Indeed. Or go work on software for manned space vehicles, or medical devices, or huge financial institutions, or anywhere where the consequence of bugs is "people die" or "national security is compromised" or "society collapses" or the like.

I wonder if you couldn't formulate a rule to the effect of the more serious the task you are working on, the less you can afford to be optimistic. When Serious Things are on the line, you have to be a pessimist, because you have to find and root out all the possible weird failure cases before they bite you. When all that's on the line is a comment on someone's photo of their lunch, optimism is a more sustainable philosophy.

Something that struck me from your comment is that yes, there are more serious repercussions than others. The problem here is that the pressure and feedback from those repercussions is relative, and knowing this makes it especially difficult to accept tons of negativity. If a bug caused someone to die, and this was preventable (i.e. obviously your fault) then yes, you should feel horrible. Most of our jobs though, involve loss of money, not loss of life. The pressure to fulfill these tasks is therefore completely constructed. Success or positive feedback is simply that the people paying you continue to make money, the status quo continues.

Being optimistic or pessimistic isn't quite relevant when people's lives are on the line, I think it's more about being _realistic_. Everything can fail, and everyone makes mistakes. This is reality. When people can die, there is much more impetus to pay (time and money) for everything to be triple-checked and triple-redundant.

But in pretty typical software development, that money and time isn't there. And the feeling of knowing you could have done better, if only given a chance, is horrible and eats away at your resolve. Then you wonder, "well perhaps I'm not fighting strongly enough," or "People are coding for space shuttles, and I can't even get this page to load!"

I believe it's a human right that your individual problems are no greater than another's, because it's relative. If you feel about it strongly enough, then it's valid. Saying it's not because people's lives aren't at risk is invalidating the human right of pursuit of happiness.