You software engineer can't be stressed, a police officer has a more stressful job.

You police officer can't be stressed, an EMT has a more stressful job.

You EMT can't be stressed, an ER doctor has a more stressful job.

You ER doctor can't be stressed, a cobalt miner has a more stressful job.

There's always somebody worse off. It doesn't mean your stress isn't real.

Stress, burnout, any mental condition isn't relative. It doesn't matter if you're not able to deal with what you're dealing with. For whatever reason.

We use the same internal stress response to stress about rent you're not sure you can make as we do to stress out about a lion stalking you. Robert Sapolsky makes the case that this actually ends up having an even worse impact on your health in his book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

I don’t think that’s how stress works. If you’re prone to stressing about things then you’ll build up failure scenarios in your head relative to what you know.

The ER physician becomes desensitized during residency and learns to fall back on their training; or burn out into another role. Same for the rest.

Even worse, we’re professionally trained to consider all the edge cases, failure cases and write code defensively.

I find most other professionals tending to be more “optimistic” than I am…

Now I wonder if there's correlation to a developer's preferred language, and their outlook in life.

Do Gophers live under a shroud of nihilism, while Pythonistas run about their business laissez-faire, leaving issues for others or a future them to deal with?

In my experience, writing Python was often followed by dread of some random exception popping up in production because my unit tests didn't pick it up.

Writing Go was a much more pleasant experience, I always felt like the code does exactly what I want.

Writing Python is great, maintaining it is miserable.

Conversely, writing Go is miserable, but maintaining it is great.

Logically, the best of both worlds my work has arrived at is Python and on-call for more senior engineers... Fuck. The sheer amount of None-type, or object doesn't have member X errors is pretty ridiculous.

Correct. I had a doctor tell me one time that when treating a patient "if you hear hoof beats don't look for zebras". Meaning, take what you see and hear for what they are. Because someone has a headache don't assume they have a brain tumor. I am over exaggerating here just to make a point.

As a former firefighter-paramedic for 14 years turned full-time software dev I disagree.

Was being a FF-PM stressful? Sure, at times. But there was a LOT of down time, even while on duty. There was banter between co-workers, working out, SLEEPING, watching TV, reading or doing a whole lot of nothing, to help relieve the stress. Majority of calls were very benign so not a lot of stress really. But it was also very exhilarating and challenging. A patient whose vitals were all stable, looked good, talking, etc, etc, all of a sudden turns into a heart attack or goes unconscious. Again, it wasn't the majority of calls but those were the type of calls that we were there for and not the calls were people want to go by ambulance so they don't sit in the waiting room at the ER. (HAPPENS A LOT!). My normal shift was 24 hours on and 48 hours off. During the 48 hours off I didn't worry about email or office politics (there was some but I tried to not get involved).

My stress as a dev comes from different things. Am I doing this correctly? What is the point of this? Imposter syndrome!! I now work from home so no more co-worker banter. Plus the mentality of FFs is way more juvenile, and fun, than that of an office worker. I could take an hour nap during the day but then I'd feel guilty, which adds more stress.

After 8 hours of sitting in front of a computer my mind is fried and I have little motivation to do much else though I have the desire to do personal computer projects which are left for the weekend. And when the weekend comes I may spend an hour or two at most because now I feel guilty for spending more time on the computer.

Is my lack of motivation not to exercise or work on personal projects due to being a software dev? No, not at all but it does add to it.

Bottom line I didn't worry about "the job" as much being a FF-PM as I do being a dev.

Also, I think working in the jobs like FF, PM, police, ER doc/nurse, it is expected to have high-stress so people approach it differently. But no one thinks a software dev can have stress. Stress is stress, it doesn't matter what causes it. It is a physiological response.