Ashish KothariMake flourishing your competitive edge

Your Job Shouldn’t Trigger #panicattack #workplaceculture #mentalhealth #brainhealth

30 May 2025 · 0 min

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0:22

Short spoken excerpt from a YouTube video by Ashish Kothari discussing how on-call expectations in software teams cause severe anxiety and panic attacks. A CIO at a large bank reports panic when briefly away from their phone because things 'are breaking all the time'; the speakers argue that many software on-call demands are avoidable with better initial design.

I was running a leadership session with the CIO of a team of a large bank. Talk about human suffering. This person said to me, I get panic attacks when I wake up in the morning and go into the shower. Why? Because I'm not next to my phone. If something breaks, I can't respond to it. And because. Because things are breaking all the time.
Yeah. That the 15 minute shower is a torturously long time because there would have been two or three emergencies that popped up in those 15 minutes.
Quote, unquote. You're on call because something is going to break down. I get it. You're on call if you're a doctor or a surgeon. But on call for software is avoidable if you design it right the first time.