Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

usehaystack.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 308 posts

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#141

Post by rantwasp »

MattGaiser wrote: post #53
rantwasp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

using interns as this is unacceptable. is there a dev shortage or is there an expectation that you can hire people for cheap and work them to death?

In economic terms, there are no shortages. In practical terms though, it means that there are a bunch of projects out there that aren't viable without heavily working people and employers are incentivized to extract as much as possible from people.

projects that are not viable should simply not get done.

it always amazes me that people put up with this insanity. The first thing I teach junior developers that join my team is 1) learn to set boundaries 2) your WLB and mental sanity is more important than any project (if you are struggling you’re gonna get fired, ie don’t kill yourself with work when you are … disposable)

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#142

Post by enraged_camel »

p_j_w wrote: post #133
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…

Your criticism of the sample size is unfounded. You absolutely can have meaningful results with only 258 people provided you have good sampling. If you want to criticize their sampling, then by all means do it, but that's not what you've done here.

Sorry, but what part of "they only surveyed software developers in the United Kingdom" gives you the impression that their sampling might actually be good?

Worth noting that the study itself doesn't seem to mention their sampling methodology.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#143

Post by systemvoltage »

jquery wrote: post #73
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…

I’m guilty of posting before reading the article. I’m glad you pointed this out. Sounds like an awful study. There’s true burnout and then there’s feelings of stress. They aren’t the same thing at all. I know because I’ve experienced both. Burnout cuts you down to your soul. I haven’t programmed professionally in 2 years and the thought of doing so makes me nauseous. That’s burnout.

Let's me 100% honest here - if we cannot define clearly the psychological and medical definition of a burn-out (with accurate diagnosis), it is just fine to discuss in non-scientific context. The moment you call this a study and no one here is willing to ask hard questions makes me extremely disappointed in HN and the intellectual curiosity that usually drives discussions here. Why do I feel like there is some political angle to this? (labor rights).

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#144

Post by pmoriarty »

syshum wrote: post #135
pmoriarty wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This only really works if you have a representative subset of he population" Of course. Never said otherwise.

In the context of your comment it is implied that you believe the "study" in question does have a representative subset. while you may not intend that, most people reading your comment would believe you think the study is fine

"In the context of your comment it is implied that you believe the "study" in question does have a representative subset."

No. I was replying to the specific objections the parent poster had.

I never said or implied anything about whether I thought it was a good study or not.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#145

Post by kirse »

protonimitate wrote: post #47
briefcomment wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is maintenance the cause of burnout then?

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…

Yep, sounds like SW development, partly why we get paid some of the highest salaries in the country. I try to keep in mind I have the power to step off the treadmill at regular intervals and go lie on a beach chair or hammock in the mountains.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#146

Post by dragontamer »

p_j_w wrote: post #133
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…

Your criticism of the sample size is unfounded. You absolutely can have meaningful results with only 258 people provided you have good sampling. If you want to criticize their sampling, then by all means do it, but that's not what you've done here.

A lot of the COVID19 stuff only has a population size (NOT EVEN sample size) of like, 15. Ex: J&J's blood clot issue.

People make conclusions off of tinier sample sizes. There are plenty of scientific studies with just 50 or 100 people, but you need to keep the small numbers in mind.

As long as sampling was done correctly, then small sample size won't matter much !!

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#147

Post by Sevii »

ratww wrote: post #117
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.

This is why FAANG pays so much. Imagine 1000+ engineers working on a single page in a web app. Your entire team is responsible for 1 widget on the page.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#148

Post by jrockway »

ratww wrote: post #117
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.

> More people, more problems.

My theory is that teams scale exponentially. That means two people working together are probably as productive as two people working on completely separate things. (By completely separate, I mean totally different goals -- your weekend projects vs. my weekend projects. Definitely not employees at the same company, who in theory have some sort of common goal.) But it means that 10,000 people working on the same overarching project are about as productive as 14 people working on their own thing.

This sounds bad, but if you treat it as a law of the universe, it's not so bad. If you want to do a project whose scope is the same as 14 unrelated one-person projects, you just need 10,000 people. It certainly seems to happen in other fields; there are no one-person teams building skyscrapers or new subway systems.

People's workarounds for this are trying to split teams apart so that they can be somewhere lower on that exponential where the actual ratio doesn't feel so bad (1/1 is better than 14/10000). Unfortunately, it doesn't really result in great products and you end up with the classic "big company" feel -- where the company has 3 different chat apps, 2 infrastructure teams, is a gigabit ISP but can't upload or download to its own products at 1Gbps, etc. The individuals working on those projects are slightly more productive, but the company as a whole fails.

So I guess if you work at a company of size N, and you feel like you're as 100%∗log2(N)/N as productive at work as you are on your personal projects outside of work, then you're doing great. The problem is that this feels super bad to software engineers, who probably got their start working alone in their spare time. But it's the law of the universe and there is nothing you can do to fight it, except hope that you can figure out a business whose scope is low enough where that log2(N)/N is pretty close to 1.

(2 may not be the right exponent, of course, maybe it's something like 1.8. You'll never get around the fact that communication paths goes up like the factorial. At a 2 person company, there is only 1 1:1 to have. At a 40 person company, there are 39∗38∗37...=39! 1:1s to have. That ain't great scalability.)

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#149

Post by kube-system »

renewiltord wrote: post #137
kube-system wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mind explaining? As institutional day care? I believe it.

I wouldn’t go that far. I do think that, particularly for primary education, some people tend to overinflate the importance of teachers as academic experts and discount their social importance.

The value that school provides kids, parents, and the community is multifaceted.

If anything, primary educations are very important, but not because kids learn basic arithmetic, but because they learn the foundational social concepts that will permanently shape their ideas about justice, respect, cooperation, etc.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#150

Post by jnwatson »

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…

One of the undersold advantages about getting a new job is that all the implicit commitments you built up go away. Try it.
Post reply on HN