It's important that the 258 were uniformly drawn from the population of software engineers in the UK. It's not important whether the sun came out in the last t

It's important that the 258 were uniformly drawn from the population of software engineers in the UK. It's not important whether the sun came out in the last two weeks or not, unless we were trying to measure the weather affecting burn out. It's true different people might have a different interpretation of burn out, but it should be pretty similar to other people. I'm going to assume all people who took the study understand the idea behind burn out. The point of the poll isn't to answer why but to measure the percentage of burn out with some degree of accuracy. The margin of error in this poll was 4.5%. That's how all yes/no polling works. We don't know that 83% of people are burnt out, but we are reasonably confident that 78% to 88% of people are burnt out.