Is maintenance the cause of burnout then?
It's also a bit thankless, being good as this job, in a lot of cases, means you are moving really fast from one task to the next without any down time in between. I find it hard to get to a place where I can feel accomplished or proud of a piece of work, because the next fire/high-priority task is already "behind schedule".
I think part of it may also be due to the fact that the job is constant problem solving. Even though its nice to find solutions to problems, knowing you'll be perpetually in a state of "there is a problem that must be fixed" is taxing on mental health (for me at least).
Something I've seen more and more often is that a lot of developers take a lot of time for every ticket. Much more time than I'd take, but I suppose it's because they are not incentivized to work fast, they'll still get paid the same no matter how many tickets they close. But I don't think paying more if you close more tickets is the solution, I don't have any solution, really.
It's that your work load seems to only increase. As the study found with regards to the causes of burnout, increased workload cited as the main reason.
I'm still providing updates to stuff from over five years ago (that has officially been retired), while my boss is breathing down my neck about new projects. The stress of doing this, the stress of trying to manage my manager's expectation, the stress of realizing you'll never be able to really put any of your work out of your mind or have a lighter load of responsibilities, etc. is what leads to burnout.
Dev shops don't have to operate like that, and all it takes is one person to have the fortitude to say no.
Some common ways that happens in software development are working for months on a feature that gets cut (or undercut) at the last minute, or trying to demonstrate your ability for some role and not being recognized for it, or even just putting your heart and soul into a company that is circling the drain.
If those experiences happen over and over, without some intervening successes to recharge you, you get burned out.
Apparently some AWS tools also got changes since some scripts seem to be failing.
It is so stupid to host anything in the cloud if you don't serve millions of users... Not really burnout, but I hate it so much right now...
Maybe it's agency? Ultimately I don't feel like my contribution wows anyone.
There's something deeply satisfying to me in cutting out thousands of lines of code and no-one even noticing.
I will even go back and look at that commit over the next few weeks with a feeling of peace and accomplishment.
I've sometimes 'stolen' time from feature work to do that refactoring, and it's the massive reduction of complexity and TLOC that often gives me satisfaction, not delivering the feature.
Don't get me wrong, I've delivered features and applications I'm proud and happy with too, but I think there's a significant minority of us who really enjoy deleting tons of bad code too.
So maybe the trick is evangelizing? I really don't know, I just know I've been successful, often in spite of the organization I was in. I'm also constantly aware of the amount of luck involved in everything I do, so it's always hard for me to believe that I was the important factor.
Eg there's a common saying, something like "Don't let your passion become work". Implying that if you love creating art, it can be a struggle to keep that same love when you start creating for other people. Of course it's all variable, but i hope my explanation suffices.
Programming can often be similar in my mind. Sometimes i can be in the height of feeling super uninterested in my work - tired, exhausted, all things i'd collectively describe as progressing towards burnout... but then i daydream and get the urge to go code some random idea. The fire is still there, in me, to be creative and produce something in the way i enjoy. It didn't seem inhibited by my work at all. It just seems work is following down a path of unfun that accumulates.
It feels similar to side projects. Devs often joke about how easy it is to start something but how difficult it is to finish. Because larger projects will often become work themselves. But in this side projects you have the luxury of stopping. I suspect if you forced your way through, never stopping on them - you'd burnout in a similar way to real work. If this is at all accurate, the consistent push on uninteresting work is the driving force for burnout in these examples. You're used to doing the work with passion, but extended periods of non-passion feels a lot like burnout, to me at least.
But anyway most "fixes" are really just changing systems to adapt to change in other systems. I spent 3+ years at Google just migrating this and that and the other subsystem to a different datastore, and knew dozens if not hundreds of developers stuck on a treadmill of constantly rewriting to adapt to other people's rewrites.