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83% of Developers Suffer from Burnout, Haystack Analytics Study Finds

79 points by iLoveOncall 4y ago

iLoveOncall 4y ago
I'm still sharing because I find the result interesting, but keep in mind that: - Calling this a study is a bit of a stretch, it's a glorified poll that took place over the course of 2 days, - n = 258, all in the UK Actual study link: https://haystack-books.s3.amazonaws.com/Study+to+understand+the+impact+of+COVID-19+on+Software+Engineers+-+Full+Report.pdf https://haystack-books.s3.amazonaws.com/Study+to+understand+...
revskill 4y ago
The issue with most developers is they don't care about being burnout or not. I've seen many of them don't care about, instead of spending 1 or 2 day for automation, they keep pushing the boundaries of manual, repitition to next levels, leading to burnout. Burnout is the result of lacking of automation. The reason is simple: Manual, repetitive job is what they're paid for, and also task automation is HARD. One example: Ruby on Rails is the result of automation to remove all manual and repetition when working on a web application (poiting at you, Enterprise Java). And the result is, all Rails developers are happy (!= burnout)
- diarrhea 4y ago
  This is too simple. One can burn out either way: building automation most, if not all, days or keeping it manual. Burnout is too multi-facetted.
  - revskill 4y ago
    I've not seen any company which encourages automation lead to burnout.
    - sockopen 4y ago
      I think the issue here is what you’re defining as automation. I worked at a managed services provider automating any task that could be automated for over a decade, there will always be more work than can be automated. It just changes too fast for that not to be true, especially when dealing with thousands of different line of business applications and edge cases which are constantly updating.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  Blaming the victim? An odd thing to do. How often do developers raise the need for improvement, and technical debt removal? Particularly in Agile environments where there is never room for such "stories". Let alone poor management that simply ignores those requests. Developers by definition want to automate and improve things, but are often not allowed to. Add in the long hours and pressure to constantly deliver "in fast paced environments". As an industry there needs to be more pushback against this sweatshop like mindset.
  - revskill 4y ago
    Sadly, it's the reality. I called this lacking of proactiveness. As a software developer, you must be master of your toolings. Noone but you have that ability to improve you ! WHo else to blame then ?
    - pedro2 4y ago
      Ya, like Elon Musk -- he really is a self-made man!
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    > Particularly in Agile environments It is "funny" how that has come to mean strict and stiff developement process.
    - yrgulation 4y ago
      Thats what you get when you put inexperienced management in charge of software. All processes diverge from their initial intention. These types of managers are those who treat software engineers like construction workers - they measure performance by the number of bricks laid per day. Or story points. This type of mindset simply shouldnt be part of the industry.
      - gonzo41 4y ago
        Really interesting view. I think treating the developers as construction workers would be great. But that would mean we'd have standard approaches, that would be regulated by a peak body. Wonky shit would get called out by inspectors. People would have an apprentice style learning environment. Sounds fantastic.
- stevewatson301 4y ago
  It is incorrect to suggest that lack of automation is the issue at hand. From where I stand, it's the pressure for deliverables and frequent oncall responsibilities that stress me out the most.
  - revskill 4y ago
    Show me one counterexample first. I've joined a bunch of companies, and there' two kinds of companies to me: Lacking of automation and pushing with automation. One example: CI/CD process where developer only cares about the code, not CI/CD configuration.
    - menaerus 4y ago
      You're so disconnected from reality that I think you should simply stop. If not for your own credibility then because of empathy to people suffering or who have suffered from a burnout. You're just adding an insult to an injury.
      - revskill 4y ago
        It's correct. It's the reason i stop working for enterprise if possible. Because i know the truth. Noone cares about automation, and there's no reason you're the guy who do automation for free (with the risk of delaying your JIRA stories). There's a reason to stay out of a mess. There's no empathy for intentionally not releasing the burnout for teammates besides the selfish reason to keep your seat forever. It's the selfishness at best. And no, for my cultural reason, i have no reason to stay there to feed lazy assholes.
- bsenftner 4y ago
  No, 100% no. Burnout is the internalization of the belief the work is endless, pointless, and certainly not worth your effort. Burnout is when one's investment is realized to be a failed commitment of one's time, one's energy, one's finite life.
  - melech_ric 4y ago
    I am pretty sure I burned out in 2017. It has been a slow crawl back to normalcy. The real trouble is that there is no end to the demands that a business will make on a person. A business can't halt and wait for your burnout to subside. A business needs to push the next widget out - and if you can't help with that then someone else will. This is directly at odds with recovery. There's never enough time to feel proud and connected to your work. Just the next task.
    - bsenftner 4y ago
      I've been coding professionally since '82 and am in the tail end of my 5th career burnout. The underlying issue is our industry is an ocean of poor communicators, who routinely ignore signals until a tsunami hits.
- deleted 4y ago
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- jansommer 4y ago
  Whenever I've automated something, the time I've spent doing that thing manually becomes free to work on the 1000 other tasks in the backlog. Nobody is going to give you a week off even if you automate the work of 10 people. And you're not limited to repetitive tasks for burnout, intellectually stimulating work can drain you as well.
- otikik 4y ago
  Our built-in pattern-matching capability (very valuable in general) is not great with regards to people problems. Programmers are humans. You can think of a human as a highly complex system. Our problems are not always "simple". Every time you see a short-phrase used to describe a solution for human problems, be very skeptical. Your phrase was "Burnout is the result of lacking of automation", but there are many others like "Just ignore what others say" or "Stop feeling sad". A highly complex system often requires nuanced and complex solutions. Short phrases simply don't have enough bytes. And that is for a single human. If we are talking about a big collective ("all programmers" instead of a single programmer) the short-phrase solution is even more inappropriate.
  - revskill 4y ago
    The default sentiment is: This is not a mathematical theorem. All upon your interpretation. Focus on the "mostly correctness" instead. You don't want to disprove anything here because the statement is of course by anyway not a mathematical theorem.
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  This is nonsense on stilts. I recently burned out hard, (I have been off for about 6 weeks) largely because I was made to spend hundreds of hours automating manual tasks performed by higher ups on an infrequent basis on top of my normal workload, despite the fact that it will literally take years of those automations being in production before there is a net gain in time or productivity for the company. Automation is sometimes worth it but often it is just a pointless time sink that people like to pretend boosts their productivity and which they can wave around to show how smart they are.
- dukodk 4y ago
  I like how SRE has a word for it. https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/ https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/
- ThalesX 4y ago
  The place I currently work at and feel almost at the edge with regards to burnout has been automating everything for a year without any business value being delivered, because we don't have a product but we're building the "best" infrastructure. This is quite frankly a naive view that manual == burnout and automated != burnout.
- badpun 4y ago
  For me, it's the automation that's causing the burnout. It's overly complex, always buggy or deficient in some way and makes the overall system way more complex that it would be otherwise.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
I don't believe that the claim "83% of developers suffer from burnout" is true or even close to the truth, and I note that this is published by a company that provides "Insights from your Git data to help you experiment faster, ship reliably and prevent burnout."... So everyone's is of course burnt out and really need Haystack ;)
- MikeSchurman 4y ago
  You are correct, it is not true based on the study. What they asked to comment on was: "I feel burnt out from work" and 83% said at least "to a small extent". I suppose it depends how much "to a small extent" maps to "suffer". Not much in my opinion.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Worked at places were some people would regularly tip over and recover in a infirmary. People die for companys. And it is not talked about. Also good diagnosis tools, the model train projects. Somebody - in power, working on something small, controllable, with a end in sight. Can be anything, a website, a shop, anything as long as it is not the project that burned them out.
- bsenftner 4y ago
  Go to any traditionally enviable career, such as the media careers of animation, VFX, and video gaming, and you will find soul crushing exploitation as the industry standard. Been there, each of those three industries, at the dominating top companies and the treatment of developers by management and the developers themselves is factually criminal, but a frog in boiling water sees no boiling water. I believe it is simple immaturity: I rarely meet an actual adult, most people are simply old children with the personalities to match.
melenaboija 4y ago
To me a good symptom is to ask any software developer that has been into it for only a couple of years if they see themselves doing this same thing all their live and make some statistics. Yes, it happens to many other professionals but software developers too.
alex3305 4y ago
I'm currently on sick leave with burnout, for 9 months already... For public health care the waiting lists are at least half a year. Although my employer 'tried' to employ a private psychologist, this has been useless thus far. This is because my situation is more complex than a regular burnout, a standard psychologist for burnout refuses to treat me. My employer says they cannot do anything besides that. So I'm currently at a stand still. This is my second burnout in 4 years with this employer and I think employers should do more about these situations and resolutions.
- Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  Usually, at the point of real "burnout" there is no fix except leaving for a different setting for awhile. While I often infer Plumbing is a cleaner trade than the tech sector, there are real consequences associated with some toxic corporate cultures. ;) I usually recommend self-evaluation though Ikigai as part of long-term career planning. 'Ikigai starts with the awareness of four key pillars: Business Values Core Competencies Income Generation What the World Needs' ( https://singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ikigai-chart-reason-for-being_1088160854.jpg https://singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ikigai... )
  - alex3305 4y ago
    First of all, thank you. > Usually, at the point of real "burnout" there is no fix except leaving for a different setting for awhile. Still being with my employer causes some real pressure. They don't want to help to fix my issues, while still expecting me to come back to work. I need to get out of this situation. > While I often infer Plumbing is a cleaner trade than the tech sector [...] The thing is though, I love software development. I have wanted to be a software developer when I was 4. And I'm almost 34 now. But I really hate the politics and drama. I just want to create, be creative and be a team leader. I know I can do that and I'm good at it. But I just have to find the right match. I didn't know about Ikigai, but I've printed out a copy for on my whiteboard and I love reflection, so thank you.
    - weatherlite 4y ago
ergonaught 4y ago
I can’t tell from the paper whether they bothered to actually define “burnout” and ensure the respondents understood that definition when answering. We will surely see the same problem in comments, here.
- deleted 4y ago
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- paulcole 4y ago
  Yes, this is one of my bigger annoyances with the word burnout. I insist upon using the WHO definition when this is discussed where I work. > feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; > increased mental distance from one’s job, > or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; > reduced professional efficacy. https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat... Only when it’s clear what we’re specifically talking about can we talk about solutions.
sharkbird2 4y ago
I think one big factor in this is that as a developer, you don't (normally) have slow periods. A lot of other occupations will have their stressful high-tempo periods, but then they have the lower-tempo periods in between. But in software engineering there's no end to the constant demand of more features and more bug fixes. There's no slow time, no low-tempo periods. Humans are just not made to always work at flank speed, but I feel like that's the expectation within the software industry, and I can easily see that leading to burnout.
- tl 4y ago
  Perversely, because the industry creates this pressure, low-tempo periods that are employer-specific cause anxiety and paranoia. This is even more true right now as large companies continue to announce layoffs.
  - Sharlin 4y ago
    Is boreout actually a problem unless you're expected to be imprisoned in an office every day and maybe, even worse, expected to look like you're "working" even if there's not much to do? In a remote or hybrid working culture, periods of lightweight work should just be regarded as more leisure time for you. Embrace the opportunity for some self-care!
    - aylmao 4y ago
      I agree, though I can see this being hard for many. Even when technically resting, knowing you are technically in working hours is often enough to prevent real leisure.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  Oh really, I actually find the slow periods of development work the hardest. Like when you start to suffer boreout when there's not much to do. It's kind of a burnout because the energy isn't there to go seek out busy work.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
jmartrican 4y ago
When I worked as a contractor for VMWare, previously Pivotal Labs, we learned then taught a burnout proof way for teams to code. As a developer, i suffered burnout all the time. I would get too emotionally vested into the code and work late to finish it. With Pivotal Labs, we coded in pairs, and it was considered rude to work on code outside of your pair. This plus other techniques like putting strong emphasis on emotional safety created an environment where burnout just disappeared.
- ResearchCode 4y ago
  Forced full-time "pair programming" might by itself cause burnout in a lot of people. I wonder how many mathematicians would put up with something like that. Full-time pair proving.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  Hasn't been my experience. I get mentally exhausted after just 2-3 hours of pair programming, and tend to be borderline useless the rest of the day. Having to communicate the entire time your thought process, not really being able to just take the wheel and investigate things quietly for a few minutes, and if you're letting them drive, getting them to go to the right spots in the code and modify the right things (especially if english is their second language) not easily being able to get up and walk away from the computer if you need to ruminate on something for a moment...yeah, just fries my brain. Still need to do it at my work, since I'm managing junior developers right now that just don't see some of these things without pair programming, but it's exhausting. Part of that is the coaching junior developers that need extra handholding, but I've found it almost as tiring even amongst peers of equal skill, if it happens for an extended period of time.
  - jmartrican 4y ago
    Interesting. We did hear complaints like this from folks starting out. What I have noticed is that when working with Pivotal veterans, those with a few years under their belt, they tended to have long endurance for pairing. They also picked up tricks along the way to keep the pair engaged and allow for investigation. Maybe its like furniture movers... it takes time to build up that endurance and mastery to get to the point where it is possible to do for 3 - 4 hours at a time. Pivotal was also strict with taking 15 minute breaks... one in the AM around 10:30am and the other in the afternoon around 3pm.... but each pair can decide on their own. When I was a team lead in pairing teams, I did allow (and encouraged solo time), but the code written during solo would be consider spike code... code to learn and try stuff out. Ultimately to make it into prod code, it had to go through a pair.
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marginalia_nu 4y ago
A significant portion of the burnout problem is down to insufficient recovery. Sleep is important. Nutrition is important. Physical activity is important. Having out-of-office social interactions is important. Non-computer hobbies are important. This is in part personality and habits. You can have the greatest job in the world, if at the end of the day you go home and keep working on something else until you drop from exhaustion, that's not great. That may be fun, but it's not permitting the necessary recovery. I unfortunately think that is somewhat common in the tech world. Of course working conditions affect the amount of recovery that is possible. If you're working 10 hour shifts and have a 2 hour commute, then crash in the couch too tired to do anything, eat leftover pizza, and then get 5 hours of sleep before it's back in the wheel again, then it's just a matter of when it all comes crumbling down. You can live like that until you can't.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  Physical activity is so important I'm surprised companies generally don't actively encourage employees to exercise. Instead they stock the kitchens with sodas and junk food. I wouldn't make exercise mandatory but I'd try to encourage everyone to a 40 minute workout in the middle of the day a few times a week. Sure, not all companies are equipped for that but many are. The thing is most people are too tired before or after work and during the weekends. If we can get them to move a bit during the day it will work. And people will be healthier, less burned out and more productive.
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    > I'd try to get everyone who agrees to a 40 minute workout in the middle of the day a few times a week. followed by a nap period, please.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    That would be great but they would then expect you to go home 40 minutes later than normal
    - weatherlite 4y ago
kleinsch 4y ago
Whenever you see a headline like this, one of the first questions you should ask is: "compared to what?" For this number to be relevant at all, it needs context - among the general population, how what percentage suffer from burnout? In this case, answering that you feel any amount of burnout (including "To a small extent") to the prompt "I feel burnt out from work" means you suffer from burnout. In fact, the distribution from most burnt out to zero was: 21%, 34%, 28%, 17% - a relatively even distribution. An alternate headline (that's less exciting) is: 45% of software developers barely suffer burnout. That's almost a coinflip. I'd be shocked if this doesn't just mirror the general population.
- Sharlin 4y ago
  Not so sure about that. Because people are generally biased to not recognize burnout symptoms in themselves (at least not until they've already been burned out once), these numbers seem shockingly high.
- onion2k 4y ago
  I'd be shocked if this doesn't just mirror the general population. That makes it worse.
  - piva00 4y ago
    Yeah, exactly my thought. How could you think that if the sentiment in the general population is that anywhere between 50-85% are feeling burnt out that it's ok because comparatively a group is not suffering more than the other. It's just much worse that the whole population is feeling this bad about work. It shouldn't be this way!
- weatherlite 4y ago
  83% is so high that you don't really need to compare it to anything. It basically means almost all devs are burned out. In fact its so high I'm not sure this study makes sense. Its higher than people with real stress like physicians, policemen and firefighters. Yes I've seen burn out here and there and even experienced it myself in one toxic workplace, but 83%? I don't know what went wrong with the study but this just contradicts my life experience by a huge margin.
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
I work at a company where employees get to choose three-weeks sabbatical (or paid equivalent) after reaching 7 years of tenure. Of those I know who took the sabbatical, a good proportion of maybe 20% to 30% come back off their break and promptly hand in their resignation. Talking to my former manager who did this, he said that he never realized just how burnt out he was until he had some time on his hands at home. I think some folks just exist in a fog of burn-out and don't really notice it until they get a chance to stand back and evaluate their situation.
- lcedp 4y ago
  Another reason why people quit right after taking a sabbatical is because people willing to quit several months before the 7 years mark will postpone their decision.
- Forge36 4y ago
  The term I've heard is sabati-quit
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  This whole situation you're in is the very reason why everyone burns out. Three weeks is the kind of vacations I take yearly, whether there's a planned release at that date, or anything else. And so do all my coworkers. America's dogshit work ethic and disrespect for workers is killing you.
- zer0tonin 4y ago
  In what world is 3 weeks a sabbatical? This is just a normal holiday
  - falcolas 4y ago
    The one we live in, sadly. Which country? US for sure. It wasn’t until my 5 year mark with my current company that I hit 4 weeks of combined PTO/sick leave. And due to a company policy, they didn’t match my prior vacation amount when I joined. And per HR, our vacation policy is better than industry average.
brutus1213 4y ago
I wonder if the economic situation affects burnout. Managers push more to keep their jobs and protect their team. Individual team members push more of themselves to be seen as more productive. You only get productivity pushing yourself to a point .. after that is the redline zone and burnout. This fear effect is compounded as you hear stories of bullweather employers doing hiring freezes (aka. AWS). I think we have a problem right now in tech .. too many people have been laid off to be absorbed in the same high-tech jobs. People will need to trade downwards, go to grad school, whatever. Not sure if I am missing some bright streaks of light in the cloud.
edw519 4y ago
I've been programming for 53 years and have never been burnt out from the act of actually building software. In fact it's been the opposite for me. Every time I've ever had a significant challenge, alone or in a small competent team, to get something built quickly and right, I've savored that challenge. The times I've sat up all night long coding are some of my fondest memories. I remember with startling accuracy every time we struggled getting something to work, got it figured out, and danced. I remember every white board, direct message, even every slice of pizza in the trenches. I've even commented here on HN many times that I've never been burnt out coding and never will be. I'd be the last one out of here to turn off the lights when everyone else was burnt out. But now I am most certainly burnt out, not from building software, but from being incarcerated in dysfunctional I.T. hell. For OP and the posers who think they understand the mindset of serious software developers, here's what really burns us out: - the same stupid meeting every morning where nothing is raised or closed and no non-programmer has a clue - taking direction from the same clueless bosses who have never accomplished anything but treat us like their children - the new technology or philosophy du jour that does everything but address the root of any problem - management that absolutely cannot grok fundamentals like cause/effect, critical path, detail/issue, urgent/important, diminishing returns, etc. - continuous leadership bombardment of idiocy and stuff we know can't work - management's complete failure to solicit or accept feedback from those of us who actually know - nothing written down and no one remembering anything - confusion by almost everyone about the difference between activity and achievement - no written business requirements, technical specs, or test plans, but instead, some new untested methodology - leaders who don't understand the difference between steak and sizzle - continuous business failures because of poor leadership, not technology (and they keep doing it!) - I could go on and on, but I wouldn't get anything done today and be just like my boss. I'd love to see an OP that addresses any of all of these things I've been suffering from for years, instead of a headline with a precise metric on a misunderstood premise. I'll suffer all day today and then to get rid of the corporate stink, build something cool for myself later tonight. That's not personal burn out, it's industry burn down.
- tored 4y ago
  I largely agree but I would like to add that much software we developers work on today works against developer satisfaction. Bizarre architecture choices based on trends, tedious build steps, complex development setups with hours spent on configuration, etc. Software development has become a time sink into things that has nothing to do with the actual task at hand. This annoys me somewhat more than a clueless manager, who can be forgiven for not understanding software development, because these software architectural problems is something we developers created, willingly.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
We could blame Agile for guaranteeing you never have a second to yourself to do anything you think is needful or interesting or fun, but just forever trudge ahead fighting fires and fiddling with format and reworking code for broken libraries you should really be fixing... We could go on and on. But I'm too tired and ... burnt out to continue.
- robin_reala 4y ago
  You need to introduce firebreak sprints. Take a week off every fourth sprint (or whatever) and give devs the freedom to build whatever they think will need doing to make the system better overall. You’ll get a bunch of preventative maintenance that you knew needed doing but never found time to do, but you’ll also get the occasional mad idea that turns out to have big benefits.
  - danuker 4y ago
    Firebreak tasks (not sprints) should be taken naturally as prioritization chooses them over other tasks. Sadly, with higher interest rates, there is a pressure to produce results in the short-term, at the expense of long-term investments.
    - piva00 4y ago
      Higher interests or not the pressure to deliver value and growth every quarter has always been present. In tech especially as we're seen as a hypergrowth model and not growing quickly every quarter is a sign of failure to the expectations of the market™. I've been working in this industry for 18 years, in different countries with different central banks rates and macroeconomics conditions, it's always been the exact same.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    I dont see why those ideas couldnt be identified and sprinkled into regular sprints. The idea of a forced break to do these things implies they arent important. Otherwise they should already get picked up.
BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
Oh are they. Time for extremely hardcore, long hours, high intensity then. Let's see if this helps.
29athrowaway 4y ago
Because of short-term mentality.
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beardedman 4y ago
I am sceptical that burnout has become very en vogue. I also think this why immigrants are eating locals' breakfast (so to speak). I do a lot of hiring & (very anecdotally of course) burnout is almost exclusively a topic of developed countries' software engineers. So much so, that I don't like hiring them (DACH region/Austria/Germany lately). And yes; I believe work life balance is important.
- freddie_mercury 4y ago
  I work in Vietnam and I've never heard developers here talk about burnout incessantly like Hacker News does.
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    Low wages and poor social mobility makes you unable to care about your mental wellbeing, how surprising. Yes, burnout is a rich country problem, because you otherwise kill yourself at the task because you can't afford not to. Give Vietnam western european wages and within 10 years, burnout will also be a talked about problem. Just because you don't have time to look at something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  Immigrants are as burnt out as locals (if not a lot more), just check Blind for 5 minutes. The difference is just that the livelyhood of sometimes dozens of people back home is on their shoulders, so they just try to power through. Which company do you work for so that I can avoid it?
  - beardedman 4y ago
    Doing so very effectively it seems. :)
elektrontamer 4y ago
It seems a bit self inflicted to me. Managers where I work expect you to correct them if your workload is too much. But people are just hyper ambitious and/or anxious to do that so they under estimate the work and end up working overtime to deliver what they promised. Over time it becomes the norm among developers. I'm guilty of this as well. Like last night I had to help a new developer, I explicitly said that we could have a meeting the next day if he wanted, I told him not to feel pressured, but he insisted it was fine so we ended up working together late at night to get his environment set up.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  > like last night I had to help a new developer, I explicitly said that we could have a meeting the next day if he wanted, I told him not to feel pressured, but he insisted it was fine so we ended up working together late at night to get his environment set up Its most likely he wanted to leave a positive impression. We're in a bad economy, people want to hold onto their jobs .. and the "easiest" way to appear like a good worker is doing long hours. Its up to you and your team to cut that shit immediately otherwise you will all work all the time.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  The workplace is an inherently biased and unbalanced environment for a worker, and anyone about you is a potential threat. The company can afford to have you gone, you usually can't afford to be gone. So, when asked by a representative of said company's authority and power over you if everything is fine, you are very likely to say it's all good, even if it isn't, especially if you live in a country where being fired is easy. Your decisions as a manager can have me fired if you have a bad impression of me, or if something you repeat to your superiors itches them the wrong way. In the same way, as a new developer, the impressions of more senior ones are a massive factor in whether or not you stay for more than 6 months. Not recognizing this inherent power imbalance is foolish. As the other comment said, if you're managing someone, then _cut that shit quick_. Developer works super fast and finishes 1 week worth of work in a day ? Don't give them more work. What was assigned initially is done. Prevent them from giving more. But to avoid boring them, encourage them to take on more personal tasks, some general cleanups that they might have wanted, that is less of a duty to the employer and more of a pleasant head scratcher to them.
tlogan 4y ago
Burnout is a big issue. I think it is the main cause for high performing employees leaving companies (I read that somewhere - sorry I cannot find the reference). A lot companies recognize this problem but I really do not know what is the best solution. I know that companies have policy that you are required to take your vacations every year. But that might not be helping in all cases. Any other ideas?
burkestar 4y ago
This survey was based on 258 developers responding from the UK. I don't recommend making sweeping generalizable claims about all developers in the world from it.
mediascreen 4y ago
I usually spread my six week of vacation over 12 weeks of half time work in order to work/vacation for longer periods in warmer weather. I don't feel like I need complete rest from work and I don't mind working a few hours every day (I'm single and without kids). Last year I spent time in Barcelona and Greece and this winter I will spend some time in Malaysia.
wonderwonder 4y ago
I've burned out a few times, each time the only way to recover was a new job. The first time was ~4 years ago. Company I worked at did agile but required you hit 10 points a week. If you didn't you were pipped. On top of that the only way you could really hit the points was to work ~60 - 70 hour weeks. You were not allowed to consider how long implementing a ticket would take when scoring a ticket only how hard it was. This led to strife when scoring tickets. When covid first hit and the world was insane and my kids had to do home schooling (I have been remote for ~5 years) I hit 8 points the first couple sprints. I was pipped. Things like this, many 90+ hour weeks, debugging and fixing data in production, and being asked to lie to clients fried me. I burned out, would sit there staring at a screen for 8 hours and get like 30 minutes of work done. After that my next job was immediately 90 hour weeks for 2 months. Not just me, dozens of people. I had coworkers weeping during standup on many occasions. Luckily I was contract so I got paid OT. Most of my coworkers did not. After a ~4 months of insane hours I just said screw it and refused to work more than 45. Everyone just dealt with it but they had to work more hours, I felt bad. Same job, next project we had no one to write requirements. so I had to do that which is not my skillset plus code. A year in, I burned out, would sit there staring at a screen for 8 hours and get like 30 minutes of work done. I lasted for another 6 months before quitting. Funny thing was even burned out I was getting more work done than most and they freaked out when I quit. This current job I am a tech lead. It started off pretty good and I still dont work OT but my scrum master did nothing for the first 6 months so it all fell on me. He got fired but they are not backfilling him so its all on me. On top of that I have to manage developers including writing tickets for them, and manage up. Which means I lose 2 days a week essentially writing reports for leadership and doing busy work. I have come to hate standups. I don't think I am burned out here yet but I feel it coming on. I really need to take a vacation. Not a go somewhere with the kids one, just a stay home for 2 weeks and destress one. Interestingly this all started when I started working in agile shops. Its just constant pressure, always a race.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  > I have come to hate standups Can't you decrease those to 2 times a week then? No scrum master and you are the lead? If management enforces 5 just do three async in chat or whatever. > Interestingly this all started when I started working in agile shops. Its just constant pressure, always a race. Agile's killer feuture is the great opportunity to micromanage and force a never ending sense of urgency.
nunez 4y ago
what does burn out even feel like? i posit that everyone feels burn out slightly differently because everyone has different amounts of burn out they can handle
esparrohack 4y ago
Every time I complain about poker planning the sprint, people act like I’m an idiot. I don’t even care anymore.
biggerChris 4y ago
I burn out at 28 years. Now I just improve one block of code a day. Sign off and sleep till tomorrow; awaiting my death of course.

79 points by iLoveOncall 4y ago

I'm still sharing because I find the result interesting, but keep in mind that: - Calling this a study is a bit of a stretch, it's a glorified poll that took place over the course of 2 days, - n = 258, all in the UK Actual study link: https://haystack-books.s3.amazonaws.com/Study+to+understand+the+impact+of+COVID-19+on+Software+Engineers+-+Full+Report.pdf https://haystack-books.s3.amazonaws.com/Study+to+understand+...

revskill 4y ago

The issue with most developers is they don't care about being burnout or not. I've seen many of them don't care about, instead of spending 1 or 2 day for automation, they keep pushing the boundaries of manual, repitition to next levels, leading to burnout. Burnout is the result of lacking of automation. The reason is simple: Manual, repetitive job is what they're paid for, and also task automation is HARD. One example: Ruby on Rails is the result of automation to remove all manual and repetition when working on a web application (poiting at you, Enterprise Java). And the result is, all Rails developers are happy (!= burnout)

diarrhea 4y ago
This is too simple. One can burn out either way: building automation most, if not all, days or keeping it manual. Burnout is too multi-facetted.
- revskill 4y ago
  I've not seen any company which encourages automation lead to burnout.
  - sockopen 4y ago
    I think the issue here is what you’re defining as automation. I worked at a managed services provider automating any task that could be automated for over a decade, there will always be more work than can be automated. It just changes too fast for that not to be true, especially when dealing with thousands of different line of business applications and edge cases which are constantly updating.
yrgulation 4y ago
Blaming the victim? An odd thing to do. How often do developers raise the need for improvement, and technical debt removal? Particularly in Agile environments where there is never room for such "stories". Let alone poor management that simply ignores those requests. Developers by definition want to automate and improve things, but are often not allowed to. Add in the long hours and pressure to constantly deliver "in fast paced environments". As an industry there needs to be more pushback against this sweatshop like mindset.
- revskill 4y ago
  Sadly, it's the reality. I called this lacking of proactiveness. As a software developer, you must be master of your toolings. Noone but you have that ability to improve you ! WHo else to blame then ?
  - pedro2 4y ago
    Ya, like Elon Musk -- he really is a self-made man!
- rightbyte 4y ago
  > Particularly in Agile environments It is "funny" how that has come to mean strict and stiff developement process.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    Thats what you get when you put inexperienced management in charge of software. All processes diverge from their initial intention. These types of managers are those who treat software engineers like construction workers - they measure performance by the number of bricks laid per day. Or story points. This type of mindset simply shouldnt be part of the industry.
    - gonzo41 4y ago
      Really interesting view. I think treating the developers as construction workers would be great. But that would mean we'd have standard approaches, that would be regulated by a peak body. Wonky shit would get called out by inspectors. People would have an apprentice style learning environment. Sounds fantastic.
stevewatson301 4y ago
It is incorrect to suggest that lack of automation is the issue at hand. From where I stand, it's the pressure for deliverables and frequent oncall responsibilities that stress me out the most.
- revskill 4y ago
  Show me one counterexample first. I've joined a bunch of companies, and there' two kinds of companies to me: Lacking of automation and pushing with automation. One example: CI/CD process where developer only cares about the code, not CI/CD configuration.
  - menaerus 4y ago
    You're so disconnected from reality that I think you should simply stop. If not for your own credibility then because of empathy to people suffering or who have suffered from a burnout. You're just adding an insult to an injury.
    - revskill 4y ago
      It's correct. It's the reason i stop working for enterprise if possible. Because i know the truth. Noone cares about automation, and there's no reason you're the guy who do automation for free (with the risk of delaying your JIRA stories). There's a reason to stay out of a mess. There's no empathy for intentionally not releasing the burnout for teammates besides the selfish reason to keep your seat forever. It's the selfishness at best. And no, for my cultural reason, i have no reason to stay there to feed lazy assholes.
bsenftner 4y ago
No, 100% no. Burnout is the internalization of the belief the work is endless, pointless, and certainly not worth your effort. Burnout is when one's investment is realized to be a failed commitment of one's time, one's energy, one's finite life.
- melech_ric 4y ago
  I am pretty sure I burned out in 2017. It has been a slow crawl back to normalcy. The real trouble is that there is no end to the demands that a business will make on a person. A business can't halt and wait for your burnout to subside. A business needs to push the next widget out - and if you can't help with that then someone else will. This is directly at odds with recovery. There's never enough time to feel proud and connected to your work. Just the next task.
  - bsenftner 4y ago
    I've been coding professionally since '82 and am in the tail end of my 5th career burnout. The underlying issue is our industry is an ocean of poor communicators, who routinely ignore signals until a tsunami hits.
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jansommer 4y ago
Whenever I've automated something, the time I've spent doing that thing manually becomes free to work on the 1000 other tasks in the backlog. Nobody is going to give you a week off even if you automate the work of 10 people. And you're not limited to repetitive tasks for burnout, intellectually stimulating work can drain you as well.
otikik 4y ago
Our built-in pattern-matching capability (very valuable in general) is not great with regards to people problems. Programmers are humans. You can think of a human as a highly complex system. Our problems are not always "simple". Every time you see a short-phrase used to describe a solution for human problems, be very skeptical. Your phrase was "Burnout is the result of lacking of automation", but there are many others like "Just ignore what others say" or "Stop feeling sad". A highly complex system often requires nuanced and complex solutions. Short phrases simply don't have enough bytes. And that is for a single human. If we are talking about a big collective ("all programmers" instead of a single programmer) the short-phrase solution is even more inappropriate.
- revskill 4y ago
  The default sentiment is: This is not a mathematical theorem. All upon your interpretation. Focus on the "mostly correctness" instead. You don't want to disprove anything here because the statement is of course by anyway not a mathematical theorem.
r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
This is nonsense on stilts. I recently burned out hard, (I have been off for about 6 weeks) largely because I was made to spend hundreds of hours automating manual tasks performed by higher ups on an infrequent basis on top of my normal workload, despite the fact that it will literally take years of those automations being in production before there is a net gain in time or productivity for the company. Automation is sometimes worth it but often it is just a pointless time sink that people like to pretend boosts their productivity and which they can wave around to show how smart they are.
dukodk 4y ago
I like how SRE has a word for it. https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/ https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/
ThalesX 4y ago
The place I currently work at and feel almost at the edge with regards to burnout has been automating everything for a year without any business value being delivered, because we don't have a product but we're building the "best" infrastructure. This is quite frankly a naive view that manual == burnout and automated != burnout.
badpun 4y ago
For me, it's the automation that's causing the burnout. It's overly complex, always buggy or deficient in some way and makes the overall system way more complex that it would be otherwise.

mytailorisrich 4y ago

I don't believe that the claim "83% of developers suffer from burnout" is true or even close to the truth, and I note that this is published by a company that provides "Insights from your Git data to help you experiment faster, ship reliably and prevent burnout."... So everyone's is of course burnt out and really need Haystack ;)

MikeSchurman 4y ago
You are correct, it is not true based on the study. What they asked to comment on was: "I feel burnt out from work" and 83% said at least "to a small extent". I suppose it depends how much "to a small extent" maps to "suffer". Not much in my opinion.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

Worked at places were some people would regularly tip over and recover in a infirmary. People die for companys. And it is not talked about. Also good diagnosis tools, the model train projects. Somebody - in power, working on something small, controllable, with a end in sight. Can be anything, a website, a shop, anything as long as it is not the project that burned them out.

bsenftner 4y ago
Go to any traditionally enviable career, such as the media careers of animation, VFX, and video gaming, and you will find soul crushing exploitation as the industry standard. Been there, each of those three industries, at the dominating top companies and the treatment of developers by management and the developers themselves is factually criminal, but a frog in boiling water sees no boiling water. I believe it is simple immaturity: I rarely meet an actual adult, most people are simply old children with the personalities to match.

melenaboija 4y ago

To me a good symptom is to ask any software developer that has been into it for only a couple of years if they see themselves doing this same thing all their live and make some statistics. Yes, it happens to many other professionals but software developers too.

alex3305 4y ago

I'm currently on sick leave with burnout, for 9 months already... For public health care the waiting lists are at least half a year. Although my employer 'tried' to employ a private psychologist, this has been useless thus far. This is because my situation is more complex than a regular burnout, a standard psychologist for burnout refuses to treat me. My employer says they cannot do anything besides that. So I'm currently at a stand still. This is my second burnout in 4 years with this employer and I think employers should do more about these situations and resolutions.

Joel_Mckay 4y ago
Usually, at the point of real "burnout" there is no fix except leaving for a different setting for awhile. While I often infer Plumbing is a cleaner trade than the tech sector, there are real consequences associated with some toxic corporate cultures. ;) I usually recommend self-evaluation though Ikigai as part of long-term career planning. 'Ikigai starts with the awareness of four key pillars: Business Values Core Competencies Income Generation What the World Needs' ( https://singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ikigai-chart-reason-for-being_1088160854.jpg https://singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ikigai... )
- alex3305 4y ago
  First of all, thank you. > Usually, at the point of real "burnout" there is no fix except leaving for a different setting for awhile. Still being with my employer causes some real pressure. They don't want to help to fix my issues, while still expecting me to come back to work. I need to get out of this situation. > While I often infer Plumbing is a cleaner trade than the tech sector [...] The thing is though, I love software development. I have wanted to be a software developer when I was 4. And I'm almost 34 now. But I really hate the politics and drama. I just want to create, be creative and be a team leader. I know I can do that and I'm good at it. But I just have to find the right match. I didn't know about Ikigai, but I've printed out a copy for on my whiteboard and I love reflection, so thank you.
  - weatherlite 4y ago

ergonaught 4y ago

I can’t tell from the paper whether they bothered to actually define “burnout” and ensure the respondents understood that definition when answering. We will surely see the same problem in comments, here.

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paulcole 4y ago
Yes, this is one of my bigger annoyances with the word burnout. I insist upon using the WHO definition when this is discussed where I work. > feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; > increased mental distance from one’s job, > or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; > reduced professional efficacy. https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat... Only when it’s clear what we’re specifically talking about can we talk about solutions.

sharkbird2 4y ago

I think one big factor in this is that as a developer, you don't (normally) have slow periods. A lot of other occupations will have their stressful high-tempo periods, but then they have the lower-tempo periods in between. But in software engineering there's no end to the constant demand of more features and more bug fixes. There's no slow time, no low-tempo periods. Humans are just not made to always work at flank speed, but I feel like that's the expectation within the software industry, and I can easily see that leading to burnout.

tl 4y ago
Perversely, because the industry creates this pressure, low-tempo periods that are employer-specific cause anxiety and paranoia. This is even more true right now as large companies continue to announce layoffs.
- Sharlin 4y ago
  Is boreout actually a problem unless you're expected to be imprisoned in an office every day and maybe, even worse, expected to look like you're "working" even if there's not much to do? In a remote or hybrid working culture, periods of lightweight work should just be regarded as more leisure time for you. Embrace the opportunity for some self-care!
  - aylmao 4y ago
    I agree, though I can see this being hard for many. Even when technically resting, knowing you are technically in working hours is often enough to prevent real leisure.
gonzo41 4y ago
Oh really, I actually find the slow periods of development work the hardest. Like when you start to suffer boreout when there's not much to do. It's kind of a burnout because the energy isn't there to go seek out busy work.
dan-robertson 4y ago

jmartrican 4y ago

When I worked as a contractor for VMWare, previously Pivotal Labs, we learned then taught a burnout proof way for teams to code. As a developer, i suffered burnout all the time. I would get too emotionally vested into the code and work late to finish it. With Pivotal Labs, we coded in pairs, and it was considered rude to work on code outside of your pair. This plus other techniques like putting strong emphasis on emotional safety created an environment where burnout just disappeared.

ResearchCode 4y ago
Forced full-time "pair programming" might by itself cause burnout in a lot of people. I wonder how many mathematicians would put up with something like that. Full-time pair proving.
cableshaft 4y ago
Hasn't been my experience. I get mentally exhausted after just 2-3 hours of pair programming, and tend to be borderline useless the rest of the day. Having to communicate the entire time your thought process, not really being able to just take the wheel and investigate things quietly for a few minutes, and if you're letting them drive, getting them to go to the right spots in the code and modify the right things (especially if english is their second language) not easily being able to get up and walk away from the computer if you need to ruminate on something for a moment...yeah, just fries my brain. Still need to do it at my work, since I'm managing junior developers right now that just don't see some of these things without pair programming, but it's exhausting. Part of that is the coaching junior developers that need extra handholding, but I've found it almost as tiring even amongst peers of equal skill, if it happens for an extended period of time.
- jmartrican 4y ago
  Interesting. We did hear complaints like this from folks starting out. What I have noticed is that when working with Pivotal veterans, those with a few years under their belt, they tended to have long endurance for pairing. They also picked up tricks along the way to keep the pair engaged and allow for investigation. Maybe its like furniture movers... it takes time to build up that endurance and mastery to get to the point where it is possible to do for 3 - 4 hours at a time. Pivotal was also strict with taking 15 minute breaks... one in the AM around 10:30am and the other in the afternoon around 3pm.... but each pair can decide on their own. When I was a team lead in pairing teams, I did allow (and encouraged solo time), but the code written during solo would be consider spike code... code to learn and try stuff out. Ultimately to make it into prod code, it had to go through a pair.

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marginalia_nu 4y ago

A significant portion of the burnout problem is down to insufficient recovery. Sleep is important. Nutrition is important. Physical activity is important. Having out-of-office social interactions is important. Non-computer hobbies are important. This is in part personality and habits. You can have the greatest job in the world, if at the end of the day you go home and keep working on something else until you drop from exhaustion, that's not great. That may be fun, but it's not permitting the necessary recovery. I unfortunately think that is somewhat common in the tech world. Of course working conditions affect the amount of recovery that is possible. If you're working 10 hour shifts and have a 2 hour commute, then crash in the couch too tired to do anything, eat leftover pizza, and then get 5 hours of sleep before it's back in the wheel again, then it's just a matter of when it all comes crumbling down. You can live like that until you can't.

weatherlite 4y ago
Physical activity is so important I'm surprised companies generally don't actively encourage employees to exercise. Instead they stock the kitchens with sodas and junk food. I wouldn't make exercise mandatory but I'd try to encourage everyone to a 40 minute workout in the middle of the day a few times a week. Sure, not all companies are equipped for that but many are. The thing is most people are too tired before or after work and during the weekends. If we can get them to move a bit during the day it will work. And people will be healthier, less burned out and more productive.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  > I'd try to get everyone who agrees to a 40 minute workout in the middle of the day a few times a week. followed by a nap period, please.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  That would be great but they would then expect you to go home 40 minutes later than normal
  - weatherlite 4y ago

kleinsch 4y ago

Whenever you see a headline like this, one of the first questions you should ask is: "compared to what?" For this number to be relevant at all, it needs context - among the general population, how what percentage suffer from burnout? In this case, answering that you feel any amount of burnout (including "To a small extent") to the prompt "I feel burnt out from work" means you suffer from burnout. In fact, the distribution from most burnt out to zero was: 21%, 34%, 28%, 17% - a relatively even distribution. An alternate headline (that's less exciting) is: 45% of software developers barely suffer burnout. That's almost a coinflip. I'd be shocked if this doesn't just mirror the general population.

Sharlin 4y ago
Not so sure about that. Because people are generally biased to not recognize burnout symptoms in themselves (at least not until they've already been burned out once), these numbers seem shockingly high.
onion2k 4y ago
I'd be shocked if this doesn't just mirror the general population. That makes it worse.
- piva00 4y ago
  Yeah, exactly my thought. How could you think that if the sentiment in the general population is that anywhere between 50-85% are feeling burnt out that it's ok because comparatively a group is not suffering more than the other. It's just much worse that the whole population is feeling this bad about work. It shouldn't be this way!
weatherlite 4y ago
83% is so high that you don't really need to compare it to anything. It basically means almost all devs are burned out. In fact its so high I'm not sure this study makes sense. Its higher than people with real stress like physicians, policemen and firefighters. Yes I've seen burn out here and there and even experienced it myself in one toxic workplace, but 83%? I don't know what went wrong with the study but this just contradicts my life experience by a huge margin.

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago

I work at a company where employees get to choose three-weeks sabbatical (or paid equivalent) after reaching 7 years of tenure. Of those I know who took the sabbatical, a good proportion of maybe 20% to 30% come back off their break and promptly hand in their resignation. Talking to my former manager who did this, he said that he never realized just how burnt out he was until he had some time on his hands at home. I think some folks just exist in a fog of burn-out and don't really notice it until they get a chance to stand back and evaluate their situation.

lcedp 4y ago
Another reason why people quit right after taking a sabbatical is because people willing to quit several months before the 7 years mark will postpone their decision.
Forge36 4y ago
The term I've heard is sabati-quit
ohgodplsno 4y ago
This whole situation you're in is the very reason why everyone burns out. Three weeks is the kind of vacations I take yearly, whether there's a planned release at that date, or anything else. And so do all my coworkers. America's dogshit work ethic and disrespect for workers is killing you.
zer0tonin 4y ago
In what world is 3 weeks a sabbatical? This is just a normal holiday
- falcolas 4y ago
  The one we live in, sadly. Which country? US for sure. It wasn’t until my 5 year mark with my current company that I hit 4 weeks of combined PTO/sick leave. And due to a company policy, they didn’t match my prior vacation amount when I joined. And per HR, our vacation policy is better than industry average.

brutus1213 4y ago

I wonder if the economic situation affects burnout. Managers push more to keep their jobs and protect their team. Individual team members push more of themselves to be seen as more productive. You only get productivity pushing yourself to a point .. after that is the redline zone and burnout. This fear effect is compounded as you hear stories of bullweather employers doing hiring freezes (aka. AWS). I think we have a problem right now in tech .. too many people have been laid off to be absorbed in the same high-tech jobs. People will need to trade downwards, go to grad school, whatever. Not sure if I am missing some bright streaks of light in the cloud.

edw519 4y ago

I've been programming for 53 years and have never been burnt out from the act of actually building software. In fact it's been the opposite for me. Every time I've ever had a significant challenge, alone or in a small competent team, to get something built quickly and right, I've savored that challenge. The times I've sat up all night long coding are some of my fondest memories. I remember with startling accuracy every time we struggled getting something to work, got it figured out, and danced. I remember every white board, direct message, even every slice of pizza in the trenches. I've even commented here on HN many times that I've never been burnt out coding and never will be. I'd be the last one out of here to turn off the lights when everyone else was burnt out. But now I am most certainly burnt out, not from building software, but from being incarcerated in dysfunctional I.T. hell. For OP and the posers who think they understand the mindset of serious software developers, here's what really burns us out: - the same stupid meeting every morning where nothing is raised or closed and no non-programmer has a clue - taking direction from the same clueless bosses who have never accomplished anything but treat us like their children - the new technology or philosophy du jour that does everything but address the root of any problem - management that absolutely cannot grok fundamentals like cause/effect, critical path, detail/issue, urgent/important, diminishing returns, etc. - continuous leadership bombardment of idiocy and stuff we know can't work - management's complete failure to solicit or accept feedback from those of us who actually know - nothing written down and no one remembering anything - confusion by almost everyone about the difference between activity and achievement - no written business requirements, technical specs, or test plans, but instead, some new untested methodology - leaders who don't understand the difference between steak and sizzle - continuous business failures because of poor leadership, not technology (and they keep doing it!) - I could go on and on, but I wouldn't get anything done today and be just like my boss. I'd love to see an OP that addresses any of all of these things I've been suffering from for years, instead of a headline with a precise metric on a misunderstood premise. I'll suffer all day today and then to get rid of the corporate stink, build something cool for myself later tonight. That's not personal burn out, it's industry burn down.

tored 4y ago
I largely agree but I would like to add that much software we developers work on today works against developer satisfaction. Bizarre architecture choices based on trends, tedious build steps, complex development setups with hours spent on configuration, etc. Software development has become a time sink into things that has nothing to do with the actual task at hand. This annoys me somewhat more than a clueless manager, who can be forgiven for not understanding software development, because these software architectural problems is something we developers created, willingly.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

We could blame Agile for guaranteeing you never have a second to yourself to do anything you think is needful or interesting or fun, but just forever trudge ahead fighting fires and fiddling with format and reworking code for broken libraries you should really be fixing... We could go on and on. But I'm too tired and ... burnt out to continue.

robin_reala 4y ago
You need to introduce firebreak sprints. Take a week off every fourth sprint (or whatever) and give devs the freedom to build whatever they think will need doing to make the system better overall. You’ll get a bunch of preventative maintenance that you knew needed doing but never found time to do, but you’ll also get the occasional mad idea that turns out to have big benefits.
- danuker 4y ago
  Firebreak tasks (not sprints) should be taken naturally as prioritization chooses them over other tasks. Sadly, with higher interest rates, there is a pressure to produce results in the short-term, at the expense of long-term investments.
  - piva00 4y ago
    Higher interests or not the pressure to deliver value and growth every quarter has always been present. In tech especially as we're seen as a hypergrowth model and not growing quickly every quarter is a sign of failure to the expectations of the market™. I've been working in this industry for 18 years, in different countries with different central banks rates and macroeconomics conditions, it's always been the exact same.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  I dont see why those ideas couldnt be identified and sprinkled into regular sprints. The idea of a forced break to do these things implies they arent important. Otherwise they should already get picked up.

BulgarianIdiot 4y ago

Oh are they. Time for extremely hardcore, long hours, high intensity then. Let's see if this helps.

29athrowaway 4y ago

Because of short-term mentality.

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beardedman 4y ago

I am sceptical that burnout has become very en vogue. I also think this why immigrants are eating locals' breakfast (so to speak). I do a lot of hiring & (very anecdotally of course) burnout is almost exclusively a topic of developed countries' software engineers. So much so, that I don't like hiring them (DACH region/Austria/Germany lately). And yes; I believe work life balance is important.

freddie_mercury 4y ago
I work in Vietnam and I've never heard developers here talk about burnout incessantly like Hacker News does.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  Low wages and poor social mobility makes you unable to care about your mental wellbeing, how surprising. Yes, burnout is a rich country problem, because you otherwise kill yourself at the task because you can't afford not to. Give Vietnam western european wages and within 10 years, burnout will also be a talked about problem. Just because you don't have time to look at something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
Immigrants are as burnt out as locals (if not a lot more), just check Blind for 5 minutes. The difference is just that the livelyhood of sometimes dozens of people back home is on their shoulders, so they just try to power through. Which company do you work for so that I can avoid it?
- beardedman 4y ago
  Doing so very effectively it seems. :)

elektrontamer 4y ago

It seems a bit self inflicted to me. Managers where I work expect you to correct them if your workload is too much. But people are just hyper ambitious and/or anxious to do that so they under estimate the work and end up working overtime to deliver what they promised. Over time it becomes the norm among developers. I'm guilty of this as well. Like last night I had to help a new developer, I explicitly said that we could have a meeting the next day if he wanted, I told him not to feel pressured, but he insisted it was fine so we ended up working together late at night to get his environment set up.

weatherlite 4y ago
> like last night I had to help a new developer, I explicitly said that we could have a meeting the next day if he wanted, I told him not to feel pressured, but he insisted it was fine so we ended up working together late at night to get his environment set up Its most likely he wanted to leave a positive impression. We're in a bad economy, people want to hold onto their jobs .. and the "easiest" way to appear like a good worker is doing long hours. Its up to you and your team to cut that shit immediately otherwise you will all work all the time.
ohgodplsno 4y ago
The workplace is an inherently biased and unbalanced environment for a worker, and anyone about you is a potential threat. The company can afford to have you gone, you usually can't afford to be gone. So, when asked by a representative of said company's authority and power over you if everything is fine, you are very likely to say it's all good, even if it isn't, especially if you live in a country where being fired is easy. Your decisions as a manager can have me fired if you have a bad impression of me, or if something you repeat to your superiors itches them the wrong way. In the same way, as a new developer, the impressions of more senior ones are a massive factor in whether or not you stay for more than 6 months. Not recognizing this inherent power imbalance is foolish. As the other comment said, if you're managing someone, then _cut that shit quick_. Developer works super fast and finishes 1 week worth of work in a day ? Don't give them more work. What was assigned initially is done. Prevent them from giving more. But to avoid boring them, encourage them to take on more personal tasks, some general cleanups that they might have wanted, that is less of a duty to the employer and more of a pleasant head scratcher to them.

tlogan 4y ago

Burnout is a big issue. I think it is the main cause for high performing employees leaving companies (I read that somewhere - sorry I cannot find the reference). A lot companies recognize this problem but I really do not know what is the best solution. I know that companies have policy that you are required to take your vacations every year. But that might not be helping in all cases. Any other ideas?

burkestar 4y ago

This survey was based on 258 developers responding from the UK. I don't recommend making sweeping generalizable claims about all developers in the world from it.

mediascreen 4y ago

I usually spread my six week of vacation over 12 weeks of half time work in order to work/vacation for longer periods in warmer weather. I don't feel like I need complete rest from work and I don't mind working a few hours every day (I'm single and without kids). Last year I spent time in Barcelona and Greece and this winter I will spend some time in Malaysia.

wonderwonder 4y ago

I've burned out a few times, each time the only way to recover was a new job. The first time was ~4 years ago. Company I worked at did agile but required you hit 10 points a week. If you didn't you were pipped. On top of that the only way you could really hit the points was to work ~60 - 70 hour weeks. You were not allowed to consider how long implementing a ticket would take when scoring a ticket only how hard it was. This led to strife when scoring tickets. When covid first hit and the world was insane and my kids had to do home schooling (I have been remote for ~5 years) I hit 8 points the first couple sprints. I was pipped. Things like this, many 90+ hour weeks, debugging and fixing data in production, and being asked to lie to clients fried me. I burned out, would sit there staring at a screen for 8 hours and get like 30 minutes of work done. After that my next job was immediately 90 hour weeks for 2 months. Not just me, dozens of people. I had coworkers weeping during standup on many occasions. Luckily I was contract so I got paid OT. Most of my coworkers did not. After a ~4 months of insane hours I just said screw it and refused to work more than 45. Everyone just dealt with it but they had to work more hours, I felt bad. Same job, next project we had no one to write requirements. so I had to do that which is not my skillset plus code. A year in, I burned out, would sit there staring at a screen for 8 hours and get like 30 minutes of work done. I lasted for another 6 months before quitting. Funny thing was even burned out I was getting more work done than most and they freaked out when I quit. This current job I am a tech lead. It started off pretty good and I still dont work OT but my scrum master did nothing for the first 6 months so it all fell on me. He got fired but they are not backfilling him so its all on me. On top of that I have to manage developers including writing tickets for them, and manage up. Which means I lose 2 days a week essentially writing reports for leadership and doing busy work. I have come to hate standups. I don't think I am burned out here yet but I feel it coming on. I really need to take a vacation. Not a go somewhere with the kids one, just a stay home for 2 weeks and destress one. Interestingly this all started when I started working in agile shops. Its just constant pressure, always a race.

rightbyte 4y ago
> I have come to hate standups Can't you decrease those to 2 times a week then? No scrum master and you are the lead? If management enforces 5 just do three async in chat or whatever. > Interestingly this all started when I started working in agile shops. Its just constant pressure, always a race. Agile's killer feuture is the great opportunity to micromanage and force a never ending sense of urgency.

nunez 4y ago

what does burn out even feel like? i posit that everyone feels burn out slightly differently because everyone has different amounts of burn out they can handle

esparrohack 4y ago

Every time I complain about poker planning the sprint, people act like I’m an idiot. I don’t even care anymore.

biggerChris 4y ago

I burn out at 28 years. Now I just improve one block of code a day. Sign off and sleep till tomorrow; awaiting my death of course.