Only time I felt burned out was through horrible management.
Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout
151–160 of 308 posts
Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout
#152How 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 dev shortage is due to excessive gatekeeping? The average interviewing process has become very burdensome these days. Not sure it translates in a higher quality of hires wrt the past.
Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout
#153This 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…
The thing is, everything in this world is now gauged by engagement, not quality. The fact that this is getting more reactions on HN gives it even more exposure, and actively reinforces this behavior even more.
If you have a really good, thorough study that is so thorough that people have nothing to comment on it, it will not rise to the top of pretty much any platform, because comments are valued higher than upvotes on most platforms. So you want to engineer some clickbait in there so that your article gets madly commented upon; being incomplete is perhaps the easiest way to do this. (I don't know about HN, but it certainly appears Facebook and Twitter work that way.)
Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Clearly, several people (including me) think that you did imply it - so, regardless of whether or not you intended to do so, that's what you communicated in your post.
In particular, the way in which you mentioned extrapolation in the context of the study (and the conversation in general) carried the implication that the extrapolation was valid.
Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout
#155How 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…
You're talking about quality, but what about quantity?
If you need to develop:
- the back end for an application
- the front end for an application
- some external APIs for the application
- a structured data storage layer, say, with an RDBMS
- an object storage of some sort, for example, on top of S3
- some sort of reporting functionality
- mailing list functionality
- etc.
Furthermore, the quality of your work can be stellar, but if there are 5 different problems, all of which need solving and you tell your clients to pound sand, you might find yourself with no clients.
Understaffing feels like a real problem.
Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree. Ideally, we get to an end-state where it doesn't matter what hours (or how many) you work as long as your team's outcomes are being met (and the outcomes are reasonable). There are a lot of caveats and complexities in that statement, but it's a state we can keep pushing towards as an industry.
Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Studies are never meant to be an ultimate answer to everything. And just because they're not the ultimate answer, doesn't mean that they are therefore worthless, bad or "bullshit".
Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout
#158This 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 arguments are specious; perhaps you're simply angry that you didn't understand an industry you've worked in for a while? Perhaps you're in management, or in the 20% who aren't burnt out, and you're embarrassed by proxy?
Psychological experiments and surveys are often done in only one or two days. Why would a wider window of time help when taking a snapshot of a current situation?
Hm, is 258 a small sample size? Let's put in some effort instead of just screaming "bullshit" a bunch. There are approximately 408,000 people in the entire population [0], and plugging everything into a calculator, we get two results: First, they should have tried to poll around 400 people (and perhaps they did!), but more importantly, the 95% confidence interval is only around ±6%.
Let me repeat that more clearly: By typical polling standards (95% confidence interval, random sample from filtered population), we expect that 77-89% of UK software developers are actually burnt out. That is still three out of every four people in the industry!
Not sure what to say. Take a stats class?
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/318818/numbers-of-progra...
Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout
#159Slightly off-topic, but can we just talk about the fact that reading this article required me to load JavaScript from FIVE different sources? The user experience of me scrolling down some formatted text with an image on the top could have been replicated in HTML and CSS easily. And even if it simply HAD to have been done in JS, why so many sources? I don't know who intercom.io or webflow.com are, but I doubt your art…
You can use your browser's reader mode. The content is all there in the HTML, but there's a bunch of `style="opacity:0"` attributes to hide them until JS removes the attributes.
Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout
#160It could be genetic. RCCX gene mutations may make people more susceptible to CF/ME and being a software developer. For most people CF/ME will present as burnout.