I share my experiences dealing with an Anxiety disorder while working as an Operations engineer and talk about ways to help mitigate anxiety on the job. The video is online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgXzjhDNuwQ

1. Dealing with Anxiety
in Operations
Devopsdays NYC 2015
Justin Lintz - @lintzston - jlintz@gmail.com

2. Me
● Chief Anxiety Officer
Sr Web Operations Engineer @ Chartbeat
● Sys Admin since 2006
● #TallOps

3. Goals of this talk
● Educate you about Anxiety disorders
● Discuss anxiety/stress in our jobs
● Methods to mitigate those anxieties
● How you can help

4. Survey Says...

5. 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.”
Source: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/anxiety-disorders/index.shtml

6. My Illness
● Generalized Anxiety Disorder
● Symptoms appeared around 13
● Wasn’t diagnosed until 17

7. 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
http://www.webmd.com/anxiety-panic/guide/mental-health-anxiety-disorders

8. Which shares symptoms of….
● Heart Attack
● Stroke
● Flu
● Spontaneous Combustion
● And every discovered and undiscovered
illness known to humans

9. Panic Attack
Sudden onset of intense anxiety symptoms
without warning
● Fight or flight
● Logic goes out the window

10. 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!

11. Stressors of
Operations

12. Oncall
https://www.flickr.com/photos/churl/263989110

13. Maintenance Windows

14. New Technology
https://www.flickr.com/photos/techbirmingham/76169852

15. A “team” of One
https://www.flickr.com/photos/piratescott/481789838/

16. Power and Responsibility
root@spof.justinlintz.com:~# rm -rf /

17. OMG WHAT WAS I
THINKING?

18. In our operations jobs
Minimizing
Anxiety

19. Don’t be an Ops team of One
● This doesn’t mean you can’t be the only
person with Operations in your title
o Shared Oncall w/ Engineering
o Empower and train engineering
o Don’t be a SPOF of knowledge
● DevOps

20. Controlled Burns

21. Bring Service down

22. Did it fail as expected?

23. Did the correct monitors go off?
● Did you even have monitors in place?
● Did too many monitors go off?

24. Was availability affected?

25. 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-1
01-velocity-2011

26. 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/

27. Checklists
● takes stress and pressure off the moment
● even for the simple things!
● removes the guesswork

28. Training
● Observation/Monitoring tools
o knowing which tool to reach for
● Expanding your toolset
● From vendors themselves
o learn the gotchas
o bring plenty of questions

29. On-call Partner
● Talk out a problem with them
● A second set of eyes
● Redundancy!

30. Talking to your Employer about your Mental Health
● Hard to approach
o 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

31. 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

32. When to seek help?
Anxiety becomes..
● excessive
● intrusive
● persistent
● debilitating

33. Treatments
Anxiety is manageable and treatable!
● Therapy
● Medication
● Exercise
● Diet
● Breathing exercises

34. How can you
help someone?

35. Listen

36. Ask what they need?

37. Avoid being dismissive
“just relax”

38. Take them to a quiet place

39. Avoid touching or grabbing

40. When in doubt, seek
emergency medical treatment

41. Wrapping up

42. Health > Job

43. Resources
● American Institute of Cognitive Therapy
● Albert Ellis Institute
● CBT/DBT Associates
No or Low Cost
● http://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/clinical-trials
● http://postdocpsychoanalytic.as.nyu.edu/page/clinical-services
● http://www.nyp.org/services/psychiatry.html
● National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number 1-800-273-8255.

44. Questions?
Twitter: @lintzston
Email: jlintz@gmail.com