Anxiety at Work in Software Development

Software development makes me anxious. Particularly when there's a small pyramid of risks involved. And you have to think through all the layers before every file save.

• - are we in the right industry?
• - are we positioned correctly in that industry?
• - in that industry are we supposed to write our own software?
• - is it the right time to write this software?
• - ok, now we've bet on software, did we pick the right business process to automate?
• - are we on the right strategy for automating that process?
• - within that strategy, did we pick the right architecture?
• - within that architecture, did we pick the right vendor for each layer?
• - within each vendor's layer, are we customising the correct parts?
• - if we choose to write our own layer (in-source) are we picking the right tools?
• - assuming we have the right tools, are we prioritising the right features?
• - within the feature, have we laid our our options so that the feature architecture is appropriate, and the tooling is correctly utilised?
• - ok, now we have the dreary work of actually writing code ... by this time I'm usually out of memory when it comes to actually debugging

This is why CEOs usually don't write software :P

Come to think about it, at this level it's literally our job to have Imposter Syndrome.