I saw this statement posted online by a software developer (I won’t name them as to not call them out directly, although you could probably find it if you searched hard enough) and thought it was rather odd:
“Crying at work is normal and it happens to everyone”
Sad developer
As expected, people responded, telling her this isn’t normal. I would have thought it would be due to
- Toxic working environment
- Bad/bullying managers (maybe ties into point A)
- Personal issues; not work related
- Maybe hypersensitive person
The thing is, if the job is that bad that it makes you cry, then you probably need to leave. Personal issues are understandable to cry, and it can easily happen in work-hours, but then it’s not “normal”; as in an everyday occurrence. If it’s a personality trait of such an individual to easily cry, then again, it is not “normal” because the average person wouldn’t react that way.
I asked one of my colleagues what he thought about it:
“if your work makes you cry, that’s quite a clear indication you should move on”
colleague
So he has the same line of thinking as me.
The original poster tries to clarify, ruling out that it’s a problem with the company culture or particular members of staff.
“If your job is making you feel upset or unsafe, that’s a different problem. But I often feel overwhelmed with coding and cry it out.”
Sad developer
This makes me think it is more related to point D, or maybe there’s not enough team support. If it gets to the point where you have been defeated, there should be other developers that can help you solve the problem.
She then posts a response to all the people that are still telling her it isn’t normal:
All the people saying “this isn’t normal, you shouldn’t cry at work“: there was the pandemic, many people are isolated and struggling. If I want to cry at work, I will. To anyone who thinks otherwise, I wouldn’t want to work with someone of that mentality.
Sad developer
For me, this ties into the personal issue scenario. This one is understandable but it’s not really work related. I’d say that can be partially solved by supporting team members and managers.
The thing is, I thought they were backpedalling a bit here, and rather than retracting the word “normal”, they were still trying to justify their statement. Additionally, the theme did sound familiar, and I did some more searching to see if I could find a previous quote from them. I was correct, I had read this before. This was from a time people worked in the office:
“I wish I could go back 5 years and tell myself that there would come a day when I wouldn’t cry at work each week and I would feel confident in my programming skills. It takes a long time but at some point you’ll realize how far you’ve come.”
Sad developer
Each…week. Damn.
So they were definitely trying their best to justify their statement rather than retracting it. It wasn’t about the pandemic at all, they just cry when their code doesn’t work, but they won’t accept that it’s not a normal reaction.
I think telling people it is normal is bad advice. I’m still going to stick with my opinion that it’s either a terrible place to work, or you have issues. Advising people to not leave the toxic job, or to not seek help for whatever problems they have – is definitely bad advice.
However, to play devil’s advocate and argue with myself, I did a quick Google search and found a few articles that quote the job site Monster who (apparently) performed a survey with 3,000 respondents. Apparently 8 out of 10 people have cried at work. Of those:
- 45% stated it was because of their bosses or co-workers.
- 19% stated personal, non-work issues.
- 15% stated workload,
- 13% said they were upset over workplace bullying.
- I assume 8% were other reasons.
Note I stressed the word “apparently”. Weirdly, all of the articles I found didn’t link to Monster, and I searched Monster’s website and also tried to use Google to find the source. I saw evidence of a survey for that time, but no statistics on crying. There’s also an article about crying, but then it links to one of the news articles I found! Why would Monster quote a news article that says Monster did the survey when they could just quote themselves.
So what are we concluding? I’m one of the emotionless 20%, or crying isn’t normal and there’s some weird conspiracy.
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