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Start by identifying the root cause of the burnout. I feel like programming itself shouldn't burn you out. It's usually other parts of coding for work that lead

Start by identifying the root cause of the burnout. I feel like programming itself shouldn't burn you out. It's usually other parts of coding for work that lead to burnout. I've interviewed thousands of developers over the years for books, research, jobs, and if I had to choose a single culprit I'd say the most common cause of programmer burnout is a really terrible codebase that viscerally painful to maintain. I did my best to illustrate that here: https://twitter.com/AndrewStellman/status/896405621494382593 https://twitter.com/AndrewStellman/status/896405621494382593 Tangled, nasty, poorly maintained code is not an easy problem to fix. The first step is getting everyone on the team -- and especially the boss -- to recognize the real problem, and accept that fixing it will save more time than it costs.

theyinwhy 9y ago
If you had infinite time to work with this code base this wouldn't be an issue I guess. I see context switches and time constraints as the issues that grind me.
imauld 9y ago
I feel that image in your tweet deep down. I would like to add it's not only working in a horrific code base it's working in a horrific code base and getting a lot of push back on fixing it. Telling PM's week after week that the backend will eventually keel over if we don't take some time to clean it up and being told there is no time to do refactoring or maintenance only time for features is very aggravating. Additionally watching outage after outage occur because of this and still being told "we need more feature work there is no time for refactoring" drove me up the wall.