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I think IT being exempt from overtime is part of the problem. Nurses for example see a direct increase in wage when they work extra, and many lawyers bill by th

I think IT being exempt from overtime is part of the problem. Nurses for example see a direct increase in wage when they work extra, and many lawyers bill by the minute. But I think the biggest thing is that programming is a craft, and many programmers think of themselves as artists. As an artist it is heartbreaking to see your creations tainted and then discarded by corporate politics. In my experience, devs who take more pride in closing tickets than coming up with elegant solutions are less susceptible to burn out. I don’t know exactly how they do it, but they do tend to have many hobbies. They don’t lose sleep over shipping some spaghetti code they copied from stack overflow without understanding. They just treat it as something to get out of their way so they can get to the things they actually enjoy.

Braini 2y ago
At first glance this seems like a healthy attitude (and probably is) On the other hand this spaghetti stuff usually comes back to them in form of new (bug) tickets or even worse on-call alerts. Then they (or some other poor soul) has to deal with it again.
- Arainach 2y ago
  It's a false dichotomy. Software engineering skills and workaholism are independent axes. There are people who work 80 hours a week and write poor code. There are amazing coders who go home by 5:00 on the dot and spend their evenings with their family. If a product is successful, eventually the tech debt price will have to be paid, but that tech debt is just as often (more often, in my experience) generated by "rockstars" burning the midnight oil to ship a prototype than "bad coders".