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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

#111

Post by jedimastert »

pmoriarty wrote: post #91
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…

> They all have to extrapolate from a subset of the entire population.

This only really works if you have a representative subset of he population you're extrapolating to. Is the distribution of experience roughly equivalent to the general population of "developers"? Age distribution? Company size? # of children? Home life? These kinds of demographics can have a big impact, and I see no discussion of how they were accounted for.

Heck, even the general work ethic culture difference between the UK vs the rest of the world could be a huge confounding factor that I know wasn't really accounted for.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#112

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #91
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…

You always want at least a week of data collection, to control for weekly effects. People are often happier on a Friday than a Monday, for instance.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#113

Post by hindsightbias »

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.

FAANGs maintain their code? Impossible.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#114

Post by roody15 »

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…

Sadly lots of today’s “research” meets this low threshold. Lots of politicized headlines use low quality research to push narratives.

#depressing

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#115

Post by cloverich »

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…

Taking OP's "spark" comment at face value, if the reality is quality development isn't a steady curve but rather a nearly flat one followed by bursts of sharp peaks, then it does provide some rubric for how to manage the situation. Which is, manage it lightly, look only at very big milestones. Measuring and optimizing day to day incremental improvements might actually be counter productive.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#117

Post by ratww »

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…

I used to work in a company with 400+ developers and our team barely had any new features to add. We took care of one screen in the app.

However getting anything done was an impossible task and required huge amounts of code because of the complexity of the architecture.

I left after 6 months and a couple weeks because I couldn't bear the stress.

Fred Brooks is still right in 2021. More people, more problems.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#118

Post by pmoriarty »

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…

"For me, burnout means not only being tired of your job, but also inability to ‘burn' outside work."

"burn outside work"? What does that mean?

Burnout is feeling great distress at doing your job, due to factors such as overwork, disillusionment, and depression. Sometimes that adverse feeling is so intense the employee is psychologically unable to continue.

As much some people would like to fancy themselves as coldly logical automatons, human action is actually in great part motivated by feelings. So feelings matter.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#119

Post by pmoriarty »

jedimastert wrote: post #111
pmoriarty wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> They all have to extrapolate from a subset of the entire population. This only really works if you have a representative subset of he population you're extrapolating to. Is the distribution of experience roughly equivalent to the general population of "developers"? Age distribution? Company size? # of children? Home life? These kinds of demographics can have a big impact, and I see no discussion of how they were ac…

"This only really works if you have a representative subset of he population"

Of course. Never said otherwise.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#120

Post by pmoriarty »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #112
pmoriarty wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

You always want at least a week of data collection, to control for weekly effects. People are often happier on a Friday than a Monday, for instance.

I'm not sure how much of a difference the day of the week would make for people who are really burnt out.
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