For each, his own. The root cause for all my stress, as I know, is because of my OCD. I spend hours trying to perfect my code, when it works just fine. Last week, I had to turn in a homework for one of my classes at Grad School. I knew my code was working just fine, and that I would get full credit for it. Instead of submitting my work, I went ahead and spent the whole weekend trying to make my code look better. So, I suppose my equation for developer stress would look something like this: var ` developerStress = timeSpentWorkingOnFix * timeSpentDueToOCD