I’ve never had a lot of workplace stress before. Normally stuff needs designing / coding / fixing and maybe there is a deadline and a difficult customer but coding is what I do, even if I don’t know how something works I’ve usually been able to figure it out from scratch / reverse engineer it from traces / google it. I have confidence in my ability to do that and more than that I have the trust of the small teams I’ve worked in - it’s not that failure isn’t an option but that everyone has appreciated if it fails it is because failure was the only the option - it wasn’t just because one of us didn’t try.

However, working for my new, big company I find myself in the Kafka-esque situation of being hassled by someone I’ve never met, several pay grades above me to finish a TLA’ed procedure that I’ve no idea what it is. The best help any one in my limited netwwork (ie my boss who allocated me to the task) could give was “It replaces the XYZ (another TLA procedure I know nothing about), you can look at the old one of those but I don’t know if it is the same.”

Great then, I’ll just wait to turn into a dung beetle - I guess I’m going to be in the dung soon enough.