Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout • Hacker News Board

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#91

Post by pmoriarty » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 3:24 PM UTC

throwawayswede wrote: post #56

This is such a great example of bullshit studies. Yeah I'm gonna go on a limb and say this is a marketing campaign. It's an insult to science to call this a "study". From the pdf: > The fieldwork of this study was carried out at remarkable speed, from the 23rd to 24th of June 2021 Data was collected in 1 day. Is this a joke? No it's not! > The population sampled included Software Engineers aged 18+ living in the Unit…

"Data was collected in 1 day. Is this a joke? No it's not!"

What makes you think data collected over 1 day worse than the same data collected in multiple days?

"I really don't understand how they can do a half-assed data survey on 258 people only, and then have the gall to claim "83% of DEVELOPERS""

It's called extrapolation.

No study ever interviews everyone. They all have to extrapolate from a subset of the entire population.

Obviously the more participants there are the more confidence you can have in the conclusion, but whether 200, 2000, or 20000 participants would make for a "good" study is completely arbitrary.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#92

Post by bigbillheck » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #88

Someone wrote: post #20

If you read https://haystack-books.s3.amazonaws.com/Study+to+understand+... , you’ll see Q1. To what extent, if any, do the following statements apply to you? I feel burnt out from work. On a four-point scale, that scores 21%, 35%, 28%, 17%. So, they took everyone except those who said they didn’t feel burnt out at all, and got 83%. I think asking for feelings of burnout exaggerates the issue of being burnt out by a…

So they also don't test if people actually are burnt out, just whether they say they are? My observation is that most people in tech discussing burnout do not know what burnout is. They think it means being bored with your job.

> So they also don't test if people actually are burnt out, just whether they say they are?

You can't shove someone into an MRI and get a 'units of burn out' score complete with confidence intervals.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#93

Post by werber » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

I went through a period of really horrible depression during the pandemic and I doubt that’s unique. Basic work tasks were harder and it felt meaningless. I’m better now but isolation was difficult

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#94

Post by raxxorrax » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

karaterobot wrote: post #57

briefcomment wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is maintenance the cause of burnout then?

Somebody said that the cause of burnout is working hard and then not seeing results. Some common ways that happens in software development are working for months on a feature that gets cut (or undercut) at the last minute, or trying to demonstrate your ability for some role and not being recognized for it, or even just putting your heart and soul into a company that is circling the drain. If those experiences happen…

Just going through this with some hosted cloud software because some environments were "deprecated". The best possible result from finishing migration will be that it worked as well as before. This is so frustrating since I don't even know why Microsoft or Amazon deprecated these in the first place. It is work purely generated on their whims.

Apparently some AWS tools also got changes since some scripts seem to be failing.

It is so stupid to host anything in the cloud if you don't serve millions of users... Not really burnout, but I hate it so much right now...

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#95

Post by hondo77 » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

geoduck14 wrote: post #81

MattGaiser wrote: post #36

How much of the workload is just the dev shortage/insufficient staffing? I am currently the only dev on my team because of departures (there should be 4). Now, it is not really all that in production yet so it hasn't required late nights or waking up at odd hours, but it does linger in my mind that this could be a big issue if it grew a lot and my team didn't. I would hate to support it alone. A friend of mine is mis…

> How much of the workload is just the dev shortage/insufficient staffing? ZERO PERCENT. Listen to me very closely. The quantity of people has ZERO IMPACT on your work quality. Well... maybe like 3%, but hear me out. Your manager has a HUGH impact on your work quality. The work that is given to you, your PERCEPTION of the work, the urgency of the work, your development opportunities (and your response to them), the p…

> Your manager has a HUGH impact on your work quality.

Are you talking a Hugh Grant impact or a Hugh Jackman impact?

Sorry. Couldn't resist. Hugely.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#96

Post by kube-system » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

Nydhal wrote: post #62

dahfizz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exclusively a problem with web development. I work in fintech, writing C and using the gnu toolchain. We are a very successful business.

Mobile, Full Stack and Data Engineering also have similar issues. Not as bad as anything related to javascript though.

Even still, a search for "jQuery" on a jobs board typically still returns plenty of results.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#97

Post by daniel_iversen » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

There were a few comments here throwing shade at the findings and also people who said that software developers are burning out way more than other occupations. I can't speak for this study in question, but the WHO did classify burnout as an occupational phenomenon a couple of years ago [1] and our own research (I work for Asana and we yearly survey 10K+ knowledge workers) suggests that indeed between 70-80% of knowledge workers in general experience burnout two or more times a year! Sad really. I've experienced it quite severely a long time ago and it can truly rock your world and take a very long time to recover from.

[1] https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat...

[2] https://asana.com/resources/anatomy-of-work

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#98

Post by Spartan-S63 » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #90

Spartan-S63 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think some of it comes from the expectations of how much time someone is productive in a day. It’s as if the expectation is that you spend all eight hours of the day making brush strokes on the canvas. It’s not practical and it’s exhausting, especially when you’re not feeling particularly motivated or just need time to think about the work ahead.

It's important for managers to plan time for design, testing, feedback, meetings, administrative tasks, and context switching. In places I've worked that has planned this well, we usually allocated somewhere around 4 hours of development work per day to someone. I think most burnout is systematic, and caused by incomplete task breakdowns.

I agree. I previously worked in an XP shop that spent seven hours a day doing pair programming. It was exhausting, and challenging to do non-dev work in the hour a day left. Especially as a team lead, it took a lot of extra time or carving out time away from the pair to get enough done.

I also don’t know if full eight hour days are good, in general. I feel like 5x6 or 4x8 would be a better schedule, though, with a four day week, I’d be curious to try “weekend Wednesday” out instead of just having a three day weekend.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#99

Post by kube-system » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 3:30 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #71

eplanit wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we learned this past year that at least a few teachers are quite exceptionally spoiled (disappointing, and for me a bit surprising). Maybe I'm biased by the witnessing the antics of the California teachers union, but their ranks have been an embarrassment to the profession. Their continued push-back against returning to regular classes has grown tiresome (California has decided, with union pressure, to defy C…

Yeah, teachers benefit from a social cachet that is outsize related to their true efficacy. They are not nearly as effective or as important as people make them out to be.

They are very important, but not always for the reasons that people make them out to be important.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#100

Post by acatnamedjoe » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 3:30 PM UTC

antris wrote: post #52

codyswann wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's the definition they're using, put it in the paper. Otherwise, it's just like asking someone if they feel "hot" at work. And if it can be tested for, why not do a study that tests for it? Otherwise, it's like asking people if they feel like they have cancer.

Studies aren't there to cater to your ignorance. Burnout is well defined, and generally quite well understood by even the general public, this is not news. You switched from "soft science is all subjective nonsense" to "I don't like how it's written". You don't have to like it.

I don't think burnout is well defined at all - at least not as used colloquially. As I understand it there's a specific medical/ mental health condition called burnout that is pretty horrendous. But in everyday usage it can mean everything from that medical definition to "I've had a rough week". I don't see any reason to assume which end of that scale a survey respondent might be thinking of when they answer.