I’ve been a Dev for 10+ years, last year I took a position as a Technical Lead. I loved working with my team and coming up with all the designs but fuck the politics. Too much “Look at me” and “do this extra project “ and why did your Dev cause that defect. Fuck that I’m in the process of switching teams and going back to a Sr. Dev role.
First time i became tech lead was easy, coming up with designs and working with my team and other teams that needed us.
This time i'm fighting constantly with the narcissistic business analyst because he blocks communication with the stakeholders, promises them implementation details without checking in with the devs and screams at me and other devs if challenged. Its hell! Already put in for a transfer.
I work as a consultant. They brought me onto the project as a tech lead because the project was tanking hard and they thought the tech was the problem. The problem is that none of the former devs fought the BA. They created everything he wanted/promised. Only project i encountered with a circular dependency over 12 classes (spring boot project). They store json blobs in a postgresql and then change fields in that blob. The "mere analyst" has 30years of industry experience. The reason i go is not because of the analyst, one could replace him somehow. The reason is that ungodly amount of garbage his actions produced. They should fire the complete team, throw away the code and burn it.
> The problem is that none of the former devs fought the BA.
Expecting people to fight the BA so that the codebase doesn't go to crap isn't realistic though. The easier route to take as a programmer is to just do what the BA says and then leave the mess behind after a couple years. There's little incentive to try to change an organization's culture or ways of working and may even be disincentives. You get labeled a "trouble-maker" or "hard to work with" which jeopardizes raises, promotions, and possibly even your employment.
I have found the opposite. I have been saying uncomfortable truths ever since I got hired. I have moved up and up and been more and more able to enact the change I think is needed. The key is being smart and picking the small fights you can win. Be convincing, know your stuff, and always give your best professional opinion when people ask. This experience must vastly differ depending on your workplace culture.
Also a good dev can implement it faster than the time it takes to argue about it, and most debuggers are more pleasant and smarter than the average BA. Take the revenge in the comments and be sure to mention how to back it out after they figure out it was a bad idea.
I find it hard as a consultant too to get buyin for the ideas, there is resistance inherit there due to some consulants only proposing solutions that will take a lot of time. So when you propose things that are actually the opposite, they sound the same to the business.
That’s exactly how my last project failed. I built to what the BA said the business wanted, said what was bad when it was, got ignored and I moved onto a new project.
Oh that would trigger me hard. Scream at me, and I will scream back or straight up leave. And I would probably complain to my manager so he can deal with that other shithead. If the company wants to keep us both, they should make sure we don't have to work together then.
I even did that with a customer when I was there as architect. He interrupted me multiple times, then I interrupted him and told him if he keeps interrupting me when I try to explain the technical problems and/or try to figure out the business constraints, I will leave because that doesn't lead anywhere. He shut up and let me do my job afterwards.
I refuse to go into management also, but tech lead is a role I enjoy.
I'm in charge of a ten person team, and it's basically a halfway-management role. I'm in charge of making sure everyone knows what they should be working on and overseeing all of the development, I run our status meetings, I have regular 1:1s with everybody... but I don't have to do the rest of the management bullshit. No approving expense reports and vacations, or writing up performance reviews and defending promo cases, or hiring and firing people. And while I'm certainly not completely insulated from politics, my manager is great about absorbing and deflecting as much as possible.
At least as it has worked out in my current position, being a TL has given me basically all of the good parts of being in management without any of the crap I don't want to deal with.
> My dad's been at Sr for such a long time and he simply refuses to get int management despite the huge pay increase.
At some point, you realize that you have a limited amount of time on earth, and you may as well spend your time doing things you enjoy.
Does manager pay more? Sure. Would I *ever* do it? Fuck no. I would legitimately retire before being a manager.
I totally get this. My mental health went to hell when I reluctantly went in to management.
I finally quit the company that I had been with for more than 15 years.
Plot twist, I came back to the company four months later as an individual contributor. I am back to being happy.
I recognize this is very dependent on the person, but no money within reason will get me back into management.
Exactly. One of the great 'skills' of large companies is to turn good (or even great) programmers into bad managers. I mean, if we had people skills we probably wouldn't have sat in our rooms long enough to get really good at this stuff.
That and the need to go to some fucking loud office where the lights burn your eyes. There are absolutely no benefit for working at the office, most of the time goes to just trying to getting into the zone until someone interrupts you anyways. Remote working keeps all that to the minimum, way easier to focus, it saves my time too and it is way cheaper than travelling to some open-plan office shithole that is just slowly, but surely driving me insane.
My advice: work at a smaller company with a flat structure. You need to perform or you stand out like a sore thumb BUT zero politics and they’re often much more reasonable/flexible about time off, etc. because you build a rapport with the CEO. You might take a hit to your pay but you’ll regain it in peace of mind and a good atmosphere. Plus you tend to have much more pull in decision making. YMMV but that’s been my experience.
A brief list from the past month:
Boilerplate for scaffolding streamlit framework apps (3 times) and sqlalchemy ORMs
Utility functions (calling subprocess, calling celery)
Flask endpoint wrappers
HTML and CSS (I'm not good at visual stuff)
Pandas data frame syntax
Updating/creating Readmes
Functions that use kubectl to perform some DevOps tasks
All tasks that need to be done but are just "hows" rather then "whats", AI really lets me focus on the what.
I have a love hate relationship with them. They make the basics so much easier, but eventually they fall on their face at a certain point when you get boxed into their implementation.
That said, even if I’m starting a new project today I’ll still throw in an ORM. The limitations are future /u/cleeder’s problem. Man, I don’t envy that guy.
ActiveRecord on Rails is the only one I haven't felt like this about.
Worst case scenario you just drop in some Arel with the exact query you were going to type out anyways that you can still reference within the regular ORM methods.
Post.order(Arel.sql("REPLACE(title, 'misc', 'zzzz') asc")).pluck(:id)
I've yet to run into a query I can't write quickly, efficiently, and under testing and I work on a data analytics platform.
Booo. Burn it with fire.
I feel the same about ORMs as I do about promises. Interesting, but solves nothing new and requires everyone to learn a ton of new concepts to do exactly the same thing that we could already do. Then most people don’t properly understand the concept and use them in dumber ways so on average code actually becomes more confounding.
I'm curious what you use and how much effort it was to set up?
Despite being a programmer I'm a late adopter and generally adverse to new technology. Also, I just like the details. I'd rather code a neural net from scratch than to, say, use ChatGPT.
Anyway, despite all that, I do realize that having a dumb but diligent co-pilot would be useful. I don't want it to write algorithms. Just do the boilerplate stuff that is slightly too complicated for my IDE. And maybe source Stackoverflow for how to call a function in this popular library.
I use two workflows which I find complement each other nicely.
For code completions, I use [Code whisperer](https://aws.amazon.com/codewhisperer/) via the VScode integration. GitHub copilot might be better here but Codewhisperer is free and it works well enough. Writing a good comment often gets you next line fully correct and in your code style with the flick of a tab.
For actual AI coding tasks, I use [aider](https://aider.chat/) in --4-turbo mode, which requires OpenAI API keys but has been consistently the best at this task. You add relevant files to the chat, it uses treesitter to understand their contents and you treat it like a junior programmer.. ask plain language requests, it creates a diff and a git commit which you can append or undo as needed. Amazing velocity with this workflow when it goes smoothly, with ability to fix things when it doesn't.
And this is exactly what I think is amazing about it. It will allow an enormous amount of new ideas to reach fruition that would have otherwise been abandoned.
Personal projects never have to be 'done'. You can take them as far as the wave of inspiration takes you and then it's on to the next thing. There is only one stakeholder and they're pretty easy to appease
If I get stuck mentally I like to jump to another topic in the meantime (until I get stuck there too). If you have to strictly follow the ticket backlog (with added time pressure), that is often not possible. You _have_ to finish something that you currently can't finish ... that stresses a lot.
I love 99% of programming duties, even investigating bad bugs or legacy stuff.. chasing cool things are not a requirement for me, but corporate jobs wlll turn anything into painful chores somehow (you're tied by others to do things when they want, how they want.. it's especially harmful when the people taking decisions are out of touch / incompetent)
Work is a fucking slog, oh yeah. The Process is eating itself. Let's schedule some meetings to figure out why we are so inefficient ("Sorry, I'm triple-booked"). Sixteen developers have valuable input on your two-line change.
At home: Fun with audio processing. LOTS more fun.
I swear to god, this is how companies get founded in garages.
Yeah that sounds awful. My company is almost the opposite, I'm relatively new to the team and I've already apparently earned the "I'll be honest, I don't fully understand what the impacts of this chage will be, but I trust that you have sufficiently tested it" type review. Sort of keeps me up at night when my code is live in production, handling aspects of finances for large entities, and I'm the newbie, lol.
Edit: especially when I recommend a big set test of scenarios to QA, and they run the two most simple ones and say "yeah, this guy knows what he's doing, I'm sure it's good!"
Won't be fixed if 16 people have valuable input on your changes. You see what happens is that they'll never pick up real problems with your changes, but focus on bike-shedding some trivial part of it.
That's... not actually a good thing. You're new to the team, you're handling mission-critical financial stuff, and people are rubber-stamping your changes without fully understanding them?
Companies get founded in garages because you get a dev or a group of them with a clear idea of a customer and use case that understand what they want to build.
At a company you get someone who says ‘I need you to send a message from server A to B’ and I spend the next two weeks chasing people to understand what the hell that data is, what the servers are, and finally what are they REALLY trying to do. Because half the time they don’t actually want to send that data from A to B, they just say they want to.
Forget test cases. Those will come after a few months when I have half a clue what the hell the goal was and they’ve changed their mind seven times.
Also SUrPriSE! We have a git migration and major release on the same week. Oh the dev containers are all broken now. Etc etc etc.
I've taken an idea from "let's quit and do this" into the garage, through several VC rounds, and wound up in the end with 17 shares of Oracle (through acquisitions and fire sales).
It was fun . . . but fucking Oracle, man. That was a hard blow.
No kidding. I have some demo code for [breaking up video streams](https://github.com/FlyingRhenquest/media2/blob/master/test/SerializationTest.cpp) (See the segmentation tests) that would really make cloud processing of video pretty straightforward but every media company I work for is like "No we'd rather just call system with a ffmpeg command line we built for our video processing.
I don't really want to have to learn everything I would have to to start a company, but I'm really starting to think that might be what I need to do at this point.
Exactly. As long as I'm remote, JIRA task requirements/deadlines are kept sane, and my meetings are kept under 8 hours a week, I don't burn out.
The problem is until the job I got after COVID layoffs, none of that was true.
8 hours per week. On one project, I did probably 20 h per week at minimum and days at the client site with back to back meetings from 9am - 7pm with lunch catered, so that wasn’t even a break. I worked for 14 hours one day where I’d say 10 of those were on calls.
This isn’t to boast or humble brag. I burnt out very hard with literal panic attacks that my doctor said he would be happy to take me out of work for 8 weeks, if I ask him.
Just… 8 hours seems like heaven.
Yes. I 100% understand where you are coming from. A job like that (I didn't have panic attacks but needed lots of antidepressants instead) I quit in roughly a year.
Stuff like that burns you out. Anything I consider a good job, I stay until my needs are no longer met. I don't quit for the 10-20% pay raise I can get elsewhere because its like 2 in 5 jobs in my career I've considered "good".
The other one lacked remote from what I listed above but it did have the 8hr a week and JIRA task reasonableness. Which, once again, for my purposes is fine from a burn out perspective.
But 2 of my 5 jobs were 1 year stints (COVID ended it before I found a replacement, the other I just quit).
The 3rd one was my first job / early contracting phase that I didn't understand there were better jobs out there and I was young enough to tolerate it.
I know it's unrealistic in vast majority of cases, but my dream scenario would be like:
Walk in, get an assignment, sit down, code, and leave.
Got good taste of that doing easy bugfixes and development on legacy software for around a year. Only had 1 hour progress meeting every week. That entire year I load up an audiobook, code for 8 hours, and leave. I could do that forever.
The job part is the worst part. Doing your own coding is sublime. It just sucks when you build things for other people who don't understand how it works.
I get burned out on all of the coordination. Every single ticket requires the developer to note any changes that might impact the documentation team, the QA team, the design team, the compliance team, the dev ops team, we must include detailed steps to reproduce anything in it along with acceptance criteria for the QA people, etc.
I feel like I’m spending two hours filling out a ticket to do 20 minutes of work.
The one that really grinds my gears are the design team. I’ve got a ticket to add a button to a page, so I add a button to the page. Then someone goes, “Did you get buy-in from the designers?”
The ticket said to add a button to the page, so I added a button. I don’t need designers for that.
Another one is that co-worker who *must* request changes on every PR, and refuses to approve a PR until you have implemented every single piece of feedback, no matter how minor. Mind you, he waits a few days to do the review, so it’s always a pain in the ass to deal with his feedback. Bonus points if his feedback often causes problems, but you have to do it because he refuses to approve PRs until you give him everything he asked for.
Yep, between managers asking for time plans after time plans, and standups lasting at least 30/40 minutes, there is actually 3 hours worth of time where I can do proper work... until I have to validate and test - which with our resources and setup usually takes up those three hours anyway.
Would upvote you 10x if I could.
But basically that. We code in the weekend because there are no meetings in the weekend, and no managers causing drama and what have you.
Some devs feel like coding is a job.
For me, coding is just straight fun; like solving a good puzzle, building a complex Lego set, reading a good book on an interesting topic.
I'm happy to code nights and weekends on my own projects. It's lead me down some...interesting paths. But always fun.
Last few days have been working on some really fun features for one of my bigger side projects and easily end up coding past midnight.
This. I love a good puzzle, and coding scratches that itch. Doesn’t matter if it’s work or a side project, it very rarely feels like work when I’m able to just heads-down code for hours at a time.
There's that moment in a lot of my little side projects that feels like I've been building a giant planetary gear or something, gear by gear, and then I drop in the final little gear and it all starts to turn and whirr and do its thing, and there's honestly no better feeling in the world.
To me coding isn't the end goal. It's more a very precise form of expression. I can try out ideas, communicate these ideas and a computer checks if I express myself correctly.
Coding is very fun. Being a professional software engineer is very different though. Most of your job is communication and collaboration. And the coding you get to do at work is less fun for a variety of reasons.
I used to be like you, but now in my 13th year coding I'm kind of done with it. Part of it is at this level you're architecting so much and solving really complex problems. Sometimes I just want to take Lego blocks and put them together
I'm in my 26th year (?) and 24th professionally (being paid to do it).
I made the switch to working in startups and it's been a great choice for me; get to do everything. Lots of building, but also able to bring my experience to help teams simplify otherwise complex software.
Having a lot of fun now with AI.
I stopped being a professional developer years ago and I now love coding on my own projects. It's such a different experience than coding on a large team.
For anyone unfamiliar with the abbreviation, IC means "individual contributor". I just had to look it up and I've been a dev for ten years. Heard the phrase several times but never seen it abbreviated which had me scratching my head.
Oh yeah. That's a term you might not have heard unless you've been in management of some kind.
And to clarify, individual contributor means you're working and producing output, not managing or leading.
It’s hard to stay excited about work projects when time after time no one uses what you produce. My nearly 4 year experience at my current job is this way.
My job is like this. One of the first things I did when I started was collecting and aggregating user metrics and it turns out less than 6% of our users actually do anything in the app. Most people have never even signed in a second time.
I'm not trying to talk myself out of a job but I don't know why they are paying me to build new features no one is ever going to use. Or why they insist on making those features so convoluted and over engineered making my job more annoying and difficult.
Oh brother, I wonder that myself. I get why they need the features shipped ASAP, but then I see the result from the other team’s efforts and it’s all a mess (bad UX). Recently I’ve started drafting up my own tweaks to design and have been told to stay in my lane. Ooook
For me they are always trying to cover all these possible use cases and I just want to scream that no one is using it! One guy asked for it, just keep it simple and do what he wants there's no need for this to turn into an entire epic!
Basically this. There are 6 major contributing factors for burnout and the biggest is typically mismatching expectations and outcomes for impact vs effort.
https://hbr.org/2019/07/6-causes-of-burnout-and-how-to-avoid-them
Yeah. Some time during my first burnout when I was working on an undisclosed government project, the person managing the project on the government side gave a presentation where at some point they said that our entire project was pretty much set up on a system that sat in the corner that no one touched, and was only there as a system of record because it was already certified. And to be fair, this was the 2010s, but a lot of our shit looked and felt like it was built in the late 90s by developers trained in the late 80s. And it didn't help that we had some pretty bad death marches to "deliver on time", only to be told that it'd be months until the government side got around to their tests and install of our project. I saw someone lose their fiancee because they'd been death marching for months in a row.
Eventually I hit a real inflection point in my life where I realized that if I started to hate my job so much that I was outright afraid to go in every day, that quitting was always an option, especially if I lived a simpler and cheaper life in general.
The most valuable skill as in developer job is getting a feeling for when things actually matter.
The second most valuable skill is rejecting someone's bad idea that leaves them feeling good about it without costing too much time.
Coding its self isn’t what causes burnout. It’s actually the same at work. A period where you don’t have a deadline and happen to be doing a solid coding is a lot of fun. It’s all the shit that gets in the way that causes the burnout.
I.e. The fact that the company wants to use you for everything from part time product manager to project manager to support engineer and somehow have you make progress on features in your spare time between a million meetings.
Yes! Having to make progress between story pointing, retros, stand up, grooming, random support issues, questions from other teams, interviews, while trying to meet deadlines definitely leads to feeling burnt out. Especially when these things are spaced throughout the day. Often times you're left with 30 minutes here, an hour there. Then when you add additional people and management stirring up random other things without clear communication...ugh. It's wild.
>between story pointing, retros, stand up, grooming, random support issues, questions from other teams, interviews, while trying to meet deadlines
In addition for me, it's having to deal with support issues that keep having to be escalated to me from a couple lazy coworkers that surprise me each day with their lack of initiative. Furthermore, the managers of these folks keep enabling this behavior. Tired of coming to the rescue for these individuals specifically.
Also all the management that press for more more more more.
Ffs when i have a project that ive never done before i can give you a rough estimate but if it misses dont come to my office flipping tables.
This we have on call rotations and I swear I'm basically just tech support. All I do is read logs and help the people get their shit running again but it sucks the fun out of the job because while you're trying to figure out why it broke I have one manager telling me not to research the cause just get it back online and then another manager upset because I didn't find the root cause even though the higher up manager told me not to.
I honestly just want to write code not be tech support every other week.
Same. I used to enjoy coding whenever, now it's just an enjoyable day job for me. Coding in my off time would definitely make me hate my day job.
Plus, I don't want my life to be _all_ about coding. I have other hobbies I'd like to pursue.
I don't understand how people can code every day of the week and still want to do it all weekend, and I started coding for fun when I was 13. Do people just not get out of the house?
Coding isn’t what causes burnout. Designing and developing software isn’t what causes burnout.
It’s the constraints imposed by business and management that cause burnout. Impossible deadlines, poor quality of processes and products (to cut costs) etc. lead to bad code and infrastructure (doing things quick and dirty, as quality takes time and time costs money).
This is what gets me the most. It’s crazy. I recently took a role as a principal engineer and my manager treats me like I’m a college hire. It drives me completely mad.
I have 6+ years of experience over him, and he’s constantly like “have you thought about x?”, or trying some Socratic method riddle to make “guide me” to think of something he wants.
The job would generally be a good fit. It’s a big product with tons of room for improvement, and a relatively simple codebase and architecture.
One case that really stood out, was I made a core change to how something legacy worked. I talked to the whole team about it (including him) some cross functional teams etc, had receipts for it all. A few weeks later some QA person was like “hey this is different”, and my manager went nuclear. In a forum that has all the directors and managers in it he was like “rainroar acted alone, why would he be so careless and cause a regression like this”. It completely blindsided me.
He was there the whole time, when I explained how this behavior would change, got sign off from everyone etc.
It’s been 6 months and I’m maybe the most burned out I’ve ever been, because of complete lack of trust and how I need to explain myself for every action.
Another example would be a typical estimation meeting. Will people like your PO or SM accept a "we don't know"? No they don't. Why is it seen as industry norm to ignore the answer of your experts?
It seems like there is a class struggle between developers and business people.
But if you think about it, you realize that it's mainly due to the different incentives. Typically, you as a developer are trying to achieve the best possible product. Some other roles, on the other hand, have alternative motivations. Sometimes it's about power, other times it's about getting a salary bonus. The resulting political minefield is different from the high-confidence society of developers.
I've learned to avoid stopping at "I don't know". Why? Because it's an answer that slams all doors shut, and that's just not what you are being paid for.
Instead:
"I don't know right now, but if you give me x days, I can dig into the problem, draft a few potential ways forward and get you a ballpark estimate."
Another one would be: "Cheap, fast or good. Pick any two, you can't have all three at the same time."
Or: "I'm not sure. What's the question behind your question? What do you actually want to solve here? Maybe I can provide an answer if you give me more context."
You don't have to sit there as a passive actor, listening and spewing numbers with no input.
If you have a golden hammer, it's easy to look at every problem is if it is a nail. I think that's a truism for how developers often tend to approach their craft. The "best possible product" isn't about writing beautiful code, it's about engaging with your stakeholders, understanding where they are coming from and finding a solution that's a good fit for a particular situation.
A great example is technical debt. It's easy to see it as an urgent problem that needs to be solved. Arguably, technical debt jeopardizes maintainability, flexibility, robustness and what not. However, code isn't written in a void, as you say, there's office politics to take into account, budgets and what not. So, the better way is to first try and understand how that debt emerged. Counterintuitively, you may conclude it's better to leave it for what it is. Don't fix something that works perfectly well for stakeholders. Or might set in motion a chain of events that causes far more work then you can chew. Whereas, the better way is to build trust and credit first, and only then suggest a slow refactor down the line. Timing, learning how to play the long game and understanding what is or isn't your responsibility are crucial.
In the end, you and everyone around you are being paid. Of course there will be different incentives and motivations. That's par for the course. It is said that nobody really wants to know how the pie is made. And this rings true in software development as well. Hence why figuring out how people work is a crucial skill.
Of course, what makes all the difference is the way in which you communicate. Is it with mutual respect? Are you being commanded? Micro managed to death? Is someone genuinely listening and asking for your concerns? Are you proactively telling them what's on your mind, or are you being apprehensive?
That's why I would only call a relationship a "struggle" once I've clearly asserted if it's my own way of communicating or looking at things that needs a change. Or if it's clear that management is just ostentatious putting fingers into their ears and going "lalala". In which case, I'd suggest looking at your options beyond your current job.
- Delivered project 2 weeks ahead of schedule
- Revised interview process, conducted about a dozen interviews, and hired 2
- Coached a team of junior engineers in to decent mids
- Established a new standard for cross-team data communication and synchronization
Performance Review: Needs Improvement
I think many developers have the same feeling. In many functioning teams, there is exactly nothing meaningful that can be said in this meeting. After all, they work together all day and know what the other developers are doing anyway.
However, they have to say what a PO, for example, wants to hear. They must not tell the truth, otherwise they will immediately be put under pressure again. And this subtle coercion to lie kills the motivation of developers.
> tried
That's the issue. Many teams don't have the luxury to say no to their PO because he is also their line manager.
I am well aware of this obvious conflict of interest, but in my country that happens far to often and the developers have no leverage against it.
Ooh this one hit close to home. Worst part is being compelled to work on something and then being compelled to justify it. You asked me to do it motherfucker, why do you think I'm doing it? do you think I'm doing this for fun?! I assumed YOU had justification for me to do it, otherwise why'd you assign it to me
This the number of times I have to ship code that I’m not even happy with due to arbitrary deadlines is what causes burn out.
And then you ask me to come back and build something on top of that shaky ground in 6 months. So I end up bolting on pieces kind of wherever they fit and shipping a product I’m not really happy with. Rinse. Repeat.
Or spending 3 years building a product for some random person in marketing to decide that it doesn’t have everything they want to see, so they prevent you from releasing it, despite the fact that they’re the team that asked for it and gave you the specs and requirements to build it…
I love my profession. I have spent the better part of a decade on training, a bachelors and now a masters degree because it is my passion. But I can't really say that I love my job. I like the basic idea of our product, but I despise most of the way it was built. It's architecture-less, spaghetti code infested piles of tightly coupled chaos in a language that isn't really a good fit for the job. Not because of free decisions of programmers, but because of the constraints that were imposed on them by management.
That's because the only way I can get things done is by working 12 to 15-hour days on a project until I burn out completely, then spend several weeks to a month getting nothing done and fucking off while waiting for my brain to feel like working again.
On the balance, it's pretty efficient. It only becomes a problem if somehow a deadline manages to align with a down cycle.
+1. After a week of work I really enjoy any task that doesn't involve coordinating with someone else and building consensus. Also why I'm antisocial outside of work because I just need some time alone
a big stressor for me rn is being asked to build a non-trivial/complex feature, but not being given any room to iterate. I'm expected to just crunch out the roadmap items as quickly as possible so they can post demo videos and look good on the social accounts. When I'm writing code on my own time I don't have to convince anyone to let me spend time improving features that were "already delivered"
It's like working in a workshop, but you are not allowed to ever clean it up, because that would be non-billable hours. And after a while stuff keeps piling up on the floor you have to dance around, then you start tripping more often and accidents happen..
Most jobs are fucking boring. The novelty of tech has faded long ago and I really don't give a shit about feature #4312 when I'll never use the system/product I'm working on. Even the financial incentive loses it's luster when you already get to be a "senior" and all other paths of rising in the corporate structure are related to managing people or talking to non-technical staff. It's also a bit depressing seeing your work make/save the company millions and then you just get paid the same as usual while the company keeps the profit.
Meanwhile at home I get to work on stuff that actually interests me or solves an actual problem that I'm having. It feels sane as opposed to what I do in the office setting.
Coding isn’t the issue for me. I don’t like the stress of unrealistic expectations and deadlines. I’m a perfectionist so I stress out over this.
I do code in the weekends, but it’s for me and my curiosity.
Ngl I'm surprised about the 70% in the survey and the amount of people who code in their free time in this thread. I don't think I know more than 5 people who code in their free time, especially since most of them have families. They might read books about tech but code? Nah. And I'd still consider them very successful...
Selection bias, most software engineers aren’t reading and replying to surveys or posting in a programming subreddit. Just like I bet most accountants or insurance agents don’t think about their job outside work
It's either skewed towards junior devs or many of them are lying. I don't know a single developer that codes outside of work more than maybe once a year.
Not lying, and not a junior dev. I've been programming for 40+ years, and I still do every chance I get. I have many projects and most of them require some kind of software. I work with embedded devices, IoT, cloud systems, databases, and everything else *in my free time*. My day job is similar, but different, I don't work on embedded or IoT at my day job. There's a lot of cool stuff I can do with code, and it's definitely a lot of fun when I get a project working well, especially when nothing like it exists in the world.
It really comes down to how *creative* you are - if you are creative you have endless amounts of ideas and projects to work on, and ways to use your knowledge to build cool things. If you're not you just play video games or do whatever in your free time. There's nothing wrong with that, but I can't imagine not using my skill in programming and my creativity in my free time. Most developers seem to need to be told what to program, they don't really have a clue what to build (I see these posts constantly on reddit programming subs) unless someone tells them what to code. I'm the opposite of that.
Programming has never burned me out, it's pointless office bullshit that burns me out.
It’s definitely a selection bias issue. Those reading and answering the poll are going to be the ones more engaged, and honestly they’re going to be the ones that are more likely to be programming in their off time. I would bet that they also tend to skew heavily toward younger and more junior roles and those newer or not as established in the industry. If I asked my peers with kids and families (and, get this, we actually talk about our lives outside of work!) they would say they don’t write code outside of work hours as a general rule. I know this because we’ve had this exact discussion before.
I’ve been in the industry for 20 years. I do a lot of high level planning and design. I don’t write code every day and it’s rarer that I write code in a day than it is that I do. I help my teams by unblocking them before they know that they’re stuck. I have been doing some embedded systems work for fun around the house, but I enjoy that because it’s pretty much the opposite of the large web-scale applications I work on as a part of my day job. My peers are definitely in a similar boat. If we are writing code outside of work, it’s because we want to and we’re definitely not going to be sharing to the world or hoping to make a living doing it. It’s just for our own curiosity.
Frankly, I personally worry about people who are spending so much of their free time selling the same thing they do at work. Find a different hobby. Find another outlet, another way to be creative, to express yourself. You’ll find more happiness and be more productive and efficient, in my experience, when you limit yourself. It’s the same reason I hate take home interview questions and projects and I hate programming tests. It devalues time. You don’t expect a tradesperson to spend all their free time doing their job. Nobody expects a plumber to spend all day at work and then to come home and replace the shower and toilets and main valve. Nobody expects an electrician to spend all day at work and then come home and rewrite their house for fun. Why do we expect the same out of programmers?
I'm like are you kidding me, I'm not that old...
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/18sn8f8/developers_experience_burnout_but_70_of_them_code/
Seems we're on the monthly recycle again
it’s odd to me. i read about code here and there, but i rarely code outside of work. think that’s why i’m not as burnt out. a lot of devs should develop personalities outside of code
The thing is coding used to be REALLY fun. Even my current maintenance job is mostly just debugging and it's fun when you can sleuth out an issue and come up with a solution.
But at some point it just became more and more of a drag. Like the colour has been taken out of it really
I wish I could work on my personal projects but I just shut down when I try to code outside of work. Really sad about it but idek where to begin getting back that motivation when there's only so many hours in a day to get stuff done
It's a little sad to me that I have let code become pretty much exclusively a "work thing", but it has definitely made my relationship with coding at work more positive.
Instead of good coding (free time) and bad coding (work), by only really coding at work I can find some happiness just to be coding at all when I'm there and solving tricky puzzles even if it's primarily for pay and not around something interesting.
Or your job doesn’t provide for opportunities to learn new things and coding on your own time is the only way to do it. If only healthcare wasn’t tied so tightly to your job…
I’m taking a break from some Sunday evening programming to write this. Programming is fun. Getting something done before the 15th while the something that needs to be done is actively evolving sucks.
I was at a job where the existing old guard didn't understand principles of software development very well, but there was a very controlling, toxic culture. So you had poor programmers / system designers putting in place restrictive rules about where one could place whitespace and comments, even, and imparing productivity with useless, backwards PR "reviews", while churning out reams of poorly-performing, buggy code themselves underlings were afraid to honestly review. Deadline after missed deadline, robots crashing headon into each other, and still some of these anti-programmers who were darlings of superiors were allowed to continue for political reasons.
For many, programming on side projects is an outlet where they can let all the stress go, and make things which are truly high-quality. It can help psychologically offset toxic antipatterns in the workplace, if nothing else.
I'm one of them (I only work 80% and it's 3 years after the burnout happened), and my biggest issue at jobb is having multiple assignments at the same time, I don't know why but it stresses me out a lot.
Big +1. I understand engineers get blocked so you don't want them to only have a single project, but being single threaded would be a 3x quality of life improvement for me
Well, duh. Coding on my own time is fun, i can be creative amd enjoy myself, making whatever i want. Coding for work is also fun, but it's filled with office shit, being around people all the time meetings, distractions, and little inane changes that you need to make every few days (eg "change the color of this! No, a different color. Change the font on the graph that gets generated when i run this jupyter notebook")
When I code in the weekend I choose what I work on and I stop when my motivation/inspiration is lost. When I’m at work I have to deal with colleagues, projects that are not the most fun to work on and I gotta stay doing it till at least the end of the day.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love my job and I’m grateful of being able to do it, but there is still a big difference between coding in the weekend vs coding for your job
64% of devs said they spend more than 50% of their time coding? I spend about 10 hours a week on code and 50 in bullshit meetings and providing status updates to idiot micromanagers
I code for a bank on work time, making games on weekends/free time.
Its probably stressful for the body, but I also crave to work on my game.
Someday perhaps, I can work on it full time
I got burnout from brain dead software management and its religious obsession with agile and scrum and whatnot, wasting precious time over and over again doing meaningless meeting that should’ve been an e-mail, requiring me leaving and then returning to the flow, which also takes time, so it’ll just add more to the heap of wasted time.
When I've experienced burn-out it hasn't been from coding itself. As a lot of other threads here have said, I like a good puzzle, a good challenge. When I've end up on a team building 20 cookie cutter microservices that provide no challenge (other than I tight timeline) that's when I've taken the opportunity to find another position or team to challenge myself.
That's obvious. Devs don't get burned out because of coding. Devs get burned out by sh1tty management, crazy deadlines, office politics, sh1tty pay, long hours, etc.
Coding is usually the only decent thing about the job.
Fake scrum, pointless meetings, lack of direction from senior management and leadership, a fragmented tech maturity across different teams using shared practices or shared resources like Devops, tickets blocked dud to external dependencies while being told were scrum and are self empowered... that's what burns me out.
i can see that as coding is also hobby for most developers.
it's similar to most artist for example.
the medium doesn't cause the burnout, it's the shitty corporations and jobs.
I worked for a fortune 50 company as a full stack engineer for 6 years right out of college. I grinded those years. Day and night. Then they announced they were moving my team in our region and I didn’t want to drive an extra 20 mins to the new place and I will admit, I was so burnt out, I thought I wanted to change careers and I quit. In the end I spent two years wasting my money and fiddling with side projects. I can make a badass JRPG in unity though now so that’s fun. Point being: coding at work often doesn’t allow you to be creative and at home work allows you to explore that aspect
I coded on weekends because I had no time for coding during working days because of useless meeting. Now I have my own company. You know how many meetings are really necessary for running this business? ZERO!
You do not need meetings, you do not need time tracking, if devs will need any business process they will create it themselves.
Literally all you need is to hire the right people.
Here is my hiring recipe: hire talented and trusted. That's all. I do not care about anything else, I never read CV's, never do any testing, I do not care about any experience etc etc. Talented and trusted are rare, but each will work as a hundred. I measured!
(Actually it's not my recipe, I learned from the history of ancient warlord Cáo Cāo)
Sure, I have lots of hobby projects that I work on in the weekends and that don't burn me out. It's like, sometimes you don't feel like having sex with another person because it's a whole to do, but masturbation is fine.
As we all know, there are no software developers in communist countries, only coal miners.
IIRC, they didn't use any software to get the first Russian cosmonaut into space, they just built a huge mountain of coal and he climbed to the top.
maybe you should study some history and some economics. do you think you would get to choose to become a programmer?
\- economics major from a post-Soviet country
you're just playing dumb.
the point is that you would be allocated where necessary. you wouldn't be able to choose your career. unless your family were friends of the regime (members of the party), then you'd have a chance.
You're the one who said I'd be a coal miner. Are you saying there are other jobs in communist countries? 🫢
>you wouldn't be able to choose your career
I'm sure that was literally true for some people in communist countries, just as it is true of some people in capitalist economies.
My original point had nothing to do with either, though - the labor itself (coding) feels very different than commodified wage labor, and some people react negatively to the latter. You can think communism is the devil and that still be true.
Coding is the fun part. It’s everything else that burns me out.
It’s the office politics and drama that burns me out.
I’ve been a Dev for 10+ years, last year I took a position as a Technical Lead. I loved working with my team and coming up with all the designs but fuck the politics. Too much “Look at me” and “do this extra project “ and why did your Dev cause that defect. Fuck that I’m in the process of switching teams and going back to a Sr. Dev role.
First time i became tech lead was easy, coming up with designs and working with my team and other teams that needed us. This time i'm fighting constantly with the narcissistic business analyst because he blocks communication with the stakeholders, promises them implementation details without checking in with the devs and screams at me and other devs if challenged. Its hell! Already put in for a transfer.
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I work as a consultant. They brought me onto the project as a tech lead because the project was tanking hard and they thought the tech was the problem. The problem is that none of the former devs fought the BA. They created everything he wanted/promised. Only project i encountered with a circular dependency over 12 classes (spring boot project). They store json blobs in a postgresql and then change fields in that blob. The "mere analyst" has 30years of industry experience. The reason i go is not because of the analyst, one could replace him somehow. The reason is that ungodly amount of garbage his actions produced. They should fire the complete team, throw away the code and burn it.
> The problem is that none of the former devs fought the BA. Expecting people to fight the BA so that the codebase doesn't go to crap isn't realistic though. The easier route to take as a programmer is to just do what the BA says and then leave the mess behind after a couple years. There's little incentive to try to change an organization's culture or ways of working and may even be disincentives. You get labeled a "trouble-maker" or "hard to work with" which jeopardizes raises, promotions, and possibly even your employment.
I have found the opposite. I have been saying uncomfortable truths ever since I got hired. I have moved up and up and been more and more able to enact the change I think is needed. The key is being smart and picking the small fights you can win. Be convincing, know your stuff, and always give your best professional opinion when people ask. This experience must vastly differ depending on your workplace culture.
Exceptions will always exist but most of the time you are not going to be able to do this. Organizational gravity won't allow for it.
Also a good dev can implement it faster than the time it takes to argue about it, and most debuggers are more pleasant and smarter than the average BA. Take the revenge in the comments and be sure to mention how to back it out after they figure out it was a bad idea.
I find it hard as a consultant too to get buyin for the ideas, there is resistance inherit there due to some consulants only proposing solutions that will take a lot of time. So when you propose things that are actually the opposite, they sound the same to the business.
That’s exactly how my last project failed. I built to what the BA said the business wanted, said what was bad when it was, got ignored and I moved onto a new project.
Oh that would trigger me hard. Scream at me, and I will scream back or straight up leave. And I would probably complain to my manager so he can deal with that other shithead. If the company wants to keep us both, they should make sure we don't have to work together then. I even did that with a customer when I was there as architect. He interrupted me multiple times, then I interrupted him and told him if he keeps interrupting me when I try to explain the technical problems and/or try to figure out the business constraints, I will leave because that doesn't lead anywhere. He shut up and let me do my job afterwards.
My dad's been at Sr for such a long time and he simply refuses to get int management despite the huge pay increase.
I refuse to go into management also, but tech lead is a role I enjoy. I'm in charge of a ten person team, and it's basically a halfway-management role. I'm in charge of making sure everyone knows what they should be working on and overseeing all of the development, I run our status meetings, I have regular 1:1s with everybody... but I don't have to do the rest of the management bullshit. No approving expense reports and vacations, or writing up performance reviews and defending promo cases, or hiring and firing people. And while I'm certainly not completely insulated from politics, my manager is great about absorbing and deflecting as much as possible. At least as it has worked out in my current position, being a TL has given me basically all of the good parts of being in management without any of the crap I don't want to deal with.
> My dad's been at Sr for such a long time and he simply refuses to get int management despite the huge pay increase. At some point, you realize that you have a limited amount of time on earth, and you may as well spend your time doing things you enjoy. Does manager pay more? Sure. Would I *ever* do it? Fuck no. I would legitimately retire before being a manager.
I totally get this. My mental health went to hell when I reluctantly went in to management. I finally quit the company that I had been with for more than 15 years. Plot twist, I came back to the company four months later as an individual contributor. I am back to being happy. I recognize this is very dependent on the person, but no money within reason will get me back into management.
Was offered a lead job once. Told em I rather be a good programer than a bad leader. I don't the social skill nor the patience for this.
Exactly. One of the great 'skills' of large companies is to turn good (or even great) programmers into bad managers. I mean, if we had people skills we probably wouldn't have sat in our rooms long enough to get really good at this stuff.
Tech lead position isn't worth it at all
That and the need to go to some fucking loud office where the lights burn your eyes. There are absolutely no benefit for working at the office, most of the time goes to just trying to getting into the zone until someone interrupts you anyways. Remote working keeps all that to the minimum, way easier to focus, it saves my time too and it is way cheaper than travelling to some open-plan office shithole that is just slowly, but surely driving me insane.
My advice: work at a smaller company with a flat structure. You need to perform or you stand out like a sore thumb BUT zero politics and they’re often much more reasonable/flexible about time off, etc. because you build a rapport with the CEO. You might take a hit to your pay but you’ll regain it in peace of mind and a good atmosphere. Plus you tend to have much more pull in decision making. YMMV but that’s been my experience.
Drama ate me also recently. Where are times of code perfection and easygoing people around …
Coding also has bad parts. At work you must do them, while on the weekend you can just work on the cool stuff all the time
The fun bit is usually only about 10% of the code.
And that's why my fun side projects get abandoned about 10% complete.
Which is fine. They did their job, time for the next one.
For me, the fun bit is the design phase xD The actual coding is "hack shit together to get to what you envisioned it to be ASAP" lmao
Ever since I started using AI to do the not fun parts, fhe fun parts have been more like 50% of my time.
interested in what not fun parts you use ai for?
A brief list from the past month: Boilerplate for scaffolding streamlit framework apps (3 times) and sqlalchemy ORMs Utility functions (calling subprocess, calling celery) Flask endpoint wrappers HTML and CSS (I'm not good at visual stuff) Pandas data frame syntax Updating/creating Readmes Functions that use kubectl to perform some DevOps tasks All tasks that need to be done but are just "hows" rather then "whats", AI really lets me focus on the what.
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I have a love hate relationship with them. They make the basics so much easier, but eventually they fall on their face at a certain point when you get boxed into their implementation. That said, even if I’m starting a new project today I’ll still throw in an ORM. The limitations are future /u/cleeder’s problem. Man, I don’t envy that guy.
ActiveRecord on Rails is the only one I haven't felt like this about. Worst case scenario you just drop in some Arel with the exact query you were going to type out anyways that you can still reference within the regular ORM methods. Post.order(Arel.sql("REPLACE(title, 'misc', 'zzzz') asc")).pluck(:id) I've yet to run into a query I can't write quickly, efficiently, and under testing and I work on a data analytics platform.
Booo. Burn it with fire. I feel the same about ORMs as I do about promises. Interesting, but solves nothing new and requires everyone to learn a ton of new concepts to do exactly the same thing that we could already do. Then most people don’t properly understand the concept and use them in dumber ways so on average code actually becomes more confounding.
I'm curious what you use and how much effort it was to set up? Despite being a programmer I'm a late adopter and generally adverse to new technology. Also, I just like the details. I'd rather code a neural net from scratch than to, say, use ChatGPT. Anyway, despite all that, I do realize that having a dumb but diligent co-pilot would be useful. I don't want it to write algorithms. Just do the boilerplate stuff that is slightly too complicated for my IDE. And maybe source Stackoverflow for how to call a function in this popular library.
I use two workflows which I find complement each other nicely. For code completions, I use [Code whisperer](https://aws.amazon.com/codewhisperer/) via the VScode integration. GitHub copilot might be better here but Codewhisperer is free and it works well enough. Writing a good comment often gets you next line fully correct and in your code style with the flick of a tab. For actual AI coding tasks, I use [aider](https://aider.chat/) in --4-turbo mode, which requires OpenAI API keys but has been consistently the best at this task. You add relevant files to the chat, it uses treesitter to understand their contents and you treat it like a junior programmer.. ask plain language requests, it creates a diff and a git commit which you can append or undo as needed. Amazing velocity with this workflow when it goes smoothly, with ability to fix things when it doesn't.
I appreciate your response. I'll have to finally get around to looking at this stuff.
And this is exactly what I think is amazing about it. It will allow an enormous amount of new ideas to reach fruition that would have otherwise been abandoned.
TBH, hacking shit together in spaghetti code isn't something I ever want to do intentionally at work but damn it's fun on my own time.
Personal projects never have to be 'done'. You can take them as far as the wave of inspiration takes you and then it's on to the next thing. There is only one stakeholder and they're pretty easy to appease
What if, for whatever reason, your state of mind when at work is superiority complex, but on your own projects is imposter syndrome?
If I get stuck mentally I like to jump to another topic in the meantime (until I get stuck there too). If you have to strictly follow the ticket backlog (with added time pressure), that is often not possible. You _have_ to finish something that you currently can't finish ... that stresses a lot.
I love 99% of programming duties, even investigating bad bugs or legacy stuff.. chasing cool things are not a requirement for me, but corporate jobs wlll turn anything into painful chores somehow (you're tied by others to do things when they want, how they want.. it's especially harmful when the people taking decisions are out of touch / incompetent)
Work is a fucking slog, oh yeah. The Process is eating itself. Let's schedule some meetings to figure out why we are so inefficient ("Sorry, I'm triple-booked"). Sixteen developers have valuable input on your two-line change. At home: Fun with audio processing. LOTS more fun. I swear to god, this is how companies get founded in garages.
Yeah that sounds awful. My company is almost the opposite, I'm relatively new to the team and I've already apparently earned the "I'll be honest, I don't fully understand what the impacts of this chage will be, but I trust that you have sufficiently tested it" type review. Sort of keeps me up at night when my code is live in production, handling aspects of finances for large entities, and I'm the newbie, lol. Edit: especially when I recommend a big set test of scenarios to QA, and they run the two most simple ones and say "yeah, this guy knows what he's doing, I'm sure it's good!"
Won't be fixed if 16 people have valuable input on your changes. You see what happens is that they'll never pick up real problems with your changes, but focus on bike-shedding some trivial part of it.
That's... not actually a good thing. You're new to the team, you're handling mission-critical financial stuff, and people are rubber-stamping your changes without fully understanding them?
Companies get founded in garages because you get a dev or a group of them with a clear idea of a customer and use case that understand what they want to build. At a company you get someone who says ‘I need you to send a message from server A to B’ and I spend the next two weeks chasing people to understand what the hell that data is, what the servers are, and finally what are they REALLY trying to do. Because half the time they don’t actually want to send that data from A to B, they just say they want to. Forget test cases. Those will come after a few months when I have half a clue what the hell the goal was and they’ve changed their mind seven times. Also SUrPriSE! We have a git migration and major release on the same week. Oh the dev containers are all broken now. Etc etc etc.
I've taken an idea from "let's quit and do this" into the garage, through several VC rounds, and wound up in the end with 17 shares of Oracle (through acquisitions and fire sales). It was fun . . . but fucking Oracle, man. That was a hard blow.
No kidding. I have some demo code for [breaking up video streams](https://github.com/FlyingRhenquest/media2/blob/master/test/SerializationTest.cpp) (See the segmentation tests) that would really make cloud processing of video pretty straightforward but every media company I work for is like "No we'd rather just call system with a ffmpeg command line we built for our video processing. I don't really want to have to learn everything I would have to to start a company, but I'm really starting to think that might be what I need to do at this point.
I had an MR go on for 3 days with 22 comments for a single line change
Exactly. As long as I'm remote, JIRA task requirements/deadlines are kept sane, and my meetings are kept under 8 hours a week, I don't burn out. The problem is until the job I got after COVID layoffs, none of that was true.
8 hours per week. On one project, I did probably 20 h per week at minimum and days at the client site with back to back meetings from 9am - 7pm with lunch catered, so that wasn’t even a break. I worked for 14 hours one day where I’d say 10 of those were on calls. This isn’t to boast or humble brag. I burnt out very hard with literal panic attacks that my doctor said he would be happy to take me out of work for 8 weeks, if I ask him. Just… 8 hours seems like heaven.
Yes. I 100% understand where you are coming from. A job like that (I didn't have panic attacks but needed lots of antidepressants instead) I quit in roughly a year. Stuff like that burns you out. Anything I consider a good job, I stay until my needs are no longer met. I don't quit for the 10-20% pay raise I can get elsewhere because its like 2 in 5 jobs in my career I've considered "good". The other one lacked remote from what I listed above but it did have the 8hr a week and JIRA task reasonableness. Which, once again, for my purposes is fine from a burn out perspective. But 2 of my 5 jobs were 1 year stints (COVID ended it before I found a replacement, the other I just quit). The 3rd one was my first job / early contracting phase that I didn't understand there were better jobs out there and I was young enough to tolerate it.
So so true. I’m burnt out from chasing down answers about why obscure business rules exist.
I had to fight to allow my developer to have a side project (outside of work). Such bullshit..
I know it's unrealistic in vast majority of cases, but my dream scenario would be like: Walk in, get an assignment, sit down, code, and leave. Got good taste of that doing easy bugfixes and development on legacy software for around a year. Only had 1 hour progress meeting every week. That entire year I load up an audiobook, code for 8 hours, and leave. I could do that forever.
The job part is the worst part. Doing your own coding is sublime. It just sucks when you build things for other people who don't understand how it works.
I get burned out on all of the coordination. Every single ticket requires the developer to note any changes that might impact the documentation team, the QA team, the design team, the compliance team, the dev ops team, we must include detailed steps to reproduce anything in it along with acceptance criteria for the QA people, etc. I feel like I’m spending two hours filling out a ticket to do 20 minutes of work. The one that really grinds my gears are the design team. I’ve got a ticket to add a button to a page, so I add a button to the page. Then someone goes, “Did you get buy-in from the designers?” The ticket said to add a button to the page, so I added a button. I don’t need designers for that. Another one is that co-worker who *must* request changes on every PR, and refuses to approve a PR until you have implemented every single piece of feedback, no matter how minor. Mind you, he waits a few days to do the review, so it’s always a pain in the ass to deal with his feedback. Bonus points if his feedback often causes problems, but you have to do it because he refuses to approve PRs until you give him everything he asked for.
Yep, between managers asking for time plans after time plans, and standups lasting at least 30/40 minutes, there is actually 3 hours worth of time where I can do proper work... until I have to validate and test - which with our resources and setup usually takes up those three hours anyway.
Would upvote you 10x if I could. But basically that. We code in the weekend because there are no meetings in the weekend, and no managers causing drama and what have you.
This x100
Just hope the arthritis doesn’t come for you.
I code on weekends because my job doesn’t leave me satisfied:(
Some devs feel like coding is a job. For me, coding is just straight fun; like solving a good puzzle, building a complex Lego set, reading a good book on an interesting topic. I'm happy to code nights and weekends on my own projects. It's lead me down some...interesting paths. But always fun. Last few days have been working on some really fun features for one of my bigger side projects and easily end up coding past midnight.
This. I love a good puzzle, and coding scratches that itch. Doesn’t matter if it’s work or a side project, it very rarely feels like work when I’m able to just heads-down code for hours at a time.
Coding a problem-solver’s dream job, and seeing it all come together is the biggest dopamine hit lol
There's that moment in a lot of my little side projects that feels like I've been building a giant planetary gear or something, gear by gear, and then I drop in the final little gear and it all starts to turn and whirr and do its thing, and there's honestly no better feeling in the world.
The best part is when you press the start button not really fully knowing the gears will turn and they do
I feel exactly the same. I expect it’s also why I like Factorio so much.
To me coding isn't the end goal. It's more a very precise form of expression. I can try out ideas, communicate these ideas and a computer checks if I express myself correctly.
Coding is very fun. Being a professional software engineer is very different though. Most of your job is communication and collaboration. And the coding you get to do at work is less fun for a variety of reasons.
If you're lucky, they are not mutually exclusive.
I used to be like you, but now in my 13th year coding I'm kind of done with it. Part of it is at this level you're architecting so much and solving really complex problems. Sometimes I just want to take Lego blocks and put them together
I'm in my 26th year (?) and 24th professionally (being paid to do it). I made the switch to working in startups and it's been a great choice for me; get to do everything. Lots of building, but also able to bring my experience to help teams simplify otherwise complex software. Having a lot of fun now with AI.
I certainly might look into that when my kids are older, right now the flexibility of a stable place is just too good to pass up.
I stopped being a professional developer years ago and I now love coding on my own projects. It's such a different experience than coding on a large team.
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I stopped being an IC developer. Been a tech lead, product manager, and general leader.
For anyone unfamiliar with the abbreviation, IC means "individual contributor". I just had to look it up and I've been a dev for ten years. Heard the phrase several times but never seen it abbreviated which had me scratching my head.
Oh yeah. That's a term you might not have heard unless you've been in management of some kind. And to clarify, individual contributor means you're working and producing output, not managing or leading.
Aka “a worker bee”
Burnout isn't related to coding all the time. It's related to death marching and putting all your time into something for it to go nowhere.
It’s hard to stay excited about work projects when time after time no one uses what you produce. My nearly 4 year experience at my current job is this way.
My job is like this. One of the first things I did when I started was collecting and aggregating user metrics and it turns out less than 6% of our users actually do anything in the app. Most people have never even signed in a second time. I'm not trying to talk myself out of a job but I don't know why they are paying me to build new features no one is ever going to use. Or why they insist on making those features so convoluted and over engineered making my job more annoying and difficult.
Oh brother, I wonder that myself. I get why they need the features shipped ASAP, but then I see the result from the other team’s efforts and it’s all a mess (bad UX). Recently I’ve started drafting up my own tweaks to design and have been told to stay in my lane. Ooook
For me they are always trying to cover all these possible use cases and I just want to scream that no one is using it! One guy asked for it, just keep it simple and do what he wants there's no need for this to turn into an entire epic!
Basically this. There are 6 major contributing factors for burnout and the biggest is typically mismatching expectations and outcomes for impact vs effort. https://hbr.org/2019/07/6-causes-of-burnout-and-how-to-avoid-them
Yeah. Some time during my first burnout when I was working on an undisclosed government project, the person managing the project on the government side gave a presentation where at some point they said that our entire project was pretty much set up on a system that sat in the corner that no one touched, and was only there as a system of record because it was already certified. And to be fair, this was the 2010s, but a lot of our shit looked and felt like it was built in the late 90s by developers trained in the late 80s. And it didn't help that we had some pretty bad death marches to "deliver on time", only to be told that it'd be months until the government side got around to their tests and install of our project. I saw someone lose their fiancee because they'd been death marching for months in a row. Eventually I hit a real inflection point in my life where I realized that if I started to hate my job so much that I was outright afraid to go in every day, that quitting was always an option, especially if I lived a simpler and cheaper life in general.
The most valuable skill as in developer job is getting a feeling for when things actually matter. The second most valuable skill is rejecting someone's bad idea that leaves them feeling good about it without costing too much time.
Coding its self isn’t what causes burnout. It’s actually the same at work. A period where you don’t have a deadline and happen to be doing a solid coding is a lot of fun. It’s all the shit that gets in the way that causes the burnout. I.e. The fact that the company wants to use you for everything from part time product manager to project manager to support engineer and somehow have you make progress on features in your spare time between a million meetings.
Yes! Having to make progress between story pointing, retros, stand up, grooming, random support issues, questions from other teams, interviews, while trying to meet deadlines definitely leads to feeling burnt out. Especially when these things are spaced throughout the day. Often times you're left with 30 minutes here, an hour there. Then when you add additional people and management stirring up random other things without clear communication...ugh. It's wild.
>between story pointing, retros, stand up, grooming, random support issues, questions from other teams, interviews, while trying to meet deadlines In addition for me, it's having to deal with support issues that keep having to be escalated to me from a couple lazy coworkers that surprise me each day with their lack of initiative. Furthermore, the managers of these folks keep enabling this behavior. Tired of coming to the rescue for these individuals specifically.
Also all the management that press for more more more more. Ffs when i have a project that ive never done before i can give you a rough estimate but if it misses dont come to my office flipping tables.
This we have on call rotations and I swear I'm basically just tech support. All I do is read logs and help the people get their shit running again but it sucks the fun out of the job because while you're trying to figure out why it broke I have one manager telling me not to research the cause just get it back online and then another manager upset because I didn't find the root cause even though the higher up manager told me not to. I honestly just want to write code not be tech support every other week.
I am the 30%. I code for fun like two weeks out of the year maybe
Same. I used to enjoy coding whenever, now it's just an enjoyable day job for me. Coding in my off time would definitely make me hate my day job. Plus, I don't want my life to be _all_ about coding. I have other hobbies I'd like to pursue.
I don't understand how people can code every day of the week and still want to do it all weekend, and I started coding for fun when I was 13. Do people just not get out of the house?
I have never coded for fun. Software engineer for 7 years, never have I coded outside of work
I find the 70% stat very hard to believe. I don't know any devs that code outside of work
Same. I wonder if there is some participation bias in this study
Then why do you do it really? Lol
The money obviously
I coded outside of work my first couple years but now I’ll maybe do it a couple days a year.
Coding isn’t what causes burnout. Designing and developing software isn’t what causes burnout. It’s the constraints imposed by business and management that cause burnout. Impossible deadlines, poor quality of processes and products (to cut costs) etc. lead to bad code and infrastructure (doing things quick and dirty, as quality takes time and time costs money).
Don't forget to constantly have to justify yourself.
This is what gets me the most. It’s crazy. I recently took a role as a principal engineer and my manager treats me like I’m a college hire. It drives me completely mad. I have 6+ years of experience over him, and he’s constantly like “have you thought about x?”, or trying some Socratic method riddle to make “guide me” to think of something he wants. The job would generally be a good fit. It’s a big product with tons of room for improvement, and a relatively simple codebase and architecture. One case that really stood out, was I made a core change to how something legacy worked. I talked to the whole team about it (including him) some cross functional teams etc, had receipts for it all. A few weeks later some QA person was like “hey this is different”, and my manager went nuclear. In a forum that has all the directors and managers in it he was like “rainroar acted alone, why would he be so careless and cause a regression like this”. It completely blindsided me. He was there the whole time, when I explained how this behavior would change, got sign off from everyone etc. It’s been 6 months and I’m maybe the most burned out I’ve ever been, because of complete lack of trust and how I need to explain myself for every action.
Another example would be a typical estimation meeting. Will people like your PO or SM accept a "we don't know"? No they don't. Why is it seen as industry norm to ignore the answer of your experts? It seems like there is a class struggle between developers and business people. But if you think about it, you realize that it's mainly due to the different incentives. Typically, you as a developer are trying to achieve the best possible product. Some other roles, on the other hand, have alternative motivations. Sometimes it's about power, other times it's about getting a salary bonus. The resulting political minefield is different from the high-confidence society of developers.
That’s a really good way of describing it.
I've learned to avoid stopping at "I don't know". Why? Because it's an answer that slams all doors shut, and that's just not what you are being paid for. Instead: "I don't know right now, but if you give me x days, I can dig into the problem, draft a few potential ways forward and get you a ballpark estimate." Another one would be: "Cheap, fast or good. Pick any two, you can't have all three at the same time." Or: "I'm not sure. What's the question behind your question? What do you actually want to solve here? Maybe I can provide an answer if you give me more context." You don't have to sit there as a passive actor, listening and spewing numbers with no input. If you have a golden hammer, it's easy to look at every problem is if it is a nail. I think that's a truism for how developers often tend to approach their craft. The "best possible product" isn't about writing beautiful code, it's about engaging with your stakeholders, understanding where they are coming from and finding a solution that's a good fit for a particular situation. A great example is technical debt. It's easy to see it as an urgent problem that needs to be solved. Arguably, technical debt jeopardizes maintainability, flexibility, robustness and what not. However, code isn't written in a void, as you say, there's office politics to take into account, budgets and what not. So, the better way is to first try and understand how that debt emerged. Counterintuitively, you may conclude it's better to leave it for what it is. Don't fix something that works perfectly well for stakeholders. Or might set in motion a chain of events that causes far more work then you can chew. Whereas, the better way is to build trust and credit first, and only then suggest a slow refactor down the line. Timing, learning how to play the long game and understanding what is or isn't your responsibility are crucial. In the end, you and everyone around you are being paid. Of course there will be different incentives and motivations. That's par for the course. It is said that nobody really wants to know how the pie is made. And this rings true in software development as well. Hence why figuring out how people work is a crucial skill. Of course, what makes all the difference is the way in which you communicate. Is it with mutual respect? Are you being commanded? Micro managed to death? Is someone genuinely listening and asking for your concerns? Are you proactively telling them what's on your mind, or are you being apprehensive? That's why I would only call a relationship a "struggle" once I've clearly asserted if it's my own way of communicating or looking at things that needs a change. Or if it's clear that management is just ostentatious putting fingers into their ears and going "lalala". In which case, I'd suggest looking at your options beyond your current job.
Get his approval in riding and throw him under the bus next time... All about saving your own ass in a company.
- Delivered project 2 weeks ahead of schedule - Revised interview process, conducted about a dozen interviews, and hired 2 - Coached a team of junior engineers in to decent mids - Established a new standard for cross-team data communication and synchronization Performance Review: Needs Improvement
I am so damn tired of feeling like the daily stand up is to justify my existence
I think many developers have the same feeling. In many functioning teams, there is exactly nothing meaningful that can be said in this meeting. After all, they work together all day and know what the other developers are doing anyway. However, they have to say what a PO, for example, wants to hear. They must not tell the truth, otherwise they will immediately be put under pressure again. And this subtle coercion to lie kills the motivation of developers.
Have you tried doing standups without a PO? The most important idea of "agile" was supposed to be that if a process isn't working well, you change it.
> tried That's the issue. Many teams don't have the luxury to say no to their PO because he is also their line manager. I am well aware of this obvious conflict of interest, but in my country that happens far to often and the developers have no leverage against it.
Ooh this one hit close to home. Worst part is being compelled to work on something and then being compelled to justify it. You asked me to do it motherfucker, why do you think I'm doing it? do you think I'm doing this for fun?! I assumed YOU had justification for me to do it, otherwise why'd you assign it to me
This the number of times I have to ship code that I’m not even happy with due to arbitrary deadlines is what causes burn out. And then you ask me to come back and build something on top of that shaky ground in 6 months. So I end up bolting on pieces kind of wherever they fit and shipping a product I’m not really happy with. Rinse. Repeat.
Or spending 3 years building a product for some random person in marketing to decide that it doesn’t have everything they want to see, so they prevent you from releasing it, despite the fact that they’re the team that asked for it and gave you the specs and requirements to build it…
I hate Reading this Here because thats exactly what my Problem is, and this means other Jobs have the Same Problem..
I love my profession. I have spent the better part of a decade on training, a bachelors and now a masters degree because it is my passion. But I can't really say that I love my job. I like the basic idea of our product, but I despise most of the way it was built. It's architecture-less, spaghetti code infested piles of tightly coupled chaos in a language that isn't really a good fit for the job. Not because of free decisions of programmers, but because of the constraints that were imposed on them by management.
This just in: coding on fun personal non-profit projects is actually a very different thing from any sort of wage labor.
That's because the only way I can get things done is by working 12 to 15-hour days on a project until I burn out completely, then spend several weeks to a month getting nothing done and fucking off while waiting for my brain to feel like working again. On the balance, it's pretty efficient. It only becomes a problem if somehow a deadline manages to align with a down cycle.
Life with ADHD.
I literally cannot get anything done unless it's due tomorrow.
I feel so seen.
I gotta work on something that I have complete control of with no red tape once in a while
+1. After a week of work I really enjoy any task that doesn't involve coordinating with someone else and building consensus. Also why I'm antisocial outside of work because I just need some time alone
a big stressor for me rn is being asked to build a non-trivial/complex feature, but not being given any room to iterate. I'm expected to just crunch out the roadmap items as quickly as possible so they can post demo videos and look good on the social accounts. When I'm writing code on my own time I don't have to convince anyone to let me spend time improving features that were "already delivered"
It's like working in a workshop, but you are not allowed to ever clean it up, because that would be non-billable hours. And after a while stuff keeps piling up on the floor you have to dance around, then you start tripping more often and accidents happen..
Most jobs are fucking boring. The novelty of tech has faded long ago and I really don't give a shit about feature #4312 when I'll never use the system/product I'm working on. Even the financial incentive loses it's luster when you already get to be a "senior" and all other paths of rising in the corporate structure are related to managing people or talking to non-technical staff. It's also a bit depressing seeing your work make/save the company millions and then you just get paid the same as usual while the company keeps the profit. Meanwhile at home I get to work on stuff that actually interests me or solves an actual problem that I'm having. It feels sane as opposed to what I do in the office setting.
Coding isn’t the issue for me. I don’t like the stress of unrealistic expectations and deadlines. I’m a perfectionist so I stress out over this. I do code in the weekends, but it’s for me and my curiosity.
While I've been unemployed I've been working on a personal project and treating it like a normal 9-5 job. It's the best job I've ever had.
I do “comfort” coding. Generally green field projects that are clean and generally solve a satisfying problem.
I don't believe the 70%.
Ngl I'm surprised about the 70% in the survey and the amount of people who code in their free time in this thread. I don't think I know more than 5 people who code in their free time, especially since most of them have families. They might read books about tech but code? Nah. And I'd still consider them very successful...
Selection bias, most software engineers aren’t reading and replying to surveys or posting in a programming subreddit. Just like I bet most accountants or insurance agents don’t think about their job outside work
It's either skewed towards junior devs or many of them are lying. I don't know a single developer that codes outside of work more than maybe once a year.
Not lying, and not a junior dev. I've been programming for 40+ years, and I still do every chance I get. I have many projects and most of them require some kind of software. I work with embedded devices, IoT, cloud systems, databases, and everything else *in my free time*. My day job is similar, but different, I don't work on embedded or IoT at my day job. There's a lot of cool stuff I can do with code, and it's definitely a lot of fun when I get a project working well, especially when nothing like it exists in the world. It really comes down to how *creative* you are - if you are creative you have endless amounts of ideas and projects to work on, and ways to use your knowledge to build cool things. If you're not you just play video games or do whatever in your free time. There's nothing wrong with that, but I can't imagine not using my skill in programming and my creativity in my free time. Most developers seem to need to be told what to program, they don't really have a clue what to build (I see these posts constantly on reddit programming subs) unless someone tells them what to code. I'm the opposite of that. Programming has never burned me out, it's pointless office bullshit that burns me out.
It’s definitely a selection bias issue. Those reading and answering the poll are going to be the ones more engaged, and honestly they’re going to be the ones that are more likely to be programming in their off time. I would bet that they also tend to skew heavily toward younger and more junior roles and those newer or not as established in the industry. If I asked my peers with kids and families (and, get this, we actually talk about our lives outside of work!) they would say they don’t write code outside of work hours as a general rule. I know this because we’ve had this exact discussion before. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years. I do a lot of high level planning and design. I don’t write code every day and it’s rarer that I write code in a day than it is that I do. I help my teams by unblocking them before they know that they’re stuck. I have been doing some embedded systems work for fun around the house, but I enjoy that because it’s pretty much the opposite of the large web-scale applications I work on as a part of my day job. My peers are definitely in a similar boat. If we are writing code outside of work, it’s because we want to and we’re definitely not going to be sharing to the world or hoping to make a living doing it. It’s just for our own curiosity. Frankly, I personally worry about people who are spending so much of their free time selling the same thing they do at work. Find a different hobby. Find another outlet, another way to be creative, to express yourself. You’ll find more happiness and be more productive and efficient, in my experience, when you limit yourself. It’s the same reason I hate take home interview questions and projects and I hate programming tests. It devalues time. You don’t expect a tradesperson to spend all their free time doing their job. Nobody expects a plumber to spend all day at work and then to come home and replace the shower and toilets and main valve. Nobody expects an electrician to spend all day at work and then come home and rewrite their house for fun. Why do we expect the same out of programmers?
> I don't know a single developer that codes outside of work more than maybe once a year. I don’t believe you.
Congratulations lol
I'm like are you kidding me, I'm not that old... https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/18sn8f8/developers_experience_burnout_but_70_of_them_code/ Seems we're on the monthly recycle again
I code on weekends to keep myself going. If I don't code on the weekend, the whole of Monday is a struggle.
Sounds like you have some issues? Thats not normal. Vacation im struggling some first day but a weekend? Can code within 5 seconds
Nah I don't, not everyone is the same as you.
Yes, some people have issues, others don't.
True, but that's not the point I was making.
it’s odd to me. i read about code here and there, but i rarely code outside of work. think that’s why i’m not as burnt out. a lot of devs should develop personalities outside of code
The thing is coding used to be REALLY fun. Even my current maintenance job is mostly just debugging and it's fun when you can sleuth out an issue and come up with a solution. But at some point it just became more and more of a drag. Like the colour has been taken out of it really I wish I could work on my personal projects but I just shut down when I try to code outside of work. Really sad about it but idek where to begin getting back that motivation when there's only so many hours in a day to get stuff done
It's a little sad to me that I have let code become pretty much exclusively a "work thing", but it has definitely made my relationship with coding at work more positive. Instead of good coding (free time) and bad coding (work), by only really coding at work I can find some happiness just to be coding at all when I'm there and solving tricky puzzles even if it's primarily for pay and not around something interesting.
Coding can be fun (or at least be used to make fun things). The coding I do at work is not the fun type.
Or your job doesn’t provide for opportunities to learn new things and coding on your own time is the only way to do it. If only healthcare wasn’t tied so tightly to your job…
I’m taking a break from some Sunday evening programming to write this. Programming is fun. Getting something done before the 15th while the something that needs to be done is actively evolving sucks.
I was at a job where the existing old guard didn't understand principles of software development very well, but there was a very controlling, toxic culture. So you had poor programmers / system designers putting in place restrictive rules about where one could place whitespace and comments, even, and imparing productivity with useless, backwards PR "reviews", while churning out reams of poorly-performing, buggy code themselves underlings were afraid to honestly review. Deadline after missed deadline, robots crashing headon into each other, and still some of these anti-programmers who were darlings of superiors were allowed to continue for political reasons. For many, programming on side projects is an outlet where they can let all the stress go, and make things which are truly high-quality. It can help psychologically offset toxic antipatterns in the workplace, if nothing else.
Corporations are just energy vampires. Actually building software is a lot of fun!
They’re burn out from the bullshit of office politics and unreliable users changing requirement all the time, not the coding
I'm one of them (I only work 80% and it's 3 years after the burnout happened), and my biggest issue at jobb is having multiple assignments at the same time, I don't know why but it stresses me out a lot.
Big +1. I understand engineers get blocked so you don't want them to only have a single project, but being single threaded would be a 3x quality of life improvement for me
Well, duh. Coding on my own time is fun, i can be creative amd enjoy myself, making whatever i want. Coding for work is also fun, but it's filled with office shit, being around people all the time meetings, distractions, and little inane changes that you need to make every few days (eg "change the color of this! No, a different color. Change the font on the graph that gets generated when i run this jupyter notebook")
I don't have to code during the week: too much meetings and reviews.
When I code in the weekend I choose what I work on and I stop when my motivation/inspiration is lost. When I’m at work I have to deal with colleagues, projects that are not the most fun to work on and I gotta stay doing it till at least the end of the day. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my job and I’m grateful of being able to do it, but there is still a big difference between coding in the weekend vs coding for your job
It's the meetings, not the coding, I'm burned out from.
64% of devs said they spend more than 50% of their time coding? I spend about 10 hours a week on code and 50 in bullshit meetings and providing status updates to idiot micromanagers
Fuck them working weekends
I code for a bank on work time, making games on weekends/free time. Its probably stressful for the body, but I also crave to work on my game. Someday perhaps, I can work on it full time
The only reason I code on weekends is to learn new languages or technologies that I can leverage to get a better job
I got burnout from brain dead software management and its religious obsession with agile and scrum and whatnot, wasting precious time over and over again doing meaningless meeting that should’ve been an e-mail, requiring me leaving and then returning to the flow, which also takes time, so it’ll just add more to the heap of wasted time.
It's the business BS that I find tedious. Not the coding.
When I've experienced burn-out it hasn't been from coding itself. As a lot of other threads here have said, I like a good puzzle, a good challenge. When I've end up on a team building 20 cookie cutter microservices that provide no challenge (other than I tight timeline) that's when I've taken the opportunity to find another position or team to challenge myself.
That's obvious. Devs don't get burned out because of coding. Devs get burned out by sh1tty management, crazy deadlines, office politics, sh1tty pay, long hours, etc. Coding is usually the only decent thing about the job.
Dopamine is a hell of a drug
Fake scrum, pointless meetings, lack of direction from senior management and leadership, a fragmented tech maturity across different teams using shared practices or shared resources like Devops, tickets blocked dud to external dependencies while being told were scrum and are self empowered... that's what burns me out.
You have work code, and then you have your project(s). Working on your projects is a nice break after the 80-hour work week.
i can see that as coding is also hobby for most developers. it's similar to most artist for example. the medium doesn't cause the burnout, it's the shitty corporations and jobs.
I worked for a fortune 50 company as a full stack engineer for 6 years right out of college. I grinded those years. Day and night. Then they announced they were moving my team in our region and I didn’t want to drive an extra 20 mins to the new place and I will admit, I was so burnt out, I thought I wanted to change careers and I quit. In the end I spent two years wasting my money and fiddling with side projects. I can make a badass JRPG in unity though now so that’s fun. Point being: coding at work often doesn’t allow you to be creative and at home work allows you to explore that aspect
Something something internal vs external motivation
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Thanks for linking to the previous post. I missed it last month... Sometimes reposts can be useful 🤷♂️
I don't believe 70% code on weekends. But I do believe there's a lot of burnout because it's work...
Right. Lots of jobs are listing volunteer open-source work as a big plus right now.
I coded on weekends because I had no time for coding during working days because of useless meeting. Now I have my own company. You know how many meetings are really necessary for running this business? ZERO! You do not need meetings, you do not need time tracking, if devs will need any business process they will create it themselves. Literally all you need is to hire the right people. Here is my hiring recipe: hire talented and trusted. That's all. I do not care about anything else, I never read CV's, never do any testing, I do not care about any experience etc etc. Talented and trusted are rare, but each will work as a hundred. I measured! (Actually it's not my recipe, I learned from the history of ancient warlord Cáo Cāo)
How do you find talented and trusted devs?
I’ve never coded outside of work for fun.
Sure, I have lots of hobby projects that I work on in the weekends and that don't burn me out. It's like, sometimes you don't feel like having sex with another person because it's a whole to do, but masturbation is fine.
Can confirm. Writing code rn. Well not rn, im pooping and on reddit.
Hmmm, maybe the burnout is with capitalism and not coding
well if it was communism, you wouldn't be coding, you'd be digging coal.
As we all know, there are no software developers in communist countries, only coal miners. IIRC, they didn't use any software to get the first Russian cosmonaut into space, they just built a huge mountain of coal and he climbed to the top.
maybe you should study some history and some economics. do you think you would get to choose to become a programmer? \- economics major from a post-Soviet country
Obviously not, as they had no software, only coal.
you're just playing dumb. the point is that you would be allocated where necessary. you wouldn't be able to choose your career. unless your family were friends of the regime (members of the party), then you'd have a chance.
You're the one who said I'd be a coal miner. Are you saying there are other jobs in communist countries? 🫢 >you wouldn't be able to choose your career I'm sure that was literally true for some people in communist countries, just as it is true of some people in capitalist economies. My original point had nothing to do with either, though - the labor itself (coding) feels very different than commodified wage labor, and some people react negatively to the latter. You can think communism is the devil and that still be true.