Dealing with Failures and Setbacks in the Workplace?

madvenu asks: "How do the other geeks and managers(!) over here handle failures and depression? Especially with the current troubled climate... this question seems very relevant and apt. We are, after all, only human." This is the real, human side of this business. When you suffer a setback, you have to psych yourself up to tackle the next one, no matter what. How do YOU pick yourself up after a particularly bad day/week/month at the high-stress office?

"Recently, a friend and fellow Unix Sys Admin called up and told me she was feeling low and useless as she had not been able to successfully setup a Volume Manager on Solaris / Fiber GBIC /A5200 / Vertias via remote install !! She has 3 years of experience on various Unix systems and is good with sendmail, backups and the usual admin stuff, but this is the first time with Veritas & remote solaris installs for her. She has been trying for a couple of weeks and some snag or the other, together with all the incompatible 'patches' which crash the machine are making her tensed and sleepless. The typical late into the nights and early morning 2am installs and crashes and reinstalls and patching are also affecting her health and joy of life. Now, she is loosing confidence in herself and is beginning to doubt her own capabilities.
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This is the same experience I have gone through before, but it was installations of OpenBSD or getting that particular hardware to work with Linux or trying to understand Emacs... that I would tire of late into the nights and start getting depressed as I would not find solutions and would wonder if I was good enough to do anything at all if I could not solve such "simple" things.I have found this syndrome occurs to me once in a while and I have not found any one solution. Usually I take time off and take things easy and tell myself that failing is not so bad after all....

So how do the slashdotters feel about this? Any tips from those great sysadmins and programmers who have built Linux and other opensource projects? What makes them keep going inspite of failures and depression? How do you do it?"

Question yourself...

[dreamquick]

Start by figuring out where you went wrong, or by what is making you depressed. Ask yourself the following questions...

Can you prevent it in the future? (e.g. if it was that you didn't check something, can you schedule and automated check in future so that it doesn't get overlooked)

Can you do anything to halt the problem now? (e.g. I'm stressed because of project XYZ, can i delegate some of the tasks leaving me with less to concentrate on. If this stress is caused by others mistakes then educate them, if that fails then eliminate them)

As for me I'm waiting to finish a project then I have a holiday so that's my coutner-measure.