There is already a whole bunch of excellent answers, but I’ll throw my voice in as well.

Any professional job where you need to produce results can be stressful. If you can’t handle a bit of stress, you’re going to struggle with a professional career.

People have an image of software developers or software engineers sitting around all day, eating pizza and swilling cola drinks, solving the world’s problems instantly, but on their own terms. Unfortunately, some of those people with that image are people studying - or wanting to study - the field.

The reality, of course, is that software is almost always a product that is intended to earn money for a company. There’s a Return On Investment calculation going on, and we are the Investment. We have a responsibility to produce a Return, or we cease to be a good investment.

Unlike the academic ideal of producing ideal software, and refactoring at will, we have to get product out the door, and then move on to the next project so the company can continue to earn enough to pay our salaries. Refactoring might (or might not) happen when the bug reports or change requests start to roll in and we get assigned to work on it.

Stress happens most when we are made aware of the deadlines and costs.