[kevindamm]

"""Three major themes that cause “bad days” for developers: tooling and infrastructure issues, process inefficiencies, and issues around team dynamics. Within those issues, deeper concerns were identified and are shared in the following sections."""

The causes will sound familiar to most developers here. The most significant causes are usually outside the person's control, as expected. Interestingly, "interruptions / randomness" was only the sixth most significant, while the most significant cause was "engineering system friction."

The average number of "bad days" per month is 3-5. Accounting for weekends and vacation days, that's nearly 20% of the time! And some report 9+ bad days per month.

So, if you happen to work on corp-infra or other tooling/support role, and you occasionally lament that your work is not in the critical path, you actually have a rather large impact if you think of it in terms of helping reduce the number of bad developer days.

[pards]

> if you happen to work on corp-infra or other tooling/support role [...] you actually have a rather large impact [...] in terms of helping reduce the number of bad developer days.

This, 1,000x.

- CI/CD pipeline needs attention: Bad day

- Dev env down: Bad day

- Infrastructure via ServiceNow: Bad day

- Change review board: Kill me now

[thih9]

For people unfamiliar with “change review board”:

> It’s a group of people from the project team that meets regularly to consider changes to the project. Through this process of detailed examination (…) decides on the viability of the change request or makes recommendations accordingly.

https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/change-control-board-rol...

[bigiain]

> Interestingly, "interruptions / randomness" was only the sixth most significant, while the most significant cause was "engineering system friction."

I notice that if you add the "lack of focus time" responses to that, you'd get the 3rd most significant factor, which feels closer to right to me...

[soneca]

I think the separation makes sense. Scheduled meetings spread out through the day rather than grouped together and running efficiently is definitely a bad day for me.

But small, 2-5 minutes interruptions for a quick question never bothered like it seems to do with a lot of people here on HN. I can go back to my focus pretty instantly after a “quick question interruption”.

[kevindamm]

Yeah, sounds right. I think they're separated because an abundance of meetings, or just poorly scheduled meetings, can contribute to lack of focus time.

Scheduled and unscheduled interruptions?