41–50 of 130 posts
My biggest source of burnout is really from mundane failures in processes: flaky tests that fail for no good reason, and obscure bugs that are hard to reproduce. These things take up 90% of my time and I feel like a code janitor, rather than a developer. Any company dealing with burnout should consider this.
To make matters slightly worse, I increasingly get the sense that outside of HN, most devs will jump through all the flaming hoops of bad process, accumulating all the little burns, without ever considering it doesn't have to be this way. Improving internal dev workflows gets more pushback from devs than management in my experience, which makes me feel like a crazy person.
Not a surprise. When senior devs leave an org due to mismanagement or other reasons, it creates more work for those left behind. And it's become extremely difficult to find replacement for the seniors that left. Senior devs are nowhere to be found through regular applicant pipelines. They seem to be leaving as a result of reaching out to friends/former colleagues. Also relevant: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
Which makes sense. Everyone learns that the best way to get jobs is skip the recruitment pipeline by using your network.
The recruitment pipeline is so miserable at most companies, why would you put yourself through it unless it is absolutely your dream job? Even then it's probably unnecessarily stressful and time consuming and annoying. Way better to make contacts with people where you want to work and just skip it.
My biggest source of burnout is really from mundane failures in processes: flaky tests that fail for no good reason, and obscure bugs that are hard to reproduce. These things take up 90% of my time and I feel like a code janitor, rather than a developer. Any company dealing with burnout should consider this.
Its also part of your job to be part of the solution and help fix them. Why are the tests flaky? Maybe you can spend a day and fix it? Obscure bugs - ok they are hard to reproduce, but if it was easy, they would probably outsource your job to some Indian developer
> creating a crisis for recruiters Weird angle. Isn't the actual story the high levels of burnout in developers, rather than the inconvenience this creates for recruiters? The article is more balanced, but why lead with this?
(Basically, daily I'm training my ops managers team that when they update directors/executives, impact is not "Process XYZ inadvertently set up flag ABC on table QEW due to lockwait timeout", but "300 employees had their union dues incorrectly deducted" )
I don't get it. I have a stellar resume and a proven track record in the public domain (open source but I've been struggling to find work and have accepted short term work for half my normal rate. There are so few opportunities, I had to switch to teaching people how to code.
Oh the poor recruiters! That's a group I have little sympathy for as employer and as an employee. To be fair to the article, it real seems to be more about developer burn out, which I have sympathy for. If you have trouble attracting talent, maybe think about how you are treating your talent?
> A report from software platform LaunchDarkly revealed that nearly 7 in 10 developers (67%) have left a job due to pressure around minimizing deployment errors or know someone who has. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the statement, but this is a biased-as-hell source for this statement given that LaunchDarkly's product is feature-flag-management (to minimize deployment errors).
The question from LaunchDarkly, btw, was as follows (asked to "500 software developers across a range of industries and job titles"): > Have you or someone you worked with ever left a job due to pressures from over minimizing mistakes (i.e. avoiding rollbacks or failed deployments)? [0] ...Which I also would not be comfortable summarizing as "minimizing deployment errors" [0] https://resources.launchdarkly.com/ebooks…
> A report from software platform LaunchDarkly revealed that nearly 7 in 10 developers (67%) have left a job due to pressure around minimizing deployment errors or know someone who has. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the statement, but this is a biased-as-hell source for this statement given that LaunchDarkly's product is feature-flag-management (to minimize deployment errors).
It also bends credulity. It suggests 7 of 10 developers work for companies (or know someone who has) that fail to prevent onslaughts of their developers from leaving over deployment problems.
Not a surprise. When senior devs leave an org due to mismanagement or other reasons, it creates more work for those left behind. And it's become extremely difficult to find replacement for the seniors that left. Senior devs are nowhere to be found through regular applicant pipelines. They seem to be leaving as a result of reaching out to friends/former colleagues. Also relevant: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
> Senior devs are nowhere to be found through regular applicant pipelines. They seem to be leaving as a result of reaching out to friends/former colleagues. Which makes sense. Everyone learns that the best way to get jobs is skip the recruitment pipeline by using your network. The recruitment pipeline is so miserable at most companies, why would you put yourself through it unless it is absolutely your dream job? Even…
>Way better to make contacts with people where you want to work and just skip it.
Thing is, this process has to be a net positive or it's just unsustainable. Seems to me more and more that networking is just nepotism and doesn't give the best candidates the jobs they are looking for. Add in some title inflation and you've got a hell of a bubble.