would you trade lives?
anonymous · text only · no accounts

a profession seen from many lives

life as a software engineer

8 strangers working as software engineers have shared an anonymous fragment of their life. Average happiness 6.6 / 10, average stress 5.9 / 10. 57% of voters say they would trade lives with someone in this work; 28% would not.

averages across this group

8
lives
6.6/ 10
happiness
5.9/ 10
stress
6.7h/ night
sleep
21.3h/ week
free time
$5,985/ month
avg income

how strangers vote on these lives

would trade57%
would not trade28%
unsure15%

626 voices

how this group feels to strangers

  • meaningful43
  • stable40
  • peaceful27
  • inspiring24
  • lonely18
  • enviable16

eight software engineers have shared an anonymous fragment of their life from 5 countries, most often Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania. every entry is one person describing the shape of their own days — hours of sleep, money, stress, what they actually feel — to be read and weighed by strangers who never know who they are.

they report an average happiness of 6.6 / 10 and an average stress of 5.9 / 10, they sleep around 6.7 hours a night and have roughly 21 hours of free time per week, the median reported monthly income (across 8 fragments that disclosed one) sits near $5,985 USD-equivalent.

asked whether they would trade lives with software engineers, 626 strangers have answered. the result is narrowly yes — slightly more strangers would trade in than not: 57% would trade, 28% would not, 15% are unsure.

the reactions readers most often leave on software engineers' fragments are: meaningful, stable, and peaceful. these tags are picked from a fixed list, so the words above carry the weight that strangers actually placed on them, not anything we paraphrased.

the fragments are spread unevenly across the world. by volume, the top countries for software engineers in our dataset are: Czech Republic (2 lifes, 63% would trade); Poland (2 lifes, 42% would trade); Romania (2 lifes, 54% would trade); Australia (1 life, 59% would trade); United States (1 life, 54% would trade).

where software engineers have shared from

recent fragments