161–170 of 308 posts
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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.
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 didn't think I was burnt out, until I started interviewing (due to work "stress", which turned out to be burn-out in disguise). One recruiter informed me they have seen a spike - 70% of interviewees canceled scheduled interviews, post-screening. I almost cancelled mine due to being overwhelmed/burnout from preparations + work, and my thesis is there are a lot of burned out developers out there. Unfortunately, I didn't hear what the cancellation rate baseline was before work-from-home.
If there are tech recruiters/HR folk/hiring managers reading this, I'd love to know the numbers you've been seeing for interview cancelations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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> 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.
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…
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…
Almost every project I have been on has been understaffed. My project last year was one year of funding to research application of deep learning for a problem that had only some classical engineering algorithms applied before. Besides the r&d, we promised to deliver software that they could use to verify experiments and test models against their systems, basically everything up to but not including integration (with integration coming later if results were good). The team was a PM, domain expert, and me. That's one person to do all the research and experiments and provide basically two working and tested software deliverables. Good times.
My current project is one piece of a government effort run shared between two three letter orgs, a smaller contractor that's kind of PMing plus infrastructure, a large contractor handling modeling, and us handling correlation. We already had a correlator written in Java for portability--that is why we were brought on--so should be easy, right? A bit of data analysis, configure the software accordingly, pass off the jar and config and should be good. The effort was funded for about two people plus a PM but had had one full time and one partial for the past six months. Our part of the project ballooned to helm charts, four Kafka interconnected docker containers, security scans on all that plus a bunch more stuff required every release, lots of core rewrites to hit their scalability goals, constant data analysis because every week a performer comes in with a "hey why didn't this particular example get correlated as expected" question. Basically one person to cloudify + do data analysis on big data + rewrite Java software to scale better is just crazy. I am on it because the "half time person" left a year ago and wasn't replaced, and the full time person is now leaving also in August, so they're finally forced to restaff. I was told I'd do data analysis and algorithm work only, but over the first month I've only done security fixes and cloud infrastructure related tasking.
I bring this up to point out, yeah it's cool to learn new stuff, but the shortage of people also means double or triple role work that definitely accelerates burn out.
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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…
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"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.
Wow. Several people on the internet think something.
Is that a large enough sample size?
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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 !!
The converse also needs to be held in mind as well. Very large studies are more likely to display statistically significant findings. Your p-value is really just a test of your sample size, so as the study grows your p-value tends to shrink. Get a large enough sample and you'll almost always find statistical significance. Just referencing a p-value isn't enough, it needs to be read in the context of the study size (whether large or small).
Edit: For those downvoting, here is a much better and eloquent explanation:
https://twitter.com/daniela_witten/status/131218095960997478...
A long time ago I was reading a text on burnout, and one factor that stood out was lack of closure. Think of an architect - they design a building, deliver blueprints and the building gets built. They're done. They can drive by the building and say "Look, I've designed that building". There's closure. A developer's job is rarely done. You do a fantastic job and fix 2 almost intractable bugs in a sprint. What happens…
Most of the work that I've done was for medical technology where the customer tends to deploy more often in Europe. I have seen very few finished products where I had a hand in implementing something.
However, one of my happiest experiences was years ago when we finished a rewrite of some hardware for a customer that had to be done because they didn't want to interrupt their sales pipeline (also their customers wanted to be able to continue buying with out their purchasing pipeline being interrupted either).
Anyway, so things had to move fast and once we were done soon after (months later iirc) there was a website up that had the new product that we had worked on.
It felt really good (even years later now thinking back) to be able to actually see and be able to show people I knew the product that we worked over a year on.