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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

#291

Post by flippinburgers »

Aeolun wrote: post #138
wonderwonder wrote: post #46

I wonder if software presents a unique situation as we generally make a pretty decent salary and to transition to a new career involves a pretty significant pay cut. So some developers become trapped in jobs they hate with golden handcuffs. I really don't enjoy software development at all, but at this stage, to even think about doing something else would result in a massive pay cut. I did it once when I was younger,…

> since then I just exist in a constant state of burnout The worst part is that even that doesn’t seem to matter. Whether I do my best work because I’m 100% into the job, or my worst because I just cannot be bothered any more, people perceive me the same way, and my salary remains the same. If the effect is nil why should I even bother.

This is exactly my experience as well. My current company has no clue the value I provide and my salary is going nowhere.

It is a social game. People who are outgoing and good looking win.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#292

Post by flippinburgers »

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…

The problem solving part is perfectly fine for me. Not getting rewarded financially for my hard work is a huge issue. Unfortunately I don't see that changing anytime soon (if ever). The people running companies often don't understand developer value at all in my opinion.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#293

Post by closeparen »

KronisLV wrote: post #155
geoduck14 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Then no matter how good your manager is, t…

Having many engineers causes changes to your engineering workflows and standards that make them a lot less productive, in order to cope with having so many engineers. Also, some of your many engineers will choose to spend their time creating internal platforms that are much worse than commercial and open-source alternatives, and since you are good collaborative synergistic team players you must always use the thing written internally, no matter how bad it is.

Creating a new backend endpoint requires a multi-week design review process and must be implemented in a straight-jacket of a programming language with 90% test coverage and tons of layers and extensive mocks of each layer.

Creating a new frontend requires the same multi-week design review process, and must use the Nth incarnation of our NIH Javascript framework. The developer who built it got promoted and then left; it's been handed over to India to maintain. So anytime anything goes wrong, post a question to the framework maintainer's slack channel and wait to hear back in the morning. Or don't. They're just as mystified by it as you are.

Creating new external APIs requires, ironically, no design review but you must use the shitty homegrown code generation tool to generate a PR to add your endpoints to the API gateway. The builds on this PR take 4 hours. Then after it's merged you can wait for the API gateway to be deployed later this week. You must repeat this process any time the schema changes.

Creating a new RDBMS table goes through a theoretically self-service workflow hosted by the RDBMS team but probably one step fails so you need to file a ticket and wait for them to fix it before your table is provisioned and ACLs dialed in.

In-house object storage implements an S3 compatible API but you must submit a ticket with a detailed description of your use case and wait a week or two to get provisioned.

If your email is static or contains only simple account properties, it's easy to create in the internal email platform's template builder UI. But if it needs complex data from your application, you'll need to land changes against the email platform to implement fetching of that data from your application. No, you can't push data into the template from the sending application, that would be too easy.

Compare to one or a few people working directly with Django/Rails, React, S3, Postmark, etc. and practicing the "write tests, not too many, mostly integration" thing.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#294

Post by eaton »

Someone wrote: post #134
pmoriarty wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

If a fire has burnt out, it can’t deliver any warmth anywhere, not just at some things. Similarly, for me, the term “burnt out” means not only that you can’t accomplish anything useful at work, but also “take that home”, and stay feeling powerless there. If you feel tired at work, but the first day of a holiday feel full of energy again, I wouldn’t call that burnout. Wikipedia doesn’t seem to fully agree, though. It…

> If a fire has burnt out, it can’t deliver any warmth anywhere, not just at some things.

You're putting a lot of weight on the mechanics of "burning," but the physics of combustion are an analogy of convenience, not the diagnostic criteria.

One of the reasons that "burnout" applies particularly to work rather than hobbies or recreational pursuits is that people (generally speaking) can't afford to just walk away from their job and return when they feel like it.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#296

Post by jquery »

ipnon wrote: post #234
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…

Your very first submission! "Ask HN: how do you avoid burnout and getting taken advantage of?"[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=939580

Haha, thanks. That brings back memories.

If I recall, that thread helped me avoid burnout for a while. But it eventually caught up to me again with a ferocity I was unable to defend against, with the catalyst being a parent who died. Fortunately, I was in a position of financial strength and faced the beast head-on. On further reflection... burnout turned out to be a gift in disguise. It was an impetus for necessary change.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#297

Post by jquery »

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.

Looking back on this comment, I want to apologize for trying to say what is "real" burnout and what isn't.

Thinking about it more, they can all be symptoms of the same thing, to varying degrees. Apologies to anyone I may have upset by minimizing their experience.

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#298

Post by loudlambda »

bbojan wrote: post #136

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…

In high school I worked some janitor jobs; every week your cleaning up a very similar mess as last week, but the work can be fulfilling if you're striving to do an excellent job and achieve mastery.

That's one area that is soul crushing in software; the complete disdain for excellence and mastery. Nobody on the business side seems to care about creating master pieces. They want to throw half cooked spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks before throwing more spaghetti against more walls, and they strive to be the next facebook and have tens of thousands of employees throwing spaghetti.

Android has 10 year old bugs with thousands of watchers and instead Google is off trying to use Android in cars or televisions or probably tennis shoes. Maybe it's finally fixed, but for years AWS cloud-formation and CDK was unable to be used with a significant and critical set of AWS services and features. Instead, AWS is off creating toy RC cars and creating elastic-cloud-simple-machine-model-shift service, which are both missing cloud-formation bindings. If your the guy who actually cares about your customers, and is trying to fix these things, you're career has been repeatedly hit-and-run by everyone else making career moves and running off to make purpose-built block-chain gamified cloud-native social machine-learned pez dispensers.

And even if you can't find a job that will let you create excellence, using and learning excellent tools can be rewarding. Instead it seems like a downward spiral. There was a brief moment of sanity when the industry dropped all tangled complexity that was XML, but in general it seems like the industry is going from well crafted products like PostgreSQL, to half-baked databases like Cassandra CQL which apparently doesn't allow NOT NULL constraints. Once Java, C++, and Javascript all start to have fairly nice feature sets, it suddenly becomes hard to not find one's self stuck in jobs requiring the obtuse language go. And then there's helm, which seems to be trying to win at a competition to see if it's possible to make a configuration that's more brittle and convoluted then the old M4 based Sendmail configs of yore.

Why should I even bother becoming anything more then slightly proficient in any of these if they're going to be replaced with something even uglier and less ergonomic next year? What's the point of pouring my sweat and tears into a product for a company if the company is just going to strand it and rush off to build something else that it's going to abandon and rush off to yet something else?

Re: Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

#300

Post by mgkimsal »

rightbyte wrote: post #269
mgkimsal wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they would if they could get a 20% raise without much fuss. was reading a reddit post on an airline host who was 'on the road' to 6 figure income - just needed to stay with the same airline for another 5-6 years. "If you switch to another airline, you'll start at the bottom again". It's so strange to think that goes on, but apparently it does. Apparently pilots, to some degree as well. Even if you had 15 years of fla…

It makes sense from the company perspective. Pay for experience with your things, coworkers and processes - reward loyalty. I think it would make even more sense for software developement, since the code base usually is so extremely specific that there are no other experts then those who work with it. Still the best way to increase wage is to change job to something you have no clue in until a year or two working wit…

I can see the "keep people tied to the same company" side as having company benefits, sure. And yeah, almost any existing project I've come in to takes months (minimum) to understand the interplay of business/code/company/process/etc.
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