This fucking anxiety is KILLING me. It's burning me away.

The BBQ Pit
1

I accepted a job offer a few hours ago. I haven’t had full-time work in almost a year; this should be a good thing, right?

But it’s going to be a tough job. Software development, on platforms I never saw before. For a small dot-com startup. And I haven’t done any serious development since 2001. I have to face the possibility I might fail.

I thought the anxiety was bad from not having a job. But now I feel like I’m DYING. Here’s where I really wish I were like my religious relatives, who could pray and “put it all into God’s hands”.

I had a few beers with a friend earlier, but I had to go home and throw up. Twice. I took a generic Zanax (well after throwing up), and it’s doing NOTHING. It’s like I swallowed a friggin’ Tic-Tac.

I used to see a psychiatrist about this anxiety, and I tried several one-a-day medications, but they did nothing but fuck up my sex drive.

God DAMN this anxiety. GOD DAMN IT. It’s destroying me. Even before worrying about the job, I had several times a day where I hyperventilated from anxiety from not having a job, ironically enough. DAMN THIS SHIT. My hands are shaking. My heart is jackhammering. It feels like death, but with no relief at the end. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!

2

Calm down man. You’ll be alright.

Software development is software development. It’s all logic. Go out and buy the best book you can on said platform. Read it. Become confortable with the syntax.

You’ll do fine.

Let me guess. It’s .NET right?

3

Congrats on the new job. Soon you’ll have health insurance and you can get more drugs. :smiley:

4

I experienced a LOT of anxiety recently after being selected for a new position. So I think I understand what you’re going through.

It sucks because most people in your real life probably aren’t being too sympathetic; after all, the new job is supposed to be a good thing, and perhaps they think you’re being overly dramatic.

I think the better the job, the more there is to lose and therefore the more anxiety.

I have no real advice, but I do empathize.

5

Thanks man, I’ll try to keep that in mind. Actually, I don’t recall what the platforms are! The interview was like 4 weeks ago, and I assumed I didn’t get the job, and it kinda went out of my head! But it’s not Microsoft, so it’s almost certainly not .NET. I’d remember if it was .NET, regardless. They had several projects going on, some Java, and some C, IIRC. I know C and C++, but they better cut me some learning slack for Java, and whatever the hell platforms they have.

freido, it will indeed be great having health insuranse again. Actually, I’ve always had it, I went from COBRA to some private insurance. But none of the drugs help, is the problem. (Generic) Xanax helps usually during bad times, but not today. I’ll have to take another to sleep tonight.

6

Don’t worry so much. There’s always a learning curve associated with starting a new job. As long as you didn’t lie during the interview about your skill set, you should be fine.

After the first week there, you’ll be fine.

7

Dude, if it’s Java, get excited, real excited! Java is the shit! And if you know C/C++, you can master Java with little problems.

Start with Sun’s Java Tutorial Portal Page. You don’t even have to buy a book. Master the links in this puppy, and you will be set!

8

Bah, I forgot to add an important link. If you are working with Java, you probably are going to be working with the J2EE architecture. Here is your J2EE Bible.

I used to work on a J2EE project, and let me tell ya, it was the best! I’m on a Coldfusion/SQL Server project right now. I miss J2EE. :wink:

9

I was very careful in the interview not to even exaggerate my skill set (which probably helps explain why it took so long to get a job…) But I hope they remember my skill sets, so it’s not a surprise when I have to learn the new stuff.

It happened to a friend of mine, where he started a job where they promised they’d train him, but they reneged on the promise and fired him for not knowing enough. I wasn’t promised any training, but I expect to be able to learn the stuff on my own. The question is, will I learn it quick enough to be valuable? I hope so.

10

Chunky Bum, thanks for those links. I hope I do indeed get to use Java, and those resources!

11

Well, you first task will be to find out what, exactly, the platforms you are required to learn are. :wink:

Good luck man. I know you’ll do fine. You are a Doper. Dopers can handle anything thrown at them. :wink:

12

Thanks for the words of encouragement all. They (or my second Xanax :wink: ) have helped me feel a bit better.

13

I’m a self-taught novice programmer. I can do some stuff ok, but mostly it is just tinkering. I like C++ better, but Java was really easy to get into. With the resources available to you as a doper and as someone who already is familiar with an OO language, Java is very easy to pick up. It is a very nice language. Heck, I recently taught myself to interface to Oracle (something I’m also a novice in) with the JDBC and it took me all of a day to get everything running. Wrote a graphical SQL interface with threads in about a week.

You’ll do fine if you can stand giving up pointers. :slight_smile:

14

Ativan works better than xanax in my :smack: :confused: :dubious: :rolleyes: :smack: experience

15

Anxiety can be a horror to try to deal with. When I was having my worst problems with it, I kept a bottle of water in a spray bottle in the frig both at work and at home. When I would feel myself start to panic, I would spray my face with cold water. It helped to take the edge off.

In fact, at home I would sometimes put my face in a bowl of water and ice. I heard this wasn’t too good for my complexion, but it felt great!

Also, allow yourself to worry only about the next step. (Another way of saying that you must allow yourself to dread only one day at a time.) :wink:

These tips from wilderness survival help too. They sound obvious but they take practice:

  1. Make a list of everything you can do about the problem.
  2. Do it.
  3. Let it go.
  4. Let it go, dammit!!

You. will. do. fine.

16

Let me be the first to say Congrats about the new job!

Panic and worry serve no one. They never help you in any situation. You know this and yet it eats away at your brain, your nervous system, your body.

Keep on trying with different meds to help with the situation. Don’t worry about the sex drive so much. If you are spazzing out and in DEFCON 5 status over Worry Du Jour you are hardly likely to get laid by anything other than Rosy Palms.

Maybe you need another outlet. Something other than the computer. Yeah, give up or tone down how much you are on here. This place is mental in oh…so…many ways.) Get out of your head and into your body. Remember that place below your neck? That globby out of shape pile of goo during moments of stress you cram krusty kreme into like it was prozac? oh, wait, that’s me. Never mind.

Exercise might help distract everything and tire you out enough to sleep. (then you could go and buy new shoes to work out in. New shoes, in a womans world, are always theraputic.)

Meditation can help teach you to still your thoughts. That is mental, but an entirely different mental. It’s like spring cleaning your mind of crap. This is my alternative to prayer , which doesn’t do squat for me either.

Yoga can help you focus, breathe deeply and relax your body.
Just relax.

Before you know it you will forget about all the problems of being unemployed and being broke and will start to enjoy learning the new job, the new people and complaining about how you are grossly underpaid.
Remember, it could always be worse.. :slight_smile:

17

Yeah. Here’s hoping it’s Java, Revtim. I am not a good C or C++ programer but my basic understanding of Object Oriented programming made it pretty easy to pick up. I pretty much learned it on my own. (I wrote a thug generator for Shadowrun if anyone if interested.)

If you were honest in your interview, than it is the fault of the company, not yours, if it turns out you don’t meet the actual job requirements. But frankly, I highly doubt that will be the case. Any decent programmer can adapt to any programming environment. At the dotcom I use to work for we took a C++ programmer and made him into a Lotus Notes programmer. The two share absolutely nothing in common.

They hired you for your brain’s computing power, not the software that is currently stored in it. You’re a CPU that just got plugged into a new motherboard. And you’ll do just fine or I’ll continue making crappy analogies. :smiley:

18

Zoe is a very wise woman (because she agrees with me! :D). When we are panicked about something that is not immediately threatening to our physical well-being, it is generally because we’re viewing a situation as overwhelming and infinite. Very few situations are. When we are panicked, we need to look at the actual situation, and see what it consists of. No matter how big a problem may be, it has limits. Once you’ve established those limits, you can stop panicking and actually start dealing with the situation.

In this case, you’ve got some fairly concrete things to deal with, and they are certainly not infinite. You have to bear in mind that it is in your new company’s best interest for you to succeed, as well as your own. It costs them money to hire you, it costs them money to employ you, it costs them money to fire you and to hire someone else. They would far rather keep you than to let you go and hire someone else.

If you have some lead time before your starting date, call them and ask them exactly what platforms you will be working on. Explain that, in your spare time, you want to be getting a head start on your new job. This will certainly do you no harm in their eyes, and will enable you to know where to focus your learning efforts. Then, since I imagine your finances are tight, bear in mind that the internet is your friend. There’s huge amounts of information on technical systems available without spending a penny.

Java syntax, if I recall correctly, is virtually identical to C syntax, so brush up on your programming in general. I’ve been programming professionally since 1977, and my experience is that programming is programming is programming. The biggest problem is learning the quirks of your particular environment that are going to force you to get creative in order to do what you want to do (and each environment has those quirks).

No one is expecting you to come in as an expert. Even if your resume precisely matched their requirements (and you know that never happens), you don’t know their business environment. They’re going to be watching for a couple of things. First and most important, are you trying hard? Are you making the effort? Second, do you have the skills they need? That doesn’t mean that you have to know the environment, but rather that you demonstrate an ability to learn and understand how to use that environment. If you were a good programmer before, the chances are you’ll be a good programmer again, that you’ll be able to pick up what you need.

Again, let me reemphasize: they don’t want you to fail. It’s in their best interest to help you succeed. Between that and your own abilities and efforts, you should be fine.

Remember, make a list of the problems/actions required. No matter how long the list is, it won’t go on forever. Once you have it, you know the limits of your problem and you can get started dealing with it. This is true for any anxiety situation, not just yours.

19

I second Shirley’s suggestion. The only cure I’ve ever found for I-want-to-vomit anxiety is exercise. Get ye on a treadmill, put it up to 6.5 or 7.0 and run it out. Then lift some weights and fatigue your body so that sleep will come even if your blasted mind wants to continue aggravating you. In my experience, a truly exhausted body always wins out on the sleep battle.

If that’s impossible, for some health reason, check out a yoga tape from the library. Yes, it’s very frustrating not being able to bend your body into some of the pretzel poses they say is for beginner’s, but you will get something out of it. Stretching is amazingly relaxing and grounding.

Good luck to you.

20

Rev, I’ve heard that visualization techniques can really help with this. Picture yourself succeeding at your new job. Start with small successes and build to larger and larger hurdles. I’ve never done this, but I’ll bet there’s a website or book that can help you with it.

You’ll be fine. They wouldn’t have hired you unless they felt you were right for the job. Feel yourself becoming the best thing that ever happened to the dot.com gig. Good luck!