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Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

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Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#101

Post by cloverich »

morpheos137 wrote: post #72

Honestly as somebody not working in software development these posts seem ridiculous to me. The pay is great, the physical work environment is good, if you work for a FANG company you might get free food, access to a corporate gym, and other amenities. Can somebody give example of another job that is better? I do agree though that America's work culture is bad as a whole and does not afford sufficient work life balan…

> Can somebody give example of another job that is better?

Dentistry. I know many Dentists and rarely if ever meet one that works more than 4 days a week. But I don't think that's a real retort to your point :p

> But SWE have one of the best jobs out there, it seems from somebody looking in on the outside. There is a huge lack of understanding what other people do for work.

Generally speaking anyone working in a situation where their efforts of improvement are frustrated will feel burnt out. Of course this is common in crappy jobs too and often manifests in highly managed employees who are driven with very strict metrics and work environments, because a constant threat of unemployement is the only method to sustain output. So its a real phenomenon and no amount of money or perks is the answer, in the same way that most people know that being rich isn't a silver bullet towards happiness. To over simplify, you can want both riches and fulfillment, and lament the lack of either independent of the other. More constructively as an employer, if you are paying and treating your employees well and they are still unhappy, it might be that they are spoiled brats and you should fire them and find others. OR it might be that there is an actual problem that needs fixed. IME its always been the latter, and failing to fix that problem has always been a missed opportunity for the places I've worked.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#102

Post by globular-toast »

titzer wrote: post #2

If you were a professional painter and every couple of months, someone snuck into your art studio, threw out all your brushes, paint, canvas, and then dumped a huge load of requests for you to "fix" your old paintings, I'm pretty sure you'd get burned out pretty quick.

When I worked for a large corporation I actually did have tools deleted from my own laptop. I left very shortly after that. I've never had this problem in any other company, though. Is this common?

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#103

Post by antris »

jquery wrote: post #66

I “retired” after 12 years of web development due to extreme burnout. I now work in a completely different industry and could not be happier. It felt like my workload was forever increasing. I could never rest on any laurels without falling significantly “behind”. I developed a major substance abuse problem as well (sober 14 months now), although untangling cause and effect here is impossible. I think I was abusing s…

> It felt like my workload was forever increasing. I could never rest on any laurels without falling significantly “behind”.

Sounds very familiar. Also, when I finally put my foot down to demand changes in order to avoid burnout, that was used against me when I was later discussing a pay raise. I learned to never bring up problems again, and got crashed hard.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#104

Post by luffapi »

soco wrote: post #51
luffapi wrote: post #14

A large part of the problem is that management doesn’t realize that writing software is a creative endeavor. You don’t get more creative output by working people harder, you do it by giving them more freedom. I may create more value with one spark of insight than months if trudging along, yet almost all management is meant to optimize the trudge and not the spark. This also adds to the very low quality of most code (…

Managers (MBA and the likes) will optimize only what can the tested and optimized. Can anyone define spark? We can all agree it's needed, but no regular management practice looks at it because everybody knows it can't be optimized. So this is what we are left with: optimizing butt time. Yes, there's also the discipline of engineering managers, but they seem to always be on the losing side when financial discussions t…

> So this is what we are left with: optimizing butt time.

Hence low quality code bases and developer burnout. It’s up to us as developers to demand more from our employers. Thankfully the shift to wfh seems to have tipped the balance of power away from the MBA types, which is why you see all the pearl clutching blog posts about the return to the office and “working hard”.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#105

Post by morpheos137 »

cloverich wrote: post #101
morpheos137 wrote: post #72

Honestly as somebody not working in software development these posts seem ridiculous to me. The pay is great, the physical work environment is good, if you work for a FANG company you might get free food, access to a corporate gym, and other amenities. Can somebody give example of another job that is better? I do agree though that America's work culture is bad as a whole and does not afford sufficient work life balan…

> Can somebody give example of another job that is better? Dentistry. I know many Dentists and rarely if ever meet one that works more than 4 days a week. But I don't think that's a real retort to your point :p > But SWE have one of the best jobs out there, it seems from somebody looking in on the outside. There is a huge lack of understanding what other people do for work. Generally speaking anyone working in a situ…

My feeling is that software developement is made more complicated than it needs to be because of bunch of frameworks and work processes churning that basically re-invent the exact same wheel spokes and all over and over again. The field desparately needs standardised work. Once the development process is standardised the pay and entitled blog posts will drop. I am quite confident for example you could build a web app with the same functionality as today with 2015 technology but it wouldn't work today because of churn inspired obselecence.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#106

Post by pmoriarty »

protonimitate wrote: post #31
zwieback wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that if you were a professional painter you'd also have a second job in order to survive.

As a art-degree holder turned engineer - yup. While there's a romantic vision of the starving artist, being broke is a whole different type of burnout.

There are plenty of commercial artists (illustrators, designers, etc) that make a good living making art.

Even if you're creating fine art exclusively it's possible to make a good living at it if your art has mass appeal.

The problem is when you make art that's not really geared towards the masses. If you make something widely considered "ugly" or disturbing, that most people wouldn't want to hang in their living room or on the walls of their business then you've got a problem.

The other problem is if you've either got a style that looks too much like everyone else or if you don't have a consistent style. Then people can't distinguish your work as uniquely yours and that makes having a "brand" difficult to impossible. You can still get by this way (especially if your work still has mass appeal -- see the endless impressionist-style paintings out there), but it's still a lot tougher than if you have a distinctive style.

The most successful fine artists have both a distinctive style and mass appeal... or a good marketing team. Often marketing is actually more important than the art itself as far as sales go.

Problem is many artists aren't good at marketing and just want to make art and aren't yet famous/rich enough to afford to hire someone to do the marketing for them.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#107

Post by pseudalopex »

gmadsen wrote: post #64
protonimitate wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me burnout comes from the endless treadmill of external pressures (arbitrary deadlines, changing requirements) and the endless treadmill of development work. There's not really ever a chance to step back and take a breath - just constantly moving from one high priority task to the next. It's also a bit thankless, being good as this job, in a lot of cases, means you are moving really fast from one task to the next…

as far as the last sentence. I think this varies with temperament widely. I like a mix of problem solving and people facing work, but I would find it hard to believe a mathematician would be upset from constant problem solving

Mathematical problems are puzzles. They were talking about defects and new requirements.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#108

Post by antris »

pixl97 wrote: post #77
mytailorisrich wrote: post #19

I feel they should clarify what they mean, and what respondents meant, by 'burnout'. Burnout is an extreme state and I am extremely surprised that 83% would feel that way. From the actual study " A total of 83% of Software Engineers reported feelings of burnout with only 17% reporting no burnout. 55%, a majority, reported “great” or “moderate” levels of burnout. " What is a "moderate level of burnout"? This is self-c…

So burnout is a binary state of on or off? Or is it a continuum where you go from slightly stressed to "I'm walking out that door right now and never coming back"

I'd say it's like a tiny smoldering piece of charcoal, that suddenly ignites when there's too much gasoline in the air. You may be aware of the signs early, and even know what your progression is, but just before the tipping point you may still be a completely productive worker.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#109

Post by guskel »

dfxm12 wrote: post #32
briefcomment wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is maintenance the cause of burnout then?

In my experience (and I think also in the spirit of the analogy), it's not just maintenance. It's expecting to maintain everything you've ever done while also simultaneously being expected to keep producing new work at the same rate (and then being expected to maintain that). It's that your work load seems to only increase. As the study found with regards to the causes of burnout, increased workload cited as the main…

Yes, and as the list of items to maintain grows, you must perform more and more context switches as bugs or other fixes crop up, spreading you more and more thin. Meanwhile the number of new requests does not slow down.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#110

Post by kube-system »

Spartan-S63 wrote: post #98
kube-system wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

I feel like measuring a workday in hours is more useful for measuring the workload of a non-stop assembly line type work than it is for a knowledge-based job. 8 hours of work where you can grab a coffee and read HN whenever you want could be easier on the mind than 6 hours of work where your attention is in constant demand.

I do wish I could do the same number of hours over 4 days instead of 5, though.

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