I think so. I like programming, and I work for smaller companies which tend to have reasonable hours. Since the move from waterfall development to agile with releases ever week or two, death marches are a thing of the past. Or have I just had it lucky?

I can think of a lot of careers that are far more stressful, careers where real people are dependent on you doing your job fast and well. All we have to do is write code that does its job fast and well. That seems like a lot less stress to me.

Not to mention ergonomic chairs, air conditioning, coffee and messing around on the net all day.

Reddit downtime is the most stressful part of my work really.

Programmers and engineers always think they have the most stressful jobs. Nothing new there. Most don't have experience outside of the industry to realize these are fundamental plight of the working man sort of complaints that apply equally to their jobs as they might to a teenager working at a fast food restaurant.

Think you might have read it wrong. This is an article about High-Paying, Low-Stress Jobs which is what is says a CSE is.

It mentions game development. Game development has extremely low pay for the amount of stress it causes.

I mean, everybody wants to be a game developer. Any prospective developer is screwed by supply and demand and a broken development model that allows for insane crunch time.

Or have things changed?

In some senses it has ... it's a lot more viable to be an indie game developer and work from home now - flash, facebook, iphone, android etc ... all have readily achievable barriers for entry.

Does that not exacerbate the supply-demand problem?

There's pretty much infinite demand - those markets are enormous and diverse, iphones the smallest I mentioned with a mere 50m potential customers.

However it's very easy to make a game that doesn't stand out and doesn't make money.

That article was predictably bad, but what really clinched it was the claim that civil engineering jobs are less stressful because projects have long deadlines without giving any consideration to how much time the job actually requires.

Somehow I don't think a five-year project with a deadline three years from now is the most stress-free job around.

Not to mention, the civil engineer's work can't be patched post-release, and tends to have more severe consequences if it's buggy.

Funny you should say, a couple of days after I read http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/ce131/citicorp1.htm via hn: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325393

I agree, though -- being responsible for people's lives has a certain je ne sais quoi when it comes to stress levels.

I don't necessarily disagree with the article, but it does a very poor job of explaining why programming is low stress, aside from saying that some programmers work from home.