[JTbane]

My biggest source of burnout is really from mundane failures in processes: flaky tests that fail for no good reason, and obscure bugs that are hard to reproduce. These things take up 90% of my time and I feel like a code janitor, rather than a developer. Any company dealing with burnout should consider this.

[altdataseller]

Its also part of your job to be part of the solution and help fix them. Why are the tests flaky? Maybe you can spend a day and fix it? Obscure bugs - ok they are hard to reproduce, but if it was easy, they would probably outsource your job to some Indian developer

[icedchai]

If the test is flaky, the first thing you should do it disable it (until you can fix it), so it stops breaking the build and slowing down everyone else. A flaky test is worse than no test. I used to work at a place where people who just "re-run the build" several times until they got lucky. Eventually I just disabled those tests in one of my unrelated PRs.

[snodnipper]

My biggest source of burnout of late is the MS Power Platform. Being under pressure to deliver with half baked tools due to "political demands" made the vast majority of us consider other options.

Today, we learned that we will no longer be using much of the "Power" Platform...but we have all wasted a year of our lives "trying".

Now that we are done, I look forward to getting back into the gym before using "traditional" tooling that actually works.

In the future I will be more careful with the projects I work on - with a preference for mature technologies. Erlang, Java, RDMS, Rust etc. sure. Latest shiny from tech company where people hate their jobs - NO WAY. They will bring us all down.

[claytonjy]

How should a company address this? They can provide developers cover and time to improve those processes, but that delays product goals at a time when those goals are more important to the ongoing survival of the business than at any point in the past decade+. If companies wouldn't let developers fix stuff when money was easy, how will they now that money is hard?

To make matters slightly worse, I increasingly get the sense that outside of HN, most devs will jump through all the flaming hoops of bad process, accumulating all the little burns, without ever considering it doesn't have to be this way. Improving internal dev workflows gets more pushback from devs than management in my experience, which makes me feel like a crazy person.

[throwawaysleep]

I am someone who routinely pushes back on improvements and fights them. Why?

1. I get held accountable for delays. The Scum Master will whine to me about "why is X taking so long?" and I capitulate as I do not care.

2. Production bugs are blameless. The team gets blamed as a whole and it gets blamed, particularly at one job, on the non-existence of a team lead.

Basically, incentives at two of my jobs make me want to turn every ticket into a production failure.

But this is me sacrificing everything about the code and the infrastructure to keep schedules happy and that is because I have no intrinsic need to do good work at my throwaway jobs. It makes things miserable for the other developers who do care though.

[claytonjy]

I really appreciate this reply from the other side. Seems like a rational response to incentives, even if as a potential coworker I don't like the outcomes.

[galdosdi]

In my experience the problem isn't really lack of time/resources, but lack of accountability. There's always more to do than there's time and you just have to estimate and prioritize.

But even for cleanup efforts that clearly are worth the time/priority, places that develop these problems really bad usually make it very difficult to be in any way rewarded for thinking ahead to how your technical choices today will impact things in a year or more. People who stay there internalize this lack of accountability and stop trying.

You need your people to feel like caring about and investing in the future is a valued priority. Otherwise, they won't, and then you'll arrive in that future, and it will suck because everyone didn't care to build a good one.

[euroderf]

Which languages are we talking here ? Just wondering, cos I'm prejudiced for NJ "worse is better".