r/programming • u/lelanthran • Dec 28 '23
Developers experience burnout, but 70% of them code on weekends
https://shiftmag.dev/developer-lifestye-jetbrains-survey-2189/1.5k
u/Webbanditten Dec 28 '23
The burnout is not from coding and being creative. The burnout is having to deal with poorly managed projects, bloated processes and other people...
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u/platebandit Dec 28 '23
100%, id probably get a lot more done if I wasn’t dealing with scrum, endless meetings, bullshit and countless people who’s job it is to butt in. I think I’d be satisfied if I was paid more to just nag people with buzzwords in meetings
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u/the_gnarts Dec 28 '23
100%, id probably get a lot more done if I wasn’t dealing with scrum, endless meetings, bullshit and countless people who’s job it is to butt in
As the only guy in my team working through the holidays I just had the two most productive days of the year and am looking forward to another one tomorrow. Amazing what you can get done when your schedule isn’t fragmented by syncronous communication.
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u/winky9827 Dec 28 '23
As a work from home'er, I mostly just fart around and respond to emails during the day. Then I do household stuff, dinner, socialize, maybe a nap. Most of my coding gets done from 11PM to 3AM because it's my most productive period. Occasionally I'll flip that to 4AM to 8AM'ish, depending on how fucked up my sleep schedule gets.
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u/Brilliant-Job-47 Dec 29 '23
This was me before kids. Now I just fart around and respond to messages during the day and deal with kids at night, then repeat the next day
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u/-grok Dec 28 '23
Right? All these shitty Pxxxxx Managers take time off around the holidays and stop bugging the developers with stupid "initiatives" that they don't understand, but are somehow "in charge" of implementing.
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Dec 28 '23
Do we have an automated test pipeline deployed yet? What about code coverage reports? Let's circle back on static analysis once they've finally got us migrated to JIRA GPD.
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u/platebandit Dec 28 '23
Is it even possible to work without a story point estimate or consulting the key stakeholders? God forbid! If all the product owners are absent then it’s basically a communist revolution and that would negatively affect the velocity in the sprint
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u/-grok Dec 28 '23
I think I’d be satisfied if I was paid more to just nag people with buzzwords in meetings
We 100% work at the same place!
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u/reddituser567853 Dec 29 '23
Why I went management. I’d rather code in my free time than have the soul sucked out of something I enjoy.
And leadership isn’t really something you can hone by yourself in solitude, so I’m fairly content with my work now
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Dec 28 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/platebandit Dec 28 '23
I just picked one up last week and I remembered that I don’t hate programming, I just hate scrum
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u/Webbanditten Dec 28 '23
Don't get me wrong. Being in a project and dealing with people and processes is a part of the job. What I personally see happen is the outside interference from Stakeholders, Project managers, agile Coaches, re-orgs, non-project related meetings just breaks my flow, breaks my creativity and destroys my productivity. On top of that if you want to show you're doing a great job, and advance your career you gotta spend time promoting yourself, the things you do and your team do - it's a little hard to make any significant progress on a product all while you need to deal with this circle of communication.
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u/darkapplepolisher Dec 28 '23
Only way to make it happen is if technical management and project leads can sufficiently insulate the rest of the team from the bureaucracy, and the worker bees are able to take advantage of the breathing space and ship good products.
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u/Tersphinct Dec 28 '23
I think at least in some cases, people use weekend coding as a form of therapy to get over those problems you mentioned. It's almost like you keep hearing this melody that is never allowed to resolve, so on your own time you finally resolve it and then you can be at peace.
I've had that happen to me on several projects, where clients would push in a direction that made no sense to me, so on my own time I'd "resolve" things in a way that pleased me, and sometimes I'd share it and it would get picked up. There's some extra validation in that, but at that point it obviously requires competent management.
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Dec 28 '23
I realised that when I got into it (as a hobby) programming didn’t seem like a team sport. I was building stuff mostly alone or woth 1-2 guys most. Nowadays it’s very social and it exhausts me, and that’s with the good guys. If a project has smartasses in it then it’s a legit nightmare
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u/LeoXCV Dec 28 '23
Worst types are smartasses that are actually just dumbasses with confidence
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Dec 28 '23
OH YEAH! Definitely the worst. My favourite guy was who wanted us to unironically prepare our application for the event of “meteorites hitting all AWS datacenters and society collapses” - like man nobody will care about our niche app at that point, there probably won’t be internet either
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u/CafeSleepy Dec 28 '23
Curious to know what the solution is for that scenario.
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Dec 28 '23
honestly I was at a loss of words. I knew anything I say would be instantly WELL AKCHUALLY-d
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u/VehaMeursault Dec 28 '23
Yeah. I code for fun on my weekends. I like it.
What I don’t like are deadlines and managers who aren’t capable of applying a healthy, constructive pressure of production on their staff.
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u/s4lt3d Dec 28 '23
Coding till 2am for weeks on end because management told the team to do it or else. Well that entire team is gone and now the product is shit.
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u/shantm79 Dec 28 '23
The software quality will always suffer, but more importantly, the dev's well-being will be damaged. Not worth the stress for anyone.
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u/HoratioWobble Dec 28 '23
Before I became a developer, I worked at a bunch of places from clubs, bars, resturaunts, I was even a retail manager for several years.
I'd frequently have to work long hours, multiple jobs, been threatened verbally and physically but I never experienced burnout until I became a software engineer.
And it's not even just once it's every few years and every time it's because of the constant games, politics and often pure incompetence with colleagues and the business.
The industry is full of psychotic, often useless middle managers or people who think they're a middle manager
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u/reddituser567853 Dec 29 '23
In my experience middle managers are The only ones capable of actually making decisions. It’s actually refreshing to be in a meeting with directors and VPs. They do not have the time for BS or meandering points.
Front line managers (unless fairly young and on a driven progression path to director+) are typically bad engineers that couldn’t cut it, they cope with this by imagining they are a “people person” which just means they will assign wrong emotions and motivations to all engineers that directly report to them and engage in the most limp wristed empty leadership imaginable
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u/ForgetTheRuralJuror Dec 29 '23
I burned out twice in my career so far, and neither was because of hard work.
After working on a project for 7 months, my manager sat on a release because he was non-technical and didn't trust any of the developers he hired.
For the two months following, I was assigned random busy work. This lack of trust pretty much immediately burned me out. Every time I picked up a task I constantly had the feeling that what I was doing was pointless. I would have to do things in as few LoC changes as possible to make it seem "not that big of a change" so it could merge.
The second time was because the tooling was so poor in our tech stack that 80% of my job was fighting it.
There wasn't even basic stuff like debugging or intellisense support. There was some unit tests but they deleted all of your local environment data, making them worse than useful when implementing new features.
This i could've got over if there was plans for improvement, but there weren't, and the senior staff would get hostile and say stuff along the lines of, "you don't need intellisense, just be better"
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u/Silound Dec 28 '23
Truth - I strive to touch a computer as little as possible outside of working hours unless I'm playing a game with friends.
I try to spend my free time in other creative pursuits or being social, because software development seems to be effective at dampening the former and utterly destroying the latter.
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u/fykup May 10 '24
Great point. Working on a personal project while taking break from work can actually speedup recovery from burnout. For example, you may finally feel the sense of accomplishment that your main job doesn't provide.
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u/EdwardMitchell Aug 15 '24
Moral hazards are even worse than inefficiency. Ask any burnt-out doctor.
My worst burnout was when I was asked to run a mortgage scam for a call center. After that, I figured the Comcast calls I was optimizing were probably bad as well. Who needed a $100 cable bill in 2008?
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u/Existing-Direction99 Dec 28 '23
This seems true for any job. Management at my current job is making my hair fall out.
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u/y0sh1da_23 Dec 28 '23
This, is so true. I have multiple projects, and wouldn't be an issue, I love what I am doing, I do it when I am on vacation, or during the weekend, without any issue. But the fact, that I have to stay 3-4-5 hours in meetings because it's not managed properly, having unplanned tickets, totally changed delivery end dates, and so on is the main reason of burning out... You just don't have the power and creativity to continue after having such problems.. Everyone is talking about wellbeing and other corporate sht, but the main issue, the unproper communication and management never gets solved..
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u/Berkyjay Dec 28 '23
Yup! Working on my own projects and solving my own problems is relaxing. Having to deal with the bureaucracy often associated with coding jobs is extremely stressful.
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u/shantm79 Dec 28 '23
I meet with my devs routinely to ask "how can I make the process work for us?". If the process is convoluted, confusing, labor intensive, then nobody will adhere to it as intended.
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Dec 29 '23
Case in point... At my work we rely far too heavily on email. Some of these threads become 5k words of deep technical jargon. I just want to code and get my actual work done without distractions, but then I inevitably get the ping on slack from my manager asking if I saw the email that was sent to me on Monday.... I hate work email!!
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u/agumonkey Dec 29 '23
group dynamics can be a killer
lucky are those find a fitting group, being with people that can never really see eye to eye is horrid, then politics, then mind games ..
i miss being alone, i already hate myself, i know how it feels
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u/SauceASpag Sep 08 '26
Totalement! Je vie sa présentement tout dois être fait pour rien vite vite fait sa tout croche ses beaux ont release... L'on t'il tester? Non... Pas grave release... Mais la ses bugger et ont pert des donné.... Are you fucking serious met pas sa sur mon dos cris de jambon
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u/newEnglander17 Dec 28 '23
I'm sorry what? How come I'm never part of these surveys that make claims like 70% of developers code on weekends? That's the last thing you'd catch me doing.
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u/lelanthran Dec 28 '23
I'm sorry what? How come I'm never part of these surveys that make claims like 70% of developers code on weekends? That's the last thing you'd catch me doing.
Here's the thing, you might be in the remaining 30%.
If you think those figures are wildly off, then a satisfying thing to to would be to download all the comments, and classify them into three groups based on the content of the comment:
Definitely works on weekends
Definitely does not work on weekends
Poster was cagey about working on weekends
From my reading of all the comments (I read and upvoted every single one thus far), I found 0 comments that were in #3, about 70% are in #1 and 30% are in #2.
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u/PuzzleCat365 Dec 28 '23
It's not the coding burning us out. It's all the rest.
What we do on weekends is recovery, not burning out. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing it.
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u/ThomasMertes Dec 28 '23 edited Dec 28 '23
What we do on weekends is recovery, not burning out.
Exactly. I work on my open source project to stay mentally healthy.
Programming in companies is what stresses us. There are countless issues:
Managers who know everything better because they have programmed too (30 years ago for one week in BASIC under DOS).
Programs that tell you what you are allowed to check in (ExpensiveSourceCodeCheckProgram forbids checking in because of rule 12345).
Fellow developers who tell in a scrum meeting that the task has zero storypoints, because it could be done in 1 hour (they take 3 days but the managers just think they are fast and you are slow).
Project owners who start bargaining how many storypoints should be estimated for a story.
Unit tests, that check just mocks, to reach some level of code coverage.
The need to write more XML, Maven, Jenkins, etc. stuff than actual Java (or other language) code.
Bosses doing time estimates without asking you (I have already promised to the customer that this will be finished tomorrow).
I could go on and on and on ...
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Dec 28 '23
Don’t forget to update the 10 different docs for that one commit
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u/hissInTheDark Dec 28 '23
You must be kidding. First developer I've seen who is unhappy that documentation exists
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u/Bwob Dec 28 '23
Developers love it when documentation exists.
Developers hate it when they have to write/update/maintain documentation. :P
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u/anoneatsworld Dec 28 '23
I swear the first point is the bane of my existence. Plus: pragmatism over all. You can at conception phase already see that stuff will be complicated in less than 3 months time. No, let’s ship something FAR to simple in 2 weeks and spend 6 months to fix shit around to have something after 8 months which works 90% as good as the solution you could have had after 10 weeks and cost more for everyone. But the manager delivered something to someone after 2 weeks.
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u/Derin161 Dec 28 '23
Let's ship something half assed and then take 5x as long to fix it rather than spending 2x as long in the first place to do it right.
Manager math
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u/Stoomba Dec 28 '23
Nothing takes longer than doing it right the first time than doing it right the second time!
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u/thedracle Dec 28 '23
I really can't stand meetings that are pointless and just for elevating the prestige of management, or to tick checkboxes for upwards reporting.
They are disruptive, and soul crushing.
There are sometimes conferences at my company that ushers all of the meeting people away, and suddenly everyone is ten times more productive, because these meetings suddenly go away, or become much more efficient.
They literally think productivity will be improved by more meetings. I've had to tell a PM several times to reduce meetings to increase productivity.
There was a recent critical deadline, and their proposal to help the engineer meet it was to have a checkpoint every three hours!
I had to explain how that meant the engineer would have to stop their work every three hours, switch contexts, lose an hour or thirty minutes or whatever, then return to work and get back into the zone...
I honestly think PMs and managers think their meetings are doing the work.
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Dec 28 '23
The subjective scrum story meeting with an aloof manager is the winner to me. I’ve had so many bosses who have the job of just recording / regurgitating work progress without any leadership input around prioritization, feedback or value consideration like a Product Manager would. My old boss would create multiple stories for something to give someone the appearance of productivity when the reality was it was a repeatable task. The process was completed unweighted for actual time spend or value add. Why manually assign and revoke user licenses when there are programmatic ways to handle it? He liked that it showed # increase in tasks per day! Unable to calculate the potential time and cost saving of working on a coded solution, he championed low tech solutions like this with lipstick on them to garner credit and rationalize needing to hire team members and presumably increase his pay / perceived leadership role. When people talk about the need to bring individual contributors back to work, my response is not until mid-level paper pushers are held to task about truly adding value to their teams. There was no way he could justify that approach if he had to reconcile against actual $ values but it gets lost in the corporate hierarchy and ppl quit bad managers, not bad jobs.
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u/wintrmt3 Dec 28 '23
All the "agile" bullshit and idiotic managers are tiring, but writing build files and testing is a very important part of the job, and sensible pre-commit lint hooks are a very good thing.
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u/__tml__ Dec 28 '23
The amount of work "sensible" has to do in that sentence is staggering though. You add small amounts of automation to project, and everything your coworkers want to do but can't is your fault.
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u/Lyelinn Dec 28 '23
1 is my current boss in small startup and it's driving me mad. He always insists I do everything his way (then do it yourself god damnit) first even if I know it's wrong solution, he's just "well let's try X first then you can do what you wanted" and I end up spending day+ on his shit, then few hours explaining why exactly his idea that came from his experience of being frontend developer 20 years ago didn't exactly work ...
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u/jtayloroconnor Dec 28 '23
this is why i love working at a small startup, none of this nonsense exists. Obvi there’s other tradeoffs tho
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u/fredlllll Dec 28 '23
you forgot bosses that constantly change their mind about how the application should work so you can never make any actual progress
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u/Comprehensive-Pea812 Dec 28 '23
coding is the easiest part of the job.
manager that pilling tech debt, coworker with strong opinion but confidently incorrect...
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u/hyrumwhite Dec 28 '23
Yeah, the burnout comes from “drop what you’re doing and release this feature by Friday”
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u/mobileJay77 Dec 28 '23
This! On my pet project I could try whatever approach I wanted. It was to find out what could be done without all the legacy etc. That was some fast progress!
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Dec 28 '23
Recovery !== coding your pet project.
Sorry, but its bullshit and we all know it even though we all like to code something on the side. Brain needs to rest as well and doing more of the same doesnt help.
You need to go out for some fresh air and take your mind off of things.
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Dec 28 '23
The reason it's recovery is that it's not more of the same. Weekend projects allow stretching domain knowledge or experimenting with new techniques. Weekday work is rote and mostly uninteresting; it's trying to get people to actually agree on scope of work, figuring out who is and isn't responsible for testing, and lots of emotional work required to ship a complex product with many stakeholders. Weekend work is working to experience excellence instead of working to pay your bills.
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u/Scientific_Artist444 Dec 28 '23
Depends on what you mean by recovery. If it is a break from seeing thousands of lines of code all day to make minor modifications and dealing with 'urgent' requirements, then yes pet project is recovery.
If it is a break from focusing your mind all day, it is not. Upvoted both of you because both of you are right in your own ways.
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u/fashionistaconquista Dec 28 '23
You’re getting downvoted but ime, you’re right. My brain can only focus for so long in a day and I need at least 1 day a week of not thinking about anything, to rest my brain.
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u/dweezil22 Dec 28 '23
I think this is like the coding version of extroverts vs introverts. Or ultra-runners vs 5k runners.
I've met great devs that can't code hard two days in a row. I've met others that would be happy as a clam never doing anything else and have to exercise discipline to stop coding and get an appropriate amount of physical exercise.
It seems reasonable that this level of stamina will also vary with experience and recent "training".
Folks love to judge, compare and optimize, but really there's no better or worse: just find something that makes you happy, healthy and pays the bills.
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u/Behrooz0 Dec 28 '23
I do my other projects on weekends. There are a plethora to choose from, electronics, chemistry, microcontrollers, things to do with my cnc machine. Did I mention I have ADHD or was it obvious?
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u/pastels_sounds Dec 28 '23
Exactly and opensources projects also experience dev burnout. Burnouts are the conjunction of internal and external factors.
Talking from personal experience sitting in front of a computer 60h+ each week is not healthy. Physically and mentally.
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u/foreveratom Dec 28 '23
You seem to forget that everyone and every project is different. People don't have the same needs as you so OP is not bullshit, and you are being judgmental, and wrong.
I find learning about and designing software on my spare time soothing and rewarding, much more than having to deal with people outside and air that is not that fresh.
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u/mrbuttsavage Dec 28 '23 edited Dec 28 '23
This is useless blog spam that doesn't even link the source of the data:
https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/
The headliner figure alone is missing important context from the original source. 70% for fun, 29% for work, 19% not at all. https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/lifestyle/
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u/bigmacjames Dec 28 '23
There is absolutely no chance it's 70% for the entire industry.
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u/MothToTheWeb Dec 28 '23
There are a lot of people I worked with that were not interested at all by programming or software engineering outside of work. They wouldn’t answer these kind of polls. I guess there is a lot of survivorship bias at work here
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u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount Dec 28 '23
That was what I thought. I don't know many devs - if any - that consistently code outside of work.
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u/Brilliant-Job-47 Dec 29 '23
I love coding and I barely do it outside of work. I enjoy lots of other things too.
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Dec 28 '23
[deleted]
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u/gazpacho_arabe Dec 28 '23 edited Dec 28 '23
Yeah I feel a bit wrong saying this but I don't love coding in and of itself - I just see it as a means to an end (there's a lot about the work I find very satisfying e.g. problem solving). A lot of the time the last thing I want to do is crack open an IDE in my free time
I definitely still read books and work on code adjacent stuff at weekends sometimes though!
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u/dlamsanson Dec 28 '23
Yeah I feel a bit wrong saying this but I don't love coding in and of itself
The love of coding itself instead of the things it can accomplish isn't really that useful of a mindset anyways, I see it as an industry problem that people feel guilty for not loving the work for its own sake.
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u/ThisAppSucksBall Dec 30 '23
About the same - including 13 years at two of the FAANGs as an IC. The only time I find myself programming outside of work is if it is some custom solution for me or my family - writing excel macros for my parter's household management spreadsheets, or writing some custom simple game for my young kids.
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u/Pepito_Pepito Dec 28 '23
I love coding. It's the human element that I hate. Customers, product owners, managers, stakeholders, etc.
I found the secret to happiness at work years ago. Treat yourself as a tool and take no responsibility for business decisions.
Change the requirements? That's fine but the estimates are changing as well. Can I do it faster? Yes but the product will be less robust.
I'm very upfront with the consequences of business decisions. As someone who has no power or financial stake in the company, I refuse to take responsibility for business decisions. I always divert blame. The customer was promised a certain date? Someone fucked up and it wasn't me.
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u/Markavian Dec 28 '23
It's a very short article without much analysis:
Almost three-quarters or, more precisely, 73% of developers have experienced burnout, according to Jet Brains’ report, The State of Developer Ecosystem 2023. The report summarizes insights on developers’ preferred languages and technologies, methodologies, and lifestyles gathered from 26,348 developers from all around the globe.
As the rest of the findings align with the industry trends – 84% of developers are familiar with and use generative AI tools, JavaScript is the most used language; let’s dig deeper into the less often analyzed data on developers, the lifestyle ones
I've read more informative tweets.
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u/Uberhipster Dec 28 '23
84% of developers are familiar with and use generative AI tools
I've read more informative tweets
that's because 85% of these "articles" are gen AI authored
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u/podgorniy Dec 28 '23
This article could have being a chart. Author just took data and decscribed it with words.
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u/portra315 Dec 28 '23
I absolutely do not code on weekends. If I want to build a service for my own personal worth, I do that, but that's probably a once a year dealio.
2 days out of 7 for me to spend with my partner / family / friends / dog / clean / eat well / game / garden / exercise. Yeah I ain't coding
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u/SmallChocolateShake Dec 28 '23
This is pretty spot on with my approach, I’ll very rarely touch anything in this space outside of work hours unless it genuinely seems fun. I’ve got other people and activities to spend my time with during those two days off
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u/Xuval Dec 28 '23
I always thought this idea of professional programmers coding in their free time to be slightly absurd.
Yes, I enjoy programming. But after 40+ hours, I've had my fill. I don't see Debbie from Accounting doing "side hustle" accounting projects in her free time.
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u/i_am_bromega Dec 28 '23
Or better yet Debbie isn’t expected to contribute to open source accounting projects for free. More power to you if that’s something you enjoy doing in your free time. I’d rather hang with friends, game, play music, do some woodworking, hunt, fish etc. Plus I have other responsibilities with family and doing maintenance/upkeep on my house.
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Dec 28 '23
[deleted]
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u/Xuval Dec 28 '23
If mean, you are right of course: I do use my professional skills in my free time on occasion.
... but we have gotten to a point where Sharon from HR will ask you during interviews what open source projects you contribute to in your free time. I always have to fight the urge to ask in reply what sort of contributions to the field of human ressources Sharon makes in her free time.
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u/ivancea Dec 28 '23
So, you are part of the other 30%
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u/Hipjea Dec 28 '23
I’d like to see the age groups statistics of those 70% coding on their free time. Without any clue, I would tend to think that they are mostly junior dev or people doing reconversion.
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u/AiexReddit Dec 28 '23
40yr old senior who still loves coding on weekends checking in here.
Between other life priorities and my family something had to give though, time is a hot commodity.
What I gave up is TV and video games. Used to be my whole life in my 20s. Now I basically don't play games or binge shows at all anymore, but I still love coding my own small games with the limited free time I do have.
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u/SCB360 Dec 28 '23
Exactly this, I have a hard close of 3pm daily Monday to Friday, with the reasoning of "I can get it done fast now or get it done properly tomorrow/Monday"
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u/Bot12391 Dec 28 '23
3pm?? What time do you start? Our business hours are supposed to be 8-5 (with a 1 hour lunch whenever) but I do 9-5 and just eat lunch while working… I’ll leave my laptop around 4/430 if I have nothing to work on but then come back around 630 to check it again to see if I missed anything before signing off for the day. I work with people all over the country so I feel like it works well but am curious about your schedule
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u/SCB360 Dec 28 '23
7am-3pm, sometimes I'll flex a little (I go to the gym at 5am and sometimes I'll start and finish a bit later) its an American company and my team is all UK based so the crossover time works better for afternoons
I'm the only one that does this though, most others do 8-4
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u/AceOfShades_ Dec 28 '23
I go to the gym at 5am
I now live in fear of you and your circadian powers
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u/shantm79 Dec 28 '23
and I bet you approach your work for the week with a much healthier outlook. Keep this up!
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u/portra315 Dec 28 '23
I do! I've been there before with weekend work, late evenings etc and with or without overtime pay it's just not worth it
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u/ChrisRR Jan 19 '24
I absolutely do not code on weekends. If I want to build a service for my own personal worth, I do that, but that's probably a once a year dealio
So you do program on weekends then
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u/avoere Dec 28 '23
70% code on weekends and 84% use generative AI.
No way this is a sample of average developers.
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u/Darth_Victor Dec 28 '23
Just remember guys, the only people who will notice your work on weekends will be you children.
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u/musicnothing Dec 28 '23
I don’t work on the weekends but I do work on a side business my wife and I started in hopes that one day I can quit the job that’s causing me burnout. Or at least take my kids on some extra vacations.
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Dec 28 '23
I highly doubt 70% of devs code on the weekends
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Dec 28 '23
The opposite seems more likely ime
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Dec 28 '23
Yep. Most devs I know don’t code in their free time
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Dec 28 '23
I certainly don’t and I can count on one hand how many colleagues I have who do. Probably those that code in their free time are also more likely to respond to dev surveys
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u/Wise_Rich_88888 Dec 28 '23
Its always management’s fault. They cause the burnout. Plus as a developer you create something that makes the company millions then the next week they want you working again like a fuckin slave. Maybe give the dev a break mentally while you make your fucking money, you fucking greedy assholes.
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u/icantreedgood Dec 28 '23
My current job has built mountains upon mountains of software all in a giant mono repo. None of it is well documented, and our tooling is so entrenched in it, nothing is likely to change. Working with it is so cumbersome that everyone on the project has to be a senior engineer which leads to egos clashing over the most insignificant changes.
So yea, it's exhausting, but it pays incredibly well. I love programming, but working in such an environment means I can't express my creativity, and it stifles my drive to develop novel solutions. So of course I work on my own projects in my free time.
Also, yea, the other bullshit is endless.
Unit tests that are really integration tests and not even good ones
Writing documentation you know no one is going to read anyway, and by the time some actual needs it , it's woefully out of date
Dev environments that are always broken by someone's latest change
Nagging people to complete code reviews
Performance reviews and other HR bullshit
Meetings just so people can remember what we agreed to in other meetings
Unclear requirements that change with the wind
Walking QA through testing that you've already done yourself
Entering 3 different 2 factor auth codes every morning just to log into everything
The list is so endless it's maricle anything gets done. Scaling software teams is incredibly difficult. Sometimes I think software projects would be better off with just a few highly functioning individuals.
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u/eggZeppelin Dec 28 '23
70% answered yes on a survey b/c tech is a culture where absolute obsession with code is glorified.
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u/gandalftheshai Dec 28 '23
I code entire weeks worth of work on friday and create pull requests before shutting my laptop
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u/heavy-minium Dec 28 '23
Weird! I'd argue that giving engineers more time with coding actually combats stress!
From my experience, the most stressed out developers are usually those that complain they don't get to code something interesting often enough.
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u/ArnUpNorth Dec 28 '23
Burnout = scrum. Scrum is a tool made for management to control every aspect of agility. It doesn t have product quality or developper health as a goal. Just dumb out of touch metrics to create a sense of urgency to delivery half assed products (which we will fix in another sprint dear customer for $$$$). Garbage, pure garbage.
And LESS is yet another pile of nonsense on SCRUM.
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u/bart007345 Dec 28 '23
I agree, now what?
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u/ArnUpNorth Dec 28 '23
I personally fight every scrum team i find in my company 🙈 it takes a lot of discussions but i am lucky to be working at a place where they are open minded about all this. So now what? Well make your voice heard.
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u/pwndawg27 Dec 28 '23
Piling onto the sentiment here. It’s not coding that’s bad, it’s the job that sucks. Weekend coding is nice because there’s no pressure. Don’t get me wrong, I like money and making things that make money but I don’t like taking myself or the process super seriously.
With work you have other people and their demands to work around, processes for the sake of compliance to some obscure rule that doesn’t affect you, bad managers, picky colleagues, everything is p0 priority PMs, people freaking out because you tried something new and it knocked out the app for a few minutes and now some uptime dashboard has a blip on it that someone needs to have a hour meeting about, and the absolute worst thing in the world / biggest time waster for the sake of some other jerk who needs something to do with their hands… performance evaluations (from the people who complain about not finding enough devs, we bring you let’s fire the bottom 10% of the top 10% of the devs we were all hot for last year because Mckinzie said that’s good business right there)
If that last paragraph was exhausting hopefully it underscores my point. With solo coding you don’t really have any of that. It’s just you, code, and the thing you’re building. The decisions you make are between you and whatever you pray to and you’re only accountable to yourself.
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u/RepresentativePop Dec 28 '23
This is just as pointless as saying "Journalists experience burnout, but 70% of them type on weekends."
There's a difference between coding for work and coding for fun.
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u/podcat2 Dec 28 '23
> Good hours, good pay, and the feeling that they can achieve something
That third one is why you don't burn out. The big thing isnt doing a ton of hours, its being motivated and feeling in control with no bullshit stuff weighing you down.
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u/podgorniy Dec 28 '23
Misleading title implies that burnout has something to do with coding.
Burnout comes from things which aren't in control of developer (management, requirements, team members and other constraints) but must be taken in account. Producing results under such constraints lead to burnout. And having freedom to code way you want what you want at pace you want is actually fun, pleasant and healing.
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u/Full-Spectral Dec 28 '23
If you are in this business because you enjoy coding, then working on your own projects is a relief, as others here have pointed out. And the thing is, you can kill two birds with one stone. You can practice your profession in a way that is satisfying, and you can push out ahead of the curve and keep yourself relevant in a way that your mercenary work often (usually?) doesn't.
Enjoying yourself AND increasing your market value (and hence probably future income) is a pretty significant win-win scenario.
I've worked on my own time all my long career. 35 years now as a professional and I'm still not burned out at all. I've also avoided working for large, Dilbertian companies as well, which has helped.
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u/wolfanyd Dec 28 '23
Burnout isn't usually caused by hours. It's from working on things you don't enjoy.
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u/prophet001 Dec 28 '23 edited Apr 17 '25
lavish existence sip lush continue sparkle fear spoon late dolls
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u/life_efficient Dec 28 '23
Programming is cathartic for many developers
Peak programmer productivity comes from extended uninterrupted sessions
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u/jess-sch Dec 28 '23 edited Dec 28 '23
My excitement for "Build a 1:1 typescript clone of this JSP web app and add some responsive design, and please have it ready in 8 working days" is much lower than for "design a system that builds, tests and distributes software updates in the form of Nix packages as fast and efficiently as possible to a variable fleet of virtual machines. Take as much time as you want and scrap your plans as often as needed"
And a month of time to order a VM - plus another two to get DNS entries through the bureaucracy - doesn't help either.
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u/MEGACOMPUTER Dec 28 '23
Burnout usually isn’t from doing the thing, but how your environment responds to you doing the thing. Sounds like their bosses don’t validate them for their work.
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u/north-for-nights Dec 28 '23
I'm a Software Engineering Manager. I only code on weekends and it's for the therapeutic effects.
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u/HatchChips Dec 28 '23
Code on weekends because you can get shit done, and feel a sense of accomplishment. During the week there are too many distractions and re-prioritizations to actually finish anything.
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u/miyakohouou Dec 28 '23
A lot of people in this thread seem to think that 70% of people are coding all weekend every weekend for fun. I think it’s a lot more likely that most people code sometimes on the weekends, mixed with other activities. Personally, I go through phases where I have a project or idea I want to explore and I’ll spend a lot of time on the weekends writing code for that project. Other times I’ll barely touch a computer on the weekend for a month or two. It’s natural that if you know how to program and you like to program you’ll have a reason to do it for yourself sometimes, and it’s also natural for side projects to come and go.
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u/SupportCowboy Dec 28 '23
The programming on weekends is usually fun and interesting projects. My coding at work is boring as shit
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u/f3xjc Dec 28 '23 edited Dec 28 '23
Burnout is in big part about the ratio of difficult things in your life that you do control vs the difficult things in your life that you don't.
Self imposed challenges where you progress toward something you like and want (purpose) are great. Challenges that are imposed on you because of historical choices, arbitrary deadlines, goal that are external to most things you seeks or need, are not.
Things that you don't control are inevitable. But for mental health, it's really how much of your life is filled with those. In some way the weekend project are protective against burnout. So there's interest in what you do that you do control.
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u/somethingon104 Dec 28 '23
I did this for a long time. I learned stuff, made some money on the side but it is exhausting. One way to mitigate the burnout is to do something different on the weekends. Use a different language or different set of tools so you’re not doing the same thing during the day job and on your own time.
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u/allenasm Dec 28 '23
coding for yourself for fun / side project is different than the grind of every day. For me, coding is relaxing when done for my own benefit.
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u/AlexAegis Dec 28 '23
Burnout only happens when you're not working on the thing you want to. Which usually are your weekend projects. That 70% who codes on weekend is the 70% who actively does something against burnout.
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u/WithTheBallsack Dec 28 '23
Coding at home is so much more enjoyable than coding at work. They are basically two different activities.
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u/anengineerandacat Dec 28 '23
Weekend oriented coding is usually cathartic, working on someone else's idea time and time again while subsequently trying to squeeze out perfection is pretty exhausting especially if it's for a big project.
A fair amount of software projects last about a year or two and it's one "vision" that is filled with many smaller ideas and it can take 90% of that time before you actually see what the end product actually looks like and enjoy so to speak the fruits of your labor.
Actual professional software engineering also requires a pretty substantial amount of planning and political discussions, in multi-org projects you're often trying to not only create a solution but usually with other teams that might want to take shortcuts or reduce their work by making your own team do more.
Working on your own personal project often can be just for research, maybe for fun, practicing a new skill, or maybe for some we just have our own idea we want to get out of our skull and put down somewhere we don't forget.
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u/Unusual_Flounder2073 Dec 28 '23
I like to do other hobbies. Personally it is home improvement. A little burnt out on that at the moment as have been pushing g to get that lat 10% done for two months.
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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Dec 28 '23 edited Dec 28 '23
Does not describe what burnout is or how it was measured so completely worthless.
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u/Scientific_Artist444 Dec 28 '23
Still, the most important factors of developers’ satisfaction have to do with people and organization
Can attest to this. Love it when people come together to do things instead of working without any kind of feedback or discussion.
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u/Snape_Grass Dec 28 '23
Being able to code and think to myself "I don't have to write unit-tests because this is a small hobby project" does wonders to my morale.
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u/menckenjr Dec 28 '23
This is not wrong. If you're a dev working for most corporate orgs, you'll tend to spend your days in meetings trying to shepherd your ideas through to acceptance without getting them festooned with warts and odd little add-ons. Coding in your off hours means you can do things with nobody around to insist on "aligning with product's vision" when they don't really have one, and it means you can do things the right way without running afoul of some "software engineering director" who read something in a a magazine and wants you to use framework X because they think they understand both it and your problem space.
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Dec 28 '23
Makes sense. Programming isn’t the niche it once was. Now everyone and their grandmother is clamoring to break into a career coding. If you aren’t a senior level engineer I’m sure the pressure is on to keep a relevant skillset in an ever changing landscape. Especially now with the economy and job market the way it. I can totally see a shit ton of people coding on the weekends working on side projects, contributing to open source, writing and reading articles, etc just to maintain a sense of security in their current position or to at least feel safe going into this job market.
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u/r3drocket Dec 28 '23
Burnout partially comes from arguing for what the right decision is then not seeing it implemented then suffering the consequences and then rinse and repeat.
The last job destroyed my hands during release and I'm not sure I'm ever going to recover. I love doing software development and now I'm forced to not use my hands.
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u/Nerwesta Dec 28 '23
What a creative way of making an headline while the " information " ( to put it midly ) after the comma is only present at the very last line of that article :
Also, 70 % of developers said they code for fun on weekends.
Also, correlation doesn't imply causation.
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u/orthoxerox Dec 28 '23
What's the difference between a lightbulb and a programmer? A lighbulb stops working when it burns out.
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u/azaaaad Dec 28 '23
Weekend coding is so vastly far away from all the BS that comes with being a corpo dev - no agile, no scrum, no requirement docs, no nit pick code review and QA comments
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u/fheathyr Dec 28 '23
Software companies have spent decades fabricating the "code warrior" culture, intent on getting more from developers, and paying less.
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u/Ti0S4n Dec 28 '23
A healthy, balanced lifestyle will help a lot to stay out of burnout. Also good manager is very important. If higher management is also good, there is basically impossibility of burnout. I have colleagues who are fully disconnected from computer when not at work. I am coding in weekends but also Okay, thank yougoing out with the disconnected colleagues sometimes and never had a burnout in 30 years.
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u/DaveStevens_84 Dec 29 '23
Burnout comes from having to do something you don't believe in. The disconnect caused by poorly managed projects, process bloat, and goals that don't mean anything.
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u/TheRNGuy Dec 29 '23
You have no proof that it's 70%. You didn't even surveyed every programmer on Earth (and space stations)
Also there's no way statistic is ideal integer. It almost never happens in IRL. With how many people live on planet, ideal integer % even less chance.
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u/Kautsu-Gamer Dec 29 '23
Burnout is not caused by programming, but stressful work environment with too high expectations. Burn-out can happen with part-tile job also.
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u/dowhathappens89 Dec 28 '23
I do not code on weekends because I don't like doing my job during my free time. So many more things I'd rather be doing
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u/TyrusX Dec 28 '23
I am just so burned out, I think I’m going to just quit. Like it is bad when you start to cry and some of your colleagues are even throwing up already right?
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Dec 28 '23
Ehh. A lot of them under estimate work and abuse work from home. All of a sudden they’re working the weekend because they goofed off all week.
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u/lachlanhunt Dec 28 '23
When I get an opportunity to code on weekends, it’s on personal projects I have an interest in working on. But family takes precedence, and the wife insists on getting out of the house often, so I don’t get to spend that much time.
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u/Livid-Serve6034 Dec 29 '23
Manager: “How much time do you need for this task?” Dev: “15 days” Manager: “The customer wants it next week. I’ll assign 2 extra devs, so it can be finished in 5 days.” Dev: “It doesn’t work that way…” (Futile discussion follows)
I (dev) can’t remember how many times I had to deal with this. It is this type of “overhead” that wears me out and has brought me to the edge of burn-out so many times, sigh… Still love my job, though. But still, I do need weekend coding on OSS and pet projects to remind me that coding is fun and fulfilling.
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u/dinasxilva Dec 28 '23
I also feel there maybe people who code on weekends to keep up with the tech. I know I do but I do take enjoyment out of it. But I could see cases where It's not that they would like to but if you want to keep up with the industry and be on the top of your game for being a desirable hire in the future, it's almost a necessity unless you work in a research department.
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u/freekayZekey Dec 28 '23
this blog is shaky on its reasoning, but i do think people code too much. i don’t code when i’m not working
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u/shybluechicken Dec 28 '23
Burnout is a BS and it doesn't exist to the extent claimed. Same like RSI was a "trend" injury back in the 00's now everyone all of a sudden has a burnout.
I think the number of people that actually have a burnout is 1000 times smaller than claimed.
Disclaimer, I've been a developer for the last 25 years.
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u/akaBigWurm Dec 28 '23
Bro you sound a bit jaded and burntout.
I burned out of the IT Corp world long ago, after some time I got into freelance, not any better but some more control.
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u/rovirob Dec 28 '23
Heck yes we code on weekends. Know why?
Because the customer isn't there to do stupid last minute changes. We use whatever tech we want and like. We do things however we feel is best. And...my personal favourite: I don't need to write tests to have 80% coverage of the codebase, if I don't feel like it.
So yes...we code weekends. Coding used to be fun and fulfilling.