxiety
Don’t be an Ops team of One ● Just cause you are the only one with Ops in title doesn’t mean you should be the only one doing Ops ○ Shared Oncall w/ Engineering ○ Empower and train engineering ○ Don’t be a SPOF of knowledge ● DevOps
Controlled Burns
Bring Service down
Did it fail as expected?
Did the correct monitors go off? ● Did you even have monitors in place? ● Did too many monitors go off?
Was availability affected?
Blameless Postmortems Remove fear of punishment from the equation https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ http://www.slideshare.net/jallspaw/advanced-postmortem-fu-and-human-error- 101-velocity-2011
Checklists ● general steps for being paged ● go back and automate what you can ● “playbooks” for detailed steps http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000/
Checklists ● takes stress and pressure off the moment ● even for the simple things! ● removes the guesswork
Training ● Observation/Monitoring tools ○ knowing which tool to reach for ● Expanding your toolset ● From vendors themselves ○ learn the gotchas ○ bring plenty of questions
On-call Partner ● Talk out a problem with them ● A second set of eyes ● Redundancy!
Talking to your Employer about your Mental Health ● Hard to approach ○ Will they understand? ● Takes time to build a comfort level ● Remember you’re not alone! ● Removes anxiety of hiding your anxiety ● Choice is up to you
Recap 1. Team of (N > 1) is > Team of 1 2. Controlled Burns 3. Blameless Postmortems 4. Checklists 5. Training 6. On-call Partner 7. Talk to your employer
When to seek help? Anxiety becomes.. ● excessive ● intrusive ● persistent ● debilitating
Treatments Anxiety is manageable and treatable! ● Therapy ● Medication ● Exercise ● Diet ● Breathing exercises ● Meditation
How can you help someone?
Listen
Ask what they need?
Avoid being dismissive “just relax”
Take them to a quiet place
Avoid touching or grabbing
When in doubt, seek emergency medical treatment
Wrapping up
Recovery not linear Anxiety recovery or JVM Heap Usage?
Health > Job
Resources Finding Help ● https://therapists.psychologytoday.com ● http://www.adaa.org/living-with-anxiety/ask-and-learn/resources Books ● “10% Happier” by Dan Harris ● “Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy” by David Burns Crisis ● National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number 1-800-273-8255. ● Crisis Text Line - Text START to 741-741
Questions? Twitter: @lintzston Email: jlintz@gmail.com